The Great Work of Your Life

by Stephen Cope

  Corot set to work to master this challenge. What followed were three years of intensive growth in his practice of capturing the subtle effects of light on stone and field—and an altogether different play of sky and shadow than he had known. He had an early breakthrough: After some initial investigation, Corot realized that the intense Mediterranean light did not actually strengthen bright colors as he had thought. Rather, it bleached them. He discovered, through systematic experimentation, that he could add white lead to his pigments, and thereby achieve a more accurate representation of the sun-drenched landscapes. But this was just the beginning. Breakthrough followed breakthrough as he bore down on his challenge.

  In his attempts at mastery, Corot did something that was strictly forbidden by several of his teachers. He returned to the same scene day after day—and at several different times of day—attempting both to see and to paint the subtle variations of these scenes as they changed with the weather and the light. The most famous of these studies is a trio of finished paintings called View in the Farnese Gardens. For three weeks in March of 1826, Corot painted all day—every day—from the Palatine Hill in Rome. In the morning, he faced east-southeast toward the church of San Sebastiano in Palatino; at midday he faced east-northeast, toward the Colosseum; and in the afternoon he looked north toward the Forum.

  In this series of paintings from the Palatine Hill, one can see something altogether new emerge in Corot’s work. He was learning, through practice, to capture astonishing subtleties of light and shadow—and a sense of the soul of the hour. These paintings are alive. There is both movement and quiet, and a kind of inner pulsation of energy. They are the fruit of a new quality of attention that the artist was developing. Corot was systematically training his attention to see more deeply into his subjects—to see them, and to master them.

  With this series, Corot began to attract attention among the scruffy lot of landscape painters with whom he socialized every evening at Caffè Greco in Rome. Caruelle d’Aligny, one of the great young painters who was carefully observing Corot’s progress in Rome, announced to the assembled landscapists at their mutual hangout one evening: “Corot is our master.”

  Why did Corot stand out from the crowd of his painter friends? Was it inborn talent? Genius? No. It was the quality of his practice. He was engaging in what some contemporary students of optimal performance now call “deliberate practice.” Deliberate practice is not just a laborious repetition of the tasks of artistry. It is, rather, a kind of sustained engagement in the work that is aimed specifically at understanding and improving the work. It is an intentional breaking down of the tasks of any domain into smaller and smaller components to see precisely how they work. And it results in steady and incremental improvements in performance.

  Corot was engaging in deliberate practice of his art. On the Palatine Hill he had intentionally given himself an assignment to improve his capacity to capture difficult and subtle changes in light. He looked systematically at how he was mixing colors. At how he was composing scenes. At where he was standing. At how he was applying the paint. He made careful observations of his work as he went, and then examined it again every night with his friends, using their eyes to help him evaluate things he may have missed. He was working intentionally for new and more accurate, or more interesting, effects.

  Corot’s finished work from this early Italian period has a lightness and ease that is disarming. But in spite of its apparent offhandedness it was actually very carefully composed. Corot developed a habit of working precisely. He stayed longer at each scene than the other artists. He persevered in his work from each station. He wrote in one of his notebooks: “One must be severe in the face of nature and not content oneself with a hasty sketch. How many times in reviewing my drawings have I regretted not having had the courage to stay at it half an hour more!… One must not allow indecision in a single thing.”

  Says critic Peter Galassi: “Many of Corot’s best open-air paintings … possess a freshness and buoyancy that is closer to athletic grace than to intellectual deliberation. The study is a document of the liveliness—one is tempted to say, the abandon—of its own making. But like the athlete, Corot did not depend on natural talent alone. A deep effort of preparation and concentration lay behind his spirited performance.”

  Here was the key to Corot’s development: the discovery of the compelling fruit of “deliberate practice.”

  6

  Several years ago, Lonny Jarrett and I had lunch together at a café near his office. I asked Lonny how he got into acupuncture. In a leisurely fashion, Lonny laid out for me a riveting dharma story—a story that exemplifies many of the same principles we find in Corot.

  Even as a child, Lonny had a gift. He was curious about the mind. He wanted to understand consciousness. (“Consciousness?” I thought. Did I even know the word when I was a kid?) Eventually, as part of his quest to understand the mind, Lonny had enrolled in graduate school in neurobiology—assuming that an examination of the brain would bring him closer to a grasp of the elusive facts of consciousness. He got himself far enough up to his elbows in neurobiology to discover that this science was not, alas, really about consciousness at all. He gradually began to see that consciousness itself was not actually located in the brain.

  Lonny began to throw his net wider. At one point in his search, he took a ten-week course in Chinese medicine and diagnosis. In this course the teacher gave a brief overview of pulse taking, and began to teach about the energy fields of the body (those wall charts I see in Lonny’s office). One episode from this ten-week course stood out vividly, and Lonny brightened as he told it.

