Can You Become a Master? Adam Gopnik Says Try It

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Now, we turn to the art of achieving greatness. If you ever wondered how experts in various fields like magic or painting becomes so excellent, the answer is best-selling author Adam Gopnik’s new book, “The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery,” where he discovers how great skills are built by learning with artists, boxers and even driving instructors. And he’s joining Hari Sreenivasan to discuss the secret of finding perfection.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Adam Gopnik, thanks so much for joining us. Your book is called “The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery.” You know, when people think a mastery, people think of putting in the hours. But what is the real work?

ADAM GOPNIK, AUTHOR, “THE REAL WORK: ON THE MYSTERY OF MASTER” AND STAFF WRITER, THE NEW YORKER: The real work is the term, Hari, that magicians use and magicians love. And they use it to refer to the person, the magician who really has totally mastered a trick, not necessarily the person who invented it, not necessarily the person who does it in the slickest way, but the guy or the girl who’s just really got it, can do it in a way that startles and astounds you every time. And they say, he’s got the real work on that. And when I was spending time with magicians in the beginning of this book, I fell in love with that term. I just love the way that they would reference, who’s got the real work? Oh, he’s got the real work. Because it seemed to me so exemplary of the way that we all know who’s got the real work when we need it. That there is always a kind of — a certain kind of mastery. You know, I spent a lot of my time as a reporter, and whenever you ask anybody, no matter who it is, a plumber or a painter, who’s got the real work in your field? Who’s the Willie Mays of plumbers?

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

GOPNIK: — they never have a moments pause, they always have an answer. And we instinctively feel, we know who’s got the real work. So, this book is about searching for the real work in many different methods (ph).

SREENIVASAN: You know, there is the line, speaking of magicians, it says that, the method is never the trick. Once you’ve mastered the method, you’ve hardly begun the trick. What’s he mean by that?

GOPNIK: That’s my friend Jamy Ian Swiss. One of the world’s greatest sleight of hand man and one of leading intellectuals of magic, which has many intellectuals. He means by it, it’s something that’s broadly true, it’s one of the things I learned and learning to drive, learning to draw, learning to dance, learning to bake, and that is that a degree of technical virtuosity, though it may be essential for your field doesn’t begin to give you mastery. Technical virtuosity is something that’s very widely spread. But what he means by it is, is being able to actually do the moves with the card deck, if you’re doing card magic, it doesn’t mean you’ll do anything that’s astounding. What’s astounding, what makes a magic trick magical is the way in which I or a magician can anticipate what you are thinking. Can, so to speak, read your mind and know in advance what you think I’m going to do and stay one step ahead of what you’re going to do and everything that I do. And that’s true, Hari, right across the board. It’s on something every good actor will tell you or every good comedian that they have to be at least a second ahead of the audience in the storytelling they’re doing and the joke that they’re making. And it’s that exchange between mines that’s the real root of mastery, not simply technical expertise.

SREENIVASAN: You know, you’ve got a chance to speak with someone who doesn’t get heard very often and that’s the Magician Teller of “Penn and Teller.” He’s usually the person who plays the mute, you had a very good conversation with him. And I was intrigued by how he perceived kind of the intellectual in magic, which I had never thought of until that conversation.

GOPNIK: Well, I fell into the company magician through my son, Luke. He’s one of the characters in the book, who fell in love with magic at the age of 13. And at first, we were a little reluctant to see him, go all the way down in this rabbit hole, but then we realized that he was learning more, getting broader, deeper sense of accomplishment from mastering card magic than he ever could from studying calculus and Spanish in school. So, I followed him down this rabbit hole, as I say, and got to meet Teller. And Teller’s whole point about magic is, exactly as you say, Hari, it’s essentially an intellectual exchange. It’s my mind, and as I said a moment ago, racing ahead of your mind. You know that I’m going to make the color – – the card change color. So, that’s going to be enough. I’m going to have make the card change color and suit, or I’m going to have to make it you sign the card and then, find it in your back pocket instead of mine. It’s the constant kind of arms race of minds that makes magic work, that’s what Teller was talking about.

SREENIVASAN: You know, you also have a chapter that I think a lot more people can relate to who can’t do a magic trick but that there is mastery in what many of us do, which is to drive. Explain that.

GOPNIK: Well, I was, if you can imagine it, in my mid 50s before I learned to drive. And I think this may be a unique distinction, I got my driver’s license, passed my driver’s test on exactly the same day with exactly the same driving inspector as my son, Luke, again, who was just 20. I went in the car. First got mine. He went in the car, got his. I don’t know how many times that that’s happened. But what’s fascinating for me is someone who had never driven at all, and that was a huge mountain for me to surmount because I was coming to it so late. But what I learned about it is that driving isn’t just a technical, isn’t just, again, a mastery of the car, of the technology, it’s a whole enterprise. You know, we’re constantly communicating with other drivers. I had this great crazy driving teacher, Arturo Lyon (ph), and he would say, just remember, always give everyone the hand, he said. The hand means bless you. The hand means FU. The hand means thank. The hand means whatever you mean it to mean. And you’re constantly engaged in that kind of communication with other drivers. And kind of a miracle, Hari, it seemed to me, I write about is that cars are not terribly difficult to operate but they are incredibly dangerous. And we have sort of absorb that danger into our systems. And yet, on the whole, we drive without — we have accidents gotten those, but on the whole, New York City, you don’t necessarily risk your life every time you cross the street because drivers know how to interact with other drivers. It’s a beautiful example of what’s called a self-emerging, self-governing system. So, in that way, driving was very inspiring for a democratic imagination.

