The Spiritual Emptiness of Achievement

Everyone has managed to master something, even if it’s the most basic of skills. If you’ve learned to read, or ride a bicycle, or play a musical instrument, you’ve experienced the moment at which an ability that previously seemed bewildering, then merely very difficult, finally yields to your efforts, becoming something you know how to do. After crossing such thresholds, you feel, in some mysterious way, more fully yourself, occupying your place in the world a little more definitively, and with more authority, than before.

Yet Adam Gopnik is surely right to argue, in the opening pages of , his new book on what he calls “mastery,” that the effort needed to achieve such proficiency (to completely learn the gestures, the vocabularies, until they become nearly second nature) is generally undervalued. What is championed instead is the lesser goal he distinguishes as “achievement,” the evanescent act critic, isn’t the first author to emerge victorious from the American tournament of achievement only to discern its spiritual emptiness. But his contribution to an antidote feels original, and mercifully within reach. We need to refamiliarize ourselves, he thinks, with the profound and enlarging experience of truly mastering things, or at least attempting to do so.