People just love books about creativity and the imagination and how to be better or smarter or more efficient. And when I say people, I mean me. I am ripe, frankly, for wholesale improvement and upgrade, right across the board – physically, emotionally and spiritually, you name it. I want to know, Molesworth-like, How to be Topp. I would love to wake up fizzing with ideas, overflowing with insights and determined beyond all reasonable determination to share my extraordinary wisdom and knowledge, my art, with the world. No one wants to be a Fotherington-Thomas – a wet. Or a schlub, a has-been or a never-was. It’s just a shame, then, that most of the books which promise to tell us how to be top are absolute garbage.

Two new books, by two very different people on a similar theme, promise the usual self-improvement Holy Grail: drink the Kool-Aid from this cup and you too can be creative and imaginative in abundance. In fairness, both books contain a few drops of invigorating liquor for those of us desperate for succour and insight – which is probably as good as it gets, because there is no Holy Grail. There are only drops and dribbles – so let us be grateful for the faintest trickles from on high.

Adam Gopnik is the Ted Lasso of glossy magazine writing. A staff writer for the New Yorker, he is supremely confident, ever-so-slightly irritating, hard to love but impossible not to like. You have to admire the sheer audacity – the low cheek, really – of a book with the title The Real Work, which is in fact a rework, a cut-and-paste of previous magazine articles, dressed up to look like a big ideas book. And the big idea? Nothing less than the very ‘nature of accomplishment’, revealed through Gopnik’s attempts to acquire and practise various and miscellaneous skills, including drawing, driving, boxing and baking.

In true Lasso style, there are lots of hokey assertions about the nature of life, work and art, as Gopnik haphazardly undertakes his tasks. These are doubtless entirely well-meaning but also rather dubious. ‘Doing something well for a lifetime actually teaches us less about what the real work is than doing something badly can teach us when we start doing it anew.’ Really? You could learn less about – I don’t know – boxing from, say, Muhammad Ali than from some middle-aged New Yorker writer who’s just turned up at the gym and strapped on gloves for the very first time?

Absolutely the best things in the book are the quirky details, the stuff that makes Gopnik a great magazine writer: his driving instructor Arturo, a part-time DJ, reminding him to relax, to ‘Become the noodle!’; his weird interview with David Blaine in his Tribeca studio, ‘accessorised with beautiful women, Nadias and Anyas’; and the very sweet chapter about making bread with his mother.

In contrast, most of the big summings-up are either confusing or obvious. He claims to have ‘wound’ the book around ‘Seven Mysteries of Mastery’, but these remain rather mysterious, presented either as ‘fables’, ‘sidebars’, ‘prefaces’ or ‘expanded footnotes’: ‘I’ve tried not to sum up too neatly the point or moral of each adventure as it happened.’ If, like me, you are foolishly seeking shortcuts to mastery and can’t be bothered with the mysteries, the big three takeaways seem to be: first, remember that ‘the flow is always a function of fragments’; second, that ‘everything we do involves everything we do’; and third, that ‘when we look to understand mastery what we find are masters’. Patience, young grasshopper.

If Gopnik spends a lot of time not getting very far but in a highly entertaining fashion, Albert Read goes absolutely all over the place in the twinkling of an eye. Gopnik is a journalist; Read is the managing director of Condé Nast UK, the kind of guy who hires and fires journalists. And if Gopnik reminds you of Ted Lasso, Read is like a cross between Kendall and Logan Roy in Succession: a super-sharp, yipped-up big beast, brimming with big ideas and new ideas and old ideas, and clearly accustomed to having all of these ideas taken entirely seriously by everyone all at once.

According to Read, borrowing a metaphor from the French scriptwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, the imagination is a muscle, a ‘figurative muscle that resides mysteriously somewhere in the mind or the soul’. All I can say is that Read’s muscle is highly developed: there’s a lot of heavy lifting going on in The Imagination Muscle, which amounts to a sort of hypertrophied commonplace book. You name it, it’s here: musings on the ‘plastic state’ of the mind and imagination in youth; the secrets of Leonardo da Vinci; the importance of coffee houses and gathering places in ‘imaginative cities’, and what Read calls ‘cloudburst cultures’, where ‘at rare moments in time, congregations of imaginative minds descend in unison on a single place’; reflections on traditions of storytelling among the griots of West Africa and the hakawatis of the medieval Islamic world; Prometheus; Gutenberg; Shakespeare; Darwin; music; art; film.

It is an extraordinary book, a genuine oddity – an elaborate cabinet of curiosities rather than a set of principles and practices, the sort of book one might almost imagine writing oneself, if one were to attempt to sum up everything one had ever thought about creativity and the imagination. But, of course, that’s probably much more difficult to do than it appears, which is why we need books by people like Gopnik and Read to remind ourselves of the true horror not only of creative work, but also of commentary on creative work, which is, in Gopnik’s words, that we ‘will always discover that there is someone else who does it better’.