The Element. How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything (Sir Ken Robinson, 2009) (En) PDF [PDF]

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The Element HOW

FINDI NG CHAN G ES

YO UR

PASSI O N

EVERYTHI NG

Ken Robinson,Ph.D. with Lou Aronica

P EN GU IN B OOKS

PENGUlN

BOOKS

Publishedby thc Pcnguin Grcup PenguinBooksLtd,8o Strand,London wczr onr, England Penguin clroup (USA), lnc., 17i Hrrdson Street, New York, New \brk Ioor4, USA Pcngub (iroup (Oanda), 9o Eglinton AvenucEut, Suift 7oo, Toronto, Ontrio, (arada v4r z v; (a division of I'carson Penguin Calada Inc.) l)cnguinlreland,:1 St Srcphen\Creen,Dublin z, Ireland(a divisionoiPcnguin BooksLtd) fcnguin Croup (AnstLalia),rio Cambcrwcll Road, Camberwell, Victoria 1ru,1,Australia (a division of I'eanon Austalia Group Pty Lrd) PcnguinBookslndir Pvr l-rd, rt Comrnunity Centre.PrnchsheelI'rrk, New Dcthi Iro oI7, India Pcnguin(imup (N/-), 6; Alolio I)r;vc, Roscchlc,Nonh Shoreo61r, Nerv7-cahnd (r division ofPearson Ncrv Zcal:nd Ltd) I'cnguin Books (Sorrh Afiica) (l'ty) l.td, z4 Sturdcc Avenuc, Rosebank,Jolunncsl'urg rr9('. South A{rica I'enguin llooks Lttl, I{cgistcrecl()f6ces:8o Strand, l,ordon wc2R otr-. Englarrd unrLpenguil.corr Fir* publishedin the United SraresofAmerica by Viking Pcngurn, a mcmbtr ofPenguin Group (USA) Inc. zoog liirst publishedin (ircar Ilritain by Allcn Lrne uoog l']ublished in l'engrrinBookszoro

3 Copyright O Ken Robinson and l-ou Aronica, zoog The morel riehr.rf drc authrrs hrs bccn assencd IISA/ Arrwork or page 6;: NASA, tSA, and rhc Hubblc l-leriragelbam (STScI/AUM) Hubble (iollaboLrrion. Acknowlcdgernent: D. Couliermis (Max Planck lnstjtutc for Astrononrl Hcidclbcrg) A1l othcr a*work: NASA{PI--{iairech All righm reserved Vithout limiting the rights under copyrighr reservedabove,no pf,rt ofthis publication may be reproduced,stored in or introduccd inro a retrievsl sysrenr, or transmirted, in any forrn or by anv Ineans(elecrronic,mechanical, photocopying, recording or othcr*ise), withour rhe prior written pcrmission ofboth rhe copyright orvner and the abovepublisher ofrhis book Printed in Crear Britain by (llays Ltd, St Ives plc A CIP crtalogue record for dris book is availablcfrom Lhe Brirish Library

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].H E EL E M EN T

'The Element is another reminder of why Sir Kcn Robinson is one of America's finest imports. With a crackling wit and a deep humanirl', he urges us to ignore the naysayers, bypass the crowd, and lind the place wlere our talents and desiresintersect . . . A truly inspiring book Daniel H. Pink. author of A \Yhole New Mind "I'here is a powerful driving force inside every human being that, once unleaslred,can make any vision, any dream, a reality. The Element captures that force with passion and insight'Tony Robbins, author of Atuahen the Giant Within: How to Take Immediata Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial De*in/ A great and inspiring book . . . After tl're first page, you have to abandon your ego and look lor your orvn gifts and graces'\Tarren Bennis, airtl-ror of OzzBecoming a Leader: The Leadersltip Ckssir 'Whilc the world is changing faster than cver, our organiz-ations,or-u' schools, and too often our minds are locked in the habits ofthe past. 'flre result is a massivc waste of human talent. T'heElementis a passionateand pcrsuasivcappeal to think diflbrendy about ourselvesand a guicle to facing the future'Alvin Tofller, aurhor oF F-uturc Shocb and The Third Waut 'ln a time whcn acccpted scientific principles and facts thcmselvcs are L-eingtossedinto the firc ofcontroversy by sonre, it is timc again, now more than ever, to educate our educators. In Sir Ken Ilobinson's rich, dceply entertaining and inspiring new book, he shows us in thc most intriguing way and with humour and humility how we can look again at how wc lcarn and how rve teach' Brian Ray, musician 'The Element provides a real platlorm lor our futures; it is essential reading lor anyone with children, unfulfilled dreams or a life still to live' Richard Cerver, educational consultant

'The Element gives you the feeling that all is possible if we dig deeply within ourselves,using our imaginations and curiosiry'V.idal Sassoon 'W'ritten with passion, humour and eloquence, The Elerrtent shows that everyone has the ability to achieve their ambitions and demonstrates the enabling mechanisms to overcome the obstaclesthat stife imagination' 'Va ter ston ei B ooks Qaarte rly 'Robinson emphasizesthe importance of mentors and reforming and transforming education, making a convincing argument bolstered by solid strategiesfor honing creativiry. Motivating and persuasive,this entertaining and inspiring book will appeal to a wide audience' Publishers IVeehlT 'Ken Robinson is a remarkable man, one of the few who really look at and into you, so he makes you leel at easeand happy. I'm proud to be in his book as one of the people he feels has attained the Element. Reading his book helps you pinpoint the searchwe must all make to achieve the best in us' Gillian Lynne, choreographer for Cats and Phantom ofthe Opera

ABOUT ' T HE AUT HORS Ken Robinson is an internationally acclaimed leader in creativity, innovation and human capacity. He has worked throughout the world with governments, Fortune 500 companies, education systems, non-profit groups, cultural organizations and thought leaders.He was knighted in2003 for his contribution to education and the arts, and in 2008 received the Benjamin Franklin i\4edal for the Royal Society of Arts, awarded to a global 'big thinker' who has energized public discourse about human progress. His'IED

lecture on creativity and education has been downloaded over 3 million

times in 200 different countries (seewwwted.com). Lou Aronica is the author ofrwo novelsand co-author ofseveral works ofnon-fiction, including the American bestseller The Cuhure Crtde (with Clotaire Rapaille).

To

sisterand brothers,Ethel Lena, Keith, Derek, Ian, -y and Neii; to our extraordinaryMum and Dad, Ethel John, and Jim; to my son, James,and my daughter,Kate, and to my soul mate, Terry. This book is for you. For all your many talentsand for the endlesslove and laughterwe put into eachother'slives.It's when I'm with you and the ones you love that i really am in my Element.

Acknowledgments

They sayit takesa village to raisea baby.Rearinga book like this takesa small metropolis.I know I haveto sayI can't thank everyone,and I reallycan't.I do haveto singleout a few people,though, for specialserviceawards. First and foremost, my wife and partner, Terry. This book simply wouldn't be in your hands but for her. Its origins were in an off-the-cuff remark I made at a conferencea few yearsago. I had just told the Gillian Lynne story,which now openschapter 1 of the book. In passing,I saidthat one of thesedaysI wasgoing to write a book about storieslike that. IVe sincelearnednot to say thesethings out loud in front of Terry. Sheaskedrne when did I havein mind. "S{)on,"I said,"definitelysoon."After a few months had passed,she started it herself,wrote the proposal,r.vorkedon the ideas,did someof the initial interviews,and then found the agent, PeterMiller, who was to help make it happen.\7ith the foundationslaid so solidly,and the escaperoutesclosedso firmly, I finally kept rny word and got on with the book. I want to thank PeterMiller, our literary agent,for all his great work, not leastin bringing Lou Aronica and me together.I travel 2 lsl-1se much, really-and producing a book like this needs time, energy,and collaboration.Lou was the ideal partner. He is seriouslyprofbssional:sage,judicious, creative,and patient. He was the calrn centerof the project as I orbited the earth, sending notes,drafts,and secondthoughtsfrom airportsand hotel rooms.

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Acknowledgments

Betweenus, we alsomanagedto steera successfulcoursebetween the often comic conflictsof British and American English.Thank you, Lou. My son,James,gaveup his precious,final studentsummer to pore over archives,journals, and Internet sites,checking facts, dates,and ideas.Then he debatedvirtually everyideain the book with me until I was worn out. Nancy Allen worked for several months on researchissuesunder increasinglytight deadlines.My daughter,Kate,had a wonderfullycreativecollaborationwith Nick Egan to producea unique \Website that showsall the other work we'renow doing. Our assistant,Andrea Hanna, worked tirelessly 'We to orchestratethe myriad rnoving parts in a project like this. wouldn't still be standing up without her. As the book was taking shape,we wereextremelyfortunate to have the wise and creativecounsel of our publisher, Kathryn Court, at Viking Penguin.Her benign form of intimidation also ensuredthat we got the book finished in decenttime. Finally, I have to thank all of thosewhose storiesilluminate this book. Many of them spent precioushours, amid very busy lives, to talk freely and passionatelyabout the experiencesand ideasthat lie at the heart of The Element Many others sent me moving lettersand e-mails.Their storiesshow that the issuesin this book reachinto the core of our lives.I thank all of them. It's usual to say,of course,that whatevergood things other people have contributed, any faults that remain in the book are my responsibilityalone.That seemsa bit harsh to me, but I supposeit's true.

Contents

Achnowledgments

uii

Introduction

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CHAPTER

ONE:

The Element

C H AP T E R

T 'WO:

Think Differently

27

Beyond Imagining

led them to considlost cells eventually case, even brain Coelho's erable levelsof fulfillment and accomplishment.\What each of them managed to do was weigh the cost of disregardingtheir loved onesagainstthe cost of relinquishingtheir dreams. W'henArianna Stasinopouloswas a teenagerin Greecein the 1960s,shehad a suddenand passionatedream. Leafing through a magazine,she saw a picture of Cambridge University in England. She was only thirteen years old, but she decided on the spot that shehad to be a student there.Everybodyshetold about this, including her friends and her father,said it was a ridiculous

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idea. Shewas a girl, it was too expensive,shehad no connections there, and this was one of the most prestigiousuniversitiesin the world. No one took her seriously.No one exceptArianna herself, that is. And one other person. Her mother decided that they had to find out if Arianna's dream was even remotelypossible.Shemade someinquiries and learnedthatArianna could applyfor a scholarship.Sheevenfound somecheapair tickets "so we could go to England and seeCambridge in person.It was a perfect exampleof what we now call visualization."It was a long flight to London, and it rained the entire time they were in Cambridge. Arianna and her mother didn't meetanyonefrom the university;they simplywalkedaround and imagined what it would be like to be there.\fith her dream reinforced,Arianna appliedas soon asshewas eligible. To her delight and everyone'sastonishment(excepther mother's),Cambridge acceptedArianna-and shewon a scholarship. At the ageof sixteen,shemovedto Englandand went on to graduate from Cambridge University with an M.A. in economics.At twenty-one,she becamethe first woman presidentof the famed debatingsociety,the CambridgeUnion. Now basedin the United States,Arianna Huffington is the author of elevenbooks on cultural history and politics, a nationally syndicatedcolumnist, and cohost of Left, Right dr Center, National Public Radio'spopular political roundtableprogram. In May 2005, shelaunchedtheHffington Post,a newsand blog site that hasbecome"one of the most widely readand frequentlycited media brandson the Internet." In 2006, Time magazineput her on their list of the world's hundred most influential people. For all her success,Huffington knows that the biggestobstaclesto achievementcan be self-doubtand the disapprovalof other people.Shesaysthis is especiallytrue for women. "I am struck by how often, when I askedwomen to blog for the Hffington Post,

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they had a hard time trusting that what they had to say was worthwhile, even establishedwriters. . . . So often, I think, we as women stop ourselvesfrom trying becausewe don't want to risk failing. \Weput such a premium on being approvedof,,we become reluctantto take risks. "\fomen still havean uneasyrelationshipwith power and the traits necessaryto be a leader.There is this internalizedfear that ifwe arereally powerful, we aregoing to be consideredruthlessor pushyor strident-all thoseepithetsthat strike right at our femininity. \7e are still working at trying to overcomethe fear that power and womanlinessare mutually exclusive." Huffington saysthere were two key factors in pursuing her early dream. The first was that shedidn't really understandwhat shewas getting herselfinto. "My first tasteof leadershipcame in a situation in which I was a blissfully ignorant outsider.It was in college,when I becamepresidentof the CambridgeUnion debating society.Since I had grown up in Greece,I had never heard of the Cambridge Union or the Oxford Union and didn't know about their place in English culture, so I wasn't weighed down with the kinds of overwhelming notions that may have stoppedBritish girls from even thinking about trying for such a position. . . . In this way, it was a blessingthat I startedmy career outsidemy home environment.It had its own problemsin that I was ridiculed for my accentand was demeanedas someonewho spoke in a funny way. But it also taught me that it is easierto overcomepeople'sjudgmentsthan to overcomeour own self-judgment, the fearwe internalize." The secondfactorwas the unwaveringsupport of her mother. "I don't think that anything I've done in my life would havebeen possiblewithout my mother. My mother gaveme that safeplace, that sensethat she would be there no matter what happened, whether I succeededor failed. Shegaveme what I am hoping to

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be ableto give my daughters,which is a sensethat I could aim for the starscombinedwith the knowledgethat if I didn't reachthem, she wouldn't love me any less.She helped me understandthat failure was part of any life."

