Finding Your Element: How to Discover Your Talents and Passions and Transform Your Life

215 Pages·2013·0.97 MB·English

by  Ken Robinson

Also by Ken Robinson, PhD, with Lou Aronica The Element: How Finding
Your Passion Changes Everything Also by Ken Robinson, PhD
Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education Exploring
Theatre and Education Learning through Drama (with Lynn McGregor and Maggie Tate) Also by Lou
Aronica
Differential Equations (with Julian Iragorri) Blue
Miraculous Health (with Dr. Rick Levy) The Culture Code (with Clotaire Rapaille)
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York
10014, USA

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Group visit penguin.com Copyright © Ken Robinson, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or
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ISBN 978-1-10162267-4
For Peter Brinson (1920–95), an inspiration and mentor to me and to countless
others on how to live a full and creative life by helping others to do the same.
Acknowledgments
T
HIS BOOK WAS born out of the tremendous response to its predecessor, The
Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. As always, there
are too many people to thank individually, but some have to be mentioned or I’ll
never hear the end of it.
First and foremost, I have to thank Lou Aronica, my collaborator on the
Element books, for his constant professionalism, expertise, and essential good
humor from start to finish. We both owe special thanks to our literary agent,
Peter Miller, for his (not always) gentle nudging to get the sequel under way in
the first place and for his expert representation of it to publishers in so many
countries once it was done. At Viking, our commissioning publisher in the
United States, Kathryn Court and her associate editor Tara Singh have been
wonderful creative partners in taking the book through all the stages from the
first hopeful outline to final publication. And our assistant, Jodi Rose, has been a
rock of reliability in helping me manage a tight writing deadline in a tangle of
other commitments and travel.
At this stage, many writers include an apology to their family for having to
put up with long months of silence and brooding preoccupation. I certainly owe
that to mine. I also have to thank them for helping to make this book a family
affair. I wanted this to be a book that families could read and share and I enlisted
my own to make sure it was. In between writing and publishing her own book,
India’s Summer, my wife, Thérèse, offered a stream of thoughts and
encouragement for this one as successive draft chapters rolled off the laptop. Our
daughter, Kate, read every word of the manuscript and road tested all of the
exercises and helped me design many of them. She was a tremendous source of
encouragement and inspiration as we tested the tone and style of the book. Our
son, James, has a special interest in, and deep knowledge of, spiritual questions
and offered some expert comment on those sections of the book. He also drew
the graphic of the Mind Map, embarrassing my own amateur attempts to do the
same. My brother John Robinson, an accomplished researcher, helped with
investigating numerous questions and checking many points of detail to make
sure that what we say is not only valuable but also true. I’m deeply grateful to
them all.
Last and of course not least, we have to thank the many people of all ages
from around the world who read the first book and then contacted us with their
own Element stories. We had far more than we could include in this new book
but they all underline the heart of the argument that people in all walks of life
really do achieve their best when they find their Element. Their responses and
questions made it clear that there was a real value in a sequel, and that’s what
you now have in your hands. I trust we’ve done justice to them and to you.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE: Finding Your Element
CHAPTER TWO: What Are You Good At?
CHAPTER THREE: How Do You Know?
CHAPTER FOUR: What Do You Love?
CHAPTER FIVE: What Makes You Happy?
CHAPTER SIX: What’s Your Attitude?
CHAPTER SEVEN: Where Are You Now?
CHAPTER EIGHT: Where’s Your Tribe?
CHAPTER NINE: What’s Next?
CHAPTER TEN: Living a Life of Passion and Purpose
Notes
Index
Introduction
T
HE AIM OF this book is to help you find your Element.
I was in Oklahoma a few years ago and heard an old story. Two young
fish are swimming down a river and an older fish swims past them in the
opposite direction. He says, “Good morning, boys. How’s the water?” They
smile at him and swim on. Further up the river, one of the young fish turns to the
other and says, “What’s water?” He takes his natural element so much for
granted that he doesn’t even know he’s in it. Being in your own Element is like
that. It’s about doing something that feels so completely natural to you, that
resonates so strongly with you, that you feel that this is who you really are.
What about you? Are you in your Element? Do you know what your Element
is or how to find it? There are plenty of people who live their lives in their
Element and feel they’re doing exactly what they were born to do. There are
very many who do not. Consequently, they don’t really enjoy their lives; they
endure them and wait for the weekend.
In 2009 we published The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes
Everything. That book is about the difference between these two ways of living
and the difference it makes. The Element is where natural aptitude meets
personal passion. To begin with, it means that you are doing something for
which you have a natural feel. It could be playing the guitar, or basketball, or
cooking, or teaching, or working with technology or with animals. People in
their Element may be teachers, designers, homemakers, entertainers, medics,
firefighters, artists, social workers, accountants, administrators, librarians,
foresters, soldiers, you name it. They can be anything at all. I was talking
recently to a woman in her early sixties who has spent her life as an accountant.
As a child at school she understood numbers right away and became fascinated
by mathematics. She just “got” it. So an essential step in finding your Element is
to understand your own aptitudes and what they really are.
But being in your Element is more than doing things you are good at. Many