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.
General
Imprint: |
W W Norton & Co Inc
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
April 2024 |
Authors: |
Adam Gopnik
|
Dimensions: |
210 x 140mm (L x W) |
Pages: |
256 |
ISBN-13: |
978-1-324-09443-2 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
1-324-09443-5 |
Barcode: |
9781324094432 |
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