From drawing to driving, Adam Gopnik explores what it takes to master a new skill

The Sunday Magazine20:39The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik on the art and meaning of mastery

New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik learned to drive at age 55.

It was just one of the ways Gopnik put himself through the ringer for his latest book, The Real Work, attempting to master a variety of skills from boxing and baking to magic and art.

But he says the task he was particularly pleased to tackle was getting his license after a lifetime in the passenger seat. 

He spoke with The Sunday Magazine guest host David Common about what it means to finally learn to drive, and what it taught him about achievement.  

Here is part of their conversation.

You set out to explore in the book, several very different skills. What is it about mastery that is both compelling and mysterious to you?

What I was drawn to, David, was that I was very acutely aware that in our civilization in Canada and the United States, like we drive everyone — particularly our kids — towards achievement, passing the next test, getting through the next thing. And that's a very, kind of, empty experience very often. Whereas accomplishment is something that is enduring, even if we don't accomplish it all that well.

In the course of this, I didn't intend it to be a book. These were things that sort of happened and then I realized as they were happening that it might become a book. That by learning to draw after years of being an art critic, and not knowing how to do life drawing; learning to drive because I grew up in the middle of Montreal, and we'd never had a car.

By compiling those accomplishments, you have that invaluable experience of what we sometimes call the flow  — you know, the way that all the little stumbling steps of life eventually magically come together into this seamless sequence. And once you've experienced that sense, that internal sense of the flow, it's addictive.

I want to go to something that's a bit more every day and talk about driving. Before this project, you actually hadn't learned to drive. You talked about, that you just didn't have the need. But what was holding you back beyond the need in those early days in Montreal?

That was the thing that had stalled me but then after that, I got many a ... lecture from my father who's a fantastic driver from Campbellford, Ont., and in its environment, and my good wife, who's Winnipeg Icelandic in background, that it was a bad idea for someone as abstracted and kind of quick-reflexed as I am to try and drive.

And so I spent my life in what my daughter would call the gendered seat — usually the mother's seat — you know, passing out the cookies and saying "shhh, your mother's trying to find the exit," and so on.

But I wanted to at least get good enough to be able to drive for cinnamon buns in the summer. And I suppose, and I discuss it in the essay ... that there are other sort of masculine testing motives involved. In any case, I believe I am the only person ever to get a driver's license on exactly the same day as his 20-year-old son with exactly the same driving judge. But what was great about the experience— 

The same assessor for both of you?

The same assessor. I got into the car, and she gave me a license with an alarmed look in her eye. Then Luke got in the car and he got the license. I was 55 and he was 20.

And who drove away from that? Was it you or your son?

It was our teacher, the great, Arturo [Leon]. Arturo drove us away. I was in such a state of shock from getting it. But Arturo, who I talked about in the book ... was a fantastic teacher. And one of the things he taught me [was] what overwhelms you when you're learning to drive at an advanced age like mine [is] you recognize that though it isn't all that difficult, it is insanely dangerous.

When you learn to drive at the normal age, you're a teenager and so you're immune to the sense of danger as teenagers are. When you're older, you're like, "Oh, my God, this is insanely dangerous. I've got two tonnes of metal at my command going 50 miles an hour up Manhattan streets, and nobody can stop me."

It's like trying to catch a bullet. 

It's exactly like trying to catch a bullet. That's a crucial thing for someone who's a non-driver is to actually press down on the accelerator and drive.

And Arturo reassured me by saying that the way to manage the danger is to use the hand. And by that he meant you use your hand, just the palm flat out to communicate to other drivers what you're doing. And as he said to me, memorably, the hand can mean anything.

It can mean F you, it can mean thank you, it can mean I'm advancing, it can mean I'm retreating, but it's telling all the other drivers that you're there and alive.

I lived in New York for a period of time. And so I'm quite familiar with the hands that are used by drivers in the city.

Exactly. So the hand is invaluable.

And driving is an interesting one because you write about how, for you, it was a moment of empowerment, but also has been, historically, a moment of emancipation for women. I can't help but think about Saudi Arabia and women who were prosecuted and jailed because of driving; now women are allowed to drive but still under very specific circumstances in that country. I don't want to compare their plight to yours necessarily, but the idea of empowerment — I suppose I am comparing it — but you know what I mean that it's not—

One of the things that I realized as I was writing these essays, and I think is thematic in the book, is that we can't separate out achieving any kind of technical skill from the human drama it represents. You're absolutely right that driving is a form of autonomy, it expresses autonomy, and when you're frightened of women's autonomy, you prevent women from driving.

In my more narrow case, I was always acutely aware that my father [who] is a fantastic driver — has been driving since he was 14, thinks nothing of driving nine hours from Campbellford to go to visit a grandchild or one of his kids — and I was aware that that level of competence in my father had always been somewhat intimidating for me. So that my own refusal to drive and then my struggle to drive, was very much about an inner subliminal dialogue with my father. And he very much became a character in my struggle to drive.

And I think that's true, inevitably. We don't seek out mastery and accomplishment for its own sake. We seek it out in dialogue with others.

There's always another person engaged, and what's empty is when we try and seek, as I said, technical virtuosity without recognizing the human engagement that drives it.