Use the code DAD20 at nextbigideaclub.com slash gift to get 20% off your dad's favorite books and e-courses. Next Big Idea Club is a subscription service that sends you eight best nonfiction books of the year in four boxes, one per season. Our curators include Adam Grant, Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Kane, and Daniel Pink. The club also offers free access to our celebrated app featuring a new book summary every day.
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."