The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

by Ken Robinson

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.

Through imagination, we not only bring to mind things that we have experienced but things that we have never experienced.

“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?”

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.

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.

Creativity involves several different processes that wind through each other. The first is generating new ideas, imagining different possibilities, considering alternative options.

The creative process also involves developing these ideas by judging which work best or feel right.

Because it’s about making things, creative work always involves using media of some sort to develop ideas.

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.

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.

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never produce anything original.” The second was, “Great education depends on great teaching.”

You can think of creativity as a conversation between what we’re trying to figure out and the media we are using.

Creative thinking involves much more than the sorts of logical, linear thinking

Being creative is about making fresh connections so that we see things in new ways and from different perspectives. In logical, linear thinking, we move from one idea to another through a series of rules and conventions. We allow some moves while rejecting others because they’re illogical. If A + B=C, we can figure out what C + B equals. Conventional IQ exams typically test for this type of thinking. The rules of logic or linear thought don’t always guide creative thinking. On the contrary.

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.

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.

there’s some suggestion in recent research that women’s brains may be more interactive than men’s brains.

It’s about the relationship between our senses and our knowledge of the world. The essence of the question is whether we can know something is true if we don’t have direct evidence of it through our senses, and the usual example is this: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” I used to teach some philosophy courses, and the students and I could debate this sort of thing in an earnest way for weeks on end. The answer, I think, is, “Of course it does, don’t be so ridiculous.”

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.

Have you ever forgotten someone’s name, or the name of somewhere you’ve visited? Try as you may, it’s often impossible to bring it to mind, and the more you think about it, the more elusive it becomes. Usually, the best thing you can do is stop trying and “put it to the back of your mind.” Sometime later, the name will probably show up in your head when you’re least expecting it. The reason is that there is far more to our minds than the deliberate processes of conscious thought. Beneath the noisy surface of our minds, there are deep reserves of memory and association, of feelings and perceptions that process and record our life’s experiences beyond our conscious awareness.

So at times, creativity is a conscious effort. At others, we need to let our ideas ferment for a while and trust the deeper unconscious ruminations of o...

The success of the group came about not because they all thought in the same way, but because they were all so different.

“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.

One of the strongest signs of being in the zone is a sense of freedom and of authenticity. 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.

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.

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.

Dr. Csikszentmihalyi speaks of the “elements of enjoyment,” the components that comprise an optimal experience. These include facing a challenge that requires a skill one possesses, complete absorption in an activity, clear goals and feedback, concentration on the task at hand that allows one to forget everything else, the loss of self-consciousness, and the sense that time “transforms” during the experience. “The key element of an optimal experience,” he says in Flow, “is that it is an end in itself. Even if initially undertaken for other reasons, the activity that consumes us becomes intrinsically rewarding.”

Activities we love fill us with energy even when we are physically exhausted. Activities we don’t like can drain us in minutes, even if we approach them at our physical peak of fitness. This is one of the keys to the Element, and one of the primary reasons why finding the Element is vital for every person. 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.

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.

intelligence is distinct for every individual.

Being in the zone is about using your particular kind of intelligence in an optimal way.

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.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

It’s essentially a personality quiz, though more sophisticated than what you might find in the pages of a pop magazine. People answer a series of questions in four basic categories (energy attitude, perception, judgment, and orientation to life events), and their answers indicate whether they are more one thing or another in each of these categories (for example, more extroverted or introverted). From the four categories and the two places in which people fall in these categories, the test identifies sixteen personality types. The underlying message of the test is that you and each of the other six billion people on the planet fit into one of these sixteen boxes.

Like the MBTI, the Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI) is an assessment tool that uses participants’ answers to a series of questions. It doesn’t seek to put people in a box. Instead, it tries to show people which of four brain quadrants they tend to use more often. The A quadrant (cerebral left hemisphere) relates to analytic thinking (collecting data, understanding how things work, and so on). The B quadrant (limbic left hemisphere) relates to implementation thinking (organizing and following directions, for example). The C quadrant (limbic right hemisphere) relates to social thinking (expressing ideas, seeking personal meaning). The D quadrant (cerebral right hemisphere) relates to future thinking (looking at the big picture, thinking in metaphors).

This is about looking into the eyes of your children or those you care for and, rather than approaching them with a template about who they might be, trying to understand who they really are.

What kinds of activities do they tend to engage in voluntarily? What sorts of aptitude do they suggest? What absorbs them most? What sort of questions do they ask, and what type of points do they make? We need to understand what puts them and us in the zone.

FOR MOST PEOPLE, a primary component of being in their Element is connecting with other people who share their passion and a desire to make the most of themselves through it.

Tribe members can be collaborators or competitors. They can share the same vision or have utterly different ones.

Connecting with people who share the same passions affirms that you’re not alone; that there are others like you and that, while many might not understand your passion, some do. It doesn’t matter whether you like the people as individuals, or even the work they do. It’s perfectly possible that you don’t. What matters first is having validation for the passion you have in common. Finding your tribe brings the luxury of talking shop, of bouncing ideas around, of sharing and comparing techniques, and of indulging your enthusiasms or hostilities for the same things.

Some people are most in their Element when they are working alone. This is often true of mathematicians, poets, painters, and some athletes. Even with these people, though, there’s a tacit awareness of a field—the other writers, other painters, other mathematicians,

Finding your tribe offers more than validation and interaction, important as both of those are. It provides inspiration and provocation to raise the bar on your own achievements.

Valley is a place where you can change your job without changing your parking spot.

the physical clustering of a tribe of creative individuals led to explosive innovation and growth.

“Great Groups,” collections of people with similar interests who create something much greater than any of them could create individually—who become more than the sum of the parts.

Why can creative teams achieve more together than they can separately? I think it’s because they bring together the three key features of intelligence that I described earlier. In a way, they model the essential features of the creative mind.