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Arun Venugopal: This is The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Welcome back, everyone. I'm Arun Venugopal from the WNYC and Gothamist newsroom. If you happen to be watching the Academy Awards last night, you would have caught the moment when our next guest got a nice little shout-out from host, Jimmy Kimmel. That's right. Adam Gopnik was in the Oscar-nominated Tár and sitting opposite Cate Blanchett. When he's not playing himself in Oscar-nominated movies, Gopnik somehow finds time to write articles and the occasional book.

His latest book is called The Real Work and it's about the mystery of mastery. How exactly do people get really good at something, whether that's baking bread or drawing a nude or a magic trick? More to the point, can we, mere mortals, become masters ourselves? Gopnik's interest vary widely in books like The Table Comes First, A Thousand Small Sanities, and At The Strangers' Gate. He explores the meaning of food, life in New York, and the nature and the virtues of liberalism. Hi, Adam, welcome back to WNYC.

Adam Gopnik: Hey, Arun. Great to be back.

Arun Venugopal: We'll get to the book pretty soon, but first things first, were you actually watching the Oscars when you hear your name globally?

Adam Gopnik: Yes, I will confess and we were having a family joke, "Maybe we would get a glimpse of daddy." Just a little piece from the thing. I was totally unprepared and everybody delighted in the shout-out. I will confess, Arun, it's mildly, what's the right word for it, instructive that you've published millions of words over a 40-year career and all you're likely to be remembered for is 10 minutes with Cate Blanchett. Such is the asymmetry of literature and entertainment.

Arun Venugopal: Not all, not all. There, there. For those of you who weren't watching, I was actually across a room when I heard Jimmy Kimmel. I was like, "Wait, did he just mention Adam Gopnik?" I think it's something along the lines. If you see only one movie this year that starts with the main character being interviewed for 15 minutes by New Yorker staff writer, Adam Gopnik, make it Tár, Jimmy Kimmel. [laughs]

Adam Gopnik: I think you have it exactly. The other thing that struck me was that I bet that the joke originally was interviewed by Adam Gopnik and everybody said, "Who's he? Nobody knows who he is. You better describe him." It's weird to be identified so narrowly, staff writer at The New Yorker.

Arun Venugopal: The studio execs in LA who are like, "The New Yorker, what's that? What the hell is The New Yorker? Who reads that magazine?"

Adam Gopnik: Exactly.

Arun Venugopal: As someone who's not an actor by trade but who did have a role in a big movie like this, albeit the role of Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker, did you feel invested in this film and whether it would win?

Adam Gopnik: Well, yes, but not because of my part in it. The truth was when I did my bit, I had no idea what the movie as a whole was about. I saw it with everybody else and I thought Todd Field did just a brilliant job of creating a movie that, as you know, has got such novelistic ambiguity that everybody has their own take on it, what it means, whether Lydia Tár is a heroine or a villain, and so on.

It's very unusual for a movie to be so broad and so capable of multiple interpretations. I was immensely proud to be in it even though, as I say, the character I'm playing is a version of myself. It was a scripted part. I'm playing myself playing myself. Since I was doing it in Berlin while pretending to be in New York, you could say I was playing myself playing myself playing myself, which is a number of mental levels removed to make it all a little dreamy.

Arun Venugopal: As I understand it, you were not necessarily given for who would play the role of Adam Gopnik, is that right?

Adam Gopnik: No, they asked me. In fact, Todd charmingly called me and said, "I've written a movie for Cate Blanchett that has a role in it named Adam Gopnik and I wondered if you would consider playing that part."

Arun Venugopal: You're like, "I was thinking Vin Diesel perhaps?"

Adam Gopnik: Exactly. Actually, I said it first, "Well, I'm not sure. It's not the kind of thing I do." Then he said, "Well, we'll bring you and your wife to Berlin for a week and Cate will be so disappointed if you don't." I said, "Let me call Mr. Gopnik to the phone." That's an old Woody Allen joke, I should add, and how appropriate for the moment.

