Sarah Lewis
speaker
58 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 19 Jun
Sarah Lewis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So success is hitting that 10 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 gets us to forward thrust more, is to value the near win.
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.
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 inbuilt 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 it out of 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 medalist and bronze medalist after 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 wind 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.
It gets us to focus on what, right now, we plan to do to address that mountain in our sights.
It's Jackie Joyner Kersey, 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.
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