By Ken Robinson Ph.D.
I became curious about Mr. Robinson after having watched that TED Conference in which he talks about how schools kill creativity in individuals. It turned out that I became fan of Mr. Robinson.
A great argument in favor of what the author calls "The Element", that conceptual "zone" in which creativity, passion, intelligence and talent converge, and why it is important to encourage in individuals.
Amazon Page for details
My Rating: 9 / 10
Click Here to Read My Notes
I became curious about Mr. Robinson after having watched that TED Conference in which he talks about how schools kill creativity in individuals. It turned out that I became fan of Mr. Robinson.
A great argument in favor of what the author calls "The Element", that conceptual "zone" in which creativity, passion, intelligence and talent converge, and why it is important to encourage in individuals.
Amazon Page for details
My Rating: 9 / 10
Click Here to Read My Notes
When they are very young, kids aren’t particularly worried about being wrong. If they aren’t sure what to do in a particular situation, they’ll just have a go at it and see how things turn out.
This is not to suggest that being wrong is the same thing as being creative.
What is true is that if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.
Education is the system that’s supposed to develop our natural abilities and enable us to make our way in the world. Instead, it is stifling the individual talents and abilities of too many students and killing their motivation to learn. There’s a huge irony in the middle of all of this.
But the fact is that in the twenty-first century, jobs and competitiveness depend absolutely on the very qualities that school systems are being forced to tamp down and that this book is celebrating.
The simple fact is that these are times of unprecedented global change. We can identify trends for the future, but accurate predictions are almost impossible.
We need to think very differently about human resources and about how we develop them if we are to face these challenges. We need to embrace the Element.
The Element is the meeting point between natural aptitude and personal passion.
What you’ll find in common among the people you’ve met in this chapter and the vast majority of the people you will meet in the coming pages is that they are doing the thing they love, and in doing it they feel like their most authentic selves.
They find that time passes differently and that they are more alive, more centered, and more vibrant than at any other times.
How do we find the Element in ourselves and in others?
The Element has two main features, and there are two conditions for being in it. The features are aptitude and passion. The conditions are attitude and opportunity.
After one of their gigs, I told Charles how well I thought he’d played that night. Then I said that I’d love to be able to play keyboards that well. “No, you wouldn’t,” he responded. Taken aback, I insisted that I really would. “No,” he said. “You mean you like the idea of playing keyboards. If you’d love to play them, you’d be doing it.” He said that to play as well he did, he practiced every day for three or four hours in addition to performing. He’d been doing that since he was seven. Suddenly playing keyboards as well as Charles did didn’t seem as appealing. I asked him how he kept up that level of discipline. He said, “Because I love it.” He couldn’t imagine doing anything else.
My goal with this book is to illuminate for you concepts that you might have sensed intuitively and to inspire you to find the Element for yourself and to help others to find it as well.
What I hope you will find here is a new way of looking at your own potential and the potential of those around you.
One of the enemies of creativity and innovation, especially in relation to our own development, is common sense.
The play-wright Bertolt Brecht said that as soon as something seems the most obvious thing in the world, it means that we have abandoned all attempts at understanding it.
If you watch athletes, dancers, musicians, and other performers of their class at work, you can see that they are thinking, as well as performing, in extraordinary ways.
As they practice, they engage their whole bodies in developing and memorizing the routines they are shaping up. In the process, they are relying on what some call “muscle memory.” In performance, they are usually moving too quickly and in ways that are simply too complex to rely on the ordinary conscious processes of thinking and decision-making.
In these ways, athletes and all sorts of other performers help to challenge something else about human capacity that too many people take for granted and also get wrong—our ideas about intelligence.
Ironically, Alfred Binet, one of the creators of the IQ test, intended the test to serve precisely the opposite function. In fact, he originally designed it (on commission from the French government) exclusively to identify children with special needs so they could get appropriate forms of schooling. He never intended it to identify degrees of intelligence or “mental worth.”
Nor did he ever intend it to suggest that a person could not become more intelligent over time. “Some recent thinkers,” he said, “[have affirmed] that an individual’s intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity that cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism; we must try to demonstrate that it is founded on nothing.”
The latter suggests a truth that we somehow don’t acknowledge as much as we should—that there are a variety of ways to express intelligence, and that no one scale could ever measure this.
Robert Sternberg is a professor of psychology at Tufts University and a past president of the American Psychological Association. He is a long-term critic of traditional approaches to intelligence testing and IQ. He argues that there are three types of intelligence: analytic intelligence, the ability to solve problems using academic skills and to complete conventional IQ tests; creative intelligence, the ability to deal with novel situations and to come up with original solutions; and practical intelligence, the ability to deal with problems and challenges in everyday life.
He practices math regularly. So that he can think faster, he exercises, doesn’t drink caffeine or alcohol, and avoids foods that are high in sugar or fat. His experience of math is so intense that he also has to take regular time off to rest his brain.
Human intelligence seems to have at least three main features.
The first is that it is extraordinarily diverse. It is clearly not limited to the ability to do verbal and mathematical reasoning.
The diversity of intelligence is one of the fundamental underpinnings of the Element. If you don’t embrace the fact that you think about the world in a wide variety of ways, you severely limit your chances of finding the person that you were meant to be.
The second feature of intelligence is that it is tremendously dynamic. The human brain is intensely interactive. You use multiple parts of it in every task you perform. It is in fact in the dynamic use of the brain—finding new connections between things—that true breakthroughs occur.
A friend of Einstein’s told Isaacson, “He would often play his violin in his kitchen late at night, improvising melodies while he pondered complicated problems. Then, suddenly, in the middle of playing he would announce excitedly, ‘I’ve got it!’ As if by inspiration, the answer to the problem would have come to him in the midst of the music.”