Arun Venugopal: To end this little thread on the movie before we get to the subject at hand, was there any point of direction that the director gave you about playing the role of Adam Gopnik?

Adam Gopnik: Just make it ever more glamorous. No, Todd is a wonderful director because he just put us in the situation and Cate as I came to call her. I bat the ball across the net and try and find the right back-and-forth of her assertiveness and my bemusement and so on. Quite seriously, it's a role I play. I often do conversations on stage with Stephen Sondheim or James Taylor or whomever and you develop a certain-- Well, it's exactly what you do every morning, right? When you're doing this, you have a set of skills. They're related to who you are, but they're not definitive of who you are, and I inhabited that part.

Arun Venugopal: Let's move onto your side hustle here.

Adam Gopnik: [laughs] Writing books, right.

Arun Venugopal: That thing, that thing. The book is called The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery. It's just out. It's not simply about making or doing something well. It's about mastery. Why is this distinction important to you?

Adam Gopnik: Well, because I got fascinated. The title of the book, The Real Work, is a term I borrowed from magicians. I spent a wonderful few weeks out in Las Vegas just following magicians from David Blaine to Penn & Teller, around the great sleight-of-hand men. Jamy Ian Swiss, a New Yorker, was my guide into the world. I was fascinated because it's 3:00 AM when magicians gather after all their performances at a diner in Las Vegas. They always talk about the real work.

They say, "Who's got the real work on [unintelligible 00:06:35] illusion?" or "Who's got real work on the Erdnase color change?" I realized after a while that what they were saying was not who originated that trick or effect and not even who does it in the most spectacular way. They meant who combines technical virtuosity and a kind of empathetic engagement. Who does it in the most persuasive way? Who covers all the bases, both of virtuosity and of engagement, of performance excellence?

I was really stirred by that because I realize that in every endeavor that we encounter in life or attempt, we know who's got the real work. We know exactly that level of engaged empathetic virtuosity. I got fascinated with the idea of studying and pursuing it in many fields that were not only not my own but which I had no expectations of ever achieving mastery in. By observing masters, I thought I could understand something about what that endeavor was about.

Arun Venugopal: We often equate mastery, that word, which is on the cover of your book, with the idea of perfection or flawlessness. You say that's not really the case, that humanity matters as well.

Adam Gopnik: Yes, and I think that's true, Arun, in two senses. One is, is that the fascinating thing is that as you become engaged in any endeavor, you realize, as I said a moment ago, that technical virtuosity is fantastic. It's what you strive for, what you work for, but it has no real meaning outside of your ability to engage with other people. I don't just mean in a general sense. That's what great magicians do.

It's not in the fingers. It's in their minds. They have an incredible, intuitive, and learned sense of what people's expectations are. They're constantly trying to startle your expectations just as much as they're trying to delight you with the movement of their fingers. That's true about art as well. I studied that there's a compensatory effort after 40 years as an art critic actually learning life drawing.

One of the fascinating things about life drawing is what I called the "eloquence of the eraser." By blurring lines, by adding uncertainty to the drawing, you invite the holder to project into it. That tends to be true right across. When you're learning music, you realize that mechanical perfection isn't what creates emotional expression. It's exactly the way we leaned out of mechanical perfection into vibrato and legato and all those things that great musicians have mastered to italicize their virtuosity and give it a human content.

I think that that's a profoundly true part of it. The other thing I'd add is every time we try and learn to do something, at least when I tried to learn to do something, you found yourself engaged with other people. I went up to Canada to learn baking from my mother finally after all these years. That story was as much about me and my mother as it was about me and the yeast in the oven.

Arun Venugopal: We're talking to Adam Gopnik about his new book, The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery. Listeners, are you a master of anything? We'll take your humble brags right now. Give us a call at 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. It could be related to your job. Maybe it's just for fun. What are you really, really good, even masterful at doing? What is it about that process that got you there and you can share with us?

