The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery

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three themes seem to spiral out, educating me as they emerged. First, again, that the flow is always a function of fragments, fluid sequences are made of small steps. Separate, discrete actions learned by effort and then put together give not just the illusion of unity but the fact of mastery.

it is, I’ve come to believe, the most sustaining feeling. I know how to do this, and this is the thing I know how to do.

We find meaning in one thing by enlarging the area of reference, making it not more precise but less, by a horizontal leap relating it to something larger. Meanings expand as our contexts expand. Art only becomes articulate within a history, each splashy “me” of Pollock’s pouring becoming a cool “you” of Warhol’s appropriation; and the more of the

More than we fear being evil, or even outrageous, what we fear most in life is being embarrassed. It is the great constraint, and the great propellant, of human accomplishment, and of its opposite, human destructiveness. Much of the worst of history is only comprehensible as a tale of embarrassment feared and, at huge lengths, avoided, or trying to

the experience of mastery lengthens time: by making each step fully self-conscious, we live within the moment as we otherwise rarely do. The attempt to banish distraction, which we try and fail to achieve in meditation, for instance, happens unbidden in kneading dough or practicing scales or making tilts in time. Our interiority is stretched like s

therein lies what I think of now as the asymmetry of mastery: we overrate masters and underrate mastery.

Poe’s deductive account of the Turk, with its focus on the minutiae of performance and deception, became the model for his later detective stories, the first ever of their kind.

mastery happens small step by small step and that the mystery, more often than not, is that of a kind of life-enhancing equivalent of the illusion called “persistence of motion” when we watch a movie or cartoon. “Flow” is the shorthand term that’s been popularized for the feeling of the real work as it seeps through our neurons and veins, and, thou

At the heart of the Too Perfect theory is the insight that magic works best when the illusions it creates are open-ended enough to invite the viewer into a credibly imperfect world. Magic is the dramatization of explanation more than it is the engineering of effects. In every art, the Too Perfect theory helps explain why people are more convinced b