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How to Find Your Element: A Two-Way Quest and Its Perils, with Sir Ken Robinson. Author of Finding Your Element
Finding your element is a two-way journey. The word I prefer is a “quest.” The difference is that if you take a regular journey, you may know exactly where you’re trying to get to, where it is, and you’ll know when you get there. You know, we’re in New York at the moment and you might set off to go to Chicago. I assume you know where it is and you’ll know when you get there. It’s not surprising when you get there.
A quest is a medieval term which is rooted in the idea that sometimes we have to take journeys of discovery and we don’t quite know what we’re looking for. We don’t quite know where to look for it either. And so there’s a great element of exploration and of risk involved about whether you will find it or not, it’s not certain that you will. But you journey, hopefully, you journey mindfully and your aim is to discover this thing. So finding your element is a bit like that. And it’s really a two-way quest.
We all live in a world, as it was once put, that exists whether or not we exist. It’s the world of the people, the world of objects, of events. It’s the world that E. M. Foster once described as the world of – you can tell when he wrote this that it was in the ’20’s, that the world of telegrams and anger. I suppose we’d now say the world of text messages and social media. But it’s this other world, the world of other people, the external world of objects and things. And that world is there whether you are here or not. It was there before you came into it, hopefully, it will be there when you leave.
But there’s another world that we all occupy which exists only because we exist. It’s the world of your private consciousness; the world that came to being when you did. The world that opened up when you became aware, when your consciousness started to grow; it’s the world that disappears from you to some degree when you fall asleep at night and comes back into focus when you wake up in the morning. It’s the world in which somebody once said, “there’s only one set of footprints.” It’s the world of your private inner life.
And we see the outer world, of course, through the inner world we experience. But to what Anais Nin the poet meant when she said that, “I don’t see the world as it is. I see it as I am” that we see the outer world through this veil of ideas and values and experiences that make up our inner world. So this quest to find your element is a two-way journey. It’s an inward journey to understand more about yourself, to learn more about what lies within you, what your aptitudes are, the things that excites your energies. And it’s an outer journey to find new opportunities in the world around you to test these things out and to create circumstances in which new aspects of yourself are revealed.
It’s perfectly possible you don’t know what your aptitudes are. Human resources are like the world’s natural resources, they are often very deep. And I remember talking with a man that I was involved with in helping to launch an academy for performing arts. He was from Western Australia. And he said that when he was growing up in Western Australia, he lived on a farm that had been operated by his family for generations. And one year, the rains failed and it had just happened one year too often, and they couldn’t make it work and so they had to abandon the farm. They left and moved to Perth. Under the rules of the provincial government, if you walk off the land, they take it over, they exonerate you from your debt, but they own the property. And they ordinarily do a geological survey, which they did.
Anyway, years later they, his father was ill and it’s coming towards the end of his life and they ask if he could go and see the old place again. So they got in the car and drove out the several hours it took to get to the old farmstead and And he said we realized after a while that the track that we were looking for was now a road, a tarmac road. And so we went down this, and in the far distance we saw the old farmhouse, but it was surrounded by large buildings and trucks and cranes and all sorts of stuff. And as they got closer to it, they saw a big sign that said, “The Western Australian Nickel Company.” And they went into the reception building and said, “What’s all this?” And they explained what had happened was, they had done the survey and they’d found a huge seam of Nickel that ran right beneath the surface of the farm. About 18 inches below the soil, the topsoil and it was worth millions of dollars.
And he looked at his father thinking he was going to have a stroke, you know, a heart attack. And he said, he just burst out laughing because he realized they had spent years, generations, picking out this thin living from this farm, and right beneath the surface there was the treasure trove that would have, you know, set them up for life if they’d had – if they had only dug down a bit. And he said, “We realized that we had been cultivating this land and our plows had been skimming the top like inches above this fantastic resource. We just didn’t know it was there. And we would have done if we’d dug a bit.
Well, you know, the analogy is pretty clear, I think, that there are all kinds of talents that people have they may never get to them. There are several reasons for this, I think. One of them is its education that we look to most obviously and systematically as a way of cultivating our aptitudes into abilities. But if they’re not focused on certain sorts of aptitude there’s every likelihood that they’ll never come to the surface. Most education systems are based on a pretty narrow view of academic ability and especially in these newly pressured times of standardized testing. The evidence everywhere is the curricula are getting narrower, they’re getting sparser, thinner, arts programs are being cut back in schools, humanities programs, all those things are tending to suffer in the interest of this very narrow focus on standardized testing. So that’s one reason.
Another is cultural. You may live in circumstances where you’re actively discouraged in doing certain things. There are, you know, plenty of examples of cultures where, women, for example, are discouraged from exploring certain aptitudes or career options. There’s often a big pressure, not just in America, but in Asia too, for people to take what is seen as safe courses to prestigious careers, like medicine or the law, irrespective of whether the individual in question has any interest in those areas at all or feels any particular compulsion for them
A third one is what we talk about in the book that not only as learning styles. It’s part of the argument that we have different aptitudes that we think differently, we learn differently. Some people are perfectly happy sitting down at a desk for hours on end doing, you know, analytical work. Other people have to get up and move around. Some people are very visual in the way they conceive ideas. I mean, my daughter’s like that. She has a very visual mind.
So often I think people find or believe they’re not good at something because of the way that they’ve encountered it. So it’s those three things. It’s the narrowest of education; it’s often limitations of cultural opportunity and our particular way of engaging with the world. For all those reasons it’s perfectly possible that people don’t know what they’re good at or have overlooked it. And so one of the recommendations in the book, and we offer some ways of attacking that is to dig a little more deeply and to try things you’ve never tried before or to revisit things that you think from your first experience you weren’t good at. And it may well be that you have a talent there that you haven’t suspected.