What Einstein seemed to understand is that intellectual growth and creativity come through embracing the dynamic nature of intelligence.
Growth comes through analogy, through seeing how things connect rather than only seeing how they might be different.
The third feature of intelligence is that it is entirely distinctive. Every person’s intelligence is as unique as a fingerprint. There might be seven, ten, or a hundred different forms of intelligence, but each of us uses these forms in different ways.
My profile of abilities involves a different combination of dominant and dormant intelligences than yours does. The person down the street has another profile entirely. Twins use their intelligences differently from one another, as do people on opposite sides of the globe.
For when you explode your preconceived ideas about intelligence, you can begin to see your own intelligence in new ways.
Discovering the Element is all about allowing yourself access to all of the ways in which you experience the world, and discovering where your own true strengths lie.
Every day of your life you can create something wonderful, so every day is going to be the same kind of wonderful day that every other day is—a day in which you discover something new because as you are painting or creating whatever it is you are creating, you are finding new ways in doing it.
A lot of my work with organizations is about showing that intelligence and creativity are blood relatives.
I firmly believe that you can’t be creative without acting intelligently. Similarly, the highest form of intelligence is thinking creatively.
In seeking the Element, it is essential to understand the real nature of creativity and to have a clear understanding of how it relates to intelligence.
One myth is that only special people are creative. This is not true. Everyone is born with tremendous capacities for creativity. The trick is to develop these capacities.
Creativity is very much like literacy. We take it for granted that nearly everybody can learn to read and write. If a person can’t read or write, you don’t assume that this person is incapable of it, just that he or she hasn’t learned how to do it. The same is true of creativity. When people say they’re not creative, it’s often because they don’t know what’s involved or how creativity works in practice.
Another myth is that creativity is about special activities. It’s about “creative domains” like the arts, design, or advertising.
The third myth is that people are either creative or they’re not. This myth suggests that creativity, like IQ, is an allegedly fixed trait, like eye color, and that you can’t do much about it.
People will pride themselves on being “down to earth,” “realistic,” and “no-nonsense,” and deride those who “have their heads in the clouds.” And yet, far more than any other power, imagination is what sets human beings apart from every other species on earth.
Through imagination, we not only bring to mind things that we have experienced but things that we have never experienced.
We can conjecture, we can hypothesize, we can speculate, and we can suppose. In a word, we can be imaginative.
What accounts for these yawning differences in how humans and other species on our small planet think and behave? My general answer is imagination.
Imagination is not the same as creativity. Creativity takes the process of imagination to another level.
My definition of creativity is “the process of having original ideas that have value.” Imagination can be entirely internal.
To be creative you actually have to do something. It involves putting your imagination to work to make something new, to come up with new solutions to problems, even to think of new problems or questions.
You can think of creativity as applied imagination.
You can be creative at anything at all—anything that involves using your intelligence. It can be in music, in dance, in theater, in math, science, business, in your relationships with other people.
Creativity is a step beyond imagination because it requires that you actually do something rather than lie around thinking about it.
Creativity involves several different processes that wind through each other. The first is generating new ideas, imagining different possibilities, considering alternative options.
Because it’s about making things, creative work always involves using media of some sort to develop ideas. The medium can be anything at all. The Wilburys used voices and guitars. Richard Feynman used mathematics. Faith Ringgold’s media were paints and fabrics (and sometimes words and music).
People who work creatively usually have something in common: they love the media they work with.
This is why people who fundamentally love what they do don’t think of it as work in the ordinary sense of the word. They do it because they want to and because when they do, they are in their Element.
Many of the people I talk about in this book think they were lucky to find what they love to do. For some of them, it was love at first sight. That’s why they call the recognition of their Element an epiphany.
In my experience, one of the main reasons that so many other people think they’re not creative is that they simply haven’t found their medium.
Creativity in different media is a striking illustration of the diversity of intelligence and ways of thinking.
To develop our creative abilities, we also need to develop our practical skills in the media we want to use.
I know plenty of people who have been turned off math for life because they were never helped to see its creative possibilities
Many people have decided that they were simply no good at math or music when it’s possible that their teachers taught them the wrong way or at the wrong time. Maybe they should look again.
Creative insights often come in nonlinear ways, through seeing connections and similarities between things that we hadn’t noticed before.
Creative thinking depends greatly on what’s sometimes called divergent or lateral thinking, and especially on thinking in metaphors or seeing analogies.
I was wandering through a street market and saw someone wearing a T-shirt that said, “If a man speaks his mind in a forest and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?” Probably.
Creativity also uses much more than our brains.
Creative work also reaches deep into our intuitive and unconscious minds and into our hearts and feelings.
It’s in this sense that creativity draws not just from our own personal resources but also from the wider world of other people’s ideas and values.
But the reach of creativity is very much deeper. It affects not only what we put in the world, but also what we make of it—not only what we do, but also how we think and feel about it.
In the nineteenth century, William James became one of the founding thinkers of modern psychology. By then, it was becoming more widely understood that our ideas and ways of thinking could imprison or liberate us. James put it this way: “The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitude of mind. . . . If you change your mind, you can change your life.
If you find a place where everybody else likes the same thing that you do, it really becomes fun.
“You’re almost unconscious to what’s going on around you. It’s literally the most peculiar feeling. It’s like being in a tunnel but you don’t see anything else. You just see what you’re doing. Time changes. Somebody could ask you how long you’ve been doing it and you could have said twenty minutes but it was actually nine hours. I just don’t know. I have never had it with anything before or since, even though I am very passionate about a lot of other things. But the feeling of playing billiards is unique for me.
“Part of the beauty that pool offers you is how much you can learn. It’s a never-ending deal.
