Sarah Lewis to Discuss Finding Success in Unlikely Places at Wi10 Breakfast Keynote

Next week, booksellers attending Winter Institute 10 in Asheville, North Carolina, will enjoy an array of education sessions and big-name speakers. At 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday, February 10, breakfast keynote speaker Sarah Lewis will present “The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery,” based on her book of the same name from Simon & Schuster. Lewis spoke with Bookselling This Week to share her excitement for Tuesday’s plenary.

“We all have a gap between where we are and where we want to go in our lives, and the larger that gap is, the more it feels like failure,” said Lewis.

As she discovered in her exhaustive research on contemporary and historical figures, many icons from the literary world, such as Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Franz Kafka, as well as notable artists and academics, used different tactics to rise up and achieve their successes.

“What I have found is that the main traits people harness for path-breaking rises are often counterintuitive,” said Lewis. “The very improbable foundations that we shy away from are often the very source of people’s strengths.”

Through her talk, and through her book, Lewis isn’t looking to teach booksellers how to overcome failure. Her research “is instead an exploration of a universal journey we’re all on to discover how great, path-breaking ideas can come about.”

It was in high school that Lewis discovered her interest in the subject, after she won an important competition one year, only to lose the next. Intrigued by the experience, Lewis used that moment as fodder for her application essay for admission to Harvard.

After receiving her bachelor’s degree from Harvard (where she is currently a Du Bois Fellow), Lewis went on to earn an M.Phil. from Oxford and her Ph.D. from Yale. She has served on President Obama’s Arts Policy Committee and was selected for Oprah’s Power List. In the art world, Lewis is an active curator, with recent positions at Tate Modern and the Museum of Modern Art.

Through her research for The Rise, Lewis discovered that her own relationship to failure was radically transformed — something she hopes booksellers experience, too, through her plenary presentation. Lewis’ talk will include many implications for the book industry, she said, and attendees at the plenary will “derive a lot of fortitude and maybe tenacity from the talk. It might even inspire some personal shifts in their own lives.”

In addition to publishing a book on the topic, Lewis has spoken to audiences nationwide about the subject of turning setbacks into successes, from business groups, to bankers, to religious organizations. While The Rise is not a self-help book, Lewis noted, “The reason why I get asked to do these [talks] is because people do find themselves inspired... That’s why writing and books are so crucial — they offer us guideposts for our lives.”