Groupthinh Positivelyor negatively,our parentsand families are powerful influenceson us. But even stronger,especiallywhen we're young, are our friends. \Wedon't chooseour families, but we do choose our friends,and we often choosethem as a way of expandingour senseof identity beyond the family. As a result, the pressureto conform to the standardsand expectationsof friends and other socialgroupscan be intense. Judith Rich Harris is a developmentalpsychologistwho has looked at the influenceson young peopleoftheir friendsand peer groups.Shearguesthat three main forcesshapeour development: personaltemperament, our parents,and our peers.The influence of peers,sheargues,is much strongerthan that of parents."The world that children share with their peers,"she says,"is what shapestheir behaviorand modifies the characteristicsthey were born with, and hencedeterminesthe sort of people they will be when they grow up." Children get their ideasof how to behaveby identifying with the group and taking on its attitudes,behaviors,speech,and styles of dressand adornment."Most of them do this automaticallyand willingly. They want to be like their peers,but just in casethey haveany funny ideas,their peersare quick to remind them of the penaltiesof being different. . . . The nail that sticks up getshammereddown." Sincebreaking the rules is a sureway to find ourselvesout of the group, we may deny our deepestpassionsto stay connected

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with our peers.At school,we disguisean interestin physicsbecauseour circle finds it uncool. \7e spendafternoonsplaying basketball when what we really want to do is masterthe five mother \7e never mention our fascinationwith hip-hop because .sauces. the peoplewe travelwith considersomethingso "street"to be beneath them. Being in your Element may dependon steppingout of the circle. Shawn Carter was born in the housing projectsin Brooklyn, New York. Now known asJay-2,he is one of the most successful of his generation,and an icon to musiciansand businesspeople millions of people around the world. To becomeall of that, he first had to confront the disapprovaland the skepticismof the friendsand peershe grew up with on the Brooklyn streets."\X/hen I left the block, everyonewas saying I was crazy," he has said of his early success."I was doing well for myself on the streets' and cats around me were like, 'These rappersare hos. They just record, tour, and get separatedfrom their fomilies, while some white person takes all their money.' I was determined to do it differently." His role model was the music entrepreneurRussellSimmons, and like him, Jay-Z now headsa diversebusinessempire that's asa musicianbut goesbeyondit to include a rooted in his success clothing line and a record label.All of this has generateda huge personalfortune for Jay-Zand the renewedrespectof many of the friends in Brooklyn he had to move asideto make his way. In extreme cases,peer groups can become trapped in what psychologistIrving Janis has called "groupthink," a mode of thinking "that peopleengagein when they are deeplyinvolvedin a cohesivein-group, when the members'strivingsfor unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative coursesof action." The prevailing belief here is that the group knows best,that a decisionor a direction that seemsto represent

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the majority of the group standsbeyond careful sxxrnln2ll6nevenwhen your instincts suggestotherwise. There are severalfamous-and sometimeinfamous-studies of the effectsof groupthink, including the SolomonAsch conformity experiments.In 1951,psychologistAsch brought together collegestudentsin groupsof eight to ten, telling them he wasstudying visual perception.All but one of the studentswere "plants." They knew the natureof the experiment,and Asch had instructed them to give incorrect answersthe majority of the time. The real subject-the only one who Asch had not preparedaheadof 6lms-xn5wered each question only after hearing most of the other answersin the group. Asch showedthe studentsa card with a line on it. He then held up another card with three lines of different lengths and askedthem to saywhich one was the samelength as the line on the other card. One was an obvious match but the planted studentshad beeninstructed by Asch to saythat the match was one of the other lines.\Zhen it was time for the subjectto answer,the effectsof groupthink kicked in. In a majority of cases,the subject answeredwith the group, and againstclearvisual evidence,at leastonceduringthe session. 'W'hen interviewedlater, most of the subjectssaid they knew they weregiving the wrong answersbut did so becausethey didn't want to be singledout. "The tendencyto conformity in our society is so strong," Asch wrote, "that reasonablyintelligent and well-meaningyoung peoplearewilling to call white black.This is a matter of concern.It raisesquestionsabout our ways of education and about the valuesthat guide our conduct." Managementwriter Jerry B. Harvey givesanother famousexample, known as the Abilene Paradox:On a hot afternoon in Coleman, Texas,the story goes,a family is comfortably playing dominoeson a porch, until the father-inJawsuggeststhey take a

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trip to Abilene, fifty-three miles north, for dinner. As Harvey describesit, "The wife says,'sounds like a greatidea.'The husband, despite having reservationsbecausethe drive is long and hot, must be out of stepwith the group and thinks that his preferences says,'sounds good to me. I just hope your mother wants to go.' The mother-inlaw then says,'Of courseI want to go. I haven't beento Abilene in a long time.' The drive zi hot, dusty,and long. \Vhen they arrive at the cafeteria,the food is as bad. They arrive back home four hours later, exhausted.One of them dishonestly says,'It was a greattrip, wasn'tit.' "The mother-in-lawsaysthat, actually,shewould rather have stayedhome, but went along sincethe other three were so enthusiastic.The husbandsays,'I didn't want to go. I only went to satisfy the rest of you.' The wife says,'I just went along to keepyou h"ppy. I would haveto be crazyto want to go out in the heat like that.' The father-inlaw saysthat he only suggestedit becausehe thought the othersmight be bored. "The group sits back, perplexedthat they togetherdecidedto take a trip which none of them wanted. They each would have preferredto sit comfortably,but did not admit to it when they still had time to enjoy the afternoon." This is a benign but dramatic illustration of the consequences of groupthink. Every member of the group agreedto do something they didn't want to do becausethey thought the otherswere committed to doing it. The result was that no one came away h"ppy. Allowing groupthink to inform our decisionsaboutour futures can leadto equallyunpleasant-and much more consequentialresults.Accepting the group opinion that physics is not cool, playing basketballis better than learning to be a chef, and hiphop is beneathyou is counterproductivenot only to the individual but to the group. Perhaps,like those in the Abilene Paradox,

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others in the circle secretlydisagreetoo but are afraid to stand aloneagainstthe group. Groupthink can diminish the group asa whole. The major obstaclesto finding the Element often emergein school.This is partly becauseof the hierarchyof subjects,which meansthat many studentsneverdiscovertheir true interestsand talents.But within the generalculture of education,different social groups form distinctive subcultures.For some groups the code is that it's just not cool to study. If you're doing science, you'rea geek;if you'redoing art or dance,you'reeffete.For other groups,doing thesethings is absolutelyessential. The power of groups is that they validate the common interestsof their members.The danger of groupthink is that it dulls their individual judgment.The group thinks in unison and behavesen masse.In this respect,schoolsof peopleare like schools of fish.

A Single Ant Can't Ruin a Picnic Youve probably seenimagesof huge schoolsof fish swirnming in tight formation that instantly move in a new direction like a single organism.Perhapsyou've seenswarms of insectscrossing the sky that spontaneouslyswoop and swirl like an orchestrated cloud. It's an impressivedisplaythat seemslike controlled and intelligent behavior.But the individual herrings or mosquitoesare not acting on free will, as we think of it in humans. \7e don't know what may be on their minds as they go along with the crowd, but we do know that when they do it, they act almost asa single creature.Researchers are now understandingmore about how this happens. The probability is that fish make thosedramatic tight shifts in direction by following the movementsof the fish that lie directly

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in their field of perception.\7hat appearsto be a masterworkof choreographyis probably little more than an especiallyelegant versionof follow-the-leader.To illustratethe point, thereare now computer programs that simulate the effects of swarms and schoolswith remarkableaccuracy. A similar principle seemsto drive the operationsof one of the oldest and most successfulcreatureson earth, the ant. If you've seen an ant wandering aimlessly acrossyour kitchen floor in searchof a morsel to eat, you don't get a senseof a highly developed intelligenceat work. Yet the work of ant coloniesis a miracle Ants dependon what'sknown asswarm of efficiencyand success. nature of which is currently the subjectof intense the intelligence, \While they haveyet to understandfully how ants havedestudy. do know that velopedsuch sophisticatedteamwork, researchers specificroles their own very by fulfilling their goals ants achieve with military precision. For instance,when looking for food, one ant startson a path, leavinga trail of pheromones.The next ant follows this trail, leaving a trail of its own. In this way, a large collection finds its way to the food sourceand carriesit back as a team to the colony. Each ant works toward a global goal, while no one ant takesthe lead.In fact, thereseemsto be no hierarchyat all within ant colonies.Eventhe queen'sone function seemsto be to lay eggs.These patternsof coordinatedgroup behaviorin fish, ants, mosquitoes, and most other creaturesareprincipally to do with protectionand security,with mating and survival,and with getting food and not becomingfood themselves. 'W'e aggregateasgroups It's much the samewith human beings. for the sameessentialand primal purposes.The upsidefor us is that groups can be tremendouslysupportive.The downside is that they encourageuniformity of thought and behavior.The Element is about discoveringyourselCand you can't do this if you're

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trapped in a compulsion to conform. You can't be yourself in a swarm.

Culture:Rightand Thong Beyond the specificsocial constraintswe may feel from families and friends, there are othersthat are implicit in the generalculture. I define culture as the values and forms of behavior that characterizedifferent socialgroups.Culture is a systemof permissions. It's about the attitudes and behaviorsthat are acceptable and unacceptablein different communities, rhose that are approvedof and thosethat are not. If you don't understandthe cultural codes,you can look just awful. I'll alwaysremembera man I sawwho got it miserablywrong on a beachin Malibu in California.He struttedslowlyinro our midst, a vision of the unexpectedthat causeda beach full of strangersto form a deep bond of helplesscamaraderie.He was about forty. My guesswas that he was somesort of executive,and I could imagine that in certain setringshe cut a distinguishedfigure. But here,he did not. In a land of physicalculture and treadmills, he waspale,hairy, and inhabiteda saggingbody that clearly spentits daysat a deskand its nights on a barstool.One can forgive a man for all of thesethings. But not for wearing a nylon, leopard-printthong. The thong clung to his groin like an oxygen mask. A stretch of elasticheld it in place,skirting his waist and threading tightly betweenhis bare buttocks. He paradeddown the length of the beach,apparentlydelighted that every eye was turning to him in a slow Mexican wave of amazement.He gave the impression of a self-appointedrole model of physical attraction and sexual magnetism bathing in the bright sunlight of popular acclaim.

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This wasn't the majority opinion, however.'At least he might havewaxed,"said the man next to me. W'hy was this so hypnotically amusingfor us all? It wasn'tjust that he had such an outrageouslyhigh opinion of his attractiveness.It was also that he was so far out of context.The outfit and attitude might haveworked in the south of France,but in Malibu, for various reasons,it was all wrong. There'san unspokencode for men on California beaches.Itt a curious mixture of peacock displayand public modesty.Oiled torsosand rippling musclesare fine, but naked buttocks are not. All overAmerica, there'sthis intricatemixture of prurienceand prudishness. Shortly afterward, my wife, Terry, and I were in Barcelona. There arebeachestherethat line the harbor in the city center,and everylunchtime during the summer the local officesspill out and young men and women head to the city beachesand sunbathe topless,in thongsat the very most.In Spain,that'scompletelyaccepted.lt would be odd there to seesomeonein a pair of kneelengthshortsand a T-shirt.The culturesimplyacceptsthat people can wanderaroundvirtually nakedon the beach. All socialculturespromotewhat I'd describeas "contagious is language,and moreparticubehavior."One of the bestexamples larly accentsand dialects.Thesearewonderful illustrationsof the impulseto copyand conform.It would be odd for someoneborn and raisedin the Highlandsof Scotlandor the Badlandsof Montana not to speakthe local dialect of English with the local acifa child born therespontaneously cent.rVe'd b eamazed,ofcourse, started speakingFrench or Hebrew. But we'd be just as taken abackif the child spokethe local languagein an entirely different dialect or accentfrom everyoneelse.The natural instinct of children is to copy and imitate, and asthey grow they absorbnot only the sounds they hear but the sensibilitiesthey expressand the

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culture they convey.Languagesare the bearersof the cultural genes.As we learn a language,accents,and waysof speaking,we also learn waysof thinking, feeling,and relating. The culturesin which we are raiseddo not only affectour values and outlook. They also shapeour bodies and may even restructure our brains. Language,again, is a prime example.As we learn to speak,our mouths and vocal organsadapt to make the soundsour languagesuse. Ifyou grow up speakingonly one or two languages,it can be physicallydifficult to createthe sounds that other languagesrequire and that other cultures take for granted-those guttural French sounds, or the lispy sounds of Spanish,or the tonal soundsof someAsian languages.To speaka new language,we may have to retrain our bodies to make and understand the new sounds.But the effects of culture may go deeperstill-into the actual structlrresof the brain. In the last few yearstherehasbeena seriesoffascinatingstudies into differencesin visual perceptionbetweenpeoplefrom the 'W'est and from EastAsia. Thesestudiessuggestthat the cultures we grow up in affectthe basicprocesses by which we seethe world around us. In one such study,'Westerners and Asianswere asked to look at a seriesof photographsand to describewhat they saw. A number of marked differencesemerged.In essence, \Testerners tend to focusmore on the foregroundof the picturesand on what they considerthe subject.Asiansfocus more on the whole image, including the relationshipsbetween the different elements.For example,onephotographshoweda jungle scenewith a tiger.Typically, the \Testernobservers,when askedwhat they saw,said, 'A tiger." To \Testernreadersof this book, that may seemreasonable enough. However,Asian observerstypically said, "It's a jungle with a tiger in it," or "It's a tiger in a jungle." The differenceis significant, and it relatesto largercultural differencesin the \Testern and Asian worldviews.

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In Asian art there is often much lessemphasison portraiture and the individual subjectof the sort that is common in \Testern art. In Asian cultures,thereis lessemphasison the individual and more on the collective. \Testern philosophy since the ancient Greekshasemphasizedthe importanceof critical reasoning,logical analysis,and the separationof ideasand things into categories. Chinese philosophy is not based as much on logic and deductivereasoningand tendsto emphasizerelationshipsand holism. These differencesin perceptionmay lead to differencesin memory and judgment. At leastone study suggeststhat overtime they may also lead to structural differencesin the brain. in Illinois and Singaporemonitored brain activity Researchers in young and elderly volunteersas they looked at a seriesof imageswith different subjectsand backgrounds.Using functional magneticresonanceimaging (FI\4RI),they focusedon the part of the brain known as the lateraloccipital complex,which processes visual informationabout objects.AII the youngerparticipanrs showedsimilar brain activity, but there were marked differences in neural responses betweenthe older \festern and Asian observers. In the'Westerners,the lateraloccipital complexremainedactive, while in the Asian participantsit respondedonly minimally. Dr. Michael Chee is a professorwith the Cognitive NeuroscienceLaboratoryin Singaporeand coauthorof the study.He concluded,"The partsof the brain involvedin processingbackground and objectsare engageddifferently acrossthe two setsof elderly peoplecoming from different geographicaland-by inferencecultural backgrounds."Dr. DenisePark is professorof psychology on the project. at the Universityof Illinois and a seniorresearcher Asian culmay East be because In her view, thesedifferent results tures "are more interdependentand individuals spendmore time focus on inmonitoring the environmentand others.'Westerners dividuals and central oblects becausethese cultures tend to be

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independentand focusedmore on the self than others."Shesays that thesestudiesshow that culture can sculpt the brain. \Whetherand to what extent this happensis now attracting a wider field of researchers. \(hat is alreadyclear is that what we actually see of the world is affected by culture, not only what we think of what we see.Culture conditionsall of us in waysthat are imperceptible.

Suimming Against the Tide All cultureshave an unwritten "survival manual" for success,to quote cultural anthropologistClotaire Rapaille.The rules and guidelinesare transparentto most of us (if not to the thong man), and thosewho movefrom one culture to anothercan gain insight into the different rules and guidelinesrelativelyeasily.This survival manual comesfrom generationsof adaptationto the particular climatein which the culture resides.But in addition to helping thosewithin the culture thrive, it also setsout a seriesof constraints. Such constraintscan inhibit us from reachingour Element becauseour passionsseeminconsistentwith the culture. The greatsocialmovementsarethosethat arestimulatedwhen the boundariesarebroken.Rock music,punk, hip-hop, and other great shifts in the socialculture usually derive their energyfrom young peoplelooking for somealternativeway of being.Youthful rebellionoften expresses itself through distinctive stylesof speech and dresscodes,which usually turn out to be just as conformist and orthodox within their subcultureasthey are at odds with the dominant culture they'retrying to escape.It's very hard to passas a hippie if you'rewearing an Armani suit. All cultures-and subcultures-also embody systemsof constraintsthat can inhibit individuals from reachingtheir Element if their passionsare in conflict with their context. Some people

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born in one culture end up adopting anotherbecausethey prefer a French its sensibilitiesand waysof life, like cultural cross-dressers; person may become an Anglophile, or an American a Francophile. Like peoplewho changereligions,they can becomemore zealousabout their adopted culture than those who were born into it. The urban culture may not be best for someonewho wants to run a small shop wherehe knows everyone'sname.Partsof heartland American culture are not prime territory for thosewho want careersas scathingpolitical comics.This is why Bob Dylan had ro get out of Hibbing, and why Arianna Stasinopouloswanted to leaveGreece.Finding your Elementsometimesrequiresbreaking awayfrom your native culture in order to achieveyour goals. ZahaHadid, the first woman everto win the Pritzker Prize for Architecture,grew up in Baghdadin the 1950s.Iraq was a different place then, much more secularand more open to \Testern thought. During this time, thereweremany women in lraq developing ambitious careers.But Hadid wanted to be an architect, and shefound no femalerole modelsof this sort in her homeland. Driven by her passions,Hadid movedfirst to London and then to America, where she studied with the greatestarchitectsof her time, honed a revolutionarystyle, and, afier a rocky start-her work requiresconsiderablerisky conceptualleaps,which many clients were loath to make at first-built some of the most distinctive structuresin the world. Her work includes the RosenthalCenter for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, Ohio, which the New York Timescalled "the most important new building in America since the Cold \War." Moving out oiher culture and into a milieu that celebratedinvention gaveHadid the opportunity to soar.If she'd stayedin lraq, she might havehad a good career,at leastuntil political circumstanceschangedfor women. But shewould not have found her

