The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

by Ken Robinson

But the foundation of all of these achievements is a unique, personal aptitude combined with a deep passion and commitment.

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. These skills are important, but they are simply one way in which intelligence expresses itself.

As the stories of Gordon Parks, Mick Fleetwood, and Bart Conner indicate, intelligence can show itself in ways that have little or nothing to do with numbers and words. We think about the world in all the ways that we experience it, including all the different ways we use our senses (however many of those there turn out to be). We think in sound. We think in movement. We think visually. I worked for a long time with the Royal Ballet in Britain and came to see that dance is a powerful way to express ideas and that dancers use multiple forms of intelligence—kinesthetic, rhythmic, musical, and mathematical—to accomplish this. Were mathematical and verbal intelligence the only kinds that existed, ballet never would have been created. Nor would abstract painting, hip-hop, design, architecture, or self-service checkouts at supermarkets.

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.

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. Certainly, the epiphany stories in this book indicate that many of the moments when things suddenly become clear happen from seeing new connections between events, ideas, and circumstances.

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. No person is a single intellectual score on a linear scale. And no two people with the same scores will do the same things, share all of the same passions, or accomplish the same amount with their lives. 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.

I think it is because most people believe that intelligence and creativity are entirely different things—that we can be very intelligent and not very creative or very creative and not very intelligent. For me, this identifies a fundamental problem. 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.

Another myth is that creativity is about special activities. It’s about “creative domains” like the arts, design, or advertising. These often do involve a high level of creativity.

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. In truth, it’s entirely possible to become more creative in your work and in your life. The first critical step is for you to understand the intimate relationship between creativity and intelligence. This is one of the surest paths to finding the Element, and it involves stepping back to examine a fundamental feature of all human intelligence—our unique powers of imagination.

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.

🙌🏾

Imagination underpins every uniquely human achievement. Imagination led us from caves to cities, from bone clubs to golf clubs, from carrion to cuisine, and from superstition to science. The relationship between imagination and “reality” is both complicated and profound. And this relationship serves a very significant role in the search for the Element.

We know too that we can routinely step outside of our immediate sensory environment and conjure mental images of other places and other times. If I ask you to think of your best friends at school, your favorite food, or your most annoying acquaintance, you can do that without having any of those things directly in front of you. This process of seeing “in our mind’s eye” is the essential act of imagination. So my initial definition of imagination is “the power to bring to mind things that are not present to our senses.”

Through imagination, we can visit the past, contemplate the present, and anticipate the future. We can also do something else of profound and unique significance. We can create. 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. As soon as we have the power to release our minds from the immediate here and now, in a sense we are free. We are free to revisit the past, free to reframe the present, and free to anticipate a whole range of possible futures. Imagination is the foundation of everything that is uniquely and distinctively human. It is the basis of language, the arts, the sciences, systems of philosophy, and all the vast intricacies of human culture. I can illustrate this power with an example of cosmic proportions.

🙌🏾

What’s the purpose of life? This is another good question. It doesn’t seem to bother other species much, but it bothers human beings quite a bit. The British philosopher Bertrand Russell presented this question simply and brilliantly. It’s in three parts, and it’s worth reading twice: “Is man what he seems to the astronomer, a tiny lump of impure carbon and water crawling impotently on a small and unimportant planet? Or is he what he appears to Hamlet? Is he perhaps both at once?” You’ll have to forgive the male language here. Russell wrote this a long time ago, when he didn’t know people might frown upon it later. Russell’s three questions capture some of the core puzzles of Western—though not necessarily Eastern—philosophy. Is life essentially accidental and meaningless, or is it as profound and mysterious as Shakespeare’s great tragic hero believed it to be? I’ll come back to Hamlet in a minute. Let’s look first at this idea of our inhabiting a small and unimportant planet.

I don’t mean to say that no other species on Earth has any form of imaginative ability. But certainly none comes close to showing the complex abilities that flow from the human imagination. Other species communicate, but they don’t have laptops. They sing, but they don’t produce musicals. They can be agile, but they didn’t come up with Cirque du Soleil. They can look worried, but they don’t publish theories on the meaning of life and spend their evenings drinking Jack Daniel’s and listening to Miles Davis. And they don’t meet at water holes, poring over images from the Hubble telescope and trying to figure out what those might mean for themselves and all other hyenas.

