Ken Robinson’s best advice for Finding your Element
Have you ever gotten nearly all of the way through a book, before realising that you were reading the wrong one?
Well, this happened to me last year. If anything, this must be a good reflection on the first book, but what it meant was that I read two of Ken Robinson’s books about purpose in order to explore his philosophy about what he calls Your Element.
It’s likely you will have heard of Ken Robinson from his hugely popular TED talks, which capture his passion for reforming education and promoting creativity. A lot of this philosophy also comes through the data and anecdotes in The Element.
You see, I thought that I was reading Finding Your Element: How to Discover Your Talents and Passions and Transform Your Life, but I was in fact reading The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. An easy mistake, right? The former is more of an essay explaining the author’s philosophy about purpose, while the latter is a practical guide to finding your Element for yourself.
Now that I’ve been on this long journey though, I’ll skip to the end.
Finding Your Element is pretty good. It’s fun, easy-to-read, practical and is likely to help people who are feeling stuck. But it’s just good, not great, and I have since come across more structured and simple frameworks which have somewhat overshadowed the work in these books. So, rather than give you a book review and an in-depth exploration of his ideas, I thought that I’d collect some of Ken’s greatest one-liners; which show him at his best: witty, entertaining, light-hearted and thoughtful.
So, here’s the best of Finding Your Element by Ken Robinson.
Why is it important to find your Element?
“The most important reason is personal. Finding your Element is vital to understanding who you are and what you’re capable of being and doing with your life. The second reason is social. Very many people lack purpose in their lives. The evidence of this is everywhere: in the sheer numbers of people who are not interested in the work they do; in the growing numbers of students who feel alienated by the education system; and in the rising use everywhere of anti-depressants, alcohol and painkillers. Probably the harshest evidence is how many people commit suicide every year, especially young people.
Whatever your circumstances may be, in many ways finding your Element is, above anything else, about finding meaning and purpose in your life.
Like the rest of nature, human talents and passions are tremendously diverse and they take many forms. As individuals, we’re all motivated by different dreams and we thrive—and we wilt too—in very different circumstances. Recognizing your own dreams and the conditions you need to fulfill them are essential to becoming who you can be. Finding your own Element won’t guarantee that you’ll spend the rest of your life in a constant, unbroken state of pleasure and delight. It will give you a deeper sense of who you really are and of the life you could and maybe should live.”
What does it mean to be in your element?
Passions + Aptitudes
“The element is where natural aptitude meets personal passion.
There is a difference between aptitudes and abilities. Aptitudes are part of your raw potential. To realise that potential, you need to apply and refine them. For example, human beings have a natural aptitude for language. But learning to speak is a cultural process that depends on being exposed to other speakers, especially in infancy.
In ordinary circumstances, everyone has the necessary aptitudes for literacy. But many children and adults can’t read or write. They’re not incapable of reading and writing; they simply haven’t learned how to do it. You don’t become literate just by getting older. Literacy, like speech, is a cultural achievement.”
Discovering your aptitudes
“Is it possible to have more than one Element? Of course it is. You have many aptitudes and your Element may evolve over time as your talents mature and your interests change.
There is another dimension to discovering your aptitudes. You may believe that you don’t have an aptitude for something—math, or music, or design, or whatever it may be—because you originally encountered it in the wrong way, or because you were taught it in school in a way that conflicted with how you really learn. To understand more fully what your aptitudes are, you need to think about your own preferred ways of thinking and about your own learning styles.
You may have all kinds of latent talents that lie undiscovered beneath the surface, like minerals in the ground. Part of finding your Element is being open to the possibility that it might lie in a field you’ve never explored. If you’re casting about for what you should do with your life, limiting your horizons can have dramatic consequences.
To find your Element you may have to challenge your own beliefs about yourself. Whatever age you are, you’ve almost certainly developed an inner story about what you can do and what you can’t do; what you’re good at and what you’re not good at. You may be right, of course. But for all the reasons we’ve discussed, you may be misleading yourself.”
