The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

by Ken Robinson

diverse.

dynamic.

distinct.

There’s a big difference between a great team and a committee. Most committees do routine work and have members who are theoretically interchangeable with other people. Committee members are usually there to represent specific interests. Often a committee can do its work while half the members are checking their BlackBerrys or studying the wallpaper. Committees are often immortal; they seem to persist forever, and so often do their meetings. Creative teams have a distinctive personality and come together to do something specific. They are together only for as long as they want to be or have to be to get the job done.

There’s an important difference between being in a tribe as I’m defining it and being part of a crowd, even when the members of a crowd are all there for the same reason and feel the same passions.

social identity theory.

They also found that students were more likely to use the pronoun we regarding the team—as in “We destroyed State on Saturday”—than they were if their team lost. In the latter instance, the pronoun usually switched to they—as in, “I can’t believe they blew that game.”

I think of the barriers to finding the Element as three concentric “circles of constraint.” These circles are personal, social, and cultural.

In my experience, most people have to face internal obstacles of self-doubt and fear as much as any external obstacles of circumstance and opportunity.

Fear is perhaps the most common obstacle to finding your Element. You might ask how often it’s played a part in your own life and held you back from doing the things you desperately wanted to try. Dr. Jeffers offers a series of well-tested techniques to move from fear to fulfillment, of which the most powerful is explicit in the title of her book.

Abilene Paradox:

swarm intelligence,

I define culture as the values and forms of behavior that characterize different social groups. Culture is a system of permissions. It’s about the attitudes and behaviors that are acceptable and unacceptable in different communities, those that are approved of and those that are not. If you don’t understand the cultural codes, you can look just awful.

But in addition to helping those within the culture thrive, it also sets out a series of constraints. Such constraints can inhibit us from reaching our Element because our passions seem inconsistent with the culture.

Finding your Element sometimes requires breaking away from your native culture in order to achieve your goals.

The contagious behavior of schools of fish, insect swarms, and crowds of people is generated by close physical proximity. For most of human history, cultural identities have also been formed through direct contact with the people who are physically nearest to us: small villages, the local community. Large movements of people once were limited to invasions, military conquests, and trade, and these were the main ways in which cultural ideas were disseminated and different languages and ways of life imposed on other communities. All of this has changed irreversibly in the last two hundred years or so with the growth of global communications. We now have patterns of contagious behavior being generated on a massive scale through the Web. Second Life has millions of people online from different parts of the world potentially affecting how they each think and taking on new virtual identities and roles.

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.

He lost his sight and found a vision. He proved dramatically that it’s not what happens to us that determines our lives—it’s what we make of what happens.

Describing ourselves as lucky or unlucky suggests that we’re simply the beneficiaries or victims of chance circumstances.

Those who simply wait for good things to happen really would be lucky to encounter them. All of the people I’ve profiled in this book have taken an active role in “getting lucky.” They’ve mastered a combination of attitudes and behavior that lead them to opportunities and that give them the confidence to take them.

Wiseman has identified four principles that characterize lucky people. 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.

Another attitude that leads to what many of us would consider “good luck” is the ability to reframe, to look at a situation that fails to go according to plan and turn it into something beneficial.

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,

Sometimes it comes in the form of a person bringing out the best in us,

Regardless, mentors tend to serve some or all of four roles for us. The first role is recognition.

the fastest path to success is often to go against the flow.

The second role of a mentor is encouragement.

The third role of a mentor is facilitating.

The fourth role of a mentor is stretching.

To be in your Element, it isn’t necessary to drop everything else and do it all day, every day. For some people, at some stages in their lives, leaving their current jobs or roles to pursue their passions simply isn’t a practical proposition. Other people choose not to do that for a whole range of reasons. Many people earn their living doing one thing, and they then create time and space in their lives to do the thing they love. Some people do this because it makes greater sense emotionally. Others do it because they feel they have no alternative but to pursue their passions “on the side.”

The passion with which many of these amateur musicians play shows that such an avocation offers a level of fulfillment they can’t find in their work, regardless of how accomplished they are at their jobs.

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.

The objective of this form of recreation is to bring a proper balance into our lives—a balance between making a living and making a life.

Discovering the Element doesn’t promise to make you richer.

Nor does it promise to make you more famous, more popular, or even a bigger hit with your family.

For everyone, being in their Element, even for part of the time, can bring a new richness and balance to their lives.

My own extremely strong belief, based on decades of work in the field, is that the best way to improve education is not to focus primarily on the curriculum, nor on assessment, important though these things are. The most powerful method of improving education is to invest in the improvement of teaching and the status of great teachers.

Reggio approach.

A+ Schools

The Element has implications for teaching. Too many reform movements in education are designed to make education teacher-proof. The most successful systems in the world take the opposite view. They invest in teachers. The reason is that people succeed best when they have others who understand their talents, challenges, and abilities. This is why mentoring is such a helpful force in so many peoples lives. Great teachers have always understood that that real role is not to teach subjects but to teach students. Mentoring and coaching is the vital pulse of a living system of education.

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.

Later in his life, Salk made a provocative observation, one that addresses the two forms of climate crisis. “It’s interesting to reflect,” he said, “that if all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within fifty years all other forms of life would end.” He understood, as Rachel Carson did, that the insects we spend so much effort trying to eradicate are essential threads in the intricate web of life on Earth. “But,” Salk went on, “if all human beings were to disappear from the earth, within fifty years all other forms of life would flourish.”

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.”