How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall?

Like many superficially accomplished people, my life strategy has been to stick with things at which I was immediately adept and abandon all others. Take philosophy. It’s not that I was great at it when I started out, or that I haven’t got better, but I showed some early promise and so I persevered. Where I did not show promise—visual art, music, any kind of sporting skill—I practiced assiduous avoidance.

I’m not proud of this proclivity, but it’s difficult to change. One of my rare attempts at aphorism: “I’ve tried to develop a growth mindset, but I think it’s something you are born with.”

In The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery, Adam Gopnik traces the adult “sense of professional competence” to a version of my strategy: you may not give up so readily, but if the learning curve is steep enough, eventually you will.

Much of what feels like mastery in adult life is actually the avoidance of a challenge. The “flow” in which, if we’re lucky, our daily work is situated, is a narrow current within a broad river that we ceased navigating adventurously long ago, having capsized too many times to try again. The moment we steer back out, we’re in white water, knuckles up. The feeling of impotent helplessness that all of us know from some piece of our early education—and that for the unlucky remains the dominant memory of schooling—is escaped not by becoming any less helpless but by doing only those things that don’t need help.

This rings true to me, though I suspect it varies temperamentally: some are more comfortable on the escarpments of expertise. I am the opposite of that.

To my good fortune, I have been more or less quick on the academic uptake: my test-taking skills were especially sharp in high school and college; my capacity to store information less so. My biggest high school failure was in GCSE Drama, which I recall as 50% essays about plays—I did fine with that—and 50% acting, which required me to internalize a script well enough to perform it as more than a memory test. This I could not do. Remembering the words was beyond me, let alone investing them with emotion. My final grade for Drama was a mediocre C, the average of an A for academic writing and an F for live performance.

I think of this experience, often, doing stand-up comedy. Writing material is hard enough, but memory, facility, and delivery, are harder. Not natively adept at any of these—a reluctant conscript to the growth mindset—I turned to Gopnik’s book for guidance. He paints elegant vignettes of learning, in which he often stars, from drawing to driving to dancing. They are well-written, sometimes captivating, but it wasn’t clear to me what they add up to. In place of principles, Gopnik has seven “mysteries of mastery”—but they are appropriately mysterious. I couldn’t say what conclusions he reached. It occurred to me, at last: were his elusive insights meant to elicit the humbling experience of inexpertise, reminding us that reading comprehension is an achievement not to be taken for granted?

Early in the book, Gopnik does state something like a thesis:

mastery happens small step by small step and … 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.

This fits his key examples: a drawing teacher decomposes the fluid recreation of appearance on a page into discrete procedures; bakers follow recipes with rapt precision; dances are contrived from literal steps.

But it doesn’t match my own experience. I haven’t found a way to break the performance of stand-up comedy into elements one can practice independently, to engineer the parts in the toolshed before putting them together. Instead, I learn by trial and error, relying on fitful feedback—not the assembly of an algorithm but reinforcement learning, albeit with the opposite of big data. My training set is not the world wide web of comedy but the reaction of distracted strangers in a bar.

Still, if Gopnik focuses too narrowly on one mode of skill acquisition, I think he is on to something when he objects to misconceptions of mastery. “We always overestimate the space between the very good and the uniquely good,” he writes. When it comes to comedy, that seems true: there are a lot of very good comics, and the great ones are just a little more adept at joke construction, timing, or delivery.

“And what of the handful of true, undisputed masters?” Gopnik asks.

What makes them unique, I’ve come to think, is not so much virtuosity but instead some strange idiosyncratic vibration of his or her own. What we call genius is most often inspired idiosyncrasy, and sometimes even inspired idiocy.

I don’t know how far this applies to other sorts of mastery—Gopnik may over-generalize again—but it’s as good a definition of genius in stand-up comedy as one could fit in forty words.