Adam Gopnik on Adult Learning and Mastery - Go For It!
On Mastery and Learning as an Adult
Adam Gopnik documents his adventure learning to drive, paint, and box as a Grown Up
Adam Gopnik, author of New Yorker essays and such bestsellers as “Paris to the Moon” and many others, has a new book on learning new skills as an adult. Here are a few good quotes extracted from the excerpt published in The Guardian:
“But the force of what was happening was that, mostly unplanned, I found that learning one skill after another was cumulative and mutually reinforcing and that doing something well for a lifetime actually teaches us less about what the real work is than doing something badly can teach us when we start doing it anew. Everybody’s good at something. Being bad at something reminds us of how we ever got good at anything...
Everyone is good at something, yes, but what I perceived in apprenticing myself to masters in various fields is that we are surrounded by masters. I don’t mean the world-class saxophone player one might fail to recognise on the subway. I mean something more mundane. I mean the mastery all around us, all the time: the mums and dads, brothers and sisters, teachers and tutors, men and women who are, often for the most eccentric of reasons or with the most improbably eccentric practices and teaching methods, able to impart something of what they know...
It seems that if you surrender sufficiently to allow a simple pattern to imprint itself on your mind, an inordinate gift will blossom. At least, that is the promise of mastery. Commit ... and you’ll achieve something that, if not exactly mastery, is at least an actual accomplishment, a happy patch, a bit of software that you had never had before. Having it now, however poorly you install it, makes yours an expanded and extended mind and body, a significantly different self than the one you were assigned at birth. Repetition and perseverance and a comical degree of commitment – simply the commitment both to recognise the absurdity of your effort and the sincerity of its goal – are disproportionately rewarded in the real world of the real work.
It seems that if you surrender sufficiently to allow a simple pattern to imprint itself on your mind, an inordinate gift will blossom. At least, that is the promise of mastery. Commit to the tilts or the finger patterns – or for that matter to being the noodle – and you’ll achieve something that, if not exactly mastery, is at least an actual accomplishment, a happy patch, a bit of software that you had never had before. Having it now, however poorly you install it, makes yours an expanded and extended mind and body, a significantly different self than the one you were assigned at birth. Repetition and perseverance and a comical degree of commitment – simply the commitment both to recognise the absurdity of your effort and the sincerity of its goal – are disproportionately rewarded in the real world of the real work.”