Things turned out rather differently from that. Matt moved to L.A., eventually placed his comic strip Life in Hell with L.A. Weekly, and began to make a name for himself. This led to an invitation from the Fox Broadcasting Company to create short animated segments for The Tracey Ullman Show. During his pitch to Fox, he invented The Simpsons on the spot—he literally had no idea he was going to do this before he went into the meeting. The show evolved into a half‐hour program and has been running on Fox every Sunday for nineteen years as of this writing. In addition, it has generated movies, comic books, toys, and countless other merchandise. In other words, it is a pop culture empire.
Yet none of this would have happened if Matt Groening had listened to those who told him he needed to pursue a “real” career.
Not all successful people disliked school or did badly there. Paul was still a high school student, one with very good grades, when he walked into a University of Chicago lecture hall for the first time. He didn’t realize as he did so that the college was one of the leading institutions in the world for the study of economics. He only knew that it was close to his home. Minutes later, he was “born again,” as he wrote in an article. “That day’s lecture was on Malthus’s theory that human populations would reproduce like rabbits until their density per acre of land reduced their wage to a bare subsistence level where an increased death rate came to equal the birth rate. So easy was it to understand all this simple differential equation stuff that I suspected (wrongly) that I was missing out on some mysterious complexity.”
At that point, Dr. Paul Samuelson’s life as an economist began. It is a life he describes as “pure fun,” one that has seen him serve as a professor at MIT, become president of the International Economic Association, write several books (including the bestselling economics textbook of all time) and hundreds of papers, have a significant impact on public policy, and, in 1970, become the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.
“As a precocious youngster I had always been good at logical manipulations and puzzle‐solving IQ tests. So if economics was made for me, it can be said that I too was made for economics. Never underestimate the vital importance of finding early in life the work that for you is play. This turns possible underachievers into happy warriors.”
Three Stories, One Message
Gillian Lynne, Matt Groening, and Paul Samuelson are three very different people with three very different stories. What unites them is one undeniably powerful message: that each of them found high levels of achievement and personal satisfaction upon discovering the thing that they naturally do well and that also ignites their passions. I call stories like theirs “epiphany stories” because they tend to involve some level of revelation, a way of dividing the world into before and after. These epiphanies utterly changed their lives, giving them direction and purpose and sweeping them up in a way that nothing else had.
They and the other people you’ll meet in this book have identified the sweet spot for themselves. They have discovered their Element—the place where the things you love to do and the things that you are good at come together. The Element is a different way of defining our potential. It manifests itself differently in every person, but the components of the Element are universal.
Lynne, Groening, and Samuelson have accomplished a great deal in their lives. But they are not alone in being capable of that. Why they are special is that they have found what they love to do and they are actually doing it. They have found their Element. In my experience, most people have not.
Finding your Element is essential to your well‐being and ultimate success, and, by implication, to the health of our organizations and the effectiveness of our educational systems.
I believe strongly that if we can each find our Element, we all have the potential for much higher achievement and fulfillment. I don’t mean to say that there’s a dancer, a cartoonist, or a Nobel‐winning economist in each of us. I mean that we all have distinctive talents and passions that can inspire us to achieve far more than we may imagine. Understanding this changes everything. It also offers us our best and perhaps our only promise for genuine and sustainable success in a very uncertain future.
Being in our Element depends on finding our own distinctive talents and passions. Why haven’t most people found this? One of the most important reasons is that most people have a very limited conception of their own natural capacities. This is true in several ways.
The first limitation is in our understanding of the range of our capacities. We are all born with extraordinary powers of imagination, intelligence, feeling, intuition, spirituality, and of physical and sensory awareness. For the most part, we use only a fraction of these powers, and some not at all. Many people have not found their Element because they don’t understand their own powers.
The second limitation is in our understanding of how all of these capacities relate to each other holistically. For the most part, we think that our minds, our bodies, and our feelings and relationships with others operate independent of each other, like separate systems. Many people have not found their Element because they don’t understand their true organic nature.
The third limitation is in our understanding of how much potential we have for growth and change. For the most part, people seem to think that life is linear, that our capacities decline as we grow older, and that opportunities we have missed are gone forever. Many people have not found their Element because they don’t understand their constant potential for renewal.
This limited view of our own capacities can be compounded by our peer groups, by our culture, and by our own expectations of ourselves. A major factor for everyone, though, is education.
One Size Does Not Fit All
Some of the most brilliant, creative people I know did not do well at school. Many of them didn’t really discover what they could do—and who they really were—until they’d left school and recovered from their education.
I was born in Liverpool, England, and in the 1960s I went to a school there, the Liverpool Collegiate. On the other side of the city was the Liverpool Institute. One of the pupils there was Paul McCartney.
Paul spent most of his time at the Liverpool Institute fooling around. Rather than studying intently when he got home, he devoted the majority of his hours out of school to listening to rock music and learning the guitar. This turned out to be a smart choice for him, especially after he met John Lennon at a school fete in another part of the city. They impressed each other and eventually decided to form a band with George Harrison and later Ringo Starr, called the Beatles. That was a very good idea.
By the mid‐1980s, both the Liverpool Collegiate and the Liverpool Institute had closed. The buildings stood empty and derelict. Both have since been revived, in very different ways. Developers turned my old school into luxury apartments—a huge change, since the Collegiate was never about luxury when I was there. The Liverpool Institute has now become the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA), one of Europe’s leading centers for professional training in the arts. The lead patron is Sir Paul McCartney. The old, dusty classrooms where he spent his teenage years daydreaming now contain students from all over the world doing the very thing he dreamed about—making music—as well as those learning to take the stage in a wide variety of ways.