Join me in this live, two-hour class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about the mystery of mastery – and about the ways our humanity is immeasurably enriched in even the simplest things we set out to master.

I’m Adam Gopnik. I’m an author, essayist, public speaker, and a lyricist and libretto writer, and I hope you’ll join me for my upcoming class, Five Things I’ve Learned ….About Five Things  I’ve Learned. In this two-hour session, I’ll talk about the process of learning itself, as I’ve studied it and absorbed it and articulated it in recent years, particularly in my last long book “The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery.”

I’ve been my own guinea pig – in learning in mid-life how to drive, draw and dance, among many other new things.

I’m an essayist, and a humanist, not a scientist – but then this is a subject that demands the broadest humane vision. I won’t’ give you a recipe, but I will give you a reason – a series of reasons – to explain why learning happens, and to give you confidence that real learning never ends. Every vector of our humanity presses down on us from every side when we undertake the process of mastery – learning to do things we didn’t know how to do before. As I’ll explain, across the lifetime I’ve spent learning and the time I’ve devoted to thinking about learning I’ve come to understand that sorting out those vectors and finding the continuity within them is, well, it’s the real work.

In this class, I’ll talk specifically about my time with some wonderful teachers – magicians, artists, boxers, and others-– and how they’ve helped me to uncover deeper insights about learning and the philosophy behind mastery.

Here are five key themes I’d love to explore.

  1. The Shared Process of Mastery. What are the real continuities of the real work? No matter how obscure or extreme the activity, or how difficult it seems, all new accomplishments are amenable to the same business of breaking down and building up – to the irresistible force of passionate perseverance.
  2. The Role of Teachers. Malcolm Gladwell said once that what I really do is fall in love with teachers – and that may be true. But what is it that teachers beautifully do?  I’ll share what I’ve learned talking to one or two, and reflect on the others – on the way, as I wrote once, that a guru may spellbind us with his personality, but a real teacher gives us his system, and then ourselves.
  3. The Necessity of “Imagining the Other.” Everything we learn is social even when it’s solitary.  We have to imagine the other – the driver in the adjoining car, the boxer we are sparring with, even if only in our imaginations. We have to imagine the other in order to improve ourselves.
  4. The Power of Imperfection – Or the ‘Vibrato’ Effect.  Wewant to become more and more perfect at the new skills we learn, but one of the things we learn is that art and performance are always most powerful and moving when they capture the quaver and personal signature of an individual voice.  Imperfection has power of its own, and I’ll analyze it – however imperfectly!
  5. The Power of the “Secondary Passion.” Almost every great artist or performer turns out to have some ‘secondary passion’ that fuels their primary one. The great French painter Ingres preferred playing the violin to painting pictures—and this became an idiom in French, the ‘violin d’Ingres.’   Yet secondary passions are not mere hobbies; they are the fuel of our primary vocation and cultivating them is one of the secrets to real accomplishment.

Above all, I want to make you feel how the real work is available to each of us. I want to share with you my strongest belief that our humanity is immeasurably enriched in even the simplest things we set out to master.

I very much hope you’ll join me.

-Adam Gopnik