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.

Ken Robinson’s TED talk on creativity has been watched over a million times. His work as an advocate for education and imagination impacts the lives of thousands every day. In The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, he (along with his co-writer Lou Aronica) works to deepen and clarify the work he has done before. He explores what it means to find your “tribe”, how we tend to attribute luck to those that succeed, and just what it might mean to find your Element, that place where you find enjoyment and expertise combine, where life seems to open up to infinite possibilities.

Robinson’s work is routed in research, and he does spend some time discussing current debates on the neuroscience behind culture and the intersection of practice and talent. But he also knows the power of the anecdote, and the powerful draw a story can have on the imagination of those who hear it. He begins with one of those stories, the tale of a little girl who couldn’t sit still, couldn’t focus, couldn’t seem to fit in at school. Everyone was worried that she wouldn’t fit in; everyone was worried that she wouldn’t succeed. Everyone was worried about Gillian:

But Gillian wasn’t a problem child. She didn’t need to go away to a special school.
She just needed to be who she really was.

What she really was, and how she succeeded in finding it, begins an exploration of the importance of self-knowledge and determination that continues throughout. Stories like this one pepper the book, a real world thread that binds all of Robinson’s ideas together. From Paul McCartney, who managed to make it through years of “music class” learning only to play cards with no one the wiser and little exposure to the music that would become such an enormous part of his life, to Feynman, one of the most creative minds in history, to Arianna Huffington, who founded a new sort of news empire, the stories inspire and discuss what it means to find your Element, and the myriad of different paths people travel to get there.

Robinson and Aronica don’t focus solely on celebrity, though, and the stories they have of the everyday, of people who find their Element outside their job, or those who pave the way for others, are equally inspiring. This book is less of a guide to finding happiness than a meditation on what happiness truly is, and a gentle reminder that finding your Element is something that *you* must do, not something that can be the responsibility of others. It emphasizes the need to always look for whatever it is that sparks the mind to creativity and satisfies the craving to do something truly and completely. It is the sort of book that is read in great chunks, interspersed with pauses to write the kind of to-do lists that change lives. It is a call for all of its readers, and anyone who hears about its ideas, to find their Element and, in doing so, change the world within them and around them for the better.

Bookmark to