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. It is because human intelligence is so wonderfully diverse that people are creative in so many extraordinary ways.

Creativity is the strongest example of the dynamic nature of intelligence, and it can call on all areas of our minds and being. Let me begin with a rough distinction. I said earlier that many people think they’re not creative because they don’t know what’s involved. This is true in two different ways. The first is that there are some general skills and techniques of creative thinking that everyone can learn and can apply to nearly any situation. These techniques can help in generating new ideas, in sorting out the useful ones from the less useful ones, and in removing blocks to new thinking, especially in groups.

Creativity is a step beyond imagination because it requires that you actually do something rather than lie around thinking about it. It’s a very practical process of trying to make something original. It may be a song, a theory, a dress, a short story, a boat, or a new sauce for your spaghetti. Regardless, some common features pertain.

The first is that it is a process. New ideas do sometimes come to people fully formed and without the need for much further work. Usually, though, the creative process begins with an inkling—like Feynman watching the wobble of the plate or George Harrison’s first idea for a song—which requires further development. This is a journey that can have many different phases and unexpected turns; it can draw on different sorts of skills and knowledge and end up somewhere entirely unpredicted at the outset. Richard Feynman eventually won the Nobel Prize in Physics, but they didn’t give it to him for the napkin he’d scribbled on over lunch.

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.

Creative work also often involves tapping into various talents at your disposal to make something original.

People who work creatively usually have something in common: they love the media they work with. Musicians love the sounds they make, natural writers love words, dancers love movement, mathematicians love numbers, entrepreneurs love making deals, great teachers love teaching. 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.

In all creative work, there may be frustrations, problems, and dead ends along the way. I know some wonderfully creative people who find parts of the process difficult and deeply exasperating. But there’s always profound pleasure at some point, and a deep sense of satisfaction from “getting it right.”

Finding the medium that excites your imagination, that you love to play with and work in, is an important step to freeing your creative energies. History is full of examples of people who didn’t discover their real creative abilities until they discovered the media in which they thought best. 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. There are other reasons, which we’ll come to, including the idea of luck. But first let’s look more closely at why the actual media we use are so important to the creative work we do.

Creativity in different media is a striking illustration of the diversity of intelligence and ways of thinking. Richard Feynman had a great visual imagination. But he wasn’t trying to paint a picture of electrons; he was trying to develop a scientific theory about how they actually work. To do that, he had to use mathematics. He was thinking about electrons, but he was thinking about them mathematically. Without mathematics, he simply couldn’t have thought about them as he did. The Wilburys were thinking about love and relationships, life and death, and the whole damn thing; but they weren’t trying to write a psychology textbook. They were thinking about these things through music. They were having musical ideas, and music is what they made.

Understanding the role of the media we use for creative work is important for another reason. To develop our creative abilities, we also need to develop our practical skills in the media we want to use. It’s important that we develop these skills in the right way.

Being creative is about making fresh connections so that we see things in new ways and from different perspectives.

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. This is what Richard Feynman was doing when he saw a connection between the wobbling plate and the spin of electrons. The idea for George Harrison’s song “Handle with Care” came from a label he saw on a packing crate.

I don’t mean that creativity is the opposite of logical thinking. The rules of logic allow enormous room for creativity and improvisation within themselves. So do all activities that are bound by rules.

Logic can be very important at different stages in the creative process, according to what sort of work we’re doing, particularly when we’re evaluating new ideas and how they fit into or challenge existing theories.

It’s now widely accepted that the two halves of the brain have different functions. The left hemisphere is involved in logical, sequential reasoning—with verbal language, mathematical thinking, and so on. The right hemisphere is involved in recognition of patterns, of faces, with visual perception, orientation in space, and with movement. However, these compartments of the brain hardly work in isolation from each other. If you look at images of the brain at work, you’ll see that it is highly interactive. Like the rest of our bodies, these functions are all related.