It’s not about a job
“Being in your Element is not only about what you do for a living. Some people can’t make a living from what they love to do and some don’t want to. Like many of those involved in the maker movement, they prefer to pursue their Element as a purely recreational process. If you are considering earning your living from your Element, it’s important to bear in mind that you not only have to love what you do; you should also enjoy the culture and the tribes that go with it.
Your life doesn’t have to play on a single track. You’re not limited to one Element for life. Some people find they love several things equally: others that their passions shift and evolve. Finding your Element for now doesn’t mean that you’re locked into it forever. Your life can be multifaceted, evolutionary, and in a process of constant growth and possibility.”
How to find your Element
“There is no single route to finding your Element. Life is not linear. It is organic.
In planning your way forward, it’s important to remember the three core principles that are at the heart of my argument. First, your life is unique. You can learn from the experiences of other people, but you cannot and should not try to duplicate them. Second, you create your own life and you can re-create it. In doing that, your greatest resources are your own imagination and sense of possibility. Third, your life is organic, not linear. You can’t plan the whole of your life’s journey and you don’t need to. What you do need to plan are the next steps.”
Stop the noise, change perspective and experiment
“Stopping the noise, changing perspective, and giving it a try are three core processes for finding your Element. You could treat them as one-off events if you like and just do them once. But if you’re serious about finding your Element, I suggest that you don’t. It would be like trying to get in good physical shape by working out once and assuming you’ve done all that’s needed. Like getting and staying in shape, these three processes are part of a continuing cycle of focus, exploration and reflection, the aim of which is to deepen your understanding of yourself and the world around you.”
Pay attention to your emotional states
“One of the most important things you can do as you try to find your Element is to pay careful attention to your emotional states. Is there something you do that consistently elevates your spirits? When do you experience stretches of real joy? Remember that one of the primary ways that Brian Schwartz helps his clients sort through their interests is by identifying how good they feel when embarking on them. It is critical to identify this as you try to figure out what you’re meant to do.
There is a myth that being happy means being constantly cheerful. Martin Seligman is known as the Father of Positive Psychology. In 2003, he published Authentic Happiness, which sets out the case for a life of sustained happiness and the principles and practices for achieving it. He identifies three different elements of happiness: positive emotions, engagement and meaning. Positive emotions are what we feel. Engagement is about flow: “being one with the music, time stopping, and the loss of self-consciousness during an absorbing activity.” The third element of happiness is meaning. “The pursuit of engagement and the pursuit of pleasure are often solitary, solipsistic endeavors. Human beings . . . want meaning and purpose in life.” Typically that means “serving something that you believe is bigger than the self.” Feeling you’re doing something meaningful doesn’t guarantee happiness, but it tends to be difficult to find happiness unless you feel that what you’re doing is significant in some way.”
Finding your Tribe
“Part of being in your Element is finding out what world you want to be in—what sort of culture you enjoy and who your “tribes” are.
As with finding your Element, if you’re looking for your tribe, you can’t plan the whole process. That’s the point. Finding your tribe is not a linear process whose outcomes you can predict. It’s an organic one that you can only cultivate and propagate. If you do it well, you may find it produces a harvest of new opportunities that you couldn’t have anticipated.”
Finally, why should you believe in yourself?
“You’re not given your resume with your birth certificate. You create your life and you can recreate it. As the psychologist George Kelly says, “no one needs to be a victim of their own biography.” Or, as Carl Jung puts it, “I am not what has happened to me, I am what I choose to become.
You may find that the road you’re on becomes blocked and you have to explore other options. If you do that properly, you’ll find you have more aptitudes than you thought and more ways forward in your life than you think.
But…
“If you know what your Element is, you need the self-belief and determination to pursue it. If you don’t know what it is, you need to feel entitled to look for it.
As far as anyone can estimate, there might have been around eighty to one hundred and ten billion of us. And yet each of us is unique and every life is different. The gift of being human is that we have deep creative resources and from these we can continuously transform our lives if we choose. Whether you aim to change the whole world or the world within you, the limits are set as much by your imagination as by your current circumstances. This has been true for all people since the beginnings of human history.”
Godspeed,
TMo