The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik on the Mystery of Mastery Later in Life

Odds are, you've heard or read journalist Malcolm Gladwell talking about research that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to get great at something. But is time really all it takes to master a skill or talent?

Prize-winning New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik explores that question in his new book, "The Real Work," and discovers that mastery is more mysterious.

"We know that we learn things through small stumbling steps that magically then become, or at least give the appearance of, a seamless sequence. But we know that that mastery is not mechanical, that there's a mysterious element to it," Gopnik told me in an interview. "Because the masters we admire most tend not to be the mere mechanical virtuosos, but bring some element of human frailty, human idiosyncrasy, human particularity to their work."

While researching mastery, the former New Yorker art critic writes in the book that in "late middle age," he learned drawing, boxing, ballroom dancing, magic and, perhaps most surprisingly, driving.

Gopnik concedes he wouldn't remotely say he has mastered any of his new skills. But he now has a much greater appreciation of "the real work" to do each well. That, he says, is part of the joy of undertaking the process of mastery, especially in your 50s, 60s or beyond.

What's more, Gopnik notes, as we get older, we build up advantages that can serve us well on the road to mastery.

Here's more of my conversation with Gopnik (whom you may have seen in the movie "Tár," on stage as himself interviewing Cate Blanchett's conductor character, Lydia Tár):

Next Avenue: What does the phrase 'the real work' mean?

Adam Gopnik: It comes from my time with magicians in Las Vegas. That's where I first heard that phrase and came to realize what it meant. Which was not who originated a magic trick or an illusion, but who had simultaneously mastered the technical virtuosity necessary to do it with a sense of performance, a sense of human empathetic engagement with an audience that made the trick work.

That's what we seek in everything we accomplish; both those things at once. Technical virtuosity and empathetic engagement.

And how do you define 'the mystery of mastery?'

I've been on the road for the past month and one of the places I stopped was the Bob Dylan Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma. There's a beautiful letter from Dylan where he mentions that he knows he doesn't sing that well, but he breathes very well. And of course, that's true. We love Bob Dylan for his breathing, not for his Pavarotti-like singing.

So that captured for me exactly the mystery of mastery. Why is Bob Dylan a master? It isn't because he is, in the conventional sense, a good singer. He's a great songwriter, but he's also a great performer because he has the mystery of mastery, that idiosyncratic and original appeal.

So, is mastery more than just having innate talent and working at it?

Well, that's the foundation of it and I would never discount that for a second. That's the core activity.

We find out that we have talent by our pursuing it. It's a virtuous, sometimes a vicious, circle. And one of the things that happens to us in grownup life is not that we focus more narrowly only on the things we love most, we dismiss all the things we don't do well initially. They don't provide us with that virtuous circle. It's later in life that we come back to the things that we had once dismissed.

Why do people later in life come back to things they'd given up on or decided not to pursue or thought they couldn't do?

I think there's a practical reason and a kind of metaphysical reason.

The practical reason is we have more time. Typically, we've accomplished something in our primary vocational career and our kids have gotten older and are less dependent on us for 24-hour-a-day attention and care.

The metaphysical reason is, I think, that we're hungry for what I call the 'cognitive opiate of the flow,' finding ourselves absorbed in an activity that extends outside ourselves. I saw it in my own life.

It's astonishing how much satisfaction you can take in late middle-age from diligently pursuing an accomplishment. It's astonishing to find how much inner satisfaction there is in doing things badly if you do them with a full heart.

As we get older, we give ourselves more permission to try new things and be okay with not being great at something in a way that in our twenties we would beat ourselves up about.

And in our twenties, we couldn't afford to pursue. We have to find something that we can make a living at.

So, in a positive sense, our later years truly provide us with the second period of potential accomplishment that can be very satisfying.

I write six hours a day, I live for writing. But I love boxing; I will never give that up. I get a profound sense of satisfaction. I boxed for an hour with my great trainer just yesterday. It fills my heart and always will. And it feeds my my professional vocation in another way because it reminds me of all the steps that I had to go through to become a writer.

Do people in their fifties or sixties have any advantages or disadvantages at mastery compared to people in their twenties and thirties?

They have the advantage of being in their fifties or sixties. You have more life experience. If you're taking up drawing, you've got something you've seen that you want to express.

You're also conscious of more things that load onto each activity you attempt.

I ended the book doing ballroom dancing with my daughter for exactly that reason. I'm never going to be a good foxtrot man, but it was a way of having a very profound conversation with her that was wholly performative. We were able to say things to each other by learning and dancing together that we couldn't have said to each other in a conversation.

Were there things you tried, and appreciated trying, for the book that you wouldn't have in your thirties or forties?

I would've been too impatient to dance if my daughter had not been there and I had not had a hunger for reaching her.

I learned driving in my fifties; something I thought I never could do. I truly thought that I would never be able to drive because I was too old and too distracted. And I drive fine. I'm not saying you'd want to be in a car with me at 2 AM, going 80 miles per hour from Boston to New York, but I can drive fine. That's a victory for me.

I'm an accomplished writer, but nothing in life gives me more pleasure than showing my driver's license at an airport security line. Because that was really hard for me to get.

Before I started the book, I thought mastery means taking incremental steps to get someplace. After I finished, I got the sense that sometimes it does, but sometimes it doesn't. Can you talk about that?

The typical pattern is that you learn stubborn little steps… You struggle with those bar chords on the guitar and suddenly find yourself playing 'Yellow Submarine.' That's true across a huge broad range of activities.

It isn't true for driving, interestingly enough, because driving turns out to be a much more mechanical activity. Anyone can start driving when you step into the car.

You write that we overrate masters and underrate mastery. Can you talk about that?

We tend to think that there are relatively few people who are really good at something, when the reality is that in modern life, there are a lot more people who are good at something than you might imagine.

When my son Luke moved on from magic and took up the guitar, we were at a cocktail party and he said, 'Dad, that guy in spats and a fedora who's making a hundred bucks for doing this is a better guitar player than anyone I've ever studied with.' And doubtless, that guitar player gets satisfaction from playing. But he's not a name we know; he's unlikely to make a fortune through guitar playing.

Now, there are two lessons you can draw from that.

One is that we're very unjust to the lesser masters and we overly fetishize the ones that we know. That's the bad part. The good part is that there are all those other people who took profound satisfaction and got the thing we look for most in life — meaning — out of the work they did.

So, what do you think of Gladwell's 10,000-hour rule of mastery?

The secret of 10,000 hours is that it's six years.

If you stop to think about it, six years is pretty much what it takes to master professionally from the moment you walk into medical school until they leave you alone to treat a patient. The moment you start law school 'til the moment you are pleading a case in court. Every PhD program, even if it's supposed to take four years, ends up taking six years.

But not everyone who practices something for 10,000 hours masters it, do they?

I make the point in the book The Beatles started out playing for 10,000 hours in Hamburg, Germany. It's true that they arrived as a high school skiffle band, and left Hamburg as The Beatles. But there were a lot of other Liverpool bands who were playing in the Hamburg clubs alongside them who played 10,000 hours and never became The Beatles.

So, there's obviously a meaningful interaction between talent and perseverance. What is true, though, is that if you pursue a vocation for six years, it is pretty much guaranteed that there will be a place for you in that.

If you write six hours a day, seven days a week for six years, I can't guarantee that you will become Malcolm Gladwell and be a New Yorker writer with innumerable bestsellers. But there will be a place for you in the literary community. Maybe it'll be as an agent, maybe it'll be as an editor. But there will be a place for you.

This sounds a little discouraging for people in their sixties who want to master something. If they need six years, maybe they won't have the time.

Well, the six years is for becoming professionally expert in something to the point where you're able to do it at some reasonable vocational professional level. But that's not true about the rewards of pursuing things for their own sake.

If you pursue something with any kind of perseverance, you suddenly get those cognitive aerobics — that moment when you're no longer struggling with it. This cognitive opiate is as powerful as the drugs we put into our veins.

One thing I enjoyed about the book is the connection between family and mastery. You wrote about your mother's strudel baking and your son's card magic, your daughter's ballroom dancing and your grandfather's boxing. Can you talk about the connection between mastery and family?

One of the secrets of the greatest masters is that they are in touch with everything they are. And more than anything else, what we are is the people who raised us and whom we married and gave birth to and raised ourselves.

I couldn't box without the ghostly presence of my grandfather who lived for boxing and whose enthusiasm for boxing had been sort of opaque to me for a very long time. I couldn't bake at all without reflecting on my mother who's been a baker her whole life.

The mystery of mastery is that inside that mystery inevitably is the whole of our genesis, the whole of our history. The mystery contains a history, to sound a bit like Muhammad Ali. And it's inescapable.

Some people have read you in The New Yorker, but some may only know you from "Tár." Anything you want to say about what it was like to be in that movie talking to Cate Blanchett's character and how that relates to mastery?

It was a joy to work with Cate Blanchett, who is maybe the master actor of her time. What was so impressive about working with her was that she had absolutely prepared. She knew where all the psychological moments were, where the pauses were, where the accelerations were. She had made a roadmap in her mind of what the dramatics of this scene should be.

It left room for play and improvisation, but she came prepared.

Richard Eisenberg is the former Senior Web Editor of the Money & Security and Work & Purpose channels of Next Avenue and former Managing Editor for the site. He is the author of "How to Avoid a Mid-Life Financial Crisis" and has been a personal finance editor at Money, Yahoo, Good Housekeeping, and CBS MoneyWatch. Read More