How to Get Hired With Andrew Seaman

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Andrew Seaman: I wanted to master a new skill in my case baking, which had been something you'd stayed away from. My mom had taught me to cook but she had never taught me to bake. It was an act of peacemaking, not that we were at war, but it was an overt act of saying, you know, I value this thing you do so well, teach me how. And then she did and then she did. We're very similar, very much alike and we've had friction and difficulty over the years. So learning to do those things, including strudel with her, was a way of interjecting and internalizing, not just the

A few years ago, Adam Gopnik, a longtime writer for The New Yorker and three-time winner of the National Magazine Award, started thinking about all the things he wasn't good at. He couldn't dance the foxtrot or bake a brioche. Well into his 50s, he still had no idea how to drive a car. To make matters worse, when he looked around, he saw people who could do these things — often with great skill. How, he wondered, did they do it? How do any of us get good at the things we're good at? And how do some of us become next-level masters? To answer those questions, Adam set out to master the skills he lacked, and he has written up the results in a profound little book, "The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery."