The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery

therein lies what I think of now as the asymmetry of mastery: we overrate masters and underrate mastery.

We usually expand our capacities without changing our lives. People go off to meditation retreats and come back to their Manhattan existence; on the whole, they are not more serene, but they are much more knowing about where serenity might yet be found. People go to cooking school and don’t cook more; but they know how to cook.

In a recent summing-up essay in Antinomy, Swiss observed

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.

three themes seem to spiral out, educating me as they emerged. First, again, that the flow is always a function of fragments, fluid sequences are made of small steps. Separate, discrete actions learned by effort and then put together give not just the illusion of unity but the fact of mastery.

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

As Swiss wrote the series of essays that were eventually collected in his book Shattering Illusions, he arrived at the idea that magic was, in his words, “an experiment in empathy”—a contest of minds, in which the magician dominates by a superior grasp of the way minds work. The spectator is not a dupe who gets fooled but a rational actor who gets

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

We make ourselves in our father’s sunlight but also in his shadow: what he beams down we bend away from.