“Even when I do an exhibition, after all these years, I get nervous. People say, ‘Well you’ve done it so many times.’ But it doesn’t matter; it’s about being in that moment.
Playing billiards puts Ewa Laurance in the zone. And being in the zone puts Ewa Laurance face to face with the Element.
To be in the zone is to be in the deep heart of the Element.
Different people find the zone in different ways. For some it comes through intense physical activity, through physically demanding sports, through risk, competition, and maybe a sense of danger. For others it may come through activities that seem physically passive, through writing, painting, math, meditation, and other modes of intense contemplation.
When we are doing something that we love and are naturally good at, we are much more likely to feel centered in our true sense of self—to be who we feel we truly are. When we are in our Element, we feel we are doing what we are meant to be doing and being who we’re meant to be.
Time also feels very different in the zone. When you’re connecting this way with your deep interests and natural energy, time tends to move more quickly, more fluidly. For Ewa Laurance, nine hours can feel like twenty minutes.
The other feature common among those familiar with this experience is the movement into a kind of “meta-state” where ideas come more quickly, as if you’re tapping a source that makes it significantly easier to achieve your task.
This is a crucial point to grasp. Being in the Element and especially being in the zone doesn’t take energy away from you; it gives it to you.
Activities we love fill us with energy even when we are physically exhausted.
When people place themselves in situations that lead to their being in the zone, they tap into a primal source of energy. They are literally more alive because of it.
It is as though being in the zone plugs you into a kind of power pack—for the time you are there, you receive more energy than you expend.
However we get there, being in the zone is a powerful and transformative experience. So powerful that it can be addictive, but an addiction that is healthy for you in so many ways.
When we connect with our own energy, we’re more open to the energy of other people.
When people are in the zone, they align naturally with a way of thinking that works best for them.
When people use a thinking style completely natural to them, everything comes more easily.
To make the Element available to everyone, we need to acknowledge that each person’s intelligence is distinct from the intelligence of every other person on the planet, that everyone has a unique way of getting in the zone, and a unique way of finding the Element.
Fan behavior is a different form of social affiliation.
My guess is that Cosell found his Element in sports, even though he wasn’t an athlete. He knew he could enhance the average fan’s sports experience, and found a greater sense of who he was in doing so.
I think of the barriers to finding the Element as three concentric “circles of constraint.” These circles are personal, social, and cultural.
Throughout his life, Chuck Close has had endless reasons to give in to his problems and to give up as an artist. He chose instead to push on beyond every limit his life presented and to stay in his Element no matter what new obstacles reared up in his way. He would not let any of these things prevent him from being who he felt he was meant to be.
Whether you’re disabled or not, issues of attitude are of paramount importance in finding your Element. A strong will to be yourself is an indomitable force. Without it, even a person in perfect physical shape is at a comparative disadvantage.
Sometimes, of course, your loved ones genuinely think you would be wasting your time and talents doing something of which they disapprove. This is what happened to Paulo Coelho. Mind you, his parents went further than most to put him off. They had him committed repeatedly to a psychiatric institution and subjected to electroshock therapy because they loved him.
For all her success, Huffington knows that the biggest obstacles to achievement can be self-doubt and the disapproval of other people. She says this is especially true for women. “I am struck by how often, when I asked women to blog for the Huffington Post, they had a hard time trusting that what they had to say was worthwhile, even established writers. . . . So often, I think, we as women stop ourselves from trying because we don’t want to risk failing. We put such a premium on being approved of, we become reluctant to take risks.
But it also taught me that it is easier to overcome people’s judgments than to overcome our own self-judgment, the fear we internalize.
“I don’t think that anything I’ve done in my life would have been possible without my mother. My mother gave me that safe place, that sense that she would be there no matter what happened, whether I succeeded or failed. She gave me what I am hoping to be able to give my daughters, which is a sense that I could aim for the stars combined with the knowledge that if I didn’t reach them, she wouldn’t love me any less. She helped me understand that failure was part of any life.
Some people born in one culture end up adopting another because they prefer its sensibilities and ways of life, like cultural cross-dressers; a French person may become an Anglophile, or an American a Francophile.
Finding your Element sometimes requires breaking away from your native culture in order to achieve your goals.
BEING GOOD AT SOMETHING and having a passion for it are essential to finding the Element. But they are not enough. Getting there depends fundamentally on our view of ourselves and of the events in our lives. The Element is also a matter of attitude.
But good and bad things happen to all of us. It’s not what happens to us that makes the difference in our lives. What makes the difference is our attitude toward what happens.
Research and experience show that lucky people often make their luck because of their attitudes.
Lucky people tend to maximize chance opportunities. They are especially adept at creating, noticing, and acting upon these opportunities when they arise. Second, they tend to be very effective at listening to their intuition, and do work (such as meditation) that is designed to boost their intuitive abilities. The third principle is that lucky people tend to expect to be lucky, creating a series of self-fulfilling prophecies because they go into the world anticipating a positive outcome. Last, lucky people have an attitude that allows them to turn bad luck to good. They don’t allow ill fortune to overwhelm them, and they move quickly to take control of the situation when it isn’t going well for them.
One way of opening ourselves up to new opportunities is to make conscious efforts to look differently at our ordinary situations. Doing so allows a person to see the world as one rife with possibility and to take advantage of some of those possibilities if they seem worth pursuing.
What Robbins and Wiseman show us is that if we keep our focus too tight, we miss the rest of the world swirling around us.
We all shape the circumstances and realities of our own lives, and we can also transform them. People who find their Element are more likely to evolve a clearer sense of their life’s ambitions and set a course for achieving them. They know that passion and aptitude are essential. They know too that our attitudes to events and to ourselves are crucial in determining whether or not we find and live our lives in the Element.
