Until she was twelve, my daughter, Kate, thought I knew everything. This was an impression I was very keen to encourage. When she was little, she’d ask me to help if she was stuck with an English or math problem. I’d look up with a confident smile from whatever I was doing, put my arm around her, and say something like, “Well, let’s see here,” pretending to share the difficulty so she’d feel better about not getting it. Then she’d gaze at me adoringly as I swept effortlessly, like a math god, through the four‐times table and simple subtraction.
One day when she was fourteen, she came home with a page full of quadratic equations, and I felt the familiar cold sweat. At this point, I introduced learning‐by‐discovery methods. I said, “Kate, there’s no point in me telling you the answers. That’s not how we learn. You need to work this out for yourself. I’ll be outside having a gin and tonic. And by the way, even when you’ve done it, there’s no point showing me the answers. That’s what teachers are for”
The next week she brought me home a cartoon strip she’d found in a magazine. She said, “This is for you.” The strip showed a dad helping his daughter with her homework. In the first frame, he leaned over her shoulder and said, “What have you got to do?” The girl replied, “I have to find the lowest common denominator.” The father said, “Are they still looking for that? They were trying to find that when I was in school.” I know how he felt.
For some people, though, math is as beautiful and engaging as poetry and music is for others. Finding and developing our creative strengths is an essential part of becoming who we really are. We don’t know who we can be until we know what we can do.
I Love It
Being in your Element is not only a question of natural aptitude. I know many people who are naturally very good at something, but don’t feel that it’s their life’s calling. Being in your Element needs something more—passion. People who are in their Element take a deep delight and pleasure in what they do.
My brother Ian is a musician. He plays drums, piano, and bass guitar. Years ago, he was in a band in Liverpool that included an extremely talented keyboard player named Charles. After one of their gigs, I told Charles how well I thought he’d played that night. Then I said that I’d love to be able to play keyboards that well. “No, you wouldn’t,” he responded. Taken aback, I insisted that I really would. “No,” he said. “You mean you like the idea of playing keyboards. If you’d love to play them, you’d be doing it.” He said that to play as well he did, he practiced every day for three or four hours in addition to performing. He’d been doing that since he was seven.
Suddenly playing keyboards as well as Charles did didn’t seem as appealing. I asked him how he kept up that level of discipline. He said, “Because I love it.” He couldn’t imagine doing anything else.
I Want It
Attitude is our personal perspective on our selves and our circumstances—our angle on things, our disposition, and emotional point of view. Many things affect our attitudes, including our basic character, our spirit, our sense of self‐worth, the perceptions of those around us, and their expectations of us. An interesting indicator of our basic attitude is how we think of the role of luck in our lives.
People who love what they do often describe themselves as lucky. People who think they’re not successful in their lives often say they’ve been unlucky. Accidents and randomness play some part in everybody’s lives. But there’s more to luck than pure chance. High achievers often share similar attitudes, such as perseverance, self‐belief, optimism, ambition, and frustration. How we perceive our circumstances and how we create and take opportunities depends largely on what we expect of ourselves.
Where Is It?
Without the right opportunities, you may never know what your aptitudes are or how far they might take you. There aren’t many bronco riders in the Antarctic, or many pearl divers in the Sahara Desert. Aptitudes don’t necessarily become obvious unless there are opportunities to use them. The implication, of course, is that we may never discover our true Element. A lot depends on the opportunities we have, on the opportunities we create, and how and if we take them.
Being in your Element often means being connected with other people who share the same passions and have a common sense of commitment. In practice, this means actively seeking opportunities to explore your aptitude in different fields.
Often we need other people to help us recognize our real talents. Often we can help other people to discover theirs.
In this book, we will explore the primary components of the Element in detail. We will analyze the traits that people who have found the Element share, look at the circumstances and conditions that bring people closer to it, and identify the deterrents that make embracing the Element harder. We’ll meet people who have found their way, others who pave the way, organizations that lead the way, and institutions that are going the wrong way.
My goal with this book is to illuminate for you concepts that you might have sensed intuitively and to inspire you to find the Element for yourself and to help others to find it as well. What I hope you will find here is a new way of looking at your own potential and the potential of those around you.
CHAPTER TWO Think Differently
MICK FLEETWOOD is one of the most famous and accomplished rock drummers in the world. His band, Fleetwood Mac, has sold tens of millions of copies of their recordings, and rock critics consider their albums Fleetwood Mac and Rumours to be works of genius. Yet when he was in school, the numbers suggested that Mick Fleetwood lacked intelligence, at least by the definitions many of us have come to take for granted.
“I was a total void in academic work, and no one knew why,” he told me. “I had a learning disability at school and still do. I had no understanding of math at all. None. I’d be hard pushed right now to recite the alphabet backward. I’d be lucky if I got it right going forward quickly. If someone were to say, ‘What letter is before this one?’ I’d break out into a cold sweat.”
He attended a boarding school in England and found the experience deeply unsatisfying. “I had great friends, but I just wasn’t happy. I was aware of being squeezed out. I was suffering. I had no sense of what I was supposed to be because everything academic was a total failure, and I had no other reference points.”
Fortunately for Mick (and for anyone who later bought his albums or attended his concerts), he came from a home where his family saw beyond the limits of what they taught and tested in schools. His father was a fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force, but when he left the service, he followed his true passion for writing. He took his family to live on a barge on the river Thames in Kent for three years so he could follow this dream. Mick’s sister Sally went to London to become a sculptor, and his sister Susan pursued a career in the theater. In the Fleetwood household, everyone understood that brilliance came in many forms and that being poor at math, or unable to recite the alphabet backward, hardly doomed one to an inconsequential life.