The real message here is that, in seeking your Element, you’re likely to face one or more of the three levels of constraint—personal, social, and cultural. Sometimes, as Chuck Close found, reaching your Element requires devising creative solutions to strong limitations. Sometimes, as we learned from Paulo Coelho, it means maintaining a vision in the face of vicious resistance. And sometimes, as Zaha Hadid showed us, it means walking away from the life you’ve known to find an environment more suited to your growth.