Tweet us also @BrianLehrer or call us again, 212-433-WNYC. Maybe you have a question for New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik on his new book, On the Mystery of Mastery. Adam, you spent years analyzing, championing, and critiquing art as you mentioned. One day, you were at a dinner party in Manhattan when you decided to take the plunge into actually making art. Thanks to one of your fellow dinner guests. Set the scene for us if you could.

Adam Gopnik: We were at one of those late-night New York dinner parties where everybody is just desperate to get home because the kids are going to be up for school at 6:00 in the morning. My dining partner turned out to be a wonderful drawing teacher and remarkable painter named Jacob Collins. What fascinated me about Jacob, and continues to fascinate me to this day and we worked together closely for a couple of years, is that he is a hard-ass reactionary.

He thinks that art took a fundamentally wrong turn in 1855. He truly, deeply dislikes modernism in all its forms. Of course, I've spent a lifetime championing modernism, not in all its forms but in many of its forms from Cézanne to Matisse to, God help me, Jeff Koons. Having that intersection with someone who fundamentally did not share my values but he was teaching me his craft made for something that I hope was dramatic in a comic way.

It was about my perpetual inadequacies to his measure, but what was fascinating about his teaching was that he didn't teach me to look and record what I was looking at. He taught me a series of stumbling steps, of little schemata. One I talked about in the book is that when you're trying to draw a face, you're better off rather than trying to describe a face, which is almost impossible for the untrained. You look at somebody's face and you say, "What time is it on that face?"

Imagine that face is on a clock face. Where does the tilt of their jaw put them on the clock face? Jacob calls those "tilts in time." He told me, "Just make tilts in time. Do that for weeks and then you'll begin to form that foundation." I found that to be true right across all of the activities, all of the endeavors that I tried out. None of which were I deliberately started in order to write about them, but all of which happened to me and I found myself writing about. They all begin with those small stumbling steps.

There's one way we learn everything. That is you start to break it down into these tiny steps. Then through sheer persistence, those steps eventually become a seamless sequence. It's that seamless sequence that I think is what we call colloquially, "the flow." We get into the flow. Even if you do it inadequately, even if you know that you'll never have exterior expertise that you can show off, the feeling of those steps becoming the flow is addictive. It's like the greatest self-induced opiate we ever encounter.

Arun Venugopal: It takes you months, this process because you don't simply incrementally get into the flow. You occasionally, as I understand it, hit a wall trying to understand what exactly you need to do to go past your beginner status to something a little higher than beginner status.

Adam Gopnik: Oh, absolutely.

Arun Venugopal: What was that that happened in that process for you?

Adam Gopnik: As I said, it was just when I was first confronted with a plaster cast of a classical nude statue, I had tears in my eyes at my own impotence, my own inadequacy to it, but it was exactly Jacob's teaching, which was break it down into the smallest possible steps, turn the big problem into a sequence of small problems. He would say to me, "Sometimes when you're looking in the flesh of a nude model, just try and find in it the outline of a South-American country or just try to find in it the profile of a snooty butler." Identify some shape in it that you can recognize and begin to draw that shape.

Don't give yourself the macro-problem of capturing a human body. Give yourself a small micro-problem of finding one legible profile within the body. It's exactly those kinds of small steps as I say that we can master. The same thing is true about any activity we try. My own favorite chapter in the book is about learning to drive in New York City. I had a great driving teacher, Arturo Leone. He taught the same thing to a panicked 50-plus-year-old man who had never driven before that you just had to break it down into all the smaller steps of driving, which is scary to do on a New York street when you've never done it before.

Arun Venugopal: We've got some calls coming in. Let's take one of them. This is Joe. Hi, Joe. Where are you calling from?

Joe: Hi, I'm calling from Tenafly, New Jersey.

Arun Venugopal: Do you have any questions for Adam Gopnik or remarks?

