The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery

Book review by Deane Barker • • tags: skill-building •
An image of the cover of the book "The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery"

This book annoyed the hell out of me. This is another book that doesn’t really describe anything in any objective sense. Rather, it’s a…"meditation” on something. It comes off feeling indulgent and narcissistic.

The writer jumps around. He talks about how he tried to master drawing, then he goes into magicians quite a bit, and then there’s a bizarre chapter on baking bread with his mother.

None of this is combined into any type of thematic whole. It seemed to just be a random collection of essays that could, in some sense, be considered to be about the same subject.

I guess I was expecting something like Practice Perfect or So Good They Can’t Ignore You. But this was not even close. Instead I got something like The French Art of Not Trying Too Hard or Bookstores (both of which I loathed).

I bailed out about two-thirds of the way through when it became clear it wasn’t going to get any better.

Ridiculous and disappointing.

Book Info

Author
Adam Gopnik
Year
Pages
256
Acquired
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Lovely coffee table picture book of independent bookstores from around the world. The writer/photographer spent a lot of time in several major cities – San Francisco, NYC, London, Paris, Vienna, and some smaller cities in Germany, Portugal and The Netherlands. Each bookstore gets a small essay from…

↑ Outbound link to – The French Art of Not Trying Too Hard December 26, 2022

I struggled with this book. I didn’t finish it, but I tried. I even tried to go back and read it in pieces. In fact, I kept it on my reading table for a week, picking it up over and over and try and make some sense of it. (The date on this review is simply the date when I gave up…) Here’s a problem…

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Absolutely brilliant book that anyone in their 20s or who is just starting out their career should read. It lays waste to the idea that we need to “pursue our passion,” and instead promotes the idea that we need to ravenously acquire skill and either (1) find passion through the expression of that…