【橘猫推书】

The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

THIRTEEN

Mastery

After William Least Heat-Moon lost his teaching job at the University of Missouri, he decided to take time off and travel around the United States, taking the small back roads that are marked in blue on the Rand McNally maps. Near the town of Hat Creek, California, he met an old man who was taking his dog for a walk.

“A man's never out of work if he's worth a damn,” the old man reflected. “It's just sometimes he doesn't get paid. I've gone unpaid my share and I've pulled my share of pay. But that's got nothing to do with working. A man's work is doing what he's supposed to do, and that's why he needs a catastrophe now and again to show him a bad turn isn't the end, because a bad stroke never stops a good man's work.”

That's a useful distinction. A job is a way of making a living, but work is a particular way of being needed, of fulfilling the responsibility that life has placed before you. Martin Luther King, Jr., once advised that your work should have length—something you get better at over a lifetime. It should have breadth—it should touch many other people. And it should have height—it should put you in service to some ideal and satisfy the soul's yearning for righteousness.

We all know people whose real work is hospitality, but they practice hospitality over the span of many different kinds of jobs. Belden Lane's work is trying to write down and describe the spiritual transcendence he sometimes experiences in nature. But he can't just tell people at dinner parties he's a guy who wanders around in the woods seeking transcendence. “My own particular cover is that of a university professor,” he writes. “It's a way of looking responsible while attending to much more important things.” As a professor, he appears to be “engaged in reputable endeavors, locked into acceptable categories. I manage to satisfy my employer, meet society's expectations, sign checks.” But his real work is up in the mountains, stalking that eternity that is seen in not being seen.

DIGGING THE DAMN DITCH

A person who has found his vocation has been released from the anxiety of uncertainty, but there is still the difficulty of the work itself. All vocational work, no matter how deeply it touches you, involves those moments when you are confronted by the laborious task. Sometimes, if you are going to be a professional, you just have to dig the damn ditch.

All real work has testing thresholds, moments when the world and fate roll stones in your path. All real work requires discipline. “If one is courteous but does it without ritual, then one dissipates one's energies,” Confucius wrote. “If one is cautious but does it without ritual, one becomes timid; if one is bold but does it without ritual, then one becomes reckless; if one is forthright but does it without ritual, then one becomes rude.”

All real work requires a dedication to engage in deliberate practice, the willingness to do the boring things over and over again, just to master a skill. To teach himself to write, Benjamin Franklin took the essays in The Spectator, the leading magazine of his day, and translated them into poetry. Then he took his poems and translated them back into prose. Then he analyzed how his final work was inferior to the original Spectator essays.

When he was teaching himself to play basketball, Bill Bradley set himself a schedule. Three and a half hours of practice every day after school and on Sundays. Eight hours on Saturdays. He wore ten-pound weights on his ankles to strengthen them. His great weakness was dribbling, so he taped pieces of cardboard to the bottom of his glasses so he could not see the ball as he dribbled it. When his family took a trip to Europe by boat, Bradley found two long, narrow corridors belowdecks where he could dribble his basketball at a sprint, hour upon hour, day after day.

Deliberate practice slows the automatizing process. As we learn a skill, the brain stores the new knowledge in the unconscious layers (think of learning to ride a bike). But the brain is satisfied with good enough. If you want to achieve the level of mastery, you have to learn the skill so deliberately that when the knowledge is stored down below, it is perfect.