Joe: No, I just wanted to make a statement about it and that is that I'm a saxophone player. I've worked very hard over the years to master or try to master the instrument. Many times, people would ask me, "How long does it take to learn to play the instrument?" They'd hear me playing or what have you. This would tip me off immediately that anyone who would ask a question like that has never really tried to master something because the more you learn about an instrument or any other process, the more you realize there is to know. It's just an endless thing. If you really have made an effort in any endeavor to master something, you would never ask a question like that.

Adam Gopnik: Yes, I think that's profoundly true. One of the true signs of mastery, and, obviously, you know how to play the saxophone, is that you're never content. People who are satisfied with their level of achievement aren't terribly good at it. The people who are really good at something are constantly engaged in the perpetual process of improvement through exactly those, mastering even more, small steps, and learning. I was fascinated actually. I was talking once to the great sociologist, Howie Becker.

He was a jazz pianist as well as being a sociologist. He was pointing out how much of learning jazz piano was learning what he called "quips," little figures, that you could work into improvisations, and then reapply to new songs and new music. Again, it's much more about learning those small steps and learning to put them together in some creative way than it is about music suddenly coming through your body like a rush. It's a perpetual process.

Arun Venugopal: Joe gets it. I guess it's one of the paradoxes here. I suppose, for me, one of my own doubts, if you will, which is that no matter how much I desire to be good at something or, for that matter, great at something, I can't download or conjure the will to be great, which is the will to pour my heart into something, to block out all the distractions, whether that's friends or family, and to be better than pretty much anyone else. My question, isn't will one of those sheer intangibles as to whether or not you can really just set yourself on something and the years that it takes to be really a master of something?

Adam Gopnik: Absolutely. We all know that being willful, having a powerful will, is a crucial part of mastering anything. The thing I'd add though, Arun, is that the stuff I tried to do in this book from drawing to driving to boxing, it's not something I'm particularly good at. This is a series of comic essays in large part about the struggle to learn. The thing I'd add though is that even in the struggle, your internal sense of accomplishment at mastering the elementary level of things can be enormous because it exactly, once again, gives you a glimpse of feeling of that flow, which we may apply far more effectively in our vocation.

I'm a writer by vocation. I can, to some degree, believe I've mastered some part of the art of writing, but it's only by engaging in those other things that we become, in a curious way, estranged from our own mastery and remember again what the experience is like. As I say, that's instructive in itself. Your very inadequacy to do it makes you respect, admire, exalt all the more in other people's mastery.

Arun Venugopal: This is The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Arun Venugopal from the WNYC and Gothamist newsroom filling in for Brian today. My guest is New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik. We're talking about his new book, The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery. We've got some callers coming in. Let's take Douglas calling from here in Manhattan. Hi, Douglas.

Douglas: Hi, there. Adam Gopnik, I'm very happy to hear you on the radio. I've been making dances here in SoHo for 50 years. When I first was working and you were writing about art and I was reading you, I thought, "Oh, please, would you please write about dance?" Because the way you're writing about art would so enhance the scene here and make people aware of how amazing modern dance can be?"

Adam Gopnik: Well, thank you. That's a lovely compliment. I will say there is a whole chapter in this book, the culminating chapter. The book is about dance. It's about learning to do formal dancing with my daughter. My daughter went off to university and was going through all the transformations that people do, the students do, and I wanted very much to stay connected with her. The way we stayed connected was by studying the foxtrot together. The whole last chapter is about learning to foxtrot with my daughter. It's about, again, the same thing that you and I've watched dance for a long time and I love it.

My wife began as a dancer, but I'm ignorant of it. The moment I began to enter even into the world of ballroom dancing, and there is no more flat-footed ballroom dancer than me, you become aware of the wild intricacy of even the simplest steps in dancing and, again, how they're built up out of those small sequences, out of those little crepes, and that the great dancers and choreographers turn them into one of those beautiful, seamless sequences. I feel I can empathize more with the work of the dancer. Having danced badly myself, I see what it must be like to do it well.