  During the last week of the course, he and his classmates and their teacher sat around in a circle. Each student would stand up and talk for a minute or two. Then everyone else in the circle would diagnose that particular student—making an effort to describe his precise energy type and his probable physical strengths and vulnerabilities seen from an Eastern, whole-systems perspective. To his surprise, Lonny nailed every diagnosis—stunning the teacher and the rest of the students as well. He discovered that he could rely on an intuitive part of his mind—a gift he hadn’t even known he had. He found to his delight that this form of medicine used all of him—all of his gifts. And he came to believe that Chinese medicine had everything that was missing from Western medicine.

  “Sitting around that circle,” said Lonny, “something shifted in me.” He realized that while neurobiology sees consciousness as a by-product of neural functioning, Chinese medicine considers the entire material universe to be an outward manifestation of consciousness. He had finally found the domain in which he could explore consciousness itself. He soon signed up for a course in acupuncture, and eventually took the entire program. The rest is history. Lonny has gone on to write several important books in the field, and to become a master practitioner.

  While he was doing his coursework, Lonny met Leon Hammer—a distinguished scholar and practitioner of Chinese medicine. Hammer, a psychologist, was teaching the first real psychological presentation of Chinese medicine in the United States. When Lonny graduated from the course, he discovered that Hammer lived just an hour north of him. He invited Hammer to be his mentor, and proceeded to work intensively with him for the next decade.

  During this ten-year apprenticeship, Leon and Lonny saw hundreds of patients together. Sometimes they would spend two hours taking just one patient’s pulses. Then they spent another two hours discussing in detail what they discovered in those pulses—precisely how they discovered it, and what it meant. Altogether, these two men would spend an astonishing four hours on each patient. In the early phase, Lonny says, it required a tremendous amount of concentration for him to perceive the subtleties of the various pulses. In the process, he could feel himself learning, stretching, improving. It was intense. It was difficult. But it was at times exhilarating. There were plateaus when nothing seemed to be happening. And then there were moments of breakthro
ugh.

  I was fascinated to hear Lonny describe how, often, just when he thought he had reached a solid ground of understanding, some new insight would pull the ground out from under him—and he’d feel disoriented, as if everything he thought he knew was dropping away. In these times, Lonny would doubt himself: Am I hypnotizing myself into believing a complex metaphysic that is actually baseless? he wondered. (This, of course, exactly paralleled my own early experience of doubt about acupuncture.) Then, inevitably, a bigger picture would emerge—more complete than before—and Lonny would gain higher ground in his practice.

  Lonny described the way in which mastery begins to show itself. “You begin to study, and for a while you just don’t get it. You don’t think you know anything. And then one day, you get a whiff of something. There it is! You perceive a pulse. Then you begin to feel for it everywhere. On your wife, your kids, your friends. Then, after a while, your teacher points you to a deeper pulse, and at first you don’t get that. You’re frustrated. But you hang in there. Eventually you begin to get a glimmer of this new pulse, this more subtle pulse. And suddenly, you’re on a new plateau. And that’s how it goes.” Just so. This is deliberate practice.

  7

  The scientific investigation of deliberate practice began with the unique contribution of researchers K. Anders Ericsson and Neil Charness, whose article “Expert Performance: Its Structure and Acquisition” is a standard text of the field. As it turns out, “expert practice” (or performance that leads to what Ericsson calls “eminent performance”) requires certain factors, all of which Corot and Lonny had stumbled onto—either through the course of formal instruction, or as a result of their own deep motivation to learn. These are the factors required for expert practice, paraphrased here from Ericsson’s work:

  • Sustained and intensive practice of a skill for several hours a day

  • Practice with the specific intention of improving, not just repeating

  • Practice that is sustained in this manner for a matter of years—in most cases as many as ten years

  • Practice that includes a particular mechanism by which the results of practice can be evaluated and improved upon in future sessions

  • The intentional development of sophisticated feedback loops—teachers and colleagues commenting on progress; other pairs of expert eyes on the work

  • Appropriate care paid to the essential ingredient of “recovery time” so that there is energy to engage in the same intense practice again the next day

  • A considerable amount of time spent within the so-called “domain of the task.” For Corot, for example, this meant hanging out with other painters—talking about his art, talking about trends in art, getting support for the lifestyle of the artist.

  For Corot, for Lonny, and for all masters, deliberate practice is really about the training of attention. It involves learning to sustain attention on a complex task, and to come back to that task over and over again; to stay with it just a little bit longer each time. (Remember Corot’s telling comment: “How often I had wished I had stayed longer!”)

  Most of young Corot’s contemporaries in Italy had not yet stumbled onto these secrets. They drew or painted views just once. They were under the common misapprehension that it is the sheer volume of practice that creates mastery. Corot, however, saw that it was not the volume, but the quality of his practice. He had to try to make every canvas better than the last—and he worked to understand why it was better.