Aside from my parents, he was my first true mentor and taught me the invaluable role mentors play in helping us reach our Element.
Finding our Element often requires the aid and guidance of others. Sometimes this comes from someone who sees something in us that we don’t see in ourselves, as was the case with Gillian Lynne.
In his book Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, Roger Lowenstein writes, “Ben Graham opened the door, and in a way that spoke to Buffett personally. He gave Buffett the tools to explore the market’s manifold possibilities, and also an approach that fit his student’s temper. Armed with Graham’s techniques, Buffett could dismiss his oracles and make use of his native talents. And steeled by the example of Graham’s character, Buffett would be able to work with his trademark self-reliance.
Regardless, mentors tend to serve some or all of four roles for us.
The first role is recognition.
One of Ballantine’s lessons to Lou was to “zig when everyone else is zagging,” his way of suggesting that the fastest path to success is often to go against the flow.
The second role of a mentor is encouragement. Mentors lead us to believe that we can achieve something that seemed improbable or impossible to us before we met them.
The third role of a mentor is facilitating. Mentors can help lead us toward our Element by offering us advice and techniques, paving the way for us, and even allowing us to falter a bit while standing by to help us recover and learn from our mistakes.
The fourth role of a mentor is stretching. Effective mentors push us past what we see as our limits. Much as they don’t allow us to succumb to self-doubt, they also prevent us from doing less with our lives than we can. A true mentor reminds us that our goal should never be to be “average” at our pursuits.
“On the last day of school we had our final class outside on the lawn, and Professor Crouch presented me with a gift—a copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance. This was invaluable to me because it summed up what he had taught me—self-reliance. His influence on me was so basic that it extended to all areas of my life. He is the reason I became an actor.
Heroes may not be good mentors to us. They may be competitive or refuse to have anything to do with us. Mentors are different. They take a unique and personal place in our lives. Mentors open doors for us and get involved directly in our journeys. They show us the next steps and encourage us to take them.
One of the most basic reasons for thinking that it’s too late to be who you are truly capable of being is the belief that life is linear.
The people at realage.com have pulled together a set of metrics designed to calculate your “real age” as opposed to your chronological age. It takes into consideration a wide range of factors regarding lifestyle, genetics, and medical history. What’s fascinating about this is that their work suggests that it’s actually possible to make yourself younger by making better choices.
One of the fundamental precepts of the Element is that we need to reconnect with ourselves and to see ourselves holistically.
Laughter has a huge impact on aging. So does intellectual curiosity. Meditation can also provide significant benefits to the physical body.
The answer to the question, Is it too late for me to find the Element? is simple: No, of course not. Even in the cases where the physical degradations that come with age make certain achievements impossible, the Element is still within reach.
Something else has been going on at the Grace Living Center, though: medication levels there are plummeting. Many of the residents on the program have stopped or cut back on their drugs. Why is this happening? Because the adult participants in the program have come back to life. Instead of whiling away their days waiting for the inevitable, they have a reason to get up in the morning and a renewed excitement about what the day might bring. Because they are reconnecting with their creative energies, they are literally living longer.
As the actor Sophia Loren once said, “There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of the people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.
In “The Pro-Am Revolution,” a report for the British think tank Demos, Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller underline the rise of a type of amateur that works at increasingly higher standards and generates breakthroughs sometimes greater than those made by professionals—hence the term Pro-Am
Finding the Element is essential to a balanced and fulfilled life. It can also help us to understand who we really are. These days, we tend to identify ourselves by our jobs.
To begin with, it can enrich everything else you do. Doing the thing you love and that you do well for even a couple of hours a week can make everything else more palatable. But in some circumstances, it can lead to transformations you might not have imagined possible.
Discovering the Element doesn’t promise to make you richer.
For everyone, being in their Element, even for part of the time, can bring a new richness and balance to their lives.
But too many graduate or leave early, unsure of their real talents and not knowing what direction to take next. Too many feel that what they’re good at isn’t valued by schools. Too many think they’re not good at anything.
However, something else stirred his passions at least as much, and he had a strong feeling that he was very good at this—he would become an entrepreneur.
This student is railing against two things that most people eventually discover in their education. One is the hierarchy of disciplines in schools that we discussed in the first chapter. The other is that conformity has a higher value than diversity.
In the industrial period, most people did manual and blue-collar work, and only a minority actually went to college. Those who did found that their degree certificates were like Willy Wonka’s golden ticket. Now, with so many people graduating college, four-year degrees are more like the shiny paper in which they wrap the chocolate bars.
The fundamental theme of this book is that we urgently need to make fuller use of our own natural resources. This is essential for our well-being and for the health of our communities.
First, we need to eliminate the existing hierarchy of subjects. Elevating some disciplines over others only reinforces outmoded assumptions of industrialism and offends the principle of diversity.
Second, we need to question the entire idea of “subjects.”
Third, the curriculum should be personalized. Learning happens in the minds and souls of individuals—not in the databases of multiple-choice tests.
Many of those whose stories I have told in this book would agree. For them the liberation came from meeting their passion and being able to pursue it.
The future for education is not in standardizing but in customizing; not in promoting groupthink and “deindividuation” but in cultivating the real depth and dynamism of human abilities of every sort. For the future, education must be Elemental.
FINDING THE ELEMENT in yourself is essential to discovering what you can really do and who you really are. At one level, this is a very personal issue. It’s about you and people you know and care for.
What this proved, of course, was that Death Valley wasn’t dead at all. It was asleep. It was simply waiting for the conditions of growth. When the conditions came, life returned to the heart of Death Valley.
