The Element (13 page)

“I realized that all those years of acting classes and taking the train to the theater was not about acting but about what the play actually was. I’d been a cocky actor—I wasn’t ever a wallflower—but writing had been so far removed from my consciousness until that night.

“The first play I wrote was a one-act play called
Hidden in This Picture
, and that was well received and reviewed. Then my sister, who is a lawyer, told me about a case in Guantánamo Bay involving some marines accused of killing a fellow marine. The story intrigued me and I spent the next year and a half writing the stage play for
A Few Good Men
.

“When it was playing on Broadway, I remembered that conversation with Gerard. I rang him up. ‘Is this what you meant?’ I asked him.”

I asked Aaron how feels when he’s writing. “When it’s going well,” he said, “I feel completely lost in the process. When it’s going poorly, I’m desperately looking for the zone. I have flashlights on and I’m desperately looking for it. I wouldn’t speak for other writers, but I’m basically an on-and-off switch. When I feel that something I’m writing is going well, everything in my life is good and the things in my life that aren’t good are completely manageable. If it’s not going well, Miss America could be standing there in a swimsuit handing me a Nobel Prize and I wouldn’t be happy about it.”

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. I asked Aaron if he had techniques of his own. He said he doesn’t and he wished that he had. But he does know when to stop pushing.

“When it’s not going well, I put it away and try again tomorrow or the next day. One thing I do is drive around in my car with music on. I try to find someplace where I don’t have to think about driving too much, like a freeway, where you don’t have to stop at red lights or turn or anything.

“What I don’t do is watch other people’s movies or television shows or read their plays for fear that they’re going to be very good and either make me feel worse or simply make me inclined to imitate what they’re doing.”

At its best, the process of writing for Aaron is completely absorbing. “Writing for me is a very physical activity. I’m playing all the parts, I’m getting up and down from my desk, I’m walking around. When it’s going well, in fact, I’ll find that I’ve been doing laps around my house, way out in front of where I type. In other words, I’ve been writing without writing. Then I have to go back to where I am on the page and make sure I actually type what I just did.”

In all likelihood, you’ve had instances in your life where you’ve become “lost” in an experience the way Aaron Sorkin did when he finally connected with writing. You begin to do something you love, and the rest of the world slips away. Hours pass, and it feels like minutes. During this time, you have been “in the zone.” 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. As I said earlier, we don’t only get one Element apiece, nor is there only one road for each of us to the zone. We may have different experiences of it in our lives. However, there are some common features to being in that magical place.

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. 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. We know the opposite is true when you have to do things to which you don’t feel a strong connection. We’ve all had experiences where twenty minutes can feel like nine hours. At those times, we’re not in the zone. In fact, we’re probably zoning out.

For me, this time shift (the good one, not the bad one) happens most often when I’m working with people, and especially when I’m giving presentations. When I am deep in the throes of exploring and presenting ideas with groups, time tends to move more quickly, more fluidly. I can be in a room with ten or twenty people or several thousand, and it’s always the same. For the first five or ten minutes, I’m feeling for the energy of the room and trying things out to catch the right wavelength there. Those first minutes can feel slow. But then, when I do make the connection, I slip into a different gear. When I have the pulse of the room with me, I feel a different energy—and I think they do too—which carries us forward at a different pace and in a different space. When that happens, I can look at the clock and see that almost an hour has gone by.

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. You develop a facility for the thing you are doing because you’ve unified your energy with the process and the efforts you are making. So there’s a real sense of ideas flowing through you and out of you; that you’re in some way channeling these things. You’re being an instrument of them rather than being obstructive to them or struggling to reach them. Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Eric Clapton describes it as being “in harmony with time. It’s a great feeling.”

You can see and experience this shift in all sorts of performances, in acting, in dance, in musical performances, and in sports. You see that people have suddenly entered a different phase. You see them relaxed, you see them loosen up and become instruments of their own expression.

Grand Prix racer Jochen Rindt said simply that when he’s racing, “You ignore everything and just concentrate. You forget about the rest of the world and become part of the car and track. It’s a very special feeling. You’re completely out of this world and completely into it. There’s nothing like it.”

Aviator Wilbur Wright described it this way: “When you know, after the first few minutes, that the whole mechanism is working perfectly, the sensation is so keenly delightful as to be almost beyond description. More than anything else the sensation is one of perfect peace mingled with an excitement that strains every nerve to the utmost, if you can conceive of such a combination.”

Superstar athlete Monica Seles says, “When I am consistently playing my best tennis, I am also consistently in the zone,” but notes, “Once you think about being in the zone, you are immediately out of it.”

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.”

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.”

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. I used to watch politicians fighting elections or trying to stay in office and wonder how they kept going. You see them traveling all over the world, under constant pressure to perform, making critical decisions with every appearance and living irregular hours in a constant spotlight of attention. I wondered how they didn’t fall over from sheer exhaustion. The fact is, though, that they love most of it, or they wouldn’t do it. The very thing that would wear me out is fueling them up.

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.

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.

These peak experiences are associated with physiological changes in the body—there may be a release of endorphins in the brain and of adrenaline through the body. There may be an increase in alpha wave activity and changes in our metabolic rates and in the patterns of our breathing and heartbeats. The specific nature of these physiological changes depends on the sorts of activities that have brought us to the zone and on what we’re doing to keep ourselves there.

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. The more alive we feel, the more we can contribute to the lives of others.

Hip-hop poet Black Ice learned at a very young age that his words could bring out emotions in himself and others. “My mom used to make me write about everything,” he told an interviewer. “When I got in trouble, when I was happy or even when I was scared. I was a giddy little kid. When I started liking little girls, I used to write letters for my friends. Mine were better than the ‘circle yes, no, maybe so.’ I came upon spoken word as an adult. I went to a poetry spot, looking to meet women. It was ‘open mic’ night and when this cat messed up, the audience gave him lots of love and support. I was blown away. Being the aggressive person that I am, it surprised me to see what I would talk about everyday in the barbershop in spoken word form at the club. I was able to release what was on my chest and people would understand what I was saying.”

Black Ice, born Lamar Manson, moved from those early performances to increasingly bigger stages. He appeared for five consecutive seasons on HBO’s
Def Poetry Jam
, was a lead cast member in the Tony Award-winning
Def Poetry on Broadway
, released his first album on a major label, and appeared in front of millions at the Live 8 concert. His message is life-affirming and motivating, speaking of the importance of family and the power of youth. To back up his words, he started the Hoodwatch Movement Organization to help inner-city kids stay on the right track and understand the extent of their potential. Critics laud his work and audiences respond passionately, and when you see him onstage, you can sense that he is very much in the zone.

For Black Ice, though, this entry into the zone comes from a sense of mission. “My life has been so meaningful I have to write something that touches folks,” he said in another interview. “I have a legacy to uphold. I grew up around great men. My father, my uncles, and my grandfather are my heroes and just in that alone, there are some things I could never say. I could never look my father in his face knowing I have something that’s playing on the radio that’s absolutely asinine.

“My voice is my gift,” Black Ice says. “It’s pointless if I’m not going to say anything. It’s mad important. I can see in society now, how important it is. Sometimes I’m discouraged, but I definitely know what I can contribute. We are who we are, but I want to get at the kids and stay in the seven- and eight-year-old’s ears. Telling them, ‘you’re going to be something . . . there is no other compromise, there is no if or you might; you are going to be something.’ ”

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.