I'm Alan Olga and this is Clear In Vivid. Conversations about connecting and communicating.

I'll never be Michelangelo but I understand now what goes into the business of making a

life drawing a naked human being. I understand that better. And boxing which has been a particularly

rich one for me if they find another five foot five Jewish writer who has been practicing

his sedentary occupation for the past 40 years. I'll hop into the ring. But in the absence

of that the way that just those simple aspirations to mastery through perseverance genuinely burst

our hearts with pleasure that's accessible to everyone.

That's Adam Gottnik. A New Yorker magazine essayist and critic for over 35 years his latest

book is called The Real Work on the Mystery of Mastery. And in it he recounts both the struggles

and the delight he's taken in trying to master skills that are entirely foreign to him.

This is going to be fun because I think a lot about the mystery involved in mastering

something and you've written a whole book about it. So the idea that everybody can master

something. Do I have that right that you say that in the book?

Well what I say is that we all can pursue the mastery of something. We can certainly all

engage in the mystery of mastering something. You know I in the course of this book which

took me 15 years of compiling essays because I didn't set out to do it in a programmatic

way. I didn't say oh I'm going to write a book about mastery. I just fell into one thing

after another in the natural course of my existence learning to draw. Then I had to learn

to drive in my 50s and then I wanted to learn to dance with my daughter and so on. But

each one of these things I make no claims to be any good at. You know it's a it's a series

of essays on the comedy of inadequacy my own. But there is that process where you get

good enough to feel that you've got a grasp of something that you once thought you maybe

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