Quotes from Sarah Lewis

To reach an audacious goal, we sometimes benefit from having it lie just beyond our grasp.

Success is a label that the world confers on you, but mastery is an ever-onward 'almost.'

Pain is not a punishment. And pleasure is not a reward. You could argue that failure is not punishment and Success is not reward. They're just failure and success. You can choose how you respond.

Mizuta Masahide's haiku: "My barn having burned down / I can now see the moon.

Mastery requires endurance. Mastery, a word we don't use often, is not the equivalent of what we might consider its cognate—perfectionism—an inhuman aim motivated by a concern with how others view us. Mastery is also not the same as success—an event-based victory based on a peak point, a punctuated moment in time. Mastery is not merely a commitment to a goal, but to a curved-line, constant pursuit.

A fuller vision comes from our ability to recognize the fallibility in our current and past forms of sight.

You reach a point where you're at the bottom of hell, yet you have your arms crossed and a smile on your face, and you feel you're the luckiest person on earth.

How many movements began when an aesthetic encounter indelibly changed our past perceptions of the world? It was an abolitionist's print, not logical argument, which dealt the final blow to the slave trade—the broadside of Description of a Slave Ship (1789).

If you want to see it well, you must not stand in one place . . . If you're rooted to a spot, you miss a lot of the grace.

The word failure is imperfect. Once we begin to transform it, it ceases to be that any longer. The term is always slipping off the edges of our vision, not simply because it's hard to see without wincing, but because once we are ready to talk about it, we often call the event something else--a learning experience, a trial, a reinvention--no longer the static concept of failure.

Geim's perspective, blunt as you like, is that it's "better to be wrong than be boring," so he lets those working on the FNEs stay free enough to take risks and, inevitably, fail.16

found graphene hiding out in the graphite from an ordinary pencil.

Mastery is in constantly wanting to close the gap between where you are and where you want to be.