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Element in architecture,becauseher native culture simply didn't afford women that option. The contagiousbehaviorof schoolsof fish, insectswarms,and crowds of people is generatedby close physical proximity. For most of human history, cultural identitieshavealsobeen formed through direct contactwith the peoplewho arephysicallynearest to us: small villages,the local community. Large movementsof people once were limited to invasions,military conquests,and trade, and thesewere the main waysin which cultural ideaswere disseminatedand different languagesand waysof life imposedon other communities. All of this has changed irreversiblyin the last two hundred yearsor so with the growth of global communications.\7e now havepatternsof contagiousbehaviorbeing generatedon a massive scalethrough the Web. SecondLife hasmillions of peopleonline from different parts of the world potentially affecting how they eachthink and taking on new virtual identitiesand roles. Many of us now live like Russiandolls nestledin multiple layersof cultural identity. I wasamusedto readrecently,for example, that nowadaysbeing British "meansdriving home in a German car, stoppingoff to pick up someBelgian beer and a Turkish kebab or an Indian takeaway,to spendthe eveningon Swedishfurniture, watchingAmerican programson a Japanese TV." And the most British thing of all? "Suspicionof anything foreign." The complexitiesand fluidity of contemporary cultures can make it easierto changecontext and break away from the pressuresof groupthink and feelingstereotyped.They can also make for a profound senseof confusion and insecurity. The message here isn't as simplistic as "Don't let anything get in your way." Our families, friends, culture, and place in the human community are all important to our senseof fulfillment, and we have certain responsibilitiesto all of them. The real messagehere is

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that, in seekingyour Element,you'relikely to faceone or more of the three levelsof constraint-personal, social,and cultural. Sometimes,as Chuck Closefound, reachingyour Elementrequires devising creative solutions to strong limitations. Sometimes, aswe learnedfrom Paulo Coelho, it meansmaintaining a vision in the face of vicious resistance.And sometimes,as Zaha Hadid showed us, it meanswalking away from the life you've known to find an environmentmore suited to your growth. Ultimately, the questionis alwaysgoing to be, "\7hat price are you willing to pay?"The rewardsof the Elementare considerable, br-rtreapingtheserewardsmay mean pushing back againstsome stiff opposition.

CHAPT ER

SEVEN

Do You FeelLucky?

v J

cooD AT soMETHrNc and havinga passionfor it put*c l-) areessentialto finding the Element.But they arenot enough. Getting there dependsfundamentally on our view of ourselves and of the eventsin our lives. The Element is also a matter of attitude. \Whentwelve-year-old \Wilsonwalked into his chemistry John classat ScarboroughHigh Schoolfor Boys on a rainy day in late October 1931,he had no way of knowing that his life was about to changecompletely.The classexperimentthat day was to show how heatinga containerof waterwould bring oxygenbubbling to the surface,something studentsat this school and at schoolsall arourrdthe world had been doing for a very long time. The container the teachergaveJohn to heat, however,was not like the containersstudents everywherehad used. Somehow,this container mistakenly held something more volatile than water. It turned out that the container had the wrong solution becausea laboratoryassistanthad been distractedand put the wrong label on the bottle. And when John heatedit with a Bunsenburner,the container exploded,shattering glassbottles in the vicinity, destroying a portion of the classroom,and pelting the studentswith razor-edgedshards.Severalstudentscame away from this acci dent bleeding. John \flilson cameawayfrom it blinded in both eyes. '$Tilsonspentthe next two months in the hospital. 'When he

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returned home, his parentsattemptedto find a way to deal with the catastrophethat had befallentheir lives.But \Wilson did not regard the accident as catastrophic."It did not strike me even then as a tragedy,"he said oncein an interview with the Timesof London. He knew he had the restof his life to live, and he did not intend to live it in an understatedway. He learnedbraille quickly and continued his education at the esteemed'WorcesterCollege for the Blind. There, he not only excelledas a student but also becamean accomplishedrower, swimmer, actor, musician, and orator. From \(/orcester,\Wilson studied law at Oxford. Away from the protected environs of a school set up for blind students,he neededto contendwith a busy camprusand the very activestreets in the vicinity. Rather than relying on a walking stick, though, he reliedon an acutesenseof hearingand what he calledhis "obstacle sense"to keep him out of harm'sway.At Oxford, he received his law degreeand set out to work for the National Institute for the Blind. His real calling, however,was still waiting for him. In 1946,\Wilsonwent on a fact-finding tour of British territories in Africa and the Middle East. \7hat he found there was rampant blindness.And unlike the accident that cost him his eyesight,the diseasesthat affectedso many of thesepeoplewere preventablewith the proper medical attention. For \7ilson, it was one thing to accepthis own fate and quite anotherto allow something to continue when it could be fixed so easily.This moved him to action. The report \Wilsondeliveredupon his return led to the formation of the British Empire Societyfor the Blind, now called Sight SaversInternational.\Tilson himself servedas the director of the organization for more than thirty years and accomplishedremarkablethings during his tenure. His work often led him to travel more than fiftv thousand

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miles a year, but he consideredthis an essentialpart of the job, believingthat he neededto be presentin the placeswherehis organization'swork was being done. In 1950,he and his wife lived in a mud hut in a part of Ghana known as "the country of the blind" becausea diseasethat came from insect biteshad blinded 10 percentof the population.He sethis team to work on developing a preventativetreatmentfor the disease,commonly known as "river blindness."Using the drug Mectizan, the organizationinoculatedthe children in the sevenAfrican countriesstrickenwith the diseaseand all but eradicatedit. By the early 1960s,river blindnesswas overwhelmingly under control. It is no exaggeration to saythat generationsof African children can thank the ef'$Tilson for their sight. forts of John Under \Tilson's direction, the organization conducted three million cataractoperationsand treated twelve million others at risk of becoming blind. They also administeredmore than one hundred million dosesof vitamin A to preventchildhood blindnessand distributedbraillestudypacksto afflictedpeoplethroughout Africa and Asia. ln all, tensof millions can seebecauseof the commitment John \X/ilsonmade to preventingthe preventable. \When\Wilsonretired, he and his wife devotedtheir considerable energiesto Impact, a program of the \World Health Organization that works on the prevention of all types of disabling Knighted in 1975,he also receivedthe Helen Keller Indiseases. ternationalAward, the Albert SchweitzerInternational Prize,and the \World Humanity Award. He continued to be an active and prominent voice for the causeof preventing blindness and all avoidabledisability until his death in 1999. John Coles, in his biography Blindnessand the Visionary: The Life and Work of John Wilson, wrote, "By any standards,his achievementsrate comparisonwith thoseof other great humani-

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tarians."Others have comparedhis accomplishmentswith those of Mother Teresa. Many people,faced with the circumstancesSir John \(ilson encountered,would havebemoanedtheir existence.Perhapsthey would haveconsideredthemselvescursedby ill fortune and frustrated in their attemptsto do anything significantwith their lives. \Wilson.however.insistedthat blindnesswas "a confoundednuisance,not a crippling affliction," and he modeledthat attitude in the most inspiring possibleway. He lost his sight and found a vision. He proved dramatically that it's not what happensto us that determineseLll liy65-i1'5 what we make of what happens.

Attitude and Aptitude There is a risk in giving examplesof peoplewho havefound their Element.Their storiescan be inspiring,of course,but they can also be depressing.After all, thesepeople seemblessedin some way; they'vehad the good fortune to do what they love to do and to be very good at doing it. One could easilyascribetheir good fortune to luck, and certainly many peoplewho lovewhat they do say that theyve been lucky (just as peoplewho don't like what they'redoing with their livesoften saytheyve been unluckl). 96 course,some"lucky" peoplehavebeenfortunate to find their passions and to have the opportunities to pursue them. Some "unlucky" peoplehavehad bad things happento them. But good and bad things happen to all of us. It's not what happensto us that makes the differencein our lives. \What makes the differenceis our attitude toward what happens.The idea of luck is a powerful way of illustrating the importanceof our basicattitudesin affecting whether or not we find our Element.

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Describing ourselvesas lucky or unlucky suggeststhat we're But if simply the beneficiariesor victims of chancecircumstances. being in your Elementwerejust a matter of chance,all you could do is crossyour fingers and hope to get lucky as well. There's much more to being lucky than that. Researchand experience show that lucky people often make their luck becauseof their attitudes. Chapter 3 looked at the concept of creativity.The real messagethere is that we all createand shapethe realitiesof our own livesto an extraordinaryextent.Those who simply wait for good things to happenreallywould be lucky to encounterthem. All of the peopleI ve profiled in this book havetaken an activerole in "gettinglucky."Theyve mastereda combinationof attitudesand behaviorthat led them to opporttrnitiesand that give them the confidenceto take them. One of these is the ability to look at situations in different ways.There'sa differencebetweenwhat we are ableto perceiveour field of perception-and what we actually do perceive.As I mentionedin the last chapter,thereare significantcultural differencesin how people perceivethe world around them. But two different people with the same cultural orientations may stilL seethe samescenein completelydifferent ways,dependingupon their preconceptionsand their setrseof mission. Best-selling author and top motivational speakerAnthony Robbins demonstratesthis with a simple activity. In his three-dayseminars,he asksthe thousandsof people in attendanceto look around and count how many items of green clothing they can see.He gives them a few minutes to do this and then asksthem for their findings. He then asks them how many items of red clothing they saw.Most peoplecan't evenbegin to answerthe questionbecause Robbins told them to look for items of green clothing, and they only focusedon those.

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In his book The Luch Factor,psychologistRichard \Tiseman writes about his study of four hundred exceptionally"lucky" and "unlucky" people. He found that those who consideredthemselveslucky tended to exhibit similar attitudes and behaviors. Their unlucky counterpartstendedto exhibit oppositetraits. \(iseman has identified four principlesthat characterizelucky people. Lucky people tend to maximize chance opportunities. They are especiallyadept at creating,noticing, and acting upon theseopportunitieswhen they arise.Second,they tend to be very effectiveat listeningto their intuition, and do work (suchasmeditation)that is designedto boosttheir intuitive abilities.The third principle is that lucky peopletend to expectto be lucky, creating a seriesof selffulfilling propheciesbecausethey go into the world anticipating a positive outcome.Last, lucky peoplehavean attitude that allowsthem to turn bad luck to good. They don't allow ill fortune to overwhelm them, and they move quickly to take control of the situationwhen it isn't going well for them. Dr. \Tiseman performedan experimentthat speaksto the role of perceptionin luck. He set up a nearbycafewith a group of actors told to behavethe way peoplenormally did in that setting. He also put a five-pound note on the sidewalk just outside the caf6. He then askedone of his "lucky" volunteersto go down to the shop.The lucky personsawthe money on the ground, picked it up, walked into the shop,and ordereda coffeefor himself and the strangerat the next chair. He and the strangerstruck up a conversationand wound up exchangingcontact information. Next, Dr. \Tiseman sent one of his "unlucky" volunteersto the ca{?. This person stepped right over the five-pound note, bought coffee,and interactedwith no one. Later,\Tiseman asked both subjectsif anything lucky happenedthat day. The lucky subjecttalked about finding the money and making a new contact. The unlucky subjectcouldn't think of anything.

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One way of opening ourselvesup to new opportunitiesis to make consciousefforts to look differently at our ordinary situations. Doing so allows a personto seethe world as one rife with possibility and to take advantageof someof thosepossibilitiesif they seemworth pursuing.Vhat Robbinsand \Tiseman show us is that if we keepour focustoo tight, we miss the restof the world swirling around us. Another attitude that leadsto what many of us would consider "good luck" is the ability to reframe,to look at a situationthat fails to go accordingto plan and turn it into somethingbeneficial. If things had worked out differently, there is a very good chancethat I would not be writing this book at all now and you would thereforenot be readingit. I might be running a sportsbar in England and regaling anyone who'd listen with tales of my glittering soccercareer.I grew up in Liverpool as one of a large family of boysand one sister.My father had beenan amateursoccer playerand boxer,and like everyonein my extendedfamily, he was devotedto our local soccerteam, Everton. It was the dream of everyhouseholdin the neighborhoodto haveone of their own kids play for Everton. Until I was four, everyonein my family assumedthe Everton soccerplayer in our clan would be me. I was strong, very active, and I had a natural aptitude for soccer.This was in 1954,the year in which the polio epidemicsreachedtheir peak in Europe and America. One day, my mother came to collect me from nursery school to find that I was howling in pain from a piercing headache.I nevercried much as a child, so my misery concernedher deeply.Our doctor came to the houseand decidedI had the flu. By the next morning, it becameclearthat his diagnosiswas off, I woke up completely paralyzed-I could not move at all. I spentthe next few weekson the emergencylist in the polio isolationunit of our local hospital.I'd completelylost the use of

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my legsand much of my body. For eight months, I found myself in the hospital surrounded by other kids who were struggling with suddenparalysis.Someof them were in iron lungs. Someof them didn't survive. Very slowly, I began to recoversome use of my left leg and, thankfully, the full use of my arms and the rest of my body. My right leg remainedcompletelyparulyzed.Ieventuallyleft the hospital at the ageof five in a wheelchair,wearing two braces. This pretty much put an end to my plannedcareerIn 5esss1although, given the way Everton has been playing lately,I might still havea shot at making the team. This blow wasdevasrating to my parenrsand everyone in my family. As I grew up, one of their biggestconcernswas how I would make a living. My father and mother recognizedfrom the outset that I neededto make the best use of my other talents, though it wasn'tclear at that point what those talentsmight be. Their first priority was for me to get the best educationpossible. As I moved through school,I was under extra pressureto study and do well in my exams.This was not easy.After all, I was one of a large,very closefamily living in a housethat was constantly full of visitors,noise,and laughter. On top of this, the housewas in Merseysidein the early '60s. Rock music-loud rock music-was everywhere.My brother Ian playeddrums in a band that rehearsedeveryweek in our house right next door to the room where I was trying to find somerelevance in algebraand Latin. In the battle for my attentions between the booksand the beat,the bookswere losing badly. Still, as much as any boy could, I understoodthat therewas a future to considerand that I neededto do the most with what I had. Soccerwasno longeran option, and as much as I loved music, I didn't haveany musical talent to speakofl \(ith the benign pressureof my father,I eventuallygot through school.I went on

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to college,and it was there that the intereststhat haveshapedmy life beganto take form. I don't know what kind of soccerplayerI would havebeen. I do know that catching polio opened many more doors for me than the one it so firmly closedat the time. I certainly didn't see this when it happened,and neither did anyonein my family. But my parents'ability to reframeour situation by doing their best to focus me on my schoolwork,and my ability to reframe my circumstance,turned a disasterinto a completelyunexpectedset of opportunities,which continue to evolveand multiply. Someoneelsewho wasdenieda careerin soccerwent in a very different direction. Vidal Sassoonis one of the most celebrated namesin hairdressing.In the 1960s,his clientsincluded the biggest stars and iconic models of the time, such as Mary Quant, JeanShrimpton, and Mia Farrow.His revolutionarycreationsincluded the bob, the five-point geometriccut, and the Greek goddessstyle,taking over from the beehivestylesofthe 1950s. \WhenVidal was a child in the EastEnd of London, his father abandonedhis mother. An aunt took them all in, and Vidal and four other children lived togetherin her two-bedroom tenement flat. Things got so bad that eventuallyhis mother sentVidal and his brother to an orphanage,and it was nearlysix yearsbeforeshe was ableto get them home again.As a teenager,he had a passionate ambition to be a soccerplayer,but his mother insistedthat he apprenticeas a hairdresser.Shethought that would be a more securejob for him. "I wasfourteenyearsold," he said,"and in England unlessyou wereprivileged,that was when you left schooland startedto earn a living. I was apprenticedto this wonderful man calledAdolph Cohen on \WhitechapelRoad and what a disciplinarian he was! I was fourteen, it was 1942, and the war was on. Bombs were dropping practicallyevery night, the Luftwaffe was giving Lon-

