Decades of writing bestselling books and award-winning essays has seen Adam Gopnik take on myriad topics. But recently a question obsessed him: how did the people he was writing about learn their outlandish skill, whether it was drawing a nude or baking a sourdough loaf?

In The Real Work the long standing New Yorker writer apprentices as a boxer, a dancer and a driving instructor and other roles he’d assumed beyond him. He finds that learning a skill is a process of methodically breaking down and building up, and that the key, in any field, is mastering other people’s minds.