Error loading page.
Try refreshing the page. If that doesn't work, there may be a network issue, and you can use our self test page to see what's preventing the page from loading.
Learn more about possible network issues or contact support for more help.

The Real Work

On the Mystery of Mastery

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

"[W]ise, companionable, and often extremely funny." —Oliver Burkeman, The Atlantic

Best-selling author and New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik investigates a foundational human question: How do we learn—and master—a new skill?

For decades now, Adam Gopnik has been one of our most beloved writers, a brilliantly perceptive critic of art, food, France, and more. But recently, he became obsessed by a more fundamental matter, one he had often meditated on in The New Yorker: How do masters learn their miraculous skill, whether it was drawing a museum-ready nude or baking a perfect sourdough loaf? How could anyone become so good at anything? There seemed to be a fundamental mystery to mastery. Was it possible to unravel it?

In The Real Work—the term magicians use for the accumulated craft that makes for a great trick—Gopnik becomes a dedicated student of several masters of their craft: a classical painter, a boxer, a dancing instructor, a driving instructor, and others. Rejecting self-help bromides and bullet points, he nevertheless shows that the top people in any field share a set of common qualities and methods. For one, their mastery is always a process of breaking down and building up—of identifying and perfecting the small constituent parts of a skill and the combining them for an overall effect greater than the sum of those parts. For another, mastery almost always involves intentional imperfection—as in music, where vibrato, a way of not quite landing on the right note, carries maximum expressiveness. Gopnik's simplest and most invigorating lesson, however, is that we are surrounded by mastery. Far from rare, mastery is commonplace, if we only know where to look: from the parent who can whip up a professional strudel to the social worker who—in one of the most personally revealing passages Gopnik has ever written—helps him master his own demons.

Spirited and profound, The Real Work will help you understand how mastery can happen in your own life—and, significantly, why each of us relentlessly seeks to better ourselves in the first place.
  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

  • Formats

  • Languages

  • Reviews

    • Booklist

      January 1, 2023
      It's pretty easy to identify someone who has mastered their craft. Think of Michelangelo, the Beatles, Serena Williams, Michael Jordan, Shakespeare. But what traits do these individuals share that make them so proficient in such wide-ranging endeavors? How exactly is a master forged? Gopnik (At the Strangers' Gate, 2017) sets out to answer these intriguing questions by plunging headlong into activities and trainings that are often new or difficult for him. He decides to learn how to drive and obtain a license late in life. His description of being taught to bake bread by his elderly mother is joyous and insightful. Gopnik undertakes dancing, boxing, and drawing lessons. He seems particularly enchanted by the art of performing magic in a chapter in which he evokes Rod Serling's brief soliloquies in The Twilight Zone. Through observation and deduction, Gopnik grasps much about the meaning of mastery, its many sides, requirement of extensive practice, invention, and intuition, how it happens via a series of small steps, and flow. Gopnik's unusual analysis of expertise and accomplishment includes his own charming moments and can-do attitude.

      COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Library Journal

      February 17, 2023

      New Yorker writer Gopnik (Paris to the Moon) combines his own ruminations about expertise with discussions of various skills he has decided to learn. Through his apprentice experiences with magic, boxing, dancing, driving, baking, and drawing, Gopnik explores the ways a person might approach learning a skill. Interspersed and intertwined with these personal essays are thoughts about what might comprise expertise in each of these areas, with particular attention paid to the opinions expressed by each of Gopnik's teachers, who range from a driving instructor to a magician and owner of a magic shop. Gopnik acknowledges that he may not master the areas he explores, but he characterizes himself as slowly moving towards gaining such know-how. VERDICT This lyrical examination of learning various skills and the ways in which expertise can manifest is recommended for collections where compilations of essays are popular.--A. Gray

      Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Kirkus

      Starred review from November 15, 2022
      A masterful speculation on the nature and art of mastery. Gopnik, a longtime critic for the New Yorker and a librettist, tells us the real work is a term used by magicians to refer to the "accumulated craft, savvy, and technical mastery that makes a great magic trick great." The real work sets lasting, incremental accomplishment apart from transitory achievements, revealing what it means when we accomplish something we thought we could not do. To fully appreciate the real work in others means gaining some sense of how it feels for them to do it, so Gopnik apprenticed himself to masters in various fields--magic, drawing, boxing, dance, etc.--to grasp their singular attainments, strategies, and styles. In doing so, he discovered that mastery is not rare but all around us. It always has its genesis in practice, and it can be embodied in everything from learning to read to hitting a baseball. Within mastery, we also look for the unique human presence that injects it with personality, idiosyncrasy, and difference. As the author notes, we often "overrate masters and underrate mastery." Gopnik builds his book around Seven Mysteries of Mastery, deciphering these matters with shrewd but self-effacing skill. The principles of magic--"an aesthetic of the clandestine"--also inform his other essays, especially the necessity of "the Other," an audience, for an artist to find meaning. He demonstrates that regardless of our level of talent and ability, as human beings of parts, we need not be hindered by our limitations but can be goaded by them. The real work is within our capacities. Gopnik's intelligence gleams on nearly every page, though he occasionally gets a little overly academic for a general audience. Yet, like Malcolm Gladwell, he has a gift for forging connections and making even the seemingly mundane compelling. In top form, Gopnik makes his subject intellectually and viscerally thrilling.

      COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

Languages

  • English

Loading
Check out what's being checked out right now This service is made possible by the CLAMS member libraries and the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.