The Cognitive Opiate of Learning

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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

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."