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don hell, and we still had to come in with our nails clean, our trouserspressed,and our shoespolished. Those two yearswith him definitely gaveme the structure I neededin my life: the inconvenienceof discipline. "I took sometime out after that becauseI still wasn'tsureif I wanted to be a hairdresser.I lovedfootball so much. In the end, I supposeit was the prospectof all the pretry girls and, of course, my mother that swung it for me. At first I couldn't ger a proper job in the \fest End of London at a big salonlike Raymond'sbecauseI had a cockney accent.That's the way it was in those days." For three years, he took voice lessonsto improve how he soundedso he could get a job at one ofthe better salons."I knew I had to learn how to projectmyself so I got a job teachingin different salonsin the evenings.I usedmy tips to take a bus to the West End and go to the theater.I'd catch the matinee and see great Shakespearean actorslike LaurenceOlivier and John Gielgud and try to copy their voices." He went regularlyto London'smany art museumsand began to educateand inspire himself with the history of painting and architecture."l really think that waswhat serme on my course.I was developingmy own vision for hairdressing.The shapesin my headwerealwaysgeometric.I havealwaysbeenworking toward a bone structureso as to definea woman rather than just make her 'pretty pretty.'I knew hair dressingcould be different, but it took a lot of work and nine yearsto developthe sysremwe usein our salons." In \954, he and a partner openeda very small salon on rhe third floor of a building in London's fashionableBond Street. "Bond Streetwas magic to me becauseit meant the \WestEnd. It was whereI couldn't get a job earlier.The \WestEnd meant I was going to make it. I was determinedto changethe way things were

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done or leavehairdressing.For me it wasn't a caseof bouffants and arrangements.It was about structure and how you train the eye," In the first week,they took in only fifty pounds,but after two yearsthey had built the businessto a point wherethey could move to the "right" end of Bond Street and compete with the top salons. "London wasa fascinatingplacein the sixties.Therewasthis incredible energy.\7e were not going to do things the way our parents did. I was always looking for different ways of doing things.Everythingwaschanging:our music,clothes,and art. So it was clear to me that there could be something different for hair." And then one day,somethingcaughthis eyethat wasto transform his vision and the whole field of hairdressing."One Saturday, one of the guys was drying a client'shair and just using a brush and drier without any rollers.I thought about it ovcr the weekend,and on the Monday I askedhim why he had dried her hair like that. He said he'd been in a hurry and didn't want to wait for her to comeout of the dryer. 'Hurry or not,' I said,'you've something,and we aregoing to work on this.' For us, discovered that'show blow drying started." Vidal Sassoonwasto createa revolutionin cutting and styling hair that changedthe industry and the way that women looked around the world. "I alwayshad shapesin my head. I remembercutting Grace Cruddington'shair into the 'five point haircut' and flying to Paris with her in 1964.I wanted to actually show it to the magazine editors.I knew we'd got somethingbut you had to seeit, seethe way it movedand swung. It was all about scissors.Our motto was 'eliminate the superfluous.''We made pages and pages in Elle magazine.They'd beengoing to featurecurls but they lovedwhat

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and tours.Then in we'd done.That led on to more photo sessions 1965, I was invited to do a show in New York and about five newspaperscoveredit. They gaveus the front pageof the beauty section in the New York Timesthe following day. The papersand magazineswere full of picturesof our new geometriccuts. \fe'd done it! tVe'd brought America 'the bob."' He openedthe first Sassoonschoolin London in 1967.Now they are all over the world. "My philosophy has alwaysbeen to shareknowledge.Our academyand educationcentersare filled with energy.That's what helpsyoung peopleto push the boundariesof their creativity.I tell them, if you havea good idea,go for it, do it your way. Take good advice,make sure it is good advice, then do it your way.\7e've beenaround for a long time and to me 'longevity is a fleeting moment that lastsforever."' Vidal Sassooncreateda new look and a whole new approach to fashion and style. He not only took the opportunities that he saw he createda million more in the way he respondedto them. Perhapsthe most important attitude for cultivating good Many of the peoplein Fortuneis a strongsenseof perseverance. constraintsin finding the E,lement this book facedconsiderable and managedto do it throughsheer,doggeddetermination.None more so than Brad Zdanivsky. At nineteen,Brad knew that he loved to climb. He'd been climbing treesand boulderssincehe was a kid and had movedon to scalesomeof the highestpeaksin Canada.Then, while returning home from a long drive after a funeral, he fell asleepat the wheel of his car and plunged nearly two hundred feet off a cliff. The accidentleft him a quadriplegic,but he remaineda rock climber in his heart. Even as he waited at the bottom of the cliff for help to arrive,knowing that he couldn't move,he recallswondering if it were possiblefor a quadriplegicto climb. After eight months of rehab, he began to talk to fellow climbers about

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designing some kind of gear that would get him back onto a mountain. \With the help of severalpeople,including his father, he createda devicewith two largewheelsat the top and a smaller one on the bottom. Seatedin this rig, he usesa pulley systemwith his shouldersand thumbs that allows him to scaleabout a foot at a time. The techniqueis excruciatinglyslow,but Zdanivsky'spersistencehasbeenrewarded.Beforehis injury, his goal had beento climb the two-thousand-footStawamusChiel one of the largest granite monoliths in the world. In July 2005, he reachedthat goal. We all shapethe circumstancesand realitiesof our own lives, and we can also transform them. Peoplewho find their Element are more likely to evolvea clearersenseof their life's ambitions and set a coursefor achievingthem. They know that passionand aptitude are essential.They know too that our attitudesto events and to ourselvesare crucial in determinine whether or not we find and live our livesin the Element.

CHAPT ER

EIGHT

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pollo, I went to a specialschoolfor the /\ rren I ceucur This wasstandardprocedure back A.physically handicapped. then in Britain; the educationauthoritiesremovedany children with disabilitiesfrom mainstreamstateschoolsand sent them to one of thesespecialschools.So I found myselffrom the ageof five travelingby specialbus everyday from our working-classareaof Liverpool acrossthe city to a small schoolin a relativelyaffluent area.The Margaret BeavanSchoolhad about a hundred or so pupils aged from five to fifteen with various sorts of disability, including polio, cerebralpalsy,epilepsy,asthma,and, in the caseof one of my bestfriends there,hydrocephalus. \(/e weren't especiallyconsciousof each other's disabilities, though many of us wore braces,usedcrutches,or were in wheelchairs.In that setting, the nature of anyone'sdisability was more or lessirrelevant.Like most kids, we formed our friendshipsbased had cerebralpalsy on people'spersonalities.One of my classmates and severespasticity.He couldn't use his hands and spokewith tremendousdifficulty. The only way he could write was by gripping a pencil betweenhis toes and arching his leg over the desk. For all of that, he was a funny and entertainingguy onceyou got used to his strained efforts at speaking and could understand what he was actually saying.I enjoyedmy time at the schooland had all the childhood excitementsand frustrations that I knew my brothersand sisterwere having at their "normal" schools.If

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anything, I seemed to like my school more than they liked theirs. One day when I was ten, a visitor appearedin the classroom. He was a well-dressedman with a kind face and an educated voice. He spentsometime talking to the teacher,who seemedto me to take him very seriously.Then he wandered around the deskstalking to the kids. I supposetherewereabouta dozenof us in the room. I rememberspeakingwith him for a little while, and that he left soon afterward. A day or so later,I receiveda message to go to the headmaster's office. I knocked on the largepaneleddoor, and a voicecalledme in. Sitting next to the head teacherwas the man who'd comeinto my classroom.He wasintroducedto me asMr. Strafford.I learned later that he was CharlesStrafford, a member of a distinguished group of public officials in the United Kingdom, Her Majesty's Inspectorsof Schools.The governmenthad appointedthesesenior educatorsto report independentlyon the quality of schoolsaround the country.Mr. Straffordhad particular responsibilityfor special schoolsin the northwestof England,including Liverpool. \Wehad a short conversationduring which Mr. Straffordasked me some generalquestionsabout how I was getting on at the school and about my interestsand family. A few days later, I receivedanothermessage to go to the headmaster's study.This time I wound up in anotherroom and met a different man who asked me a seriesof questionsin what I later understoodwas a general IQ test. I rememberthis vividly becauseI made a mistakeduring the test that really irritated me. The man read a seriesof statementsand askedme to comment on them. One of them was this: "Scientistsin America havediscovereda skull which they believe belongedto Christopher Columbus when he was fourteen." He askedme what I thought of that, and I said that it could not have

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beenChristopherColumbus'sskull becausehe didn't go to America when he was fourteen. The moment I left the room, I realizedwhat a stupid answer that was and turned to knock on the door to tell the man that I knew the real flaw in the statement.I heard him speaking to someoneelse,though, and decidednot to interrupt. The next day I saw him crossingthe playgroundand was about to accosthim with the answer.But I worried that he would assumethat I'd spoken with my dad overnightand that he'd told me the real answer. I decidedit was a wasteof time to correctthings. Fifty yearslateg I'm still annoyedabout this. I know; I should get over it. My error turned out to be insignificant to whateverthe testerswere looking for in me. Shortly afterward, the school moved me to a different classof children who were severalyearsolder than me. Apparently, Mr. Strafford had spoken with the head teacherabout me and said that he sawa particular spark of intelligence that the schoolwasn't developingas fully as they could. He thought the school could challengeme more and that I had the potential to passa test known at the time as the eleven-plus examination. In Britain back then, high schooleducationtook placein two different types of school: secondarymodern schoolsand grammar schools.The grammar schoolsoffereda more prestigious,academiceducation,and they werethe primary routesto professional careersand universities.Secondarymodern schoolsoffereda more practical educationfor kids to take up manual and blue-collar jobs. 'Ihe whole systemwas a deliberatepieceof socialengineering designedto provide the workforce neededfor the industrial economyin the UK. The eleven-pluswas a seriesof IQ testsdevelopedto identify the academicaptitudesneededfor a grammar school education.Passingthe eleven-pluswas, for working-class

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kids, the best path to a professionalcareerand an escapefrom a possiblelifetime of manual work. The teacherin my new classwas the redoubtableMiss York. Shewas a small woman in her forties,kind but with a reputation for being intellectually rigorous and demanding. Some of the teachersat the schoolhad relativelylow expectationsof what we kids were likely to achievein our lives.I think they saw the purposeof "specialeducation"mainly aspastoral.Miss York did not Sheexpectedof her "special"pupils what shewould cxpcctof any others:that they work hard, learn, and do their absolutebest. Miss York coachedme relentlesslyin math, English, history, and a variety of other subjects.Periodicallyshe would give me past eleven-plus examsto practiceon, encouragingme to excelat these. She remains one of the most impressiveteachersI have evermet. Eventually,with a group of other children from my schooland other specialschoolsin the area, I sat down to take the actual eleven-plusexam. For weeksafterward,Miss York, Mr. Strafford, my parents,and I waited anxiouslyfor the brown envelopefrom the LiverpoolEducationCommittee to arrivewith the potentially life-changingresultof the test. One morning in the earlysummer of 1961,we heard the letterboxclatter,and my mother ran to the front door. Tensewith excitement,she carried the letter into the small kitchenwherewe werehaving breakfastand handedit to me to open. With a deepbreath,I took out the small folded pieceof I had passed. paperinsidethe envelopewith its typed message. 'We could hardly believeit. The houseerupted in wild excitement. I was the first member of my family to passthis test, and the only pupil at the school who passedit that year. From that moment on, my life moved in a completelynew direction. I receiveda scholarshipto the Liverpool CollegiateSchool,one of the bestin the city. In one leap,I moved from the specialschoolinto

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the upper ends of mainstreamstateeducation.There, I beganto developthe interestsand capacitiesthat have shapedthe rest of my life. Charles Strafford becamea closefriend of my family and a frequent visitor to our packed, usually frenetic family home in Liverpool. He was a sophisticated,urbane man with a passionfor A professionaleduhelpingpeoplefind the chancesthey deserved. cator with a love of literature and classicalmusic, he played the in Merseytimpani, sangin choirs,and conductedmusicensembles side.He had a refinedtastefor good wines and brandiesand lived in a finely furnished town house in northern England. He'd servedas a major during World \WarII and had been part of the Normandy campaign.He kept a secondhome in Ranville in the Calvadosregion of northern France,where he had becomea key figure in the local Frenchcommunity. Ranville now boastsa road named after him, the allie CharlesStrafford. I visited him there in rny universitydays,and he introduced me to local societyand to the pleasuresof French cuisinc and calvadosapplebrandy,for which I am equallygrateful. For me, CharlesStrafford was a window into another world. Through hands-on, practical assistance,he facilitated my early journey from the back row of specialeducationto what has become a lifelong passionfor full-scaleeducationalreform. He was an inspirationalrolemodelfor seeingthe potentialin otherpeople and for creatingopportunities for them to show what they can really do. Aside from my parents,he was my first true mentor and taught me the invaluablerole mentorsplay in helpingus reachour Element.

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The Life- Changing Connection Finding our Elementoften requiresthe aid and guidanceof others. Sometimesthis comesfrom someonewho seessomethingin us that we don't seein ourselves,as was the casewith Gillian Lynne. Sometimesit comesin the form of a personbringing out the bestin us, as Prggy Fury did with Meg Ryan.For me, Charles Strafford saw that I would only reachmy potential if my educastepsto tors offeredme greaterchallenges.He took the necessary assurethat it happened. I didn't know it at the time, but the personwho wasto mentor me for most of my adult life this far was also at school in Liverpool at the time, just a few miles awayfrom me. I met Terry years later,when I was living and working in London in my late twenties. I was back in Liverpool for a week to run a coursefor teachers.Shewas teachingdrama in a difficult, low-incomeareaof the city. \Wehad an instant connection-which had absolutelynothing to do with teaching,education,or the Element-and we ve been togetherever since.She'sone of the finest mentorsI know, not just to me but to friends, family, and everyonewho works with her and for her. Sheknows intuitively the power and importanceof mentorsbecausethey havebeenso important in her own life. \While I was being mentoredby Charles,shehad a childhood mentor of her own. This is how shetells it: "I went to an all-girls Catholic high schoolrun by an order of nuns known as the Sistersof Mercy-a misnomer if ever there was one.This wasthe 'swingingsixties,'and we weren'tdoing any swinging, but we were doing a lot of praying and in particulaq I was praying for a way out. By the time I was seventeenmy only ambition wasto leavehome, moveawayfrom the suburbsand get to the bright lights of London fast. From there I was planning on getting to America and marrying Elvis Presley.

