DRF Speaker Series presents Sarah Lewis

Sarah Lewis is a cultural historian and a Du Bois Fellow at Harvard University. She is the author of The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, a layered, story-driven investigation of how innovation, discovery, and the creative progress are all spurred on by advantages gleaned from the improbable, the unlikely, even failure.
 
She has served on President Obama's Arts Policy Committee and as a Trustee of Creative Time, The CUNY Graduate Center, the Brearley School, and the Andy Warhol Foundation of the Visual Arts. She has also held curatorial positions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Tate Modern, London.
 
She received her bachelor's degree from Harvard University, an M. Phil from Oxford University, and her Ph.D. from Yale University (expected Fall 2014). She lives in New York and Cambridge, MA.
 
She will be speaking on her book, The Rise:
 
Where do new innovations ? new ideas ? spring from? It's an enduring enigma, but, in this exquisite talk, Sarah Lewis offers a new understanding of what enables creative endeavors. What really drives iconic, transformational change on both a personal and an organizational level? From Nobel Prize?winning discoveries to new inventions to works of art, many of our creative triumphs are not achievements, but are conversions, corrections after failed attempts. Drawing on figures such as Frederick Douglass, Angela Duckworth, J. K. Rowling, and others, Lewis reveals the importance of play, grit, surrender, often ignored ideas, and the necessary experiments and follow-up attempts that lead to true breakthroughs. Smart, uplifting, and counterintuitive, this keynote will help change the way you think about creativity, innovation, and mastery: the path to success, Lewis notes, is often more surprising than we expect.
 
Here is a recent TED Talk that Sarah gave in Vancouver regarding how to ?Embrace the Near Win.?
 
http://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_lewis_embrace_the_near_win