Human beings and human communities are the same. We need the right conditions for growth, in our schools, businesses, and communities, and in our individual lives. If the conditions are right, people grow in synergy with the people around them and the environments they create. If the conditions are poor, people protect themselves and their anxieties from neighbors and the world. Some of the elements of our own growth are inside us. They include the need to develop our unique natural aptitudes and personal passions. Finding and nurturing them is the surest way to ensure our growth and fulfillment as individuals.
If we discover the Element in ourselves and encourage others to find theirs, the opportunities for growth are infinite.
Michelangelo once said, “The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.” For all our futures, we need to aim high and be determined to succeed. To do that each of us individually and all of us together need to discover the Element.
This is not to suggest that being wrong is the same thing as being creative.
What is true is that if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.
Education is the system that’s supposed to develop our natural abilities and enable us to make our way in the world. Instead, it is stifling the individual talents and abilities of too many students and killing their motivation to learn. There’s a huge irony in the middle of all of this.
But the fact is that in the twenty-first century, jobs and competitiveness depend absolutely on the very qualities that school systems are being forced to tamp down and that this book is celebrating.
The simple fact is that these are times of unprecedented global change. We can identify trends for the future, but accurate predictions are almost impossible.
We need to think very differently about human resources and about how we develop them if we are to face these challenges. We need to embrace the Element.
The Element is the meeting point between natural aptitude and personal passion.
What you’ll find in common among the people you’ve met in this chapter and the vast majority of the people you will meet in the coming pages is that they are doing the thing they love, and in doing it they feel like their most authentic selves.
They find that time passes differently and that they are more alive, more centered, and more vibrant than at any other times.
How do we find the Element in ourselves and in others?
The Element has two main features, and there are two conditions for being in it. The features are aptitude and passion. The conditions are attitude and opportunity.
After one of their gigs, I told Charles how well I thought he’d played that night. Then I said that I’d love to be able to play keyboards that well. “No, you wouldn’t,” he responded. Taken aback, I insisted that I really would. “No,” he said. “You mean you like the idea of playing keyboards. If you’d love to play them, you’d be doing it.” He said that to play as well he did, he practiced every day for three or four hours in addition to performing. He’d been doing that since he was seven. Suddenly playing keyboards as well as Charles did didn’t seem as appealing. I asked him how he kept up that level of discipline. He said, “Because I love it.” He couldn’t imagine doing anything else.
My goal with this book is to illuminate for you concepts that you might have sensed intuitively and to inspire you to find the Element for yourself and to help others to find it as well.
What I hope you will find here is a new way of looking at your own potential and the potential of those around you.
One of the enemies of creativity and innovation, especially in relation to our own development, is common sense.
The play-wright Bertolt Brecht said that as soon as something seems the most obvious thing in the world, it means that we have abandoned all attempts at understanding it.
If you watch athletes, dancers, musicians, and other performers of their class at work, you can see that they are thinking, as well as performing, in extraordinary ways.
As they practice, they engage their whole bodies in developing and memorizing the routines they are shaping up. In the process, they are relying on what some call “muscle memory.” In performance, they are usually moving too quickly and in ways that are simply too complex to rely on the ordinary conscious processes of thinking and decision-making.
In these ways, athletes and all sorts of other performers help to challenge something else about human capacity that too many people take for granted and also get wrong—our ideas about intelligence.
Ironically, Alfred Binet, one of the creators of the IQ test, intended the test to serve precisely the opposite function. In fact, he originally designed it (on commission from the French government) exclusively to identify children with special needs so they could get appropriate forms of schooling. He never intended it to identify degrees of intelligence or “mental worth.”
Nor did he ever intend it to suggest that a person could not become more intelligent over time. “Some recent thinkers,” he said, “[have affirmed] that an individual’s intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity that cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism; we must try to demonstrate that it is founded on nothing.”
The latter suggests a truth that we somehow don’t acknowledge as much as we should—that there are a variety of ways to express intelligence, and that no one scale could ever measure this.
Robert Sternberg is a professor of psychology at Tufts University and a past president of the American Psychological Association. He is a long-term critic of traditional approaches to intelligence testing and IQ. He argues that there are three types of intelligence: analytic intelligence, the ability to solve problems using academic skills and to complete conventional IQ tests; creative intelligence, the ability to deal with novel situations and to come up with original solutions; and practical intelligence, the ability to deal with problems and challenges in everyday life.
He practices math regularly. So that he can think faster, he exercises, doesn’t drink caffeine or alcohol, and avoids foods that are high in sugar or fat. His experience of math is so intense that he also has to take regular time off to rest his brain.
Human intelligence seems to have at least three main features.
The first is that it is extraordinarily diverse. It is clearly not limited to the ability to do verbal and mathematical reasoning.
The diversity of intelligence is one of the fundamental underpinnings of the Element. If you don’t embrace the fact that you think about the world in a wide variety of ways, you severely limit your chances of finding the person that you were meant to be.
The second feature of intelligence is that it is tremendously dynamic. The human brain is intensely interactive. You use multiple parts of it in every task you perform. It is in fact in the dynamic use of the brain—finding new connections between things—that true breakthroughs occur.
A friend of Einstein’s told Isaacson, “He would often play his violin in his kitchen late at night, improvising melodies while he pondered complicated problems. Then, suddenly, in the middle of playing he would announce excitedly, ‘I’ve got it!’ As if by inspiration, the answer to the problem would have come to him in the midst of the music.”
What Einstein seemed to understand is that intellectual growth and creativity come through embracing the dynamic nature of intelligence.
Growth comes through analogy, through seeing how things connect rather than only seeing how they might be different.
The third feature of intelligence is that it is entirely distinctive. Every person’s intelligence is as unique as a fingerprint. There might be seven, ten, or a hundred different forms of intelligence, but each of us uses these forms in different ways.
