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Calendar View | List of Events
Event name

Virtual Speaker Series - The Real Work: Accomplishment, Achievement, and Their Discontents

When

Thu 05 / 11 / 2023
2:00 PM to 3:00 PM

Where

on Zoom

Who can attend

Open to all

Limited capacity: Registration Closed

Price

Free, but donations appreciated to cover costs! Click on "Donate for this Event" below.
Donate for this Event

The Real Work: Accomplishment, Achievement, and Their Discontents

Speaker: Adam Gopnik

How do masters learn their miraculous skill, whether producing a museum-quality painting or baking a perfect sourdough loaf? How could anyone become so good at anything? In his new book, The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery, best-selling author and The New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik investigates how we learn - and master - a new skill. To unravel this fundamental mystery, Adam became a dedicated student of several masters of their craft: a classical painter, a boxer, a dancing instructor, a driving instructor, and others. Join us to hear what Adam discovered in his search for the answer to mastery and how mastery can happen in your own life - and, significantly, why each of us relentlessly seeks to better ourselves in the first place.   

Adam Gopnik, staff writer and contributor to The New Yorker since 1986, has written fiction, humor, book reviews, personal essays, profiles, and reported pieces from abroad. He was the magazine’s art critic from 1987 to 1995, Paris correspondent from 1995 to 2000, and from 2000 to 2005, wrote a journal about New York life. His books, ranging from essay collections about Paris and food to children’s novels, include Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life, The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food, Winter: Five Windows on the Season, At the Strangers’ Gate: Arrivals in New York, and A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism. Gopnik has won three National Magazine Awards for essays and for criticism, and the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting. In 2013, Gopnik was awarded the medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters, and in 2021 he was made a Chevalier of the Legion d’honneur. He lectures widely, and, in 2011, delivered the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s fiftieth-anniversary Massey Lecture. His musical, “Our Table,” opened in 2017, at the Long Wharf Theatre, in New Haven, and his one-man storytelling show, “The Gates,” played at the Public Theatre in New York.

Northwest Neighbors Village is a local non-profit dedicated to building a supportive community where older adults are valued and age with dignity. We are delighted to offer these programs for free to our neighbors, and keep you engaged and learning. To learn more about us or to support our efforts to enable older adults to thrive in Northwest, DC, please visit our homepage.

Thank you for your interest in our program!

Our membership dues only account for 1/3 of our budget, and we rely on the support of generous donors to continue to create and share engaging programs with the community. If you enjoy this program, please consider making a donation to Northwest Neighbors Village.