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How to Find Your Element: Discover Your Talents, with Sir Ken Robinson. Author of Finding Your Element
Aptitudes
So the first condition, as I see it, for being in your element is that you’re doing something for which you have a natural aptitude. Aptitudes are what you’re born with. And I make a distinction in the book between aptitudes and abilities. You may have an aptitude for music, but it’s possible you would never discover it until you actually picked up an instrument or found a form of music that excited you. In itself it doesn’t give you all the skills and knowledge and techniques that you need to pursue music as an area that will be really fulfilling to you because doing that requires that you develop abilities.
You can think of ability as a developed aptitude, I suppose or a practiced aptitude. I mean, for example, I have an aptitude for languages, but I can’t speak Romanian. Now that’s an ability to do that. But it would build upon an aptitude I have for it. Some people have a much sharper visual sense. They have a much sharper sense of music and tone, a sharper design sense or perhaps a different gift for language, a better gift for movement than some others.
Often people don’t know what their element is because they don’t understand enough about their own aptitudes. They don’t get to discover them; they don’t get to find out about them. And there are lots of reasons for that. One of them, I think, and I’ve talked a lot about it is education, which on the whole promotes a very narrow view of aptitudes.
External Approaches
We live in a culture here in the U.S. and most western cultures which confuse intelligence, for example, with IQ. And very often I come across people who feel they’re not very smart at all when they have all kinds of extraordinary aptitudes and abilities which fall outside these dominant conceptions. Part of this process then is discovering how these things are for you.
There are lots of ways in which you can learn more about your aptitudes. I mean, there all – there are hundreds of tests out there, proprietary sort of tests that you can take. But my recommendation always is don’t take any of them too seriously. Don’t take them as definitive. They’re just evidence; they are things that you should act critically on and think hard about.
My son James and I did a whole series of tests as part of the research for the book. And there was one particular proprietary test that we took. It meant sitting down for three hours on two separate occasions doing dozens of tests. But what was interesting was when we got the results, which were being processed by a computer, you know, they were broadly right in some areas, but some were, in some ways they were so wide of the mark. I mean, for example, they suggested when they analyzed the results that I have a natural gift for color and design. And I perhaps should consider a life as an interior designer. When I told my wife this, she couldn’t stop laughing for over half an hour. You know, she was hysterical because I am famously bad at matching colors and knowing where to put the furniture in the room.
James we were told was much better than me in an ability called foresight. He had much better ability to plan ahead. Well, this is not true. We know this for a fact. In fact, he almost didn’t get the results of this test because he was 20 minutes late for the meeting. So you have to take all of them with a pinch of salt. They’re interesting. I’m not saying that they’re not interesting or useful, but you should avoid being stereotyped by them. You can take these tests on different days of the week, all of these tests and get different results.
I always feel that it’s not an exaggeration to say, you know, there’s 7 ½ billion people on the earth and that’s how many types of people there are. There are some broad patterns that we can talk about, but each life is unique. Don’t try and reduce yourself to formula. Try and find out what’s special about how your talents and passions start to mesh together.
Internal Approaches
Probably most important way to get to this is to go through a process of self-reflection. So I have a lot of practical exercises which encourage people to reflect on their own experience by doing very simple things, by the way. Like listing all the activities that would make up a typical week and then identifying the aptitudes that are involved in this sort of thing and then marking them yourself, assessing them about whether you consider yourself to be really good at this, not so good at this or kind of all right or incompetent.
So part of this is doing an inventory of all the things that you do in your life and you can go back as far as you like about the things you have done. And then give yourself some assessment of your competence in them. I mean, for example, I have a big family. You know, I have five brothers and a sister. And I talk in there about one of my brothers who, from a very young age when he was at elementary school, was very good at stripping engines down. Motor car engines, motorcycle engines. This was in Liverpool, where we live. He could easily take them to pieces, and more importantly, he could put them back together then. And they would work better than before. We used to have adults when my brother Derrick was young lining up to get him to fix their motorbike or their engine.
I have another brother who can’t even put shelves on the wall. I mean, if he does, we all back out of the room because we know they’re not going to be there for very long. So part of this process is, as I say, is to get you to reflect on the things that you do and the things that come most naturally to you. Later on in the book, we go back to that inventory to talk about the things that you like doing. But this first exercise isn’t about whether you’d like it, it’s about whether you can do it or not and also to make a list of things that you have never attempted, but might be interested to try it because until you do that you don’t know either.