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"My academiccareerhad beenone abjectfailure after another, but I loved to act and I loved to read. Then in my last year at school for the first time i had an inspirational English teacher, SisterMary Columba, a tiny young woman who had a passionfor V. B. Yeatsand a passionfor teaching.At the very first seminar, shepicked me to read a poem to the classand, as I did, the hairs on the back of my neck tingled. I still have neverread anything more beautiful or oowerful: Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths Enwroughtwith goldenandsilverlight, The blueand the dim and the darkcloths Of night and light and the half light, I would spreadthe clothsunderyour feet; But I, beingpoor,haveonly my dreams; I havespreadmy dreamsunderyour feet; Treadsoftlybecause you treadon my dreams. "For the first time I really wanted to learn more and over the next two yearssheguided me to a love of Dickens and E. M. Forand Synge.\fle were a small ster to Wilfred Owen, Shakespeare, tutorial group and every one of us was intenselyengagedin her my writing, shemade me give of my best classes. Sheencor.rraged and with her guidanceI was ableto challengeothersintellectually and to shine. "These books openedme to a world of possibilitiesand what intrigued me most was how open-mindedshewas. After all, she was a Catholic nun and herewe were discussinglove and sexand the occult. No subjectwas taboo.\Wewould spendhours discussing any themethat was thrown up, from the Oedipus complexin Coriolanusto the infidelity in HoutardsEnd. For a girl who had rarely beenout of Liverpool this was headystuff.

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"I was her top pupil that year and I passedmy English exams cum laude.At her suggestionI went on to study drama and literature at college.From then on I never doubted my ability to debate. I had friends for life in the writers we studied and I know that without her wonderful mentoring I would still be looking for Elvis." Mentors often appear in people'slives at opportune times' though, as we sawwith Eric Drexler and Marvin Minsky, sometimes "mentees"take an activc role in choosing their mentors. \Tarren Buffett, a man who hashimself inspiredlegionsof investors,points to Benjamin Graham (known asthe fatherof security analysis) as his mentor. Graham taught Buffett at Columbia University-giving Buffett the only A-plus he ever bestowedin twenty-two yearsof teaching-and then offered Buffett a iob at his investmentcompany.Buffett stayedthere severalyearsbefore heading off on his own. In his book Buffitt: The Making of an American Capitalist, Roger Lowenstein writes, "Ben Graham openedthe door, and in a way that spoke to Buffett personally. He gaveBuffett the tools to explorethe market'smanifold possibilities, an approachthat fit his student'stemper. Armed with Graham'stechniques,Buffett could dismisshis oraclesand make useof his native talents.And steeledby the exampleof Graham's character,Buffett would be able to work with his trademarkselfreliance." In a different domain entirely,the singer Ray Charleswas a guiding light to countlesspeoplefor his remarkablemusical talent and his ability to overcomeadversity.His story starts,though, with a man who taught him to tap into the music that was deep insidehim. In an interview with the Harvard Mentoring Project posted on www.\ThoMentoredYou.org,Charles recalled, "\il/iley Pittman, he wasa cat. I mean,if it hadn't been for him, I don't think

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I'd be a musiciantoday.\7e lived next door to him. He had a little caf!, a generalstore,and he had a piano in there.Everyafternoon around 2:00 p.m., 3:00 p.m., he'd start to practice.I was three years old and-I don't know why I loved him, I can't explain that-but any time he'd start practicingand playing that boogie woogie-I loved that boogie woogie sound-I would stop playing as a child, I didn't care who was out there in the yard, my buddies,or whoever,I would leavethem, and go insideand sit by him and listen to him play. "From time to time, I'd start hittin' the keys with my whole fists and finally he would sayto me, 'Look kid, you don't hit the keyswith your whole fist like this if you like music so much,' and he knew how much I liked music becauseI'd stop everything I was doing and listen to him. "So he startedto teachme how to play little melodieswith one finger.And, of course,I realizetoday that he could ve said, 'Kid, get awayfrom me, can't you seeI'm practicing?'But he didn't. He took the time. Somehow,he knew in his heart, 'this kid lovesmusic so much, I'm going to do whateverI can to help him learn how to play."' Marian \Wright Edelman, founder and presidentof the Children'sDefenseFund, discoveredher mentor when shewent away to school at Spelman College, a place she describesas "a sraid women'scollegethat developedsafe,young women who married Morehousemen, helpedraisea family, and neverkicked up dust." \7hile shewas there,shemet the history professorHoward Zinn. They werein the South in the late 1950s,andZinn felt it was important to motivatehis studentsto play an activepart in the civil rights struggle. Inspired by Zinn, Edelman engagedin the early civil rights proteststhat openedthe door to a national movement.Her essential role as a voice for changeand justice, and the extraordinary

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found work shehasdonefor children for more than threedecades, its path through the mentorshipof HowardZinn. I cameupon the storiesabout Ray Charlesand Marian Vright Edelman while reading about National Mentoring Month, a campaign orchestratedby the Harvard Mentoring Projectof the Harvard School of Public Health, MENTOR/National Mentoring Partnership,and the Corporation for National and Community Service.Sponsorsfor the campaign (eight yearsold, as of January 2009) include many huge corporations.In addition, a largenumber of major mediacompaniesserveaspartners,doing everything from offering hundreds of millions of dollars of free to incorporatingmentoringstories public serviceannouncernents into the plots of televisionshows. Public/PrivateVentures,a national nonprofit organizationfoof socialpolicies,Programs, cusedon improving"the effectiveness and community initiatives, especiallyas they affect youth and young adults,"performeda landmark impact study on mentoring beginning in 2004. Randomly pairing 1,100 fourth- through ninth-gradersin more than seventyschoolsaround the country with volunteersfrom Big Brothers Big Sistersof America, they reachedsomeencouragingfindings about the value of mentoring. The mentored students improved in overall academic performance, quality of classwork, and delivery of homework. They also got into serioustrouble in school less often and were less likely to skip school. It was good to seetheseresults,but they didn't surpriseme at all. Many of thesekids probably did better in school simply becausethey appreciatedsomeonetaking an interest in them. This is an essentialpoint, and I'll come back to it later on when I look at the issuesand challengesof education.At the very least,good and senseof purpose.But mentoring mentoring raisesself-esteem takesan elevatedrole for peoplewhen it involvesdirecting or in-

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spiring their searchfor the Eiement.\X/hat the psychologistsaw with Gillian Lynne and rn'hat'WileyPittrnan sawwith RayCharles was the opportunity to lead someonetoward his or her heart's fulfiliment. \What Howard Zinn sawwith Marian \Wright Edelman and Ben Graham saw with \Tarren Buffett was rare talent that could blossom into something extraordinary if nurtured. When mentors servethis function-either turning a light on a new world or fanning the {lamesof interestinto genuinepassionthey do exaltedwork.

The Roles of Mentors Mentorsconnectwith us in a varietyof waysand rernainwith us for varying lengths of time . Someare r,r,ithus for decadesin an and ultimately evolvingrole that might start as teacher/str.rdent a critical moour lives at Others enter evolveinto closefriendship. ment, staywitlr us long enoughto make a pil'otal diffbrence,and then move on. Regardless,trrentorstend to servcsome or all of fbur rolesfor us. 'fhe first roleis rec'ognition. CharlesStraffordservedthat function in my life, identifying skills that my teachershad not yet noticecl. One o[ the fundamental tenets of the Element is the As tremendousdiversityof our individual talentsand aptitucles. we've discussedearlier,somc testsare availablethat aim to give people a general indication of their strengths and weaknesses basedon a seriesofstandardizedquestions.But the real subtlety and nuancesof individual aptitudesand talentsare far more complex than anv existingtestscan detect. Some peoplehave generalaptitudesfor music, or for dance, or for science,but more often than not, their aptitudesturn out to be much more specificwithin a given discipline. A person may havean aptitudefor a particular type of music or for specific

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instruments:the guitar, not the violin; the acousticguitar, not the electricguitar. I don't know of any test or softwareprogram that can make the kinds of subtle,personaldistinctionsthat differentiate an interest from a potential burning passion.A mentot who has alreadyfound the Elementin a particular disciplinecan do preciselythat. Mentors recognizethe spark of interestor delight and can help an individual drill down to the specificcomponents of the discipline that match that individual's capacityand passion. Lou Aronica, my coauthoron this book, spentthe first twenty yearsof his professionallife working for book publishers.His first job out of collegewas for Bantam Books,one of New York'spublishing powerhouses. Not long after he startedat the company,he noticed a wizened,gnomish man wandering the halls. The man didnt seemto have any particular job, but everyoneseemedto pay attentionto him. Lou finally askedabout the man and learned that he was Ian Ballantine, who'd not only founded Bantam Books and later Ballantine Books but was in fact the personwho introduced the paperbackbook to the United Statesin the 1940s. Over the next coupleof years,Lou passedBallantine in the hall numeroustimes,nodding to him politely,and feelinga bit intimidated in the presenceof a man who was such a legend in his chosenprofession. Lou got his first "real" job at Bantam around this time, a position in the editorial department,trying to piecetogethera science fiction and fantasypublishing program. One day not long after this, Lou was sitting at his desk when Ian Ballantine strolled in and satdown.This part wassurprisingenoughro Lou. The next severalminutes,however,left him stunned."Ian had a distinctive way of speaking,"Lou told me. "You got the sensethat every thought was a pearl, but his languagewas so circuitous that it seemedthe pearl still had the oyster around it." \7hat became

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clear as Ballantine continued to speak,though, was that-much to Lou's astonishment-the publishing legend wanted to take Lou under his wing. "He never actually said, 'Hey, I'll be your mentor.' Ian didn't make declarativestatementslike that. But he suggestedhe might enjoy dropping by regularly,and I made it clear that he could drop by wheneverhe wanted and that I'd be h"ppy to go halfway acrossthe world to get to him if he didn't feel like coming to me." Over the next severalyears,Lou and Ian spenta considerable amount of time together.Ballantine taught Lou much about the history and, more importantly, the philosophy of book publishing. One of Ballantine'slessonsto Lou was to "zig when everyone elseis zagging,"his way of suggestingthat the fastestpath to successis often to go against the flow. This struck a specialchord I'd beenhearwith Lou. "From the time I startedin the business, 'conventions' of book publishing. it seemedthere ing about the were a lot of rules about what you could and couldn't do, which didn't seemto make much senseto me, sincereadersdon't readby rules.Ian didn't believeany of that, and he'd been overwhelmthan the peoplespoutingtheseruleswere. ingly more successful Right then, I decideclto becomea publisherwho would publish books I lovedwith only a nodding glanceto 'the rules."' The approachservedLou well. He had his first book imprint by the time he was twenty-six and becamedeputy publisher at Bantam and then publisher at Berkley Books and Avon Books beforeturning his attentionsto writing. Before lan Ballantine choseto mentor him, Lou knew he wanted a careerin books. But in addition to teachinghim the nuancesof the industry, Ballantine helped him identify the particular part of publishing that truly brought him to his Element. Mentors leadus The secondrole of a mentor is encouragement. to believethat we can achievesomethingthat seemedimprobable

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or impossibleto us beforewe met them. They don't allow us to succumbto self-doubtfor too long, or the notion that our dreams are too large for us. They stand by to remind us of the skills we alreadypossessand what we can achieveif we continue to work hard. \fhen JackieRobinsoncame to play major-leaguebaseballin Brooklyn for the Dodgers, he experiencedlevelsof abuseand hardship worthy of Greek tragedy from those who believed a black man shouldn't be allowed to play in a white man's league. Robinsonbore up under most of this, but at one point, things got so bad that he could barelyplay the game.The tauntsand threats rattled his concentrationso badly that he faltered at the plate and in the field. After a particularly bad moment, Pee\7ee Reese, the Dodger shortstop,called a time-out, walked over to Robinson, and offered him encouragement,telling him he was a great ballplayerdestinedfor the Hall of Fame.Yearslater,during Robinson's Hall of Fame induction ceremony,he spoke about that moment. "He savedmy life and my careerthat day," Robinson saidfrom the podium at Cooperstown."I had lost my confidence, and Pee'W'ee picked me up with his words of encouragement.He gaveme hope when all hope was gone." The third role of a mentor isfacilitating. Mentors can help lead us toward our Elementby offering us adviceand techniques,paving the way for us, and evenallowing us to falter a bit while standing by to help us recoverand learn from our mistakes.These mentorsmight even be our contemporaries,as was the casewith Paul McCartney. "I rememberone weekendJohn and I took the bus acrosstown to seesomeonewho knew how to play 87 on the guitag" Paul told me. "The three basicchordsyou neededto know were E, A, and '$7e 87. didn't know how to do 87 and this other kid did. So we bus to seehim, learnedthe chord, and came back again. got the

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So then we could play it too. But basically,mates would show you how to do a particular riff, I rememberone night watching a TV show called Oh Boy! Cliff Richard and the Shadows were on, playing'Move It.' It had a greatriff. I loved it but didn't know how to play it. Then I worked it out and ran over to John's housesaying,'I've got it. I've got it.' That was our only education experience-showing eachother how to do things. "To start with, we werejust copying and imitating everyone.I wasLittle Richard and Elvis.John wasJerryLeeLewis and Chuck Berry. I was Phil from the EverlyBrothersand John was Don. \7e just imitated other peopleand taught eachother. This was a big point for us when we were planning the policies at LIPA-the fact that it's important for studentsto rub up againstpeoplewho have actually done or are doing the thing that the studentsare learning.They don't really need to tell you much, just show vou what they do." The fourth role of a mentor is stretching.Effective mentors push us pastwhat we seeas our iimits. Much as they don't allow us to succumbto self-doubt,they also preventus from doing less with our lives than we can. A true mentor reminds us that our goal should neverbe to be "average"at our pursuits. Janes Earl Jonesis known asa superlativeactor and one of the great"voices"in contemporarymedia.Yet most of us neverwould haveheard that voicehad it not beenfor a mentor. One can only imagine what Darth Vader might sound like if Donald Crouch hadn't enteredJones'slife. As a child, Jonessuffered from crippling self-consciousness, largelybecausehe stutteredand found it very difficult to speakin front of people.\fhen he got to high school,he found himself in an English classtaught by Crouch, a former collegeprofessorwho had worked with Robert Frost. Crouch discoveredthat Jones wrote poetry, a fact that Joneskept to himself for fear of ridicule

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from the other boysin school."He questionedme about why, if I lovedwords so much, couldn't I saythem out loud?"Jonessaysin the book ThePerson\Yho ChangedM1 Ltfe: ProminentAmericans Recall Their lVfentors. "One day I shou'edhim a poem l had written, and he respondedto it by sayingthat it was too good to be my own work, that I must havecopied it from someone.'Io prove that I hadn't plagiarizedit, he wanted rne to recitethe poem, by heart, in front of the entire class.I did as he asked,got through it without stuttering, and from then on I had to write more and speakmore. This had a trernendouseffect on me, and my confidencegrew as I learnedto expressmyselfcomfortablyout loud. "On the lastday of schoolwe had our final classoutsideon the lawn, and ProfbssorCrouch presentedme rvith a gifi-a copy of Ralph Valdo Emerson'sSelfReliance.This was invaluableto me because it summedup what he had taughtme-self-reliance.His influenceon me was so basicthat it extendedto all ar:easof my life. t{e is the reasonI becamean actor." Mentors servean invaluablerole in helping peopleget to the Element.It might be overstatingthings to suggestthat the only way to reach the Element is with the help of a mentor, but it is \X/eall encountermultiple roadblocks onlv a mild overstatement. and constraintson the journey toward finding what we feel we were meant to do. \Without a knowledgeableguide to aid us in identifying our passions,to encourageour interests,to smooth our paths,and to push us to make the most of our capacities,the journey is considerablyharder. Mentorship is of coursea two-way street.As important as it is to have a mentor in your life, it is equally important to fulfill theserolesfor other people.lt is evenpossiblethat you'll find that your own real Element is as a mentor to other people.