Arun Venugopal: Let's take another call. This is Janet. Janet's calling in from Brooklyn. Hi, Janet.

Janet: Good morning. I've learned from my polymer clay teacher that you are the artist. You may not be, "I will never be as good as her, but I enjoy the process." I quote also, "I enjoy doing what I do. I'm not going to do what someone else does. I enjoy the art and it'd be very good as you get older to do new things."

Arun Venugopal: Thank you, Janet.

Adam Gopnik: Yes, absolutely. I say somewhere in the book, this is a self-help book that won't help. I don't pretend to have recipes or how to advise for people, but I think that what our caller has said is profoundly true. You not only sharpen your own cognition by trying new things, you broaden your empathy. You become attached to more and more people. You become aware of more and more people's skills and gifts and struggles by trying new things. Yes, I think it's a hugely salubrious thing to do in what I prefer to the late middle age.

Arun Venugopal: Adam, has becoming a maker of art altered the way you think you'll be writing about it going forward?

Adam Gopnik: That's a great question. As I say, I'm as poor a draftsman as can be. I think that as one gets older, our respect for anyone who does anything well deepens because we know how hard it is. When I see sidewalk artists making a caricature, I'm astounded. I'm impressed by that. I'm endlessly impressed. I play the piano very badly, but it only makes me more aware of the miracle of Erroll Garner or Bill Evans playing the piano that well.

Learning new things in that sense is helpfully humbling and it increases your humility before the greatest works. I don't, for a second, dispute the idea that there are extraordinary talents in the world. We hope to have an extraordinary talent in our own world, but what we're aware of is the one way to approach those extraordinary talents is to engage in our ordinary struggle to empathize with their struggle and recognize how extraordinary it is.

Arun Venugopal: Let's take a call from East Harlem. Hi, Austin. Are you calling from East Harlem?

Austin: Yes, sir. I'm a fine artist and a painter and I draw incessantly. It's the binging that just gets me into that flow state where, all of a sudden, you're just seeing so much in a glance that you can't help but just feel it. It just flows right through you. It is ecstatic, but it comes from drawing a line when I'm at the grocery store and incessantly doing it. You hit it and you lose it if you don't work it.

Adam Gopnik: Yes, absolutely. I know that state best through writing. I love to write. I'm one of those unusual writers who loves to write. I flip my laptop open and start. Exactly, it's almost like aerobics. There's a moment when, suddenly, your inner self flips on and it's making itself. It's that moment of absorption, which is happiness, which is the flow state, and we get addicted to it. It's wonderful. The fun of what I was trying to do in this book was find out what that state felt like and how it was achieved by people doing things radically different from my own.

Arun Venugopal: Adam, for me, one of the things I think about as I'm reading your book is some advice a friend gave me. You're so immersed in your professional life or the daily quotidian stuff that you sometimes forget that you need to remember the joy of just encountering something that you might fail at and be willing to fail at that, which is, I guess, what you've been doing in pursuit of this book, isn't it?

Adam Gopnik: Absolutely. I've been failing for 15 years in everything I've attempted, but that's exactly right. It's salutary for everybody to do that. We live in an achievement-driven society of ruin, I think. We push our kids to achieve over and over. Finally, what matters in life, what resides in life, what remains in life is our accomplishments, our sense of being good at something, whether it's forming chords on a guitar or making inadequate soufflé.

Those are things that are the foundation of our humanity and they're even the foundation of the things we really do well. One of the things this book I hope does is it makes the case for encouraging our kids to pursue accomplishment rather than driving them towards achievement because I think that those accomplishments, however small they may seem, doing card tricks, playing the guitar, are finally the foundation of genuine meaning.

Arun Venugopal: Sometimes just for ourselves or the people in our immediate midst, isn't it? Well, thank you. We're going to leave it there for today. Adam Gopnik is a New Yorker writer and his new book is called The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery. Adam, thanks so much for joining us today.

Adam Gopnik: Arun, it was a pleasure talking to you.

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