My profile of abilities involves a different combination of dominant and dormant intelligences than yours does. The person down the street has another profile entirely. Twins use their intelligences differently from one another, as do people on opposite sides of the globe.
For when you explode your preconceived ideas about intelligence, you can begin to see your own intelligence in new ways.
Discovering the Element is all about allowing yourself access to all of the ways in which you experience the world, and discovering where your own true strengths lie.
Every day of your life you can create something wonderful, so every day is going to be the same kind of wonderful day that every other day is—a day in which you discover something new because as you are painting or creating whatever it is you are creating, you are finding new ways in doing it.
A lot of my work with organizations is about showing that intelligence and creativity are blood relatives.
I firmly believe that you can’t be creative without acting intelligently. Similarly, the highest form of intelligence is thinking creatively.
In seeking the Element, it is essential to understand the real nature of creativity and to have a clear understanding of how it relates to intelligence.
One myth is that only special people are creative. This is not true. Everyone is born with tremendous capacities for creativity. The trick is to develop these capacities.
Creativity is very much like literacy. We take it for granted that nearly everybody can learn to read and write. If a person can’t read or write, you don’t assume that this person is incapable of it, just that he or she hasn’t learned how to do it. The same is true of creativity. When people say they’re not creative, it’s often because they don’t know what’s involved or how creativity works in practice.
Another myth is that creativity is about special activities. It’s about “creative domains” like the arts, design, or advertising.
The third myth is that people are either creative or they’re not. This myth suggests that creativity, like IQ, is an allegedly fixed trait, like eye color, and that you can’t do much about it.
People will pride themselves on being “down to earth,” “realistic,” and “no-nonsense,” and deride those who “have their heads in the clouds.” And yet, far more than any other power, imagination is what sets human beings apart from every other species on earth.
Through imagination, we not only bring to mind things that we have experienced but things that we have never experienced.
We can conjecture, we can hypothesize, we can speculate, and we can suppose. In a word, we can be imaginative.
What accounts for these yawning differences in how humans and other species on our small planet think and behave? My general answer is imagination.
Imagination is not the same as creativity. Creativity takes the process of imagination to another level.
My definition of creativity is “the process of having original ideas that have value.” Imagination can be entirely internal.
To be creative you actually have to do something. It involves putting your imagination to work to make something new, to come up with new solutions to problems, even to think of new problems or questions.
You can think of creativity as applied imagination.
You can be creative at anything at all—anything that involves using your intelligence. It can be in music, in dance, in theater, in math, science, business, in your relationships with other people.
Creativity is a step beyond imagination because it requires that you actually do something rather than lie around thinking about it.
Creativity involves several different processes that wind through each other. The first is generating new ideas, imagining different possibilities, considering alternative options.
Because it’s about making things, creative work always involves using media of some sort to develop ideas. The medium can be anything at all. The Wilburys used voices and guitars. Richard Feynman used mathematics. Faith Ringgold’s media were paints and fabrics (and sometimes words and music).
People who work creatively usually have something in common: they love the media they work with.
This is why people who fundamentally love what they do don’t think of it as work in the ordinary sense of the word. They do it because they want to and because when they do, they are in their Element.
Many of the people I talk about in this book think they were lucky to find what they love to do. For some of them, it was love at first sight. That’s why they call the recognition of their Element an epiphany.
In my experience, one of the main reasons that so many other people think they’re not creative is that they simply haven’t found their medium.
Creativity in different media is a striking illustration of the diversity of intelligence and ways of thinking.
To develop our creative abilities, we also need to develop our practical skills in the media we want to use.
I know plenty of people who have been turned off math for life because they were never helped to see its creative possibilities
Many people have decided that they were simply no good at math or music when it’s possible that their teachers taught them the wrong way or at the wrong time. Maybe they should look again.
Creative insights often come in nonlinear ways, through seeing connections and similarities between things that we hadn’t noticed before.
Creative thinking depends greatly on what’s sometimes called divergent or lateral thinking, and especially on thinking in metaphors or seeing analogies.
I was wandering through a street market and saw someone wearing a T-shirt that said, “If a man speaks his mind in a forest and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?” Probably.
Creativity also uses much more than our brains.
Creative work also reaches deep into our intuitive and unconscious minds and into our hearts and feelings.
It’s in this sense that creativity draws not just from our own personal resources but also from the wider world of other people’s ideas and values.
But the reach of creativity is very much deeper. It affects not only what we put in the world, but also what we make of it—not only what we do, but also how we think and feel about it.
In the nineteenth century, William James became one of the founding thinkers of modern psychology. By then, it was becoming more widely understood that our ideas and ways of thinking could imprison or liberate us. James put it this way: “The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitude of mind. . . . If you change your mind, you can change your life.
If you find a place where everybody else likes the same thing that you do, it really becomes fun.
“You’re almost unconscious to what’s going on around you. It’s literally the most peculiar feeling. It’s like being in a tunnel but you don’t see anything else. You just see what you’re doing. Time changes. Somebody could ask you how long you’ve been doing it and you could have said twenty minutes but it was actually nine hours. I just don’t know. I have never had it with anything before or since, even though I am very passionate about a lot of other things. But the feeling of playing billiards is unique for me.
“Part of the beauty that pool offers you is how much you can learn. It’s a never-ending deal.
“Even when I do an exhibition, after all these years, I get nervous. People say, ‘Well you’ve done it so many times.’ But it doesn’t matter; it’s about being in that moment.
Playing billiards puts Ewa Laurance in the zone. And being in the zone puts Ewa Laurance face to face with the Element.
To be in the zone is to be in the deep heart of the Element.
Different people find the zone in different ways. For some it comes through intense physical activity, through physically demanding sports, through risk, competition, and maybe a sense of danger. For others it may come through activities that seem physically passive, through writing, painting, math, meditation, and other modes of intense contemplation.
