-
I feel so fortunate that my first job
-
was working at the Museum of Modern Art
-
on 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 didn't know they were hers,
-
you might not have been able to guess.
-
She told me that a few didn't quite meet
-
her own mark for what she wanted them to be.
-
One of the works, in fact,
-
so didn't 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 we're always celebrating
-
is creativity and mastery.
-
But this is the thing: what gets us to convert success
-
into mastery?
-
This is a question I've 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 Columbia's Baker Athletic Complex.
-
I wanted to see what's called archer's 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 grey 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 didn't understand how even one
-
was going to hit the ten ring.
-
The ten ring from the standard 75-yard distance,
-
it looks as small as a matchstick tip
-
held out at arm's length.
-
And this is while holding 50 pounds of draw weight
-
on each shot.
-
She first hit a seven I remember, and then a nine,
-
and then two tens,
-
and then the next arrow
-
didn't even hit the target.
-
And I saw that gave her more tenacity,
-
and she went after it again and again.
-
For three hours this went on.
-
At the end of the practice, one of the archers
-
was so taxed that she laid out on the ground
-
just star-fished,
-
her head looking up at the sky,
-
trying to find what T.S. Eliot might call
-
that still point of a turning world.
-
It's so rare in American culture,
-
there's so little that's vocational about it anymore,
-
to look at what doggedness looks like
-
with this level of exactitude,
-
what it means to align your body posture
-
for three hours in order to hit a target,
-
pursuing a kind of excellence in obscurity.
-
But I stayed because I realized I was witnessing
-
what's so rare to glimpse,
-
that difference between success and mastery.
-
So success is hitting that ten ring,
-
but mastery is knowing that it means nothing
-
if you can't do it again and again.
-
Mastery is not just the same as excellence, though.
-
It's not the same as success,
-
which I see as an event,
-
a moment in time,
-
and a label that the world confers upon you.
-
Mastery is not a commitment to a goal
-
but to a constant pursuit.
-
What gets us to do this,
-
what get us to thrust more
-
is to value the near win.
-
How many times have we designated something
-
a classic, a masterpiece even,
-
while its creator considers it hopelessly unfinished,
-
ridiculed with difficulties and flaws,
-
in other words, a near win?
-
Elizabeth Murray surprised me
-
with her admission about her earlier paintings.
-
Painter Paul Cezanne so often
thought his works incomplete
-
that he would deliberately leave them aside
-
with the intention of picking them back up again,
-
but at the end of his life,
-
the result was that he had only signed
-
10 percent of his paintings.
-
His favorite novel was "The Unfinished
Masterpiece" by Honoré Balzac,
-
and he felt the protagonist was the painter himself.
-
Franz Kafka saw incompletion
-
when others would find only works to praise,
-
so much so that he wanted all of his diaries,
-
manuscripts, letters, and even sketches
-
burned upon his death.
-
His friend refused to honor the request,
-
and because of that, we now have all the works
-
we now do by Kafka:
-
"America," "The Trial," and "The Castle,"
-
a work so incomplete it even stops mid-sentence.
-
The pursuit of mastery, in other words,
-
is an ever onward almost.
-
"Lord, grant that I desire
-
more than I can accomplish,"
-
Michelangelo implored,
-
as if to that old testament God on the Sistine Chapel,
-
and he himself was that Adam
-
with his finger outstretched
-
and not quite touching that God's hand.
-
Mastery is in the reaching, not the arriving.
-
It's in constantly wanting to close that gap
-
between where you are and where you want to be.
-
Mastery is about sacrificing for your craft
-
and not for the sake of crafting your career.
-
How many inventors and untold entrepreneurs
-
live out this phenomenon?
-
We see it even in the life
-
of the indomitable arctic explorer Ben Saunders,
-
who tells me that his triumphs
-
are not merely the result
-
of a grand achievement,
-
but at the propulsion of a lineage of near wins.
-
We thrive when we stay at our own leading edge.
