The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery

We always overestimate the space between the very good and the uniquely good.

As in any marginal community, there were, I learned, fierce schisms and expulsions. I say marginal; it was marginal to me, but it wasn’t marginal to the people in it. Microworlds don’t look micro to the microbes. (And what we think are macroworlds don’t look macro to the next biggest thing up; Apollo smiles down from Parnassus on career retrospecti

Arts large and small, major and minor, are always on a constantly turning wheel of invention. One generation’s “Such irony!” is the next generation’s “So obvious!” What makes a great magic trick is not skill alone, nor even performance alone, but skill and performance placed within a story that stays one neat step ahead of the audience’s expectatio

it is, I’ve come to believe, the most sustaining feeling. I know how to do this, and this is the thing I know how to do.

being talented is also, obviously, a composite gift. It arrives each time in a unique formula of many parts, some obvious, some more mysterious.

Much of what feels like mastery in adult life is actually the avoidance of a challenge. The “flow” in which, if we’re lucky, our daily work is situated, is a narrow current within a broad river that we ceased navigating adventurously long ago, having capsized too many times to try again.

We recognize a work of art, with pleasure, as archaic or antique, only to find ourselves rewarded when it is still able to speak directly to our experience. By “timeless” in that sense, we don’t mean outside time. We mean in two times at once: ours and theirs. What we want from wheels is surely timelessness, but what we want from art is time, time

in drawing as much as in boxing and dancing, that we miss the whole if we don’t attempt to grasp, in however limited and even feeble a form, what the real work feels like for other people as they do it. A sportswriter doesn’t have to be able to hit a baseball thrown by a Major League pitcher, but without some sense of what that act feels like—the h

Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility: it’s really our relief at no longer having to do things we were never any good at doing in the first place—relief