The Element (30 page)
Authors: Ken Robinson
Suzanne’s sister, Andrea Hanna, is an executive assistant working in Los Angeles. Like Suzanne, she’s found a pursuit beyond her job that adds dimension to her life.
“I didn’t like writing until my senior year of high school,” she told me. “My English teacher told us to write a compelling college entrance essay about anything of our choice. Like most assignments, I dreaded the idea of sitting down and writing a five-paragraph essay that was just going to end up covered in red pen. Nonetheless, I finally sat down and wrote about how unprepared I felt for college but how excited I was to start a new chapter of my life. This was the first essay I had ever written for school that had humor in it. It was also the first essay where I was able to write about something I was an expert on: me. To my surprise, my teacher loved it and read it in front of the class. She also entered it into a writing contest. I won first place and was asked to read my paper in front of a large group of professional women writers. I even got my picture in the paper! It was exciting for me and gave me a boost of confidence as I entered college.
“I have always been told I have a very strong writer’s voice. People always tell me, ‘I can hear you while I read this.’ In college I started sending friends the occasional comedic e-mail recapping our weekends. I would turn each one of my friends into a character and embellished the story just enough to get the laugh I wanted. My e-mails started getting circulated amongst groups of friends and pretty soon I would get a reply from someone I wouldn’t know telling me how great my writing was. It felt great to be so good at something that came so naturally for me.
“The summer between my sophomore and junior year, I got a job as a receptionist at a radio station. Within a month, I had started writing funny advertising spots for the station. The station manager loved my ideas and put them on air. All my friends would tune in to hear my funny commericals, many of which I starred in myself. It felt really good to hear my work produced and get the response I had sought out to get.
“As my work got recognized, I started realizing I had a talent for something that could possibly be a career. I entered the entertainment industry right after college. I had several jobs working for television writers and film producers, learning the ropes. After years of coffee runs and executive car washes, I realized that many of these ‘dream jobs’ were some of the least creative jobs out there. At one point, I dreamt of being a writer for
Saturday Night Live
, but learned weekly deadlines and high-stress environments take any enjoyment out of it for me. I began to think,
why does a paycheck validate my talent?
When it comes down to it, I just love to make people laugh and if one of my sketches, short stories, or funny e-mails makes someone crack up, well that’s really enough for me. I became a much happier person when I came to that realization.
Saturday Night Live
, but learned weekly deadlines and high-stress environments take any enjoyment out of it for me. I began to think,
why does a paycheck validate my talent?
When it comes down to it, I just love to make people laugh and if one of my sketches, short stories, or funny e-mails makes someone crack up, well that’s really enough for me. I became a much happier person when I came to that realization.
“When I think about it, I think the main reason I enjoy writing comedy is because I feel witty and smart when I am doing it. For so many years I felt stupid because I never excelled at school. My writing gives me confidence and makes me feel like a more complete version of myself.”
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. Whether or not we can spend most of our time in our Element, it’s essential for our well-being that we connect with our true passions in some way and at some point. More and more people are doing this through formal and informal networks, clubs, and festivals to share and celebrate common creative interests. These include choirs, theater festivals, science clubs, and music camps. Personal happiness comes as much from the emotional and spiritual fulfillment that this can bring as from the material needs we meet from the work we may have to do.
The scientific study of happiness is a relatively new field. It got off to something of a false start with Abraham Maslow six decades ago, when he suggested that we spend more time understanding the psychology of our positive traits rather than focusing exclusively on what makes us mentally ill. Unfortunately, most of his contemporaries found little inspiration in his words. The concept gained a great deal of traction, though, when Martin Seligman became president of the American Psychological Association and, coining the term
Positive Psychology
, announced that the goal of his yearlong term in office was to provoke further exploration into what made human beings flourish. Since then, scientists have conducted dozens of studies on happiness. “Happy individuals seem to have a whole lot more fun than the rest of us ever do,” Dr. Michael Fordyce said in his book
Human Happiness
. “They have many more activities they enjoy doing for fun, and they spend much more of their time, on a given day or week, doing fun, exciting, and enjoyable activities.”
Positive Psychology
, announced that the goal of his yearlong term in office was to provoke further exploration into what made human beings flourish. Since then, scientists have conducted dozens of studies on happiness. “Happy individuals seem to have a whole lot more fun than the rest of us ever do,” Dr. Michael Fordyce said in his book
Human Happiness
. “They have many more activities they enjoy doing for fun, and they spend much more of their time, on a given day or week, doing fun, exciting, and enjoyable activities.”
