The Element (29 page)

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.”

A couple of years ago, I was leasing a new car from a dealership in Santa Monica. As it turned out, this was not easy. There was a time when the only decision you had to make when buying a car was whether to have it or not. Now you have to take a full-scale multiple-choice test to navigate your way between the hundreds of finishes, trims, accessories, and performance features that stand between you and the version you actually want. I’m not good at this kind of excessive decision-making. I need help deciding what to wear in the morning, where there’s much less choice and the stakes are far lower. By the time I’d made up my mind about the car, my salesman, Bill, and I had bonded and were planning our annual reunion.

While we were waiting for the final paperwork—another lengthy process—I asked him what he did when he wasn’t working. Without missing a beat, he said he was a photographer. I asked him what he photographed, assuming he meant family weddings and pets. He said he was a sports photographer. I asked him what sports he covered. “Just surfing,” he said. I was intrigued and asked him why. He said that he’d been a surfer when he was younger and simply loved the beauty and dynamics of the sport. He went to the beach at Malibu after work, weekends, holidays—whenever he could—just to take pictures. He’d been doing this for years and had accumulated thousands of dollars’ worth of cameras, tripods, and specialized lenses. Over longer holidays, he traveled to Hawaii and Australia to catch the big surf on camera.

I asked him if any of his pictures had been published. He said they had, and pulled open the drawer of his desk. It was full of high-production, glossy surfing magazines. He had pictures in every one of them. His work was very, very good.

I asked him if he’d ever thought of doing this type of work for a living. “I’d love to,” he said, “but there isn’t enough money in it.” Nonetheless, surfing photography was his passion, and one of the things that made his life worthwhile. As I leafed through these amazing, professional images, I asked him what his boss at the dealership thought of them. “He doesn’t know anything about them,” Bill told me. “It’s not really relevant to how I do my job, is it?”

I’m not sure he was right about that. I actually think it might have had a great deal to do with how Bill did his job, as is likely the case with all people who discover the Element in a pursuit other than their jobs. My guess is that the satisfaction and excitement Bill found photographing surfers made it so much easier for him to be effective at what he thought of as the relative drudgery of helping customers choose from dozens of paint samples, finish options, and decisions about running boards. The creative outlet he found in his photography made him that much more patient and helpful in his day job.

The need for an outlet of this sort manifests itself in many forms. One that I find fascinating is the emergence of the corporate rock band. Unlike the company softball team, which tends to fill its roster with young people from the mailroom, these bands tend to include a lineup of senior executives (unless someone in the mailroom is a great bass player) who once dreamed of being rock stars before settling into other careers. 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.

For four years now, there has been a rock festival of sorts put together in New York to benefit the charity A Leg to Stand On. What distinguishes this rock benefit show from all others is that every member of every band (with the exception of a couple of ringers) is in the hedge fund business. “By day, most of the performers manage money,” states one of the press releases for Hedge Fund Rocktoberfest, “but when they turn off their trading screens, they turn on the music.”

“By 11 p.m., everyone is either thinking about their 4 a.m. train ride the next morning or the fact that the Tokyo markets are now open,” noted Tim Seymour, one of the performers. But while the show is on, it’s pure revelry, with managers covering classic hits or even donning skimpy outfits to serve as backup singers. The contrast between the day job and this is dramatic and, by all indications, liberating for everyone who participates.

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 first question at parties and social gatherings is often, “What do you do?” We dutifully answer with a top-line description of our professions: “I’m a teacher,” “I’m a designer,” “I’m a driver.” If you don’t have a paid job, you might feel somewhat awkward about this and find the need to give an explanation. For so many of us, our jobs define us, even to ourselves—and even if the work we do doesn’t express who we really feel we are. This can be especially frustrating if your job is unfulfilling. If we’re not in our Element at work, it becomes even more important to discover that Element somewhere else.

To begin with, it can enrich everything else you do. Doing the thing you love and that you do well for even a couple of hours a week can make everything else more palatable. But in some circumstances, it can lead to transformations you might not have imagined possible.

Khaled Hosseini immigrated to America in 1980, got a medical degree in the 1990s, and set off on a career practicing internal medicine in the Bay Area. In his heart, though, he knew he wanted to be a writer and that he wanted to tell the story of life in Afghanistan prior to the Soviet invasion. While continuing his medical practice, he began work on a novel about two boys growing up in Kabul. That novel became
The Kite Runner
, a book that has sold more than four million copies and generated a recent film.

Hosseini’s pursuit of his most intense interests, even while he was working hard at another profession, transformed him in profound ways. The success of
The Kite Runner
has allowed him to go on an extended sabbatical from medicine and to concentrate on writing full-time. He published his second novel, the best-selling
A Thousand Splendid Suns
, in 2007. “I enjoyed practicing medicine and was always honored that patients put their trust in me to take care of them and their loved ones,” he said in a recent interview. “But writing had always been my passion, since childhood. I feel ridiculously fortunate and privileged that writing is, at least for the time being, my livelihood. It is a dream realized.”