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Anthony Robbins is one of the world's most successfulpersonalcoachesand mentors,often creditedwith laying the foundations for the personalcoachingprofession.This sectoris growing exponentiallyaround the world and has becomea multimilliondollar industry. All of this speakseloquentlyto the appetitefor mentoring and coachingand to the profbund rolesthesecan fulfill in many of our lives. More and more peopleare discovering that being a mentor,for them, is being in the Element. 'fhis happened for l)avid Neils. His own mentor was Mr. Clawson, a neighbor who came up with multiple successfulinventions.When Neils wasa child, he would go to visit the neighbor rvhile he worked. Instead of chasingthe kid awa)',Clawson askeclfor Neils'sadviceand criticism about his work. This interaction charged Neils with a senseof self-worth and an understandingthat his opinionsmattered.As an adult, Neils founded the lnternationalTelementorPrograln,an organizationthat facilitates mentoring by electronic rleans between professionalsand students.Since1995,the programhashelpeclmore than 15,000 guidance.David studentsaround the world receiveprofessional Neiis literallymadementoringhis life'swork.

More Tltan Heroes I'm sure that severalof the mentors mentioned here, ir-rcluding many of the Big Brothersand Big Sisters,becameheroesto those they mentored.We all havepersonalheroes-a parent,a teacher, a coach,evena schoolmateor colleague-lvhose actionswe idolize. In addition, we all haveireroeswe'venevermet who stir our imaginationswith their deeds.\7e considerLance Armstrong a hero for the way he overcamea lile-threateningillnessto dominate a physicallygrueling sport, and Nelson Mandela one for his

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critical role in ending apartheidin South Africa. In addition, we forever associatepeople with heroic 2s15-fte53 Parks'striumphant stand against bigotry, Neil Armstrong's first step on the moon. Thesepeopleinspire us and lead us to marvel at the wonders of human potential. They open our eyesto new possibilitiesand fire our aspirations.They might even drive us to follow their examplesin our lives,moving us to dedicateourselvesto public serinjustice.In this vice,exploration,breakingbarriers,or lessening way, theseheroesperform a function similar to mentors. Yet mentorsdo somethingmore than heroesin our searchfor the Element. Heroes may be remote from us and inaccessible. They may live in another world. They may be dead. If we meet them, we may be too awestruckto engageproperly with them. Heroesmay not be good mentorsto us. They may be competitive or refuseto have anything to do with us. Mentors are different. They take a unique and personalplacein our lives.Mentors open doorsfor us and get involveddirectly in our journeys.T'heyshow us the next stepsand encourageus to take them.

CHAPT ER

NINE

Is It Too Late? J

-V;. ..?,

useN JrrrBns is the author of Feel the Fear and Do It AnywalP and many other best-sellingbooks.Shedidn't begin her writing careeruntil shewaswell into her forties.How shedid it is a remarkablestory. As a child, Susanloved to read.The best time of the day for her was when she could curl up with a book in the quiet of her room. "I was alwayscurious, and nly flther was a great one for explaining things. Sometimeshe would go into so much detail my eyeswould roll back. I rememberhearing something on the radio once that I didn't understand.The word was circumcision. True to fonn, he didn't give me a short explanation!He was like a teacher.I think he missedhis calling. He'd alwayswanteda boy, and I was treatedto all the things he would havedonewith a son. I got to go to a lot of wrestlingmatches!" Susanwent ofTto college,whereshemet and soonmarried her first husband.She dropped out when she got pregnantwith the first of her two children.After four yearsat home, shedecidedshe had to go back to college.This decisioncreatedmuch anxiety: "The yearsat home had shatteredmy confidence,and I wasn't sure I would succeed."She eventually found her feet at college 'W'hen shelearnedof this and evengraduatedsumma cum laude. "Finally I dropped she knew. honor, shebeganphoning everyone the phoneand begancrying asI realizedthat the one personI was

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trying to reachwas my father,who had died a few yearsearlier. He would havebeenso proud." \With the encouragementof one of her teachers,Susan enrolled in graduateschooland ultimately receivedher doctoratein psychology.Then, through an unexpectedturn of events,shewas askedto becomethe executivedirector of the FloatingHospital in New York City. Shehesitatedat first, as it was a very big job and shedidn't know if shecould handle it. But finally, sheagreed. By then, shewas having trouble in her marriage,and shefiled for divorce.This was a difficult time for Susan."Even having my doctoratein psychologydidn't help.\While my job wasrewarding beyond my wildest dreams,I was miserable.I soon got tired of feelingsorry for myselfand knew I had to find a new way of 'being' in the world. And that is when my spiritual journey began." During the ten yearssheran the Floating Hospital, Susanbecame what she calls a "workshop addict." In her free time, she studiedEasternphilosophiesand attendedall manner of personal growth and New Age workshops."I discoveredthat it was fear that was creatingmy 'victim mentality' and negativeattitude. It was stopping me from taking responsibilityfor my experienceof life. k wasalsofear that waskeepingme from being a truly loving person.Little by little, I learnedhow to push through fear and move myself from the weakestto the strongestpart of who I am. Ultimately, I felt a senseof power that I had neverfelt before." Sitting at her deskone day,the thought cameinto her mind to go down to the New Schoolfor SocialResearch,a placeshehad neverbeen.Sinceshewas learning to trust her intuition, shedecided to check it out. "I thought maybe they had a workshop I neededto take.\When I arrived,I looked at the directory and nowhich soundedreleticed the Department of Human Resources, vant to my interests.I mademy way to their offices.There wasno one in the receptionarea.Then I heard a woman in the office to

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the right say,'Can I help you?' I walked in and blurted out, 'I'm hereto teacha courseabout fear.''Wherethat camefrom, I hadn't a clue!Shelooked at me in shockand said,'Oh my goodness,I've been searchingfor someoneto teach a courseon fear and this is the last day to put it in the catalogueand I haveto leavein fifteen minutes.'Satisfiedwith my credentialsshesaid, 'Quickly write a coursedescription.\Without coursetitle and a seventy-five-word any forethought,I titled the course'Feelthe Fearand Do It Anyway' and wrote the coursedescription.Shewaspleasedand placed desk with a note to inmy courseinformation on her assistant's clude it in the catalogue.She thanked me profuselyand quickly exited.Alone, I stood thinking to myself,'\Whatjust happened?' I believestrongly in the Law of Attraction, but to me this was mind blowing." Susanwas nervousas shefacedthe first sessionof the twelveweek course.The two hours went well, but she then was confronted with a new fear. "I thought, 'That's it. That's all I know about this subject.So what am I going to teach next week?And the ten more sessionsto follow?' But every week I found I had more to say.And my confidencelevelgrew.I realizedI had learned so much over the yearsabout pushing through fear.And my students were drinking it up. Ultimately, they were amazedat how shifting their thinking really changedtheir lives. Teaching this courseconvinced me that the techniquesthat had transformed my life were the same techniquesthat could transform anyone regardlessofage, sex,or background." Susaneventuallydecidedto write a book basedon the course shehad taught. Shefacedmany roadblocks.And after four agents and fifteen rejectionsfrom variouspublishers,shereluctantlyput the proposalin a drawer.One of the worst rejectionlettersshereceived said, "Lady Di could be bicycling nude down the street giving this book away,and no one would read it!"

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During this period, shedecidedto leavethe FloatingHospital and focus on becoming a seriouswriter. "I rememberriding in a cab one evening.The driver askedme what i did. I heard myself say,'I'm a writer.' I supposeuntil that moment I had thought of rnyselfas a psychologistor an administrator,but there it was. I was a writer." After three years of writing articles fbr magazines,she was going through the drawer that held her much-rejectedbook proposal. "l picked it up and had a profound sensethat I held somethingin my hands that many peopleneededto read.So I set out with much determinationto find a publisherwho believedin my book the same way I did. This time, I succeeded.\What's more, I succeededbeyondmy wildest c{reams." Fee/ theFearand Do It Anyway(4hassold millions of copies.it is availablein a hundredcountries,and it hasbeentranslatedinto more than thirty-five languages.Susan has written seventeen more books that are alsomaking their way around the world. Susanwas indeecla writer; the T'irnes of London evendubbedher the "Queen of Self-t-{elp."Sheis a sought-afterpublic speakerand has been a gueston many radio and televisionshowsinternationally. About Feel the Fear and Do It AnywayG),she says,"My \feb site receivese-mails from all over the world from people telling me how my book has helpedtheir lives.Somehave actually credited it with sauingtheir lives.I'm so h"ppy I nevergaveup. My father would really havebeenproud."

Is It Tbo Late? \7e all know people who feel locked into their lives. They sincerelywish they could do something more meaningful and fulfilling, but at age thirty-nine or fifty-two or sixty-four, they feel that the opportunity has passed.Perhapsyou feel that it's too

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late-that it's unrealistic to pivot your life suddenlyin a new direction. Perhapsyou feel that you'vemissedthe one opportunity you had to pursue your heart'sdesire (maybedue to one of the constraintswe discussedearlier).Perhapsyou didn't havethe confidenceto follow the passionearlier,and now believethat the moment is gone. There is abundant evidencethat opportunitiesto discoverour Element exist rnore frequentlyin our lives than many might believe.In the courseof writing this book, we havecome upon literally hundredsof examplesof peoplefollowing their passionslater in their lives.For example,Harriet Doerr, the best-sellingauthor, only dabbledin writing while she raisedher family. When she was sixty-five,she returned to collegeto get a degreein history. But the writing coursesshe took along the way raisedher prose skills to a new level,and shewound up enrolledin Stanfbrd'screative writing program. Sheeventuallypublishedher first novel,the National Book Award-winning Stones for lbarra, in 1983,at the ageofseventy-three. \X/hile lessthan half that age at thirty-six, Paul Potts still seemedstuck in an obscure and unfulfilling life. He'd always known he had a good voice and he'd pursued operatictraining. However, a motorcycle acciclentcut short his dreams of the stage.Instead,he becamea mobile telephonesalesmanin South \Walesand continued to strugglewith a lifelong self-confidence problem.'Ihen he heardabout auditionsfor the talent competi tion televisionshowBritain\ Got Thlent,createdby Simon Cowell of Americanldol fame.Pottsgot the opportunity to sing Puccini's "Nessun Dorma" on national television,and his beautiful voice brought down the house,leavingone of the judgesin tears.Over the next few weeks,Potts becamean international sensalienthe YouTube video of his first performance has been downloadedmore than eighteenmillion times. He ultimately won the

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competitionand got the opportunity to sing in front of the Queen. losshas beena gain for operafans around Carphone'Warehouse's the world, as Potts releasedhis first album, One Chance,in late 2007. Singing had alwaysbeenhis Element. "My voice,"he said, "has alwaysbeen my bestfriend. If I was having problemswith bullies at school,I alwayshad my voice to fall back on. I don't really know why peoplebullied me. I was always a little bit different. So I think that's the reasonsometimes that I struggledwith self-confidence.\fhen I'm singing I don't havethat problem. I'm in the placewhereI should be. All my life I felt insignificant.After that first audition, I realizedthat I am somebody.Im PaulPotts." Julia Child, the chef creditedwith revolutionizingAmerican home cookingand originatingthe televisioncookingshow,worked first as an advertisingcopywriter and then in variousrolesfor the U.S. government.In her mid-thirties, shediscoveredFrenchcuisine and began professionaltraining. It was not until she was nearly fifty that she publishedMnsteringtheArt of French Cooking, and her storied careertook off. At sixty-five,Maggie Kuhn was a church organizerwho had no intention of leaving her job. Unfortunately, her employers made retirementmandatory at her age.Angry at the way her employer showedher the door, shedecidedto start a support group with friends in similar situations.Their attempts to addressthe common problems of retireespushed them toward higher and higher levelsof activism,culminating in the creationof the Gray Panthers,a national advocacygroup. \Weve all heard that fifty is the new thirty and that seventyis the new forty (if this algorithm extends in both directions, it would explainthe adolescentbehaviorof somethirty-somethings I know). But there are some important changesthat we should take seriously.Life expectancyhas increasedin our lifetimes. It

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has more than doubled in the past hundred years,and is growing at an acceleratedrate. Quality of health for older peoplehas improved.According to a MacArthur Foundationstudy,nearlynine in ten Americansagessixty-fiveto seventy-foursaythey areliving disability-free.Many older people in the developedworld have much greaterfinancial stability.In the 1950s,35 percentof older Americanslived in poverty; today that figure is 10 percent. There'sa greatdeal of talk thesedaysabout the "secondmiddle 'W'hat we once consideredmiddle age (roughly thirty-five age." to fifty) presageda rapid descenttoward retirement and imminent death.Now, the end of this first middle agemarks a seriesof benchmarks(a certain levelof accomplishmentin your work, kids going off to college,reduction in necessarycapital purchases). \What comesafter this is a secondstretchwhere healthy,accomplishedpeoplecan set offto reachtheir next set ofgoals. Itt certainly eitherchasteningor inspirational-I'm not surewhich-to hear boomer rock starsprovetheir predictionswrong about what they'd be doing "when I'm sixty-four" or still trying to get some "satisfaction." If we have an entire extra "middle age" thesedays, certainly we get additional opportunities to do more with our lives as part of the package.Thinking that we need to fulfill our grandest dreams(or at leastbe in the processof fulfilling them) by the time we'rethirty is outmoded. I don't mean to say,of course,that we all can do anything at any time in our lives.If youte about to turn one hundred, it's unlikely that you'regoing to nail the leading role in Swan Lake, es' peciallyif you haveno previousdancebackground.At fifty-eight, with a wobbly senseof balance,I'm getting usedto the idea that I'll probably never take the speed-skatinggold at the \Tinter Olympics (particularlysinceI ve neveractually seena pair of ice skatesin real life). Some dreams truly are "impossibledreams."

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However, many aren't. Knowing the difference is often one of the first stepsto finding your Element,becauseif you can seethe chancesof making a dream come true, you can alsolikely seethe necessarynext stepsyou needto take toward achievingit. One of the most basicreasonsfor thinking that it's too late to be who you are truly capableof being is the belief that life is linear.As if we'reon a busy one-waystreet,we think we haveno alternativebut to keep going forward. If we missedsomethingthe first time, we can't double back and take another look becauseit takesall of our effort just to keepup with traffic. 'W'hatwe'veseen in many of the storiesin this book, though, are clear indications that human lives are not linear. Gordon Parks'sexplorationsand masteryof multiple disciplineswere not linear. Chuck Closecertainly has not lived a linear life; diseasecausedhim to reinvent himself. Sir Ridley Scott had a decidedlynonlinear approachtoward entering the film world. He told me that when he first left art school,"I had absolutelyno thoughtsabout making films. Films were somethingI would go to on a Saturday.It was impossiblettr think of how you would make that leap into film from the life I was leading. "l then decidedthat fine art wasn'tfor me. I neededsomething more specific.I neededa target>a brief. So I moved around and tried other forms of art practiceand finally I found my feet with Mr. Ron Storein printing. I lovedthe printing process.I lovedhaving to grind stonesfor eachcolor of the lithograph.I usedto work late every day, go to the pub for two pints of beer,and get the last bus home. I did that for four years,five nights a week. I adoredit." A short while after this, he startedmoonlighting at the BBC. "I was alwaystrying to breakthe boundariesof what I was doing, maximizing the budgets.They sentme on a year'stravel scholar-

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ship, and when I went back, I went straight in asa designer.After two yearsat the BBC, I was put into the director'scourse." From there, though, he made another leap,this time into advertising,becauseit was "fantasticallyfun. Advertisinghasalways been a dirty word in relation to fine art and painting and you know, that side of things. I unashamedlygrabbedit with both hands." Directing commercialsled to directing television.Only after that did Ridley Scott becomeimmersed in the film world that would define his life's work. If he'd believedat any point along this journey that he had to follow a straight path in his career,he neverwould havefound his true calling. Human lives are organic and cyclical.Different capacitiesexpressthemselvesin strongerwaFSat different times in our lives. Becauseof this, we get multiple opportunities for new growth and development,and multiple opportunities to revitalizelatent capacities.Harriet Doerr started to exploreher writing skill before life took her in another direction. That skill was waiting for her decadeslater when she turned back to it. Maggie Kuhn discoveredher inner advocatewhen the opportunity arose,though she was probablyentirely unawarethat she had this talent until that moment. \7hile physicalageis absoluteasa way of measuringthe number of yearsthat havepassedsinceyou wereborn, it is purely relative when it comesto health and quality of life. Certainly, we are all getting older by the clock. But I know plenty of peoplewho are the sameage chronologicallyand generationsapart emotionally and creatively. My mother died at the age of eighty-six,very suddenly and very quickly from a stroke. Right up to the end of her life, she looked ten or fifteenyearsyoungerthan her birth date suggested.