  Remember our friend Hokusai? Every dot and stroke will be alive! Hokusai did precisely this kind of practice in his masterful Thirty Views of Mt. Fuji, of which the aforementioned Great Wave is a part. Claude Monet was doing this, too, when he painted eighteen canvases of the façade of the Rouen Cathedral, minutely recording all its variations in color from dawn to sunset.

  8

  Deliberate practice is really a kind of sophisticated attentional training. It bears fruit when attention begins to penetrate the object of its interest in an entirely new way. With sustained practice, the master’s perception of the object becomes refined. Aspects of the object that had previously been out of perceptual range begin to come into perceptual range. Eventually, for example, Corot began to observe subtle aspects of color and light in the Italian countryside that others simply did not see. The quality of his perception was refined in parallel with his skill at capturing it.

  This refinement of attention is a central component of mastery. Technically, it is called “the development of pattern recognition.” With practice, the master begins to see patterns that others cannot yet see. Lonny begins to see energy patterns in the pulse. Thoreau begins to see plants in the Concord woods that no one had previously noticed or cataloged. (The last great unfinished work of Thoreau’s life was a mammoth classification system of nature; he was seeing entirely new patterns of flora, of seasonal change, of fauna.) Beethoven—as we shall see in a forthcoming chapter—in his late work began to see patterns and opportunities in the sonata form that no one had seen before.

  Experts gradually learn to see their object of study with something more than ordinary vision. They see the object, as it were, “fresh.” In contemplative practice, this is sometimes called “beginner’s mind.” This fresh seeing involves two related components: First, a master sees the parts of the object in enormous detail—in much more detail than normal. But at the same time—and most important—he sees these parts in their relationship to the whole. He sees both the parts and the whole at the same time. When a chess master looks at a board during a game, he sees hundreds of potential individual moves (many more than the average player sees) but more important, he sees them in relationship to the outcome of the overall game. This gives the individual moves heightened meaning.

  It is well known that expert meditators develop the capacity to see life in slow motion, observing objects (including their own thoughts) in minute detail, as if seeing every individual frame of a movie. It turns out that masters in every field develop the same capacity. Master baseball players, for example, when at bat, see the ball coming at them as if in slow motion—even though the ball is actually traveling 90 miles an hour. Not only can the master batter see the ball in “individual frame” detail, but he can at the same time see the meaning of those details. How low is the ball to the ground? Over what quadrant of the plate will it pass? Is it spinning? In what direction? How will all of this detail influence my decision about how and where I want to hit the ball? This is mastery.

  The great Japanese-American conductor Seiji Ozawa almost always conducts great symphonies without a score. He knows each individual moment in the score in great detail, of course. But he also sees that individual moment in the context of the whole symphony. So, in each moment, he holds both the part and the whole in his mind.

  Corot developed precisely this kind of mastery. His students observed that as he matured, he appeared to visualize the completed painting as he approached a fresh canvas. He was famous for running his hand lightly over a fresh canvas, feeling it, making love to it, as it were. He would imagine an ideal structure in his mind’s eye, placing objects in just the right relationship to one another. Indeed, by all accounts, he would not start a canvas until he had seen it whole.

  Lonny has a remarkably similar story to tell about his practice of acupuncture and Chinese medicine. After I had known him for a while, he confided to me that he “knows exactly how to treat a person as soon as the person comes into the room.” There are so many cues visible to his naked and knowing eye, that he does not really need to take pulses. He takes pulses only to confirm the hunches that are already forming in his mind, and because it builds patients’ confidence that he is not actually just performing voodoo. This confidence emerges from the degree of detail Lonny is able to perceive about a patient by merely touching his wrist for a moment or two. Lonny’s perception has now become so refined that he sees those energy grids, depicted in his wall hangings,
come alive in each patient who walks into his treatment room.

  The capacity to know a certain domain of the world in such depth appears to us ordinary mortals as a kind of supernormal power. It seems like magic. It is not magic at all, of course, but simply the inevitable result of sustained concentration on an object of intense interest.

  Any one of us can discover these principles—and these capacities—in our own domain, whether it be stamp collecting or gardening or selling insurance. I have stumbled onto most of these principles in my own domain—writing. As it turns out, Ericsson and his friends have studied writers, and have a great deal to say about the subject. Great writers, they discovered (not surprisingly) see a manuscript whole—just as a chess master sees a chessboard whole. Even when working on details, the master writer always holds in mind the entire scope of her argument. She sees the parts in relationship to the whole. Ericsson found that while revising manuscripts, for example, expert writers focus on global problems, while novice writers focus on local problems. Novice writers spend the bulk of their time assessing whether they are using the correct word or phrase, or in evaluating the structure of a sentence. They become easily lost in the details, and lose the global view of the whole argument. In contrast, expert writers constantly evaluate the form or shape of their argument. Expert writers focus on making sure that their global meaning is communicated through the words and sentences. The meaning is primary, and every word, sentence, and paragraph in a polished work must support this meaning.