When we are doing something that we love and are naturally good at, we are much more likely to feel centered in our true sense of self—to be who we feel we truly are. When we are in our Element, we feel we are doing what we are meant to be doing and being who we’re meant to be.
Time also feels very different in the zone. When you’re connecting this way with your deep interests and natural energy, time tends to move more quickly, more fluidly. For Ewa Laurance, nine hours can feel like twenty minutes.
The other feature common among those familiar with this experience is the movement into a kind of “meta-state” where ideas come more quickly, as if you’re tapping a source that makes it significantly easier to achieve your task.
This is a crucial point to grasp. Being in the Element and especially being in the zone doesn’t take energy away from you; it gives it to you.
Activities we love fill us with energy even when we are physically exhausted.
When people place themselves in situations that lead to their being in the zone, they tap into a primal source of energy. They are literally more alive because of it.
It is as though being in the zone plugs you into a kind of power pack—for the time you are there, you receive more energy than you expend.
However we get there, being in the zone is a powerful and transformative experience. So powerful that it can be addictive, but an addiction that is healthy for you in so many ways.
When we connect with our own energy, we’re more open to the energy of other people.
When people are in the zone, they align naturally with a way of thinking that works best for them.
When people use a thinking style completely natural to them, everything comes more easily.
To make the Element available to everyone, we need to acknowledge that each person’s intelligence is distinct from the intelligence of every other person on the planet, that everyone has a unique way of getting in the zone, and a unique way of finding the Element.
Fan behavior is a different form of social affiliation.
My guess is that Cosell found his Element in sports, even though he wasn’t an athlete. He knew he could enhance the average fan’s sports experience, and found a greater sense of who he was in doing so.
I think of the barriers to finding the Element as three concentric “circles of constraint.” These circles are personal, social, and cultural.
Throughout his life, Chuck Close has had endless reasons to give in to his problems and to give up as an artist. He chose instead to push on beyond every limit his life presented and to stay in his Element no matter what new obstacles reared up in his way. He would not let any of these things prevent him from being who he felt he was meant to be.
Whether you’re disabled or not, issues of attitude are of paramount importance in finding your Element. A strong will to be yourself is an indomitable force. Without it, even a person in perfect physical shape is at a comparative disadvantage.
Sometimes, of course, your loved ones genuinely think you would be wasting your time and talents doing something of which they disapprove. This is what happened to Paulo Coelho. Mind you, his parents went further than most to put him off. They had him committed repeatedly to a psychiatric institution and subjected to electroshock therapy because they loved him.
For all her success, Huffington knows that the biggest obstacles to achievement can be self-doubt and the disapproval of other people. She says this is especially true for women. “I am struck by how often, when I asked women to blog for the Huffington Post, they had a hard time trusting that what they had to say was worthwhile, even established writers. . . . So often, I think, we as women stop ourselves from trying because we don’t want to risk failing. We put such a premium on being approved of, we become reluctant to take risks.
But it also taught me that it is easier to overcome people’s judgments than to overcome our own self-judgment, the fear we internalize.
“I don’t think that anything I’ve done in my life would have been possible without my mother. My mother gave me that safe place, that sense that she would be there no matter what happened, whether I succeeded or failed. She gave me what I am hoping to be able to give my daughters, which is a sense that I could aim for the stars combined with the knowledge that if I didn’t reach them, she wouldn’t love me any less. She helped me understand that failure was part of any life.
Some people born in one culture end up adopting another because they prefer its sensibilities and ways of life, like cultural cross-dressers; a French person may become an Anglophile, or an American a Francophile.
Finding your Element sometimes requires breaking away from your native culture in order to achieve your goals.
BEING GOOD AT SOMETHING and having a passion for it are essential to finding the Element. But they are not enough. Getting there depends fundamentally on our view of ourselves and of the events in our lives. The Element is also a matter of attitude.
But good and bad things happen to all of us. It’s not what happens to us that makes the difference in our lives. What makes the difference is our attitude toward what happens.
Research and experience show that lucky people often make their luck because of their attitudes.
Lucky people tend to maximize chance opportunities. They are especially adept at creating, noticing, and acting upon these opportunities when they arise. Second, they tend to be very effective at listening to their intuition, and do work (such as meditation) that is designed to boost their intuitive abilities. The third principle is that lucky people tend to expect to be lucky, creating a series of self-fulfilling prophecies because they go into the world anticipating a positive outcome. Last, lucky people have an attitude that allows them to turn bad luck to good. They don’t allow ill fortune to overwhelm them, and they move quickly to take control of the situation when it isn’t going well for them.
One way of opening ourselves up to new opportunities is to make conscious efforts to look differently at our ordinary situations. Doing so allows a person to see the world as one rife with possibility and to take advantage of some of those possibilities if they seem worth pursuing.
What Robbins and Wiseman show us is that if we keep our focus too tight, we miss the rest of the world swirling around us.
We all shape the circumstances and realities of our own lives, and we can also transform them. People who find their Element are more likely to evolve a clearer sense of their life’s ambitions and set a course for achieving them. They know that passion and aptitude are essential. They know too that our attitudes to events and to ourselves are crucial in determining whether or not we find and live our lives in the Element.
Aside from my parents, he was my first true mentor and taught me the invaluable role mentors play in helping us reach our Element.
Finding our Element often requires the aid and guidance of others. Sometimes this comes from someone who sees something in us that we don’t see in ourselves, as was the case with Gillian Lynne.
In his book Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, Roger Lowenstein writes, “Ben Graham opened the door, and in a way that spoke to Buffett personally. He gave Buffett the tools to explore the market’s manifold possibilities, and also an approach that fit his student’s temper. Armed with Graham’s techniques, Buffett could dismiss his oracles and make use of his native talents. And steeled by the example of Graham’s character, Buffett would be able to work with his trademark self-reliance.