SREENIVASAN: So, what is it that — you know, the — sort of the masters that you spoke with, what’s happening to their brains when they get to a level of proficiency or a mastery? Is there an auto pilot? Is there a zone that they get into?

GOPNIK: Yes. And I mean, the — and we have a beautiful phrase for it, Hari, the flow, right? And it’s one of the things that you learn right across everything that you attempt in middle age. And I hardly mastered these things but I became intrigued by the mystery of how others have mastered them. Is that everything you try, whether it’s drawing or dancing or boxing, which I took up, begins with a set of small awkward steps that you have to master, right? In boxing, it’s keeping your hands up. Throwing a jab and then, throwing a cross. We’ve seen that a million times but we’re not aware that it’s a learned sequence. And slowly, overtime, whether it’s a dance step or a brush mark or a jab and a cross, those small awkward steps develop into a kind of seamless sequence. And that’s true right across all the fields, all the mets case (ph) that I looked at, it’s always about a series of small steps becoming a seamless sequence. And that seamless sequence comes to sit inside ourselves, and it’s what we call the flow. That feeling of the flow, of absorption is, I suggest, maybe the best feeling — one of the best feelings we ever get in life.

SREENIVASAN: Yes. You know, when you were learning how to draw, you an option to just sort of walk around and understand art in a different way with someone who is very, very good at it. And what did you learn during the process of what it takes to be good at something as almost simple or universal that we all see around us, which is to draw?

GOPNIK: Yes. Well, it was deliberately — you know, it was kind of compensatory, chastening in middle age. I’ve been to my shame, an art critic, for 40 years, but I never knew how to draw. Now, you don’t have to be a great draftsman to be a smart art critic. But if you don’t understand at some place in your inner self what it feels like to be able to draw, then I suspect your judgment will never entirely ripen. So, I went to study with an incredibly old-fashioned reactionary drawing master, my friend, Jacob Collins, who basically hates all modern art, and I’ve been writing about modern art all my life. And the friction between this beautiful system of shaded, chiaroscuro, line drawing, you know, staring at a nude body for hours on in, learning to depict every patch of shadow, every little shole of fat on a human body, it was an incredible form of intellectual discipline for me, and it increased my respect for the great drawing masters, and I learned, again, exactly the same thing, the way you learn to draw is not by looking at a face and suddenly an epiphany comes down, it touches you on the shoulder and your hand is moving in the right direction. You learn a whole series of steps. I learned — you know, Jacob taught me, always do tilts in time. Look at the face of Hari and see — oh, there, you see. You just move your head to 25 minutes to 11, right? I draw that, I’ve made the first step to drawing you. And once again, it’s an awkward schematic, almost childlike depiction when I do that. But if I make tilts in time, I could begin to ascend to actually being able to draw.

SREENIVASAN: You know, like a lot of people, I picked up baking during the pandemic, and I always wondered, what is it that will separate something that I make from anybody else if they follow the same instructions, right? If we use the same ingredients and follow it everything down to a letter, why is it that the person who wrote that recipe down in the first place, the master, so to speak, why does their cookie taste better than mine?

GOPNIK: It’s the key question, right? I have a chapter in the book about baking with my mother, because my mom is, in addition to being a linguist and a scientist, a great baker. And I wanted to learn exactly that, why wasn’t my bread tasting like my mom’s bread? And what I discovered are two things. One is exactly as you say, as in everything in life, the secret lies in the slippage between the ingredients and the acts in the recipe. It’s all the things that you can’t instantiate, you can’t code for, right? That’s exactly where the imperfection, the vital imperfection, the way she rolls it, the way she knows exactly, to the second, when to take it out of the oven. Those are all things that are instinctive things that we’ve acquired over years. The other thing is, I think, very beautiful is that literally one of the things I discovered is that the schmutz, as we say, the dirt and bacteria on our hands enters, profitably, fruitfully, into the material, the things that we are baking. And the schmutz, the bacteria of baker’s dead for centuries, is still present in the sourdough starter they leave us. So, in that way, baking — all of the things that we looked at, are deeply human activities in the sense that what we search for is not strict technical professions but the meaningful signs of human imperfection, the schmutz on our hands, the vibrato in our voice, the uncertainty in our meter.