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Shehad an insatiablecuriosity about other peopleand the world around her. She danced, read, partied, and traveled.She entertained everyoneshemet with her wit, and sheinspiredthem with her senseof style, her energy,and her sheer pleasurein being alive-in spite of multiple hardships,struggles,and crisesin her life. I'm one of her sevenchildren, and she rvas one of sevenas well-so when we gatheredin one placern,ithour extendedfar-nily, we were a substantialcrowd. My mother took careof us durinpStimes when there wcre few modern conveniencesand little help apart frorn what shecould drag reluctantlyfrom us when we werenot actuallycrcatingwork for her.When I wasnine, we all faceda catastrophe. My father,who was the pillar of the farnily, and had beenso distraughtat my gettingpolio, had an industrial accident.He broke his neck, and for the rest of his life was a quadriplegic. He washimselfan extraordinaryman who remainedfirmly at the centerof our family lile . He was shar:plyfunny, deeplyintelligent, and an inspiration to everyonewho came within range clf him. So, too, was my mother. I{er energyand zest for life never dirninished.Shewas alwaystaking on new projectsand learning new skills. At family gatherings,she was alwaysthe first on the dance floor. And in the last yearsof her life, she was studving ballroom dancing and making dollhousesand rniniatures.For both my mother and my father therewas alwaysa clear,substantial difference between their chronological ages and their real ages. There'sno shortageof peoplewho achievedsignificantthings in their later years.Benjamin Franklin invented the bifocal lens when he was seventy-eight.Thatt how old Grandma Moseswas when shedecidedto get seriousabout painting. Agatha Christie

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wrote The Mowsetrap,the world's longest-running play' when she wassixty-two.JessicaTandy won the Oscarfor BestActressat age eighty. Vladimir Horowitz gavehis last seriesof sold-out piano recitalswhen he was eighty-four. Compare theseaccomplishmentswith the prematureresignation of peopleyou know in their thirties or forties,who behaveas if their lives havesettledinto a dull routine and who seelittle opportunity to changeand evolve. If you'refifty, exerciseyour mind and body regularly,eatwell, and have a generalzest for li{b, you're likely younger-in very real,physicalterms-than your neighborr,vhois forty-four,works thinkin a dead-endjob, eatschickenwingstwice a day,considers reasonable as a lifting a beer glass ing too strenuous,and looksat daily workout. Dr. Henry L,odgc,coauthor of YoungerNext Year,makes the point sharply."It turns out," he says,"that 70o/oof Americanaging is not real aging. It's just decay.It's rot from tire stuff that we . . . the diabetes,the obesity,the heart do. All the lifestylediseases lots of the cancers,and almost much of the Alzl-reimer's, disease, all of the osteoporosis,those are all decay.Nature doesn'thave that in storeftrr any of us. \Wego out and buy it off the rack." 'Ihe peopleat realage.com havepu[ed togethera setof metrics "real age" as opposedto your chronoyour to c,alculate designed logical age.It takesinto considerationa wide rangeof factorsregarding lifestyle,genetics,and medicalhistory.\(hat's fascinating about this is that their work suggeststhat it's actually possibleto make yourselfyoungerby making better choices. One way to improve your real age is to take better care of yourself physically,through exerciseand nutrition. I know this, becauseI live in Califbrnia, where everyoneseemsto have stock in Lycra, and dairy products have the same health status as

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cigarettes.I try my best to live healthily, too. I aim to do sit-ups everyday and to avoiddessert.But it's not only aboutworking out and eatingin. One of the fundamental preceptsof the Element is that we need to reconnectwith ourselvesand to seeourselvesholistically. One of the greatestobstaclesto being in our Elementis the belief that our minds somehowexist independentlyof our bodies,like tenantsin an apartment,or that our bodiesare really just a form of transport for our heads.The evidenceof research,and of common sense,is not only that our physicalhealth affectsour intellectual and emotional vitality, but that our attitudes can affect our physicalwell-being.But equallyimportant is the work you do to keepyour mind young. Laughter has a huge impact on aging. So doesintellectualcuriosity. Meditationcan alsoprovidesignificant benefitsto the physicalbody. The answerto the question,Is it too late for me to find the Element? is simple: No, of coursenot. Even in the caseswhere the physicaldegradationsthat come with age make certain achievements impossible,the Elementis still within reach.I'll neverget that speed-skatinggold, but if the sport meant that much to me (it doesn't),I could find a way to gain accessto that tribe, perhaps using the skills I alreadyhaveand thoseI could acquireto make a meaningful contribution to that world.

KeepingThingsPlastic tWhat this really comes down to is our capacity to continue to develop our creativity and intelligence as we enter new stages in our lives. Obviously, it happens in dramatic ways when we're very young. The infant brain is tremendously active and enormously plastic. It is a ferment of potential. It has somewhere near one hundred billion neurons, and it can make a nearly infinite variety

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of possibleconnections,building what scientistscall "neuralpathways" out of what we encounterin the world. Our brainsare preprogrammedto somedegreeby our genetics,but our experiences deeply affect how we evolveas individuals and how our brains develop. Consider,for instance,how we learn language.Learning to speakis one of the most miraculousachievelnentsin a child's life. It happensfor most of uswithin our first few years.No one teaches languageto us-certainly not our parents.They couldn't possibly do that becausespokenlanguageis too complex,too subtle,and too full of variationsfor anyoneto teachit formally to a child. Of course,parentsand others guide and correct young children as they learn to speakand they may encourageand applaud them. But babiesdon't learn to speakby instruction. They learn by imiration and inference.\7e are all born with a deep,instinctive capacity for language,which is activatedalmost as soon aswe draw breath. Babiesinstinctively recognizcmeaningsand intentions in the soundsand tonesthey hear from other humansaround them. Babies born into householdswith dogs as pets will respondto the noisesand growls that dogs make. However,they don't confuse thesesoundswith human language.Most children don't opt for barking asa way of communicating-with the possibleexception of the terrible twos and a coupleof yearsin late adolescence. There doesn'tseemto be any obviouslimit to our capacityfor languages.Children born into multilingual householdsare likely to learn eachof theselanguages.They don't reacha point of saturation and say,"Pleasekeep my grandmotherout of here. I can't handle anotherdialect."Young children tend to learn all the languagesto which they are exposedand to slip effortlesslybetween them. I recall meeting three school-agebrothers a few years ago. Their mother was French, their father was American, and

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they lived in Costa Rica. They were fluent in French,English, and Spanishas well as an amalgam they createdfrom the three that they usedexclusivelywhen speakingwith eachother. On the other hand, if you are born into a monolingual household, the odds are that you won't seek out other languagesto learn, at least until you need to chooseone in middle school. Learning a new languageat that point is a much more difficult thing to do becauseyouve alreadypaveda largenumber of neural pathwayswith rcgardto language(in other words, you'vemade a huge number of yes/nodecisionsabout what to call a particular and evenhow to shapeyour mouth item, how to form sentences, when speaking).tying to speaka foreign languagefor the first time in your thirties is eventougher. The neuroscientistSusan Greenfield illustratesthe amazing plasticity of the young brain in a cautionarytale of a six-year-old boy in ltaly, who was blind in one eye.The causeof his blindness was a mystery.As far as the ophthalmologistscould tell, his eye was perfectly normal. T'hey eventuallydiscoveredthat when he was a baby,he had been treatedfor a minor infection. The treatment included having the eye bandaged for two weeks. T'his would havemade little differenceto the eye of an adult. But in a young baby,the developmentof the eye-to-brainneural circuits is a delicateand critical process.Becausethe neurons serving the bandagedeye were not being used during this crucial period of development,theyweretreatedby the brain asthough they weren't there at all. "Sadly," said Greenfield,"the bandaging of the eye was misinterpretedby the brain as a clearindication that the boy would not be using the eyefor the rest of his life." The resultwas that he was pernanently blinded in that eye. Youngbrainsarein a constantprocessofevolution and change, and extremelyreactiveto their environment.During early stages of development,our brains go through a processthat cognitive

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scientistscall "neural pruning." Essentially,this involves trimming awayneural pathwaysthat we determineat an unconscious levelto havelittle long-termvalueto us. This pruning is of course different for every individual, but it is a tremendouslynecessary part of development.It servesthe same function in our brains branches aspruning doesto 2 11ss-i1 getsrid of the unnecessary to allow for continued growth and increasedoverall strength. It shuts down pathways that we'll never use again in order to make room for the expansionof pathwaysthat we will use regularly. As a result, the enormousnatural capacitieswith which we are all born become shapedand molded, expandedor limited, through a constant processof interaction betweeninternal bioin the world. and our actual experiences logical processes The bestnewsin all of this is that the physicaldevelopmentof the brain is not a straightforward,one-waylinear process.Our brains don't stop developingwhen we get our first set of car keys (though the insurancecompanieswould like to suggestasmuch). Harvard neurobiologistGerald Fischbachhas performed extensive researchin brain cell counting and has determinedthat we retain the overwhelmingmajority of our brain cellsthroughout our lives. The averagebrain contains more neuronsthan it could possibly use in a lifetime, even given our increasedlife expectancies. In addition, researchindicatesthat, as long as we keep using our brainsin an activeway,we continue to build neural pathways as we get older.This givesus not only the ongoing potential for creativethought, but also an additional incentivefor continuing to stretch ourselves.There is strong evidenceto suggestthat the creativefunctions of our brain staystrong deepinto our lives:we can recoverand renew many of our latent aptitudesby deliberately exercisingthem. Just as physicalexercisecan revitalizeour muscles,mental exercisecan revitalize our creativecapabilities.

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There'sextensiveresearchgoing on now regardingneurogenesis, the creation of new brain cells in adult humans. It's becoming clear that, contrary to what we believedfor more than a century, the brain continu€sto generatenew cells, and certain mentai this. techniques(suchasmeditation) can evenaccelerate \7e can admire the remarkabler.vorkdone by peoplelike Georgia O'Keeffe,Albert Einstein,PaulNewman,and I. M. Peilatein their lives, but we should not considerthis work remarkablebecausethey did it late in life. 'fhese peopleweresimplyhigh achieverswho kept their brainssharpso they could continueto be high achievers.'i-hat they accomplishedwhat they did at advanced agesshouldnot surpriseus nearly:rsmuch as it often does. I nrentionedearlierthat it's unlikely that a centenarianwill just unlikely.The take tlre leadin Swdnl.ake.lt'snot irnpossible, reason,of course,is that, at leastr"rntilmedical sciencetakesseveral leapsforwirrd, someoltour capacitiesdo deterioratewith age, especiallyphysicalathleticism.There'snot much point in denying this, though someof Llstry desperately to do so, to the point of ernbarrassing ourselvesin public. However, this isn't true of all of our capacities.Like a goocl wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano,some of them actually improve over time. There seemto be seasons of possibilityin all of our lives,and they vary accordingto what we'redoing. It's r.videlyaccepted thar our abilities in mathematics,for example, tend to grow and peak in our twentiesand thirties. I don't mean the ability to work out the food bill or to calculatethe odds of your team winning the SuperBowl. I'm speakingabout the kind of higher math doneby world-classmathematicians,the Terencef aosof the world. Most math geniuseshavedone their most original work by the time the rest of us have signedup for our first mortgageswhich is somethingwe probablywouldn't do if we were better at

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rnath. The same is true of learning the technical skills of playing a musicai instrument. But in other ways and in other areas, maturity can be a genuine advantage, especially, for example, in the arts. Many writers, poets, painters, and composers have produced their greatestwork as their insights and sensitivitiesdeepenedwith age. One can say the same about disciplines as diverse as law, cooking, teaching, and landscapedesign. In fact, in any discipline where experience plays a significant role, age is an assetrather than a liability. It follows. then, that "too late" arrives at various times, depending on where your search for the Element takes you. If it's toward internationally cornpetitive 91,6ns.1ics, it might be too late by the time yc'ru'refifteen" If it's towarcl developing a new style of fusion cuisine, "too late" might never come. For rnost of us, we're not even close to "too late."

EngagedI'-orauer One of the resultsof seeingour lives as linear and unidirectional is that it leadsto a cuiture (true of nrost Western cultures, in fact) 'We send the very youtrg to nursery of segregating people by age. schools and kinclergartens as a group. \We educate teenagers in batches. \7e inove the elderly into retirement homes. There are some sood teasonsfor all of this. After all, as Gail Sheehy noted decades ago, there are predictable passagesin our lives, and it meke s s om c s c ns et o c re a tee n v i ro n me n tsw l te re pcopl e can experience those passagesin an optimal way. However, there are also good reasonsto challenge the routines of what reaily amounts to age discrirnination. An inspiring example is a unique educational program in the Jenks school district of Tulsa, Okiahoma.

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The stateof Oklahoma has a nationally acclaimedearly-years readingprogram,providing readingclasses for three-to five-yearolds throughout the state.The Jenksdistrict offersa unique version of the program. This cameabout when the owner of another institution in Jenks-one acrossthe street from one of the elem€ntary schools-approached the superintendentof schools. He'd heard about the readingprogram and wonderedif his institution could offer somehelp.The superintendentrespondedpositively to the idea and, after clearing some bureaucratichurdles, welcomedthe other institution'shelp. The other institution is the GraceLiving Center,a retirement home. Over the next few months, the district establisheda preschool and kindergarten classroomin the very heart of Grace Living Center. Surroundedby clearglasswalls (with a gap at the top to allow the soundsof the children to filter out), the classroomsits in the foyer of the main building. The children and their teachers go to school there every day as though it were any other classroom. Becauseit's in the foyer, the residentswalk past it at least three times a day to get to their meals. As soon as the classopened,many of the residentsstoppedto look through the glasswalls at what was going on. The teachers told them that the children were learning to read. One by one, severalresidentsaskedif they could help. The teacherswere glad to have the assistance, and they quickly set up a program called Book Buddies.The program pairs a member of rhe retiremenr home with one of the children. The adults listen to the children read,and they readto them. The programhashad someremarkableresults.One is that the majority of the children at the Grace Living Center are ourperforming other children in the district on the srare'sstandardized reading tests.More than 70 percentare leaving the program at

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agefive readingat third-gradelevelor higher.But the children are learningmuch more than how to read.As they sit with their book with the adults about a buddies,the kids have rich conversations wide variety of subjects,and especiallyabout the elders'memories of their childhoods growing up in Oklahoma. The children ask things about how big iPods were when the adults were growing up, and the adults explain that their lives really weren't like the livesthat kids havenow. J'his leadsto storiesabout how they lived and playedseventy,eighty,or evenninety yearsago.The children are getting a wonderfully textured social history of their hometowns from peoplewho have seenthe town evolveover the decades.Parentsare so pleasedwith this extracurricularbenefitthar a lottery is now required becausethe demand for the sixty availabledesksis so strong. Somethingelsehas beengoing on at the GraceLiving Center, though: medicationlevelsthereareplummeting.Many of the residentson the program havcstoppedor cut back on their drugs. \fhy is this liappening?Becausethe adult participantsin the program have come back to life. Instead of whiling away their dayswaiting fbr the inevitable,they havea reasonto get up in the morning and a renewedexcitementabout what the day might bring. Becausethey are reconnectinglvith their creativeenergies, they areliterallyliving longer. J'here'ssomething else the children learn. Every now and then, the teachershaveto tell them that one of their book buddies won't be coming an)/ more; that this personhas passed.So the children cometo appreciateat a tenderagethat life hasits rhythms and cycles,and that eventhe peoplethey becomecloseto arepart of that cycle. In a way,the GraceLiving Center has restoredan ancient,traditional relationshipbetween the generations.The very young and the very old havealwayshad an almost mystical connection.

