Now that I’ve started, I can’t stop seeing new angles on this topic.
I just started Adam Gopnik’s The Real Work. It’s a book-length meditation on how to find mastery in your life.1 He’s talking about mastery on page 2, but he could have been talking about effort and satisfaction in learning:
What really moves and stirs us is accomplishment, that moment of mastery when suddenly we feel that something profoundly difficulty, tenaciously thorny, has given way, and we are now the Master of It, instead of us being mastered by it.
That’s what we need to inspire in our students, a feeling of mastery, that they are masters of the subject, not the other way around.
- “The real work” is a phrase magicians use when talking among themselves about their craft. It is, in Gopnik’s words, “what makes a magic effect magical.” ↩