Discovering the Element doesn’t promise to make you richer. Quite the opposite is possible, actually, as exploring your passions might lead you to leave behind that career as an investment banker to follow your dream of opening a pizzeria. 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.
The Element is about a more dynamic, organic conception of human existence in which the different parts of our lives are not seen as hermetically sealed off from one another but as interacting and influencing each other. Being in our Element at any time in our lives can transform our view of ourselves. Whether we do it full-time or part-time, it can affect our whole lives and the lives of those around us.
The Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn saw this clearly. “If you want to change the world,” he said, “who do you begin with, yourself or others? I believe if we begin with ourselves and do the things that we need to do and become the best person we can be, we have a much better chance of changing the world for the better.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Making the Grade
MANY OF THE PEOPLE we’ve met in this book didn’t do well at school, or at least didn’t enjoy being there. Of course, many people do do well in their schools and love what they have to offer. But too many graduate or leave early, unsure of their real talents and not knowing what direction to take next. Too many feel that what they’re good at isn’t valued by schools.
Too many think they’re not good at anything.
Sometimes, getting away from school is the best thing that can happen to a great mind. Sir Richard Branson was born in England in 1950. He attended Stowe School, and he was very popular there, making friends easily and excelling at sports. He was so good at athletics, in fact, that he became the captain of the soccer and cricket teams. He also showed an early flair for business. By the time he was fifteen, he’d started two enterprises, one selling Christmas trees and the other selling small Australian birds known as budgerigars. Neither business was particularly successful, but Richard had an obvious aptitude for this kind of thing.
What he didn’t seem to have an affinity for was school. His grades were poor, and he disliked the whole business of attending classes. He tried to make a go of it, but it just wasn’t a comfortable fit. At the age of sixteen, he decided he’d had enough and left, never to return.
Richard’s experience at school confounded those who taught him. Clearly he was bright, clearly he was industrious, clearly he was personable and capable of putting his mind to good use—but equally clearly, he was completely unwilling to conform to the school’s standards. Commenting on Richard’s decision to drop out, his head teacher said, “By the time he is twenty-one, Richard will either be in jail or be a millionaire, and I have no idea which it will be.”
Out in the real world now, Richard needed to find something to do with his life. Sports were not an option; he wasn’t skilled enough to be a professional athlete. However, something else stirred his passions at least as much, and he had a strong feeling that he was
very
good at this—he would become an entrepreneur.
very
good at this—he would become an entrepreneur.
Richard Branson soon started his first real enterprise, a magazine called
Student
. He followed this in 1970 with a mail-order business selling records. The mail-order business ultimately became a chain of record stores—you might know them now as Virgin Megastores. This was the first of his enterprises to carry the Virgin name. But it was hardly the last. Not long after he launched the stores, he started Virgin Records. Then, in the 1980s, he took on an entirely new business with Virgin Atlantic Airways, starting the airline with virtually no cash outlay and one 747 that he leased from Boeing. Today, his empire also includes Virgin Cola, Virgin Trains, Virgin Fuel, and, one of his most ambitious ventures, Virgin Galactic, the first commercial endeavor to send people into space. His decision to forgo school and become an entrepreneur was inspired. And his head teacher’s prophecy did turn out to be true—at least the part about his becoming a millionaire by the time he was twenty-one.
Student
. He followed this in 1970 with a mail-order business selling records. The mail-order business ultimately became a chain of record stores—you might know them now as Virgin Megastores. This was the first of his enterprises to carry the Virgin name. But it was hardly the last. Not long after he launched the stores, he started Virgin Records. Then, in the 1980s, he took on an entirely new business with Virgin Atlantic Airways, starting the airline with virtually no cash outlay and one 747 that he leased from Boeing. Today, his empire also includes Virgin Cola, Virgin Trains, Virgin Fuel, and, one of his most ambitious ventures, Virgin Galactic, the first commercial endeavor to send people into space. His decision to forgo school and become an entrepreneur was inspired. And his head teacher’s prophecy did turn out to be true—at least the part about his becoming a millionaire by the time he was twenty-one.
Branson eventually learned that one of the reasons for his poor academic performance was dyslexia. Among other things, this caused him to have serious difficulties understanding math. Even now, in spite of the billions he is worth, he still can’t navigate his way around a profit-and-loss sheet. For a long time, he couldn’t even grasp the difference between net and gross income. One day, in exasperation, his director of finance took him aside after a Virgin board meeting and said, “Richard, think of it this way: if you go fishing and throw a net into the sea, everything you catch in the net is yours to keep. That’s your ‘net’ profit. Everything else is the gross.”
“Finally,” Richard said, “I got the difference.”
