Embrace the near win——Sarah Lewis.docxVIP

I feel so fortunate that my first job was working at the Museum of Modern Arton a retrospective of painter Elizabeth Murray. I learned so much from her. After the curator Robert Storr selected all the paintings from her lifetime body of work, I loved looking at the paintings from the 1970s.There were some motifs and elements that would come up again later in her life. I remember asking her what she thought of those early works. If you didnt know they were hers, you might not have been able to guess. She told me that a few didnt quite meet her own mark for what she wanted them to be. One of the works, in fact, so didnt meet her mark, she had set it out in the trash in her studio, and her neighbor had taken it because she saw its value. In that moment, my view of success and creativity changed. I realized that success is a moment, but what were always celebrating is creativity and mastery. But this is the thing: What gets us to convert success into mastery? This is a question Ive long asked myself. I think it comes when we start to value the gift of a near win. I started to understand this when I went on one cold May day to watch a set of varsity archers, all women as fate would have it, at the northern tip of Manhattan at Columbias Baker Athletics Complex. I wanted to see whats called archers paradox, the idea that in order to actually hit your target, you have to aim at something slightly skew from it. I stood and watched as the coach drove up these women in this gray van, and they exited with this kind of relaxed focus. One held a half-eaten ice cream cone in one hand and arrows in the left with yellow fletching. And they passed me and smiled, but they sized me up as they made their way to the turf, and spoke to each other not with words but with numbers, degrees, I thought, positions for how they might plan to hit their target. I stood behind one archer as her coach stood in between us to maybe assess who might need support, and watched her, and I didnt understand