The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery

For decades, Adam Gopnik has been one of our most beloved writers, a brilliantly perceptive critic of art, food, France, and more. Recently, he became obsessed with a fundamental matter: how did the people he was writing about learn their outlandish skills, whether it was drawing a nude or baking a sourdough loaf? In "The Real Work"—his title for the term magicians use for the accumulated craft that makes for a great trick—Gopnik apprentices himself to an artist, a dancer, a boxer, and even a driving instructor, among others, trying his late-middle-age hand at things he assumed were beyond him. He finds that mastering a skill is a process of methodically breaking down and building up, piece by piece—and that true mastery, in any field, requires mastering other people's minds. Exuberant and profound, "The Real Work" is ultimately about why we relentlessly seek to better ourselves in the first place.