-
It's a wisdom understood by Duke Ellington,
-
who said that his favorite song out of his repertoire
-
was always the next one,
-
always the one he had yet to compose.
-
Part of the reason that the near win
-
is in build to mastery
-
is because the greater our proficiency,
-
the more clearly we might see
-
that we don't know all that we thought we did.
-
It's called the Dunning–Kruger effect.
-
The Paris Review got at Adam James Baldwin
-
when they asked him,
-
"What do you think increases with knowledge,"
-
and he said, "You learn how little you know."
-
Success motivates us, but a near win
-
can propel us in an ongoing quest.
-
One of the most vivid examples of this comes
-
when we look at the difference
-
between Olympic silver medalists
-
and bronze medalists after a competition.
-
Thomas Gilovich and his team from Cornell
-
studied this difference and found
-
that the frustration silver medalists feel
-
compared to bronze, who are typically a bit
-
more happy to have just not received fourth place
-
and not medaled at all,
-
gives silver medalists a focus
-
on follow-up competition.
-
We see it even in the gambling industry
-
that once picked up on this phenomenon
-
of the near win
-
and created these scratch-off tickets
-
that had a higher than average rate of near wins
-
and so compelled people to buy more tickets
-
that they were called heart-stoppers,
-
and were set on a gambling industry set of abuses
-
in Britain in the 1970s.
-
The reason the near win has a propulsion
-
is because it changes our view of the landscape
-
and puts our goals, which we tend to put
-
at a distance, into more proximate vicinity
-
to where we stand.
-
If I ask you to envision what a
great day looks like next week,
-
you might describe in more general terms.
-
But if I ask you to describe a
great day at TED tomorrow,
-
you might describe it with granular, practical clarity.
-
And this is what a near win does.
-
It gets us to focus on what, right now,
-
we plan to do to address that mountain in our sights.
-
It's Jackie Joyner-Kersee, who in 1984
-
missed taking the gold in the heptathlon
-
by one third of a second,
-
and her husband predicted that would give her
-
the tenacity she needed in follow-up competition.
-
In 1988, she won the gold in the heptathlon
-
and set a record of 7,291 points,
-
a score that no athlete has come very close to since.
-
We thrive not when we've done it all,
-
but when we still have more to do.
-
I stand here thinking and wondering
-
about all the different ways
-
that we might even manufacture a near win
-
in this room,
-
how your lives might play this out,
-
because I think on some gut level we do know this.
-
We know that we thrive when we stay
-
at our own leading edge,
-
and it's why the deliberate incomplete
-
is inbuilt into creation myths.
-
In Navajo culture, some craftsmen and women
-
would deliberately put an imperfection
-
in textiles and ceramics.
-
It's what's called a spirit line,
-
a deliberate flaw in the pattern
-
to give the weaver or maker a way out,
-
but also a reason to continue making work.
-
Masters are not experts because they take
-
a subject to its conceptual end.
-
They're masters because they realize
-
that there isn't one.
-
Now it occurred to me, as I thought about this,
-
why the archery coach
-
told me at the end of that practice,
-
out of earshot of his archers,
-
that he and his colleagues never feel
-
they can do enough for their team,
-
never feel there are enough visualization techniques
-
and posture drills to help them overcome
-
those constant near wins.
-
It didn't sound like a complaint, exactly,
-
but just a way to let me know,
-
a kind of tender admission,
-
to remind me that he knew
he was giving himself over
-
to a voracious, unfinished path
-
that always required more.
-
We build out of the unfinished idea,
-
even if that idea is our former self.
-
This is the dynamic of mastery.
-
Coming close to what you thought you wanted
-
can help you attain more than you ever dreamed
-
you could.
-
It's what I have to imagine Elizabeth Murray
-
was thinking when I saw her smiling
-
at those early paintings one day
-
in the galleries.
-
Even if we created utopias, I believe
-
we would still have the incomplete.
-
Completion is a goal,
-
but we hope it is never the end.
-
Thank you.
-
(Applause)