Former WBUR Morning Edition host Bob Oakes moderated a conversation with New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik about his new book, “The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery,” where Gopnik investigates a foundational human question: how do we learn—and master—a new skill? The pair discussed why people seek to better themselves in the first place and how true mastery, in any field, requires mastering other people’s minds.
About “The Real Work”
For decades, 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 fundamental matter: How did the people he was writing about learn their outlandish skill, whether it was drawing a nude or baking a sourdough loaf? In “The Real Work”—his title 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 (from the DMV), 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.