![]() I don’t mean the world-class saxophone player one might fail to recognise on the subway. Being bad at something reminds us of how we ever got good at anything.Įveryone is good at something, yes, but what I perceived in apprenticing myself to masters in various fields is that we are surrounded by masters. But the force of what was happening was that, mostly unplanned, I found that learning one skill after another was cumulative and mutually reinforcing and that doing something well for a lifetime actually teaches us less about what the real work is than doing something badly can teach us when we start doing it anew. These episodes arose out of emotional moments more than a purposeful plan: I needed at last to learn to drive to relieve my wife and I wanted to re-cement a relationship with my daughter by dancing. Yet I came to see that we miss the whole if we don’t attempt to grasp what the real work feels like for other people as they do it.įrom drawing nude bodies badly, I went on to driving a car – nervously – and then to boxing awkwardly and to dancing even more awkwardly, my feet being more recalcitrant than my hands. For the longest time, that difference did not seem to me to be vitally important. And the same is true for every other skill: doing it well is different from judging it eloquently. Mastery as a critic obviously means something different from what it does to an artist. I found that learning one skill after another was cumulative and mutually reinforcing It begins with my effort, after 30 years as an art critic, making vast pronunciamientos on other people’s drawings, to actually attempt to draw a single nude body myself. I know how to do this and this is the thing I know how to do.Īnd so I wanted to study the nature of accomplishment and, more broadly, what I like to call the mystery of mastery. That feeling may not be the very best feeling in life – there are a few competitive others – but it is, I’ve come to believe, the most sustaining feeling. No, what really moves and stirs us is accomplishment, that moment of mastery when suddenly we feel that something profoundly difficult, tenaciously thorny, has given way and we are now the Master of It, instead of us being mastered by it. Yet anyone who is a parent of any sensitivity at all recognises that what really stirs and moves children isn’t the “A” you get in the test. ![]() ![]() We live in an achievement-driven society in which kids of all kinds and classes are perpetually being pushed toward the next evanescent achievement instead of the next enduring accomplishment. Yet the real work doesn’t seem to be a goal of the way we live, which favours, over the real work, what we might call the rote work. It’s shorthand, one might say, for the difference between accomplishment and mere achievement. We all know the real work in whatever field it is we’ve mastered. By the “real work”, they mean the accumulated craft, savvy and technical mastery that makes a great magic trick great. Over late-night drinks in New York, or over 3am breakfasts in Las Vegas, they love to talk to one another about “the real work”. ![]()
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