Whatever gender differences there may be in everyday thinking, creativity is always a dynamic process that may draw on many different ways of thinking at the same time. Dance is a physical, kinesthetic process. Music is a sound-based art form. But many dancers and musicians use mathematics as an integral part of their performances. Scientists and mathematicians often think in visual ways to picture and test their ideas. Creativity also uses much more than our brains. Playing instruments, creating images, constructing objects, performing a dance, and making things of every sort are also intensely physical processes that depend on feelings, intuition, and skilled coordination of hands and eyes, body and mind. In many instances—in dance, in song, in performance—we do not use external media at all. We ourselves are the medium of our creative work.

While you can see the dynamic nature of creative thinking in the work of single individuals, it becomes much more obvious when you look at the work of great creative groups like the Traveling Wilburys. The success of the group came about not because they all thought in the same way, but because they were all so different. They had different talents, different interests, and different sounds. But they found a process of working together where their differences stimulated each other to create something they wouldn’t have come up with individually. 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. This is where the argument for developing our powers of creativity moves up a gear.

Harmony!

The power of human creativity is obvious everywhere, in the technologies we use, in the buildings we inhabit, in the clothes we wear, and in the movies we watch. 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.

Unlike all other species, so far as we can tell, we don’t just get on in the world. We spend much of our time talking and thinking about what happens and trying to work out what it all means. We can do this because of the startling power of imagination, which underpins our capacity to think in words and numbers, in images and gestures, and to use all of these to generate theories and artifacts and all the complex ideas and values that make up the many perspectives on human life. We don’t just see the world as it is; we interpret it through the particular ideas and beliefs that have shaped our own cultures and our personal outlook.

🙌🏾

What we think of ourselves and of the world makes us who we are and what we can be.

🙌🏾

The good news is that we can always try to think differently. If we create our worldview, we can re-create it too by taking a different perspective and reframing our situation.

“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.”

🙌🏾 🎉🎉

Doing the thing you love to do is no guarantee that you’ll be in the zone every time. Sometimes the mood isn’t right, the time is wrong, and the ideas just don’t flow. Some people develop their own personal rituals and for getting to the zone. They don’t always work.

Those who have embraced the Element find themselves in this place regularly. This is not to suggest that they find every experience of doing the thing they love blissful, but they regularly have optimal experiences while doing these things, and they know they will again. 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.

Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (it’s pronounced “chicks-sent-me-HIGH-ee,” if you’d like to try it at home) performed “decades of research on the positive aspects of human experience—joy, creativity, the process of total involvement with life I call flow.” In his landmark work Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Dr. Csikszentmihalyi writes of a “state of mind when consciousness is harmoniously ordered, and [people] want to pursue whatever they are doing for its own sake.” What Dr. Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow” (and what many others call “being in the zone”) “happens when psychic energy—or attention—is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action. The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else.”

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. Energy drives all of our lives. This isn’t a simple matter of physical energy we think we have or don’t have but of our mental or psychic energy. Mental energy is not a fixed substance. It rises and falls with our passion and commitment to what we are doing at the time. The key difference is in our attitude, and our sense of resonance with an activity. As the song says, “I could have danced all night.”

Being in your Element, having that experience of flow, is empowering because it’s a way of unifying our energies. It’s a way of feeling deeply connected with our own sense of identity and it curiously comes about through a sense of relaxing, of feeling perfectly natural to be doing what you’re doing. It’s a profound sense of being in your skin, of connecting to your own internal pulse or energy.

This is another secret of being in the zone—that when you are inspired, your work can be inspirational to others. Being in the zone taps into your most natural self. And when you are in that place, you can contribute at a much higher level.

From a manager’s perspective, introducing new team members who are very engaged and, as a result, get in the zone more frequently is a great way to reenergize a team that’s in an energy lull or tailspin.

Mind mapping, a technique created by Tony Buzan, allows a person to create a visual representation of a concept or piece of information. The primary concept sits at the center of the map, and lines, arrows, and colors connect other ideas to that concept. I had the feeling that, as someone who tends to think visually, Kate would benefit from looking at the Civil War from this perspective.

The risk in saying that there is a set number of personality types, a set number of dominant ways of thinking, is that it closes doors rather than opening them. 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.