Like Khaled Hosseini’s, Miles Waters’s first career was in the medical profession. He began practicing as a dentist in England in 1974. And like Hosseini, Waters had a burning passion for an entirely different field. In Waters’s case, it was popular music. He’d played in bands at school and started writing songs along the way. In 1977, he scaled back his dental practice to spend more time at songwriting. It took him several years to make inroads, but he eventually wrote several hit songs and began to earn a living in the music field. He quit dentistry for a period and worked full-time as a writer and producer, contributing to an album by Jim Capaldi (from the legendary rock band Traffic) that featured work from Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, and George Harrison. He’s traveled in the same circles as Paul McCartney and Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour. These days, he shuttles between music and dentistry, maintaining a practice while still composing and producing.

John Wood made a fortune as a marketing executive for Microsoft. During a trip to the Himalayas, though, he came upon a school in an impoverished village. The school taught four hundred and fifty students, but had only twenty books—and not one of these was a children’s book. When Wood asked the school’s headmaster how the school got by with such a paucity of books, the headmaster enlisted his aid. Wood began collecting books and raising money for this school and others, doing the work on nights and weekends while dealing with a hugely demanding day job. Finally, he walked away from Microsoft for his true calling—Room to Read, a nonprofit organization with the goal of extending literacy in poor countries. Several of his Microsoft colleagues thought he’d lost his mind. “It was incomprehensible to many of them,” he said in an interview. “When they found out I was leaving to do things like delivering books on the backs of donkeys, they thought I was crazy.” Room to Read has been transformational not only for Wood, but for thousands and thousands of others. The nonprofit organization has created more than five thousand school libraries in six countries with plans to extend that reach to ten thousand libraries and fifteen countries by 2010.

There’s an important difference between leisure and recreation. In a general sense, both words suggest processes of physical or mental regeneration. But they have different connotations. Leisure is generally thought of as the opposite of work. It suggests something effortless and passive. We tend to think of work as something that takes our energy. Leisure is what we do to build it up again. Leisure offers a respite, a passive break from the challenges of the day, a chance to rest and recharge. Recreation carries a more active tone—literally of re-creating ourselves. It suggests activities that require physical or mental effort but which enhance our energies rather than depleting them. I associate the Element much more with recreation than with leisure.

Dr. Suzanne Peterson is a management professor at the W. P. Carey School of Business and Center for Responsible Leadership at Arizona State University and a consultant for an executive coaching firm. She’s also a championship dancer, twice winning the Holiday Dance Classic in Las Vegas and grabbing the 2007 Hotlanta US Open Pro-Am Latin Championship, among others.

Suzanne took some dance classes when she was a teenager, but she never seriously considered dance as a career. Suzanne knew from the time she was in high school that she wanted to be an executive. “I didn’t grow up knowing exactly what I wanted to be, but I knew that I wanted to wear business suits, speak to large groups of people and have them listen to me, and have a title. I always saw myself as being able to wear great business suits for some reason. And I liked the idea that I could visualize myself in front of groups of people and have something important to say. But dancing was not a passion when I was young. It was something you did because what else do girls do as a hobby if they don’t want to play soccer and baseball?”

Her rediscovery of dance and the intense excitement that accompanied it this time around came nearly accidentally. “I was just looking for a hobby and my achievement and motivation got the best of me. I was about twenty-six, and I was in graduate school. At this time, salsa and swing dancing were getting popular, so I’d just go into the social dance studio and I would watch. I’d mimic what the teachers were doing. Slowly but surely I started taking group lessons and then some private lessons. The next thing I know, it’s this huge part of my life. So it really was a progression based on my belief that I had the requisite talent for it and sort of the basic ability level. But probably my academic side allowed me to study it and focus on it just like any other subject.

“And I literally would study it like any other academic science. Huge visualization. I would sit on planes and I would visualize myself going through all the dances. So anytime I couldn’t physically practice, I would mentally practice. I could feel the music. I could feel the emotions. I could see the facial expressions. And I would come the next day to the dance studio after being gone and I would be better. And my dance partner would say, ‘How did you get better overnight? Weren’t you traveling to Philadelphia?’ and I would say, ‘Oh, I practiced on the plane.’ And I literally would practice up to two hours in my head totally uninterrupted.

“I went into dancing the same way I go into my career—you give 110 percent and you go in strong and powerful. And I realized that when you do that in dancing, it’s too much. You lose the femininity and, all of a sudden, you’re in everybody’s face so much. The business side is power and confidence and all these things. And the dancing is vulnerability and sensuality, everything soft. You go from one to the other and I enjoy them equally.”

Suzanne in fact seems to have found her Element in multiple ways. She loves her profession, and she loves what she does for recreation. “If I’m really teaching something about leadership that I’m passionate about, I get the same exact feeling except that it’s just a different emotion. I mean I feel confident and powerful and very connected to the audience and I want to make a difference. And then in the dancing I feel more vulnerable, a little less confidence. But they’re both escapes in different ways and I get completely engulfed in them and get very moved by them emotionally.”

Ultimately, though, her life has added meaning because she’s chosen a recreational pursuit that is fulfilling, rather than simply entertaining. “It’s taught me more about communication than studying communication ever could. You realize the effect that you have on another person. If you were in a bad mood, that person knows it in a second just touching your hand. And so in my head I could feel the perfect connection that’s in a partnership, the perfect communication. I would feel extremely happy.

“It’s a flow experience. I mean it’s a complete release. I don’t think about anything. I don’t think about anything good in my life. I don’t think about anything bad in my life. Literally, I would not get distracted if gunshots went off. It’s really amazing.”