THE REAL WORK: Adam Gopnik on the Mystery of Mastery
The Next Big Idea
The Cognitive Opiate of Learning
When we struggle to learn something, when you finally put all those laborious stumbling awkward inept steps together and you're actually playing lullaby of Birdland, you suddenly are open onto that sense of sometimes called the flow. It enables us to feel confident in ourselves about our own capacities as a person. What made you want to go from art critic to artist of a type? It was an impulsive compensatory gesture. I literally couldn't draw a blade of grass so that it would look like a blades of grass. So I went to study with Jacob Collins for two years of Friday afternoons in his Atelier struggling to draw bodies and faces. He told me: "You've
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