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Twyla Tharp
Dancer and Choreographer
Twyla Tharp: You called it vision, I call it analyzing what my strengths were. It just so happened there was no market whatsoever for my strength, unless I was interested in becoming a show dancer, for which I tried, but I'm not tall enough. Also, when I auditioned for the Radio City Rockettes they said, "We love your fouettés, but can't you smile?" And things of that nature transpired between me and a commercial future. So, I managed to find a way of subsisting in the beginning by doing odd jobs, Kelly Girl temp work, selling perfume at Macy's, and any and everything to be able to sustain studying and beginning a career with a group of dancers who were willing to devote five years, really, of their lives to me, working very seriously, with complete commitment, for not a penny. This is not a pleasant route for many young people to consider, I would imagine. Either you have to be either hopelessly passionate, I guess is the word that gets devoted here, or very stupid. None of us were very stupid, we were all college graduates, actually. But we all believed that we could make an impact on something that was very important to us, which was dancing and the future of dancing, and what could be accomplished. We determined we would do that.
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Wayne Thiebaud
Painter and Teacher
If you're engaged, as you say, you're working, theoretically, so hard that you're willing to make mistakes, and you know that doing something once is never enough. As Degas says, "If you start drawing, be sure you draw it ten times." Correct it over and over again -- even a hundred times -- to get to that ballet slipper fitting on the shoe properly. In that instance, I think you don't think of creativity so much, because what you're doing is creating all the time. Some of it not very good, but it's a creation nonetheless, and the nerve of failure I think is paramount. Learning by mistakes. Modifying, reconstituting, reorganizing, over and over again.
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James Thomson
Father of Stem Cell Research
Back then it was illegal to use federal funds for the derivation of these cells, and still is. And the university was extremely nervous about what I was doing, because I could lose all their federal funding. So for a variety of reasons so I didn't have federal funding and the university itself would not fund it. So a small company offered to fund it, and I didn't have any choice, so I took that funding. So we set up a small lab that was completely devoid of anything that was bought with federal dollars, and I physically did all the work myself, so it would protect other people around. So over a course of I guess about nine months or so, we derive these cell lines. And everybody asked like whether there's this "Aha!" moment that was exciting and all. The reality is pretty much no. It's just kind of this long, drawn-out process, where you kind of think you have the right thing, and it takes several months, little by little, to increase your confidence. So there's no single moment. And at the time that it was all done and it's finally published, instead of being happy, it was more like relieved that it was done after all this work.
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James Thomson
Father of Stem Cell Research
James Thomson: So biology, there's simply a rhythm of the material you work on. And you can't change it. You can't change it by having a lot of hands doing things in parallel, which is happening right now in this field. But these cells divide about once every day. So if you want to make one cell go to a lot of cells, it takes some time, right? So I think you just get used to what you can do with your system, what you can't, and just live with it. And pushing harder doesn't always work.
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