SREENIVASAN: Yes. I wonder, in this era, especially with social media and everything, we’re kind of really into the end product, the result, but what is it that you are saying in this book about, I guess, the value of process?

GOPNIK: It’s a good question. You know, one of the things I learned, and I hope I’m saying now, is that, you know, you don’t have to be a master of something to get an enormously satisfying feeling of mastery. I give the example in one part of the book that hummingbirds and elephants have exactly — it turns out this is true, have exactly the same number of heartbeats in a lifetime. They just experience things in different ways. And in the same way, you know, I’m not a terrific musician. God knows I’m not a great draftsman, and you wouldn’t want to put me in the ring with anyone except another middle age sedentary short writer. But nonetheless, the sense of satisfaction that I’ve acquired through those accomplishments, the way that simply the process of them comes to sit inside your body and become a kind of foundation for everything else you do in the vocation that you practice, in writing, in my case, is I think really profound. We have a society, Hari, that’s so emphasizes achievement, passing a test, getting into the next school. But really, when we think about our own lives, it’s the foundation of accomplishment that I think matters most to us. I’m a good writer today because I was struggling to form beetle chords on a guitar that I had never touched before at the age of 12. Every time we give ourselves the challenge of mastering something that seemed impossible to us before, we become more assured, more serene, more accomplished people.

SREENIVASAN: You know, you are not the average bear, so to speak, in that you’ve had a life that where you’ve had curiosity as a license and you’ve been able to feed that curiosity through doing stories on a number of things. But I wonder, in the process of this book, did it change your appreciation of kind of the mastery that maybe was all around us that we are not aware of?

GOPNIK: Absolutely. It’s a great question. You know, one moment I had, as my son, Luke, again, was studying guitar and we went to some, you know, New York cocktail party and there was a band playing way in the background. No one was paying any attention to them. And Luke looked at this poor guy who had been dressed up in gangster wear and said, guy, dad that guy is a better guitar player than anyone I’ve ever studied with. So, part of it is becoming aware that there is just so much mastery in the world. I tell the story in a book, it’s a story that I love, about how there was this famous chess playing automaton in the 18th century called the turk (ph), which was really just a magician’s illusion. And they had to find chess players to sit inside the cabinet and manipulate the hands of the ottoman figure. And what was so cool about it is, is that they didn’t have one great chess player or somebody who did it all the time. Every time they went to a new city, these magicians would go to a chest cafe and say, is there anybody here who needs a gig and doesn’t mind close working conditions? Mastery in that sense is very far spread out. And one more thing that it reminds us of is that the people we think of sort of the ultimate masters, the best in any field, those Willie Mays people we were talking about, they tend to be people who have discovered some vital form of imperfection, you know? That’s a beautiful thing about blues singing or Jimi Hendrix’s guitar, it’s the degree of distortion and imperfection that they discover that liberates our own imaginations. So, there’s this wonderful dialogue between technical perfection and meaningful imperfection that I think is the real sign of mastery.

SREENIVASAN: How much of mastery is time, repetition, experience? I mean, we’ve heard that idea that it takes 10,000 hours to become a master or something or good at something, but not all masters or not all people that reach exceptional skill at something have necessarily put in that 10,000 hours in that skill.

GOPNIK: I think it’s — look, it’s a complicated dialogue, right, between what we properly call it natural talent, because we all know what that is. You know, we all saw the one kid in fourth grade who could draw like a wizard, that girl has a different set of talents than I do. But at the same time, we all also know that almost everything is susceptible to perseverance and effort. You know, Miles Davis maybe the greatest jazz trumpet player, was not what anybody thought of as a terribly talented jazz player when he first came up. But his musical imagination was so exacting and so original that he could glom onto find new ways of playing all the time. You know, talent is a real thing. Picasso was insanely talented draftsman, a draftsman of genius. Cezanne was not. Cezanne just had his genius. And if Cezanne were at your shoulder telling you were to make every mark, you and I could do it. We couldn’t see it adequately, but we could do it. And again, it’s that dialogue between imagination and technical virtuosity that we recognize as art.

SREENIVASAN: Do the masters you’ve spoken with think that they are?

GOPNIK: No, in my experience, Hari, perpetual dissatisfaction is the surest sign of actual mastery. I’ve never known anyone who is really good at something, and I’ll include myself here, who thinks that they are — you know, who thinks that they’re finally very good. I wrote once about a great winemaker that — who is always dissatisfied with the wine he makes, is that we can — we all judge other people by the scale of their accomplishments. But they judge themselves, as we judge ourselves, by the original scale of our ambitions. And the space always between our ambitions and our accomplishments internally is enormous no matter how big those accomplishments are. So, I would say that perpetual unhappiness with the scale of your accomplishments compared to your original ambitions is the surest sign a mastery.

SREENIVASAN: Author Adam Gopnik, the title of the book is “The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery,” thank so much for joining us.

GOPNIK: It’s a pleasure talking to you, Hari.