Branson’s flamboyant style of entrepreneurship and huge success in so many fields earned him a knighthood in 1999. None of this seemed remotely likely when he was struggling to make passing grades at school. Perhaps it should have been, though.
“The fact is,” he told me, “all the great entrepreneurs of my generation really struggled at school and couldn’t wait to get out and make something of themselves.”
Paul McCartney didn’t find school nearly as uninspiring as Richard Branson did. In fact, Paul actually considered becoming a teacher until he decided to become a Beatle instead. Still, one subject that left him entirely unengaged was music.
“I didn’t like music at school because we weren’t really taught it. Our class was just thirty teenage Liverpool lads. The music teacher would come in and put an old LP of classical music on this old turntable and then walk out. He’d spend the rest of the lesson in the common room having a cigarette. So as soon as he’d gone, we turned the gramophone off and posted a guy at the door. We got the playing cards and cigarettes out and spent the whole lesson playing cards. It was great. We just thought of music as card-playing lessons. Then when he was coming back, we put the record back on, right near the end. He asked us what we thought, and we’d say ‘It was great that, sir!’ I really can’t remember anything else about music at school. Honestly. That’s all we ever did.
“The music teacher completely failed to teach us anything about music. I mean, he had George Harrison and Paul McCartney in his classes as kids and he couldn’t interest us in music. George and I both went through school and no one ever thought we had any kind of musical talent at all. The only way it would ever show then was if you were in a little band or something. Sometimes people would get guitars out at the end of term. John was in a band like that in his school. But otherwise, no one would ever notice you were interested in music. And nobody taught us anything about it.”
Finding our Element is essential for us as individuals and for the well-being of our communities. Education should be one of the main processes that take us to the Element. Too often, though, it serves the opposite function. This is a very serious issue for all of us. In many systems, the problems are getting worse.
What do we do about this?
This Looked-Down-Upon ThingI receive many e-mail messages from students around the world. This is one from a seventeen-year-old student in New Jersey who watched the speech I gave at the TED Conference in 2006 (TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design):
Here I am sitting quietly unable to sleep in my room. It’s currently 6:00 a.m., and this is the period of my life that is supposed to change me forever. After a few weeks, I will be a senior and colleges seem to be the main topic of my life right now . . . and I hate it. It’s not that I don’t want to go to college, it’s just that I had thoughts of doing other things that wouldn’t suppress my ideas. I was so dead confident about something I wanted to do and devote my time with, but to everyone around me it seems like getting a Ph.D. or some boring job is key to being successful in life. To me I thought that spending your time on something boring and meaningless was a bad idea. This is the one opportunity in my life . . . heck it’s the one life I’ll ever get and if I don’t do something drastic, I will never get a chance to do it. I hate it when I get some funny look from my parents or my friends’ parents when I tell them I want to pursue something completely different than the trite old medical- or business-related job.
Somehow, I stumbled upon a video with a guy talking about ideas I’ve had in my head for some time now and it utterly shook me to euphoria. . . . If everyone wants to be a pharmacist, in the future, a job in the medical field won’t be such a prestigious profession. I don’t want money, I don’t want some lousy “expensive” car. I want to do something meaningful with my life, but support is something I rarely get. I just want to tell you that you’ve personally made me believe once again that I can follow my dream. As a painter, a sketcher, a music writer, a sculptor, and a writer, I truly thank you for giving me hope. My art teacher always gives me stares when I would do something odd. I once poured my paintbrush cleaning water on top of a painting my teacher said was “completed and ready to be graded.” Boy, would you have loved the look on her face. These boundaries are so clearly set in school and I want to break free and create the ideas that come from my head at three in the morning. I hate drawing plain old shoes or trees and I don’t like having this “grading” of art. Since when should someone “grade” art? I bet if Pablo Picasso handed in one of his pieces to his old art teacher, she’d absolutely flip and fail him. I asked my teacher if I could incorporate sculpture with canvas and have both intertwined together and have my sculpture give the illusion that the painting was alive and coming towards the viewer. . . . Her response was that it wasn’t allowed! I am going to take an AP art studio class my senior year and they tell me that I can’t do three-dimensional art? It’s insane and we need people like you to come down to New Jersey and give a speech or two about this looked-down-upon thing called creativity.
It pains me when the minute I say I want to be an artist when I grow up, all I get are laughs or frowns. Why can’t people do the things they love to do? Is happiness a mansion, some big-screen television screen, watching numbers scroll go by as you cringe when S&P goes down a point? . . . This world has turned into an overpopulated, scary, and competitive place. Thank you for those nineteen minutes and twenty-nine seconds of pure truth. Cheers.
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