Regardless, mentors tend to serve some or all of four roles for us.
The first role is recognition.
One of Ballantine’s lessons to Lou was to “zig when everyone else is zagging,” his way of suggesting that the fastest path to success is often to go against the flow.
The second role of a mentor is encouragement. Mentors lead us to believe that we can achieve something that seemed improbable or impossible to us before we met them.
The third role of a mentor is facilitating. Mentors can help lead us toward our Element by offering us advice and techniques, paving the way for us, and even allowing us to falter a bit while standing by to help us recover and learn from our mistakes.
The fourth role of a mentor is stretching. Effective mentors push us past what we see as our limits. Much as they don’t allow us to succumb to self-doubt, they also prevent us from doing less with our lives than we can. A true mentor reminds us that our goal should never be to be “average” at our pursuits.
“On the last day of school we had our final class outside on the lawn, and Professor Crouch presented me with a gift—a copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance. This was invaluable to me because it summed up what he had taught me—self-reliance. His influence on me was so basic that it extended to all areas of my life. He is the reason I became an actor.
Heroes may not be good mentors to us. They may be competitive or refuse to have anything to do with us. Mentors are different. They take a unique and personal place in our lives. Mentors open doors for us and get involved directly in our journeys. They show us the next steps and encourage us to take them.
One of the most basic reasons for thinking that it’s too late to be who you are truly capable of being is the belief that life is linear.
The people at realage.com have pulled together a set of metrics designed to calculate your “real age” as opposed to your chronological age. It takes into consideration a wide range of factors regarding lifestyle, genetics, and medical history. What’s fascinating about this is that their work suggests that it’s actually possible to make yourself younger by making better choices.
One of the fundamental precepts of the Element is that we need to reconnect with ourselves and to see ourselves holistically.
Laughter has a huge impact on aging. So does intellectual curiosity. Meditation can also provide significant benefits to the physical body.
The answer to the question, Is it too late for me to find the Element? is simple: No, of course not. Even in the cases where the physical degradations that come with age make certain achievements impossible, the Element is still within reach.
Something else has been going on at the Grace Living Center, though: medication levels there are plummeting. Many of the residents on the program have stopped or cut back on their drugs. Why is this happening? Because the adult participants in the program have come back to life. Instead of whiling away their days waiting for the inevitable, they have a reason to get up in the morning and a renewed excitement about what the day might bring. Because they are reconnecting with their creative energies, they are literally living longer.
As the actor Sophia Loren once said, “There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of the people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.
In “The Pro-Am Revolution,” a report for the British think tank Demos, Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller underline the rise of a type of amateur that works at increasingly higher standards and generates breakthroughs sometimes greater than those made by professionals—hence the term Pro-Am
Finding the Element is essential to a balanced and fulfilled life. It can also help us to understand who we really are. These days, we tend to identify ourselves by our jobs.
To begin with, it can enrich everything else you do. Doing the thing you love and that you do well for even a couple of hours a week can make everything else more palatable. But in some circumstances, it can lead to transformations you might not have imagined possible.
Discovering the Element doesn’t promise to make you richer.
For everyone, being in their Element, even for part of the time, can bring a new richness and balance to their lives.
But too many graduate or leave early, unsure of their real talents and not knowing what direction to take next. Too many feel that what they’re good at isn’t valued by schools. Too many think they’re not good at anything.
However, something else stirred his passions at least as much, and he had a strong feeling that he was very good at this—he would become an entrepreneur.
This student is railing against two things that most people eventually discover in their education. One is the hierarchy of disciplines in schools that we discussed in the first chapter. The other is that conformity has a higher value than diversity.
In the industrial period, most people did manual and blue-collar work, and only a minority actually went to college. Those who did found that their degree certificates were like Willy Wonka’s golden ticket. Now, with so many people graduating college, four-year degrees are more like the shiny paper in which they wrap the chocolate bars.
The fundamental theme of this book is that we urgently need to make fuller use of our own natural resources. This is essential for our well-being and for the health of our communities.
First, we need to eliminate the existing hierarchy of subjects. Elevating some disciplines over others only reinforces outmoded assumptions of industrialism and offends the principle of diversity.
Second, we need to question the entire idea of “subjects.”
Third, the curriculum should be personalized. Learning happens in the minds and souls of individuals—not in the databases of multiple-choice tests.
Many of those whose stories I have told in this book would agree. For them the liberation came from meeting their passion and being able to pursue it.
The future for education is not in standardizing but in customizing; not in promoting groupthink and “deindividuation” but in cultivating the real depth and dynamism of human abilities of every sort. For the future, education must be Elemental.
FINDING THE ELEMENT in yourself is essential to discovering what you can really do and who you really are. At one level, this is a very personal issue. It’s about you and people you know and care for.
What this proved, of course, was that Death Valley wasn’t dead at all. It was asleep. It was simply waiting for the conditions of growth. When the conditions came, life returned to the heart of Death Valley.
Human beings and human communities are the same. We need the right conditions for growth, in our schools, businesses, and communities, and in our individual lives. If the conditions are right, people grow in synergy with the people around them and the environments they create. If the conditions are poor, people protect themselves and their anxieties from neighbors and the world. Some of the elements of our own growth are inside us. They include the need to develop our unique natural aptitudes and personal passions. Finding and nurturing them is the surest way to ensure our growth and fulfillment as individuals.
If we discover the Element in ourselves and encourage others to find theirs, the opportunities for growth are infinite.
Michelangelo once said, “The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.” For all our futures, we need to aim high and be determined to succeed. To do that each of us individually and all of us together need to discover the Element.