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They seemto understandeachother in a fundamental,often unspokenway. Our practicein the \7est is often to keepthesegenerationsapart. The Book Buddiesprogram showsin a simpleyet profound way the enrichment possiblewhen generationscome together.It showstoo that the elderlycan revivelong-lostenergies if the circumstancesare right and the inspiration is there.

There\ Time \Whateveryonefrom Susan Jeffersto Julia Child to the book buddies teach us is that remarkable,life-enhancingthings can happen when we take the time to stepout of our routines,rethink our paths,and revisitthe passionswe left behind (or neverpursuedat all) for whateverreason.\7e can take ourselvesin freshdirections at nearly any point in our lives.\7e havethe capacityto discover the Element at practically any age. As the actor Sophia Loren oncesaid,"There zi a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents,the creativityyou bring to your life and the livesof the people you love. tVhen you learn to tap this source,you will truly have defeatedage."

CHAPT ER

T EN

For Love or Money

v

academicscholar.'$?'hen ennlel Tnop is an accomplished f for a Ph.D. in Gerwas Berkeley studying met him, he at Ut man literature.This work meansa greatdeal to him, but it is not the only thing about which he is passionate.He alsohas an overwhelming attraction to music. "If I were to lose the use of my hands,"he said to me, "my life would be over." Yet Gabriel has neverentertainedthe thought of becoming a professionalmusician.In fact, for a long time he didn't want to be involved in music at all. In his first yearsof high school,Gabriel would look pityingly at the music students,struggling acrossthe campuswith their bulky instrumentcases,turning up at school fbr rehearsalshours before anyone else had to be there. That u'asn'ta life for him, especiallythe part about getting to school extra early.He vowed secretlyto avoid music. However, one day, in the music classthat was part of his school'sstandardcurriculum, he was tinkling idly on the piano and reaiizedthat he found it easyto pick out tunes.\7ith a sinking feeling,he realizedtoo that he actually enjoyeddoing it. He tried to disguisehis obviouspleasurefrom the music teacher,who had wanderedover to listen. He must not havedone this particularly well, becausethe teachertold Gabriel that he had a good ear and suggestedthat Gabriel go into the music storeroomto seeif any of the instrumentsthere appealedto him. A friend of Gabriel'splayedthe cello, and for this reasonand

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no other,Gabriel decidedto try out one of thosein the storeroom. He found that he loved the shapeand sizeof the instrument and the deep, sonorousnoise it made when he plrrckedthe strings. One cello in particular,had "a wonderful smell of middle school varnish." He decided to break his vow and to give the cello a chance.\When he beganpracticing,he took it very casually.But he quickly found that he loved playing this instrument, and that he wasspendingmoreand more time doing so. From there,Gabriel practicedso ofien and with such intensity that within a couple of months he was playing reasonablywell. Within a year,he wasthe principalccllistin the schoolorchestra. 'fhis meant,of course,that he arrivedat schoolearlyin the morning, dragginghis bulky iustruntentcaseacrossthe campusto the pitying looks of the nonmusicianshe had left behind. Gabrielalso lovesliterature,the German ianguage,and acadernic work. At somepoint, he had to make a hard decisionbetween music and academicsas his prirnary focus in life. After a long internal struggle,he choseGerman literaturebecausehe felt that doing so would allow him to continue to spendtime asa cellist, while if he dedicatedhimself to a professionin music,the time requiredto do so would have made it nearly impossibleftir hirn to exploreGerman poetry in depth. "I choseliterature becauseit seemedto me compatiblervith an intensity of music playing, and if I wereto be a professionalmusician,my attachmentto literaturewould havebeendisproportionatelysidetracked.So this arrangementwas really the one I could find where I could remain a dedicatedcellist and sustaina high degreeof involvementwith Iiterarylanguage." Still, he plays for hours every day and continues to perfbrm (he recentlyplayeda cello concertowith the University of California BerkeleySymphony C)rchestra).He doesn'tknow how he would survive without regular immersion in the practice and

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enjoymentof music. To call this a hobby,he says,would be ridiculous.Music is elementalin his life, and in music,he hasfound his Element. In the truest meaning of the word, Gabriel is an amat€urmusician.And he wouldn't haveit any other way.

For the Loue of It in any field aresimply those At the most basiclevels,professionals living in that field, while amateursarepeotheir peoplewho earn ple who don't. But the terms arnateur andprofessionaloften imply somethingel5s-5ornslhing about quality and expertise.People as thoseu4roperform well oftcn think of amateursassecond-rate, below professionallevels.Amateurs are the oneswho gesticulate too wildly in the local theaterproduction,who scoreovera hundred on the golf course,or who write cute storiesabout petsin the town'sfreenewspaper.tiThen we call something"amateurish,"we usethc rvord asa pejorative.\7e're suggestingthat the thing upon rn'hichwe're cclmmentingis nowhere near professional,that the effort is som€thingof an embarrassment. Sometirnesit's perfectlyreasonableto draw sharp distinctions and amateurs.There can, after all, be enorbetweenprofessionals mous clifferencesof accomplishmentbetweenthem. If I had to havea vasectomy,I'd greatlypreferto put myself in the hands of' someonewho did this sort of thing for a living ratherthan someone who occasionallydabbledin it. But often the differencesbetween professionalsand amateurshave less to do with quality than with choice.Many people,like Gabriel, do perform at professionallevelsin the fields they love.They simply choosenot to make their living that way. They aren'tprofessionalsin this field becausethey don't make money that way.They are,by definition, amateurs.But nothing about their skill is "amateurish."

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The word amateurderivesfrom the Latin word dmAtor,which meanslover,devotedfriend, or someonewho is in avid pursuit of' an objective.In the original sense,an amateur is someonewho doessomethingfor the love of it. Amateurs do what they do becausethey havea passionfor it, not becauseit paysthe bills. True amateurs,in other words, arepeoplewho havefound the Element in somethingother than their jobs. In "The Pro-Am Revolution," a report for the British think tank Demos, CharlesLeadbeaterand Paul Miller underline the rise of a rype of amateur that works at increasinglyhigher standards and generatesbreakthroughssometimesgreaterthan those made by professionals-hencethe term Pro-Am. In many cases, new technologyis providing a wider group with apparatusonce unaffordable to the 2m31su1-QCD chips for telescopes,Pro Toolsfor musicians,sophisticatedvideo editing softwarefor home computers,and so on. Leadbeaterand Miller point to the emergenceof hip-hop, a musical genrethat startedwith the distribution of handmadetapes. They note that the Linux computer operating system is a collaborativework createdby a largecommunity of programmers in their sparetime. The Jubilee2000 debt campaign,which has resultedin the relief of tens of billions of dollars in debt from Third \7orld countries,startedwith the petitions of peoplewith And an amateurastronomer no professionallobbying experience. using a ten-inch telescopeis credited with the discovery of a supernova. 'A Pro-Am pursuesan activity as an amateur,mainly for the love of it, but setsa professionalstandard,"Leadbeaterand Miller say. "Pro-Ams are unlikely to earn more than a small portion of their income from their pastime but they pursue it with the dedication and commitment associatedwith a professional. For Pro-Ams, leisureis not passiveconsumerismbut active and

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participatory; it involves the deployment of publicly accredited knowledgeand skills, often built up overa long career,which has involvedsacrificesand frustrations." Leadbeaterand Miller call Pro-Ams "a new social hybrid," noting that they pursue their passionsoutsideof the workplace, but with an energyand dedicationrarely given to actsof leisure. Pro-Ams find this level of intensity restorative,often helping to jobs. compensatefor less-than-inspiring Somepeopledo truly remarkablework asamateurs.Arthur C. Clarke was a best-sellingsciencefiction writer, author of, among with Rama. other novels,2001: A SpaceOdysseyand Rendezuous He'd alreadybegun his writing careerwhen he becamean officer in the BritishRoyalAir Force.While there,he observedscientists in the air force'sradar division and becamefascinatedwith their work. In 1945he published an article in WirelessWorld magazine entitled "Extra-TerrestrialRelays: Can Rocket Stations Cive World-\V'ideRadio Coverage?" In it, he positedthe use of satelorbit to broadcasttelevisionsignalsaround litesin geostationary the globe. Most scientistsdismissedthis propositionasyet anotherwork of sciencefiction. However,Clarke had a very keeninterestin the subject,and he had studied it carefully. His proposalwas solid technically and, as we all now know, utterly prescient.The specific geostationaryorbit Clarke proposedis now known as the Clarke orbit, and hundreds of satellitesuse it. And while Clarke of the New York Times made his living in the upper stratospheres (specificallya he amateur it's the work did as an list, best-seller letter to the editors of WirelessWorld that precededhis article) that sitsin the National Air and SpaceMuseum. SusanHendrickson hasn't had a particular professionat all. She dropped out of high school, becamea skilled scuba diver, taught herselfto identify raremarine specimens,becamean expert

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at finding amber insectfossils,and haslived a multifacetedlife as an explorerand adventurer.In 1990, Hendricksonjoined an archaeologicalexpedition in South Dakota led by the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research.The work started extremely slowly.The group exploredsix outcropsand made no significant Then one day,while the restof her team wasin town, discoveries. Hendrickson decidedto explorethe only other mappedoutcrop. There, shecameupon a few small bones.Theseboneswould lead to the uncoveringof the largestand most completefossil skelerex ever discovered-and one of the few ton of a Tyrannosaurus female T rexeseverfound. The skeletonis now on display at the Field Museum in Chicago.Her name:TyrannosaurusSue,after the amateurarchaeologist who unearthedher. In his book The Amateurs,David Halberstam wrote about four athletesin their pursuit of Olympic gold in 1984. Unlike the track champions or basketballplayerswho could leverage Olympic successinto huge professionalcontracts (the Olympic Committee didnt allow NBA stars to participateback then) or endorsementdeals,the subjectsHalberstamfollowed-scullershad no chanceof cashingin on their victories.They weredoing it purely for the love of the sport and the senseof accomplishment that would come from being the best. 'Wood. The book focusesmost closelyon Christopher "Tiff" Halberstam calls \Wood "the personificationof the amateur.He had put asidecareer,marriage,pleasurein his single-mindedpursuit of excellencein a sport that few of his fellow countrymen caredabout and that was, therefore,absolutelywithout commercial rewards."At thirty-one, \7ood was old for the sport (at least at the Olympic level),but he was on a mission.He'd been an alternate at the 1976 Olympics and never got to compete. He was

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the captain of the 1980 team that was supposedto go to Moscow. But, asa protestover the SovietinvasionofAfghanistan, America chosenot to attend thosegames. The 1984 Olympics would be'Woodk last chancefor a gold medal. \Within the small but devotedsculling community, he'd becomesomething of a favoriteson. Tiff \Wood,as it turns out, did not come away with the gold. That fact, though, is only a '$(/'hat comesacrossin Halberstam'sdepiction sidebarto the story. of \food and the other scullersis the passionand satisfactionassociatedwith a purely amateurpursuit. Tiff \Wooddiscoveredthe Element through his nonprofessionalefforts. His job was just a job. Rowing was his life. To be in your Element, it isn't necessaryto drop everything elseand do it all day,everyday. For somepeople,at somestages in their lives, leaving their current jobs or roles to pursue their passionssimply isn't a practicalproposition.Other peoplechoose not to do that for a whole range of reasons.Many peopleearn their living doing one thing, and they then createtime and space in their lives to do the thing they love. Some peopledo this becauseit makes greatersenseemotionally. Others do it because they feel they haveno alternativebut to pursuetheir passions"on the side." A coupleof yearsago, I was leasinga new car from a dealership in SantaMonica. As it turned out, this was not easy.There was a time when the only decisionyou had to make when buying a car was whetherto have it or not. Now you haveto take a fullscalemultiple-choicetest to navigateyour way betweenthe hunand performance features dreds of finishes,trims, accessories, you the version you actuallywant. I'm not between and that stand decision-making.I needhelp decidgood at this kind of excessive ing what to wear in the morning, where there'smuch lesschoice

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and the stakesare far lower. By the time I'd made up my mind about the car, my salesman,Bill, and I had bonded and were planning our annualreunion. Vhile we were waiting for the final paperwork-another lengthy process-l askedhim what he did when he wasn'tworking. \Without missing a beat, he said he was a photographer.I asked him what he photographed,assuming he meant family weddingsand pets.He said he was a sportsphotographer.I asked him what sports he covered."Just surfing," he said. I was intrigued and askedhim why. He said that he'd beena surferwhen he was younger and simply loved the beauty and dynamics of the sport. He rvent to the beachat Maiibu after work, weekends, holidays-whenever he could-just to take pictures.He'd been doing this for yearsand had accumulatedthousandsof dollars' worth of cameras,tripods, and specializedlenses.Over longer holiciays,he traveledto Hawaii and Australia to catch the big surf on canlera.

I askedhim if any of his pictureshad beenpublished.He said they had, and pulled open the drawer of his desk. It was full of high-production,glossysurfing magazines.He had picturesin everyone of them. His work was very,very good. I askedhim if he'd ever thought of doing this type of work for a living. "I'd love to," he said, "but there isn't enough money in it." Nonetheless,surfing photographywas his passion,and one of the things that rnade his life worthwhile. As I leafedthrough these amazing, professionalimages.I asked him what his boss at the deaiershipthought of them. "He doesn't know anything about them," Bill told me. "It's not really relevantto how I do my job, is it?" I'm not surehe was right about that. I actually think it might havehad a greatdealto do with how Bill did his job, asis likely the casewith all peoplewho discoverthe Element in a pursuit other

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than their jobs. My guessis that the satisfactionand excitement Bill found photographingsurfersmade it so much easierfor him to be effectiveat what he thought of as the relativedrudgery of helping customerschoosefrom dozensof paint samples,finish options, and decisionsabout running boards.The creativeoutlet he found in his photographymade him that much more patient and helpful in his day job. The need for an outiet of this sort manifestsitself in many forms. One that i find fascinatingis the emergenceof the corporate rock band. Unlike the conrpanysoftball team,which tendsto fill its rosterwith young peoplefrom the mailroom, thesebands rend to include a lineup of senior executives(unlesssomeonein the mailroom is a great bassplayer)who once dreamedof being rock stars before settling into other careers.The passionwith which many of theseamateurmusiciansplay showsthat such an avocationoffersa levelof fulfilhnent they can't find in their work, regardlessof how accomplishedthey are at their jobs. For four yearsnow, there has been a rock festivalof sortsput togetherin New York to benefit the charity A Leg to Stand On. \What distinguishesthis rock benefitshow from all othersis that every member of every band (with the exceptionof a couple of ringers) is in the hedgef und business."By day, most of the perfor Hedge formersmanagemoney,"statesone of the pressreleases Fund Rocktoberfest,"but when they turn off their trading screens, they turn on the music." "By 11 p.m., everyoneis eirher thinking about their 4 aln. train ride the next morning or the fact that the Tokyo marketsare now open,"notedTim Seymour,one of the performers.But while the show is on, it's pure revelry,with managerscovering classic hits or even donning skimpy outfits to serveas backup singers. The contrastbetweenthe day job and this is dramatic and, by all indications,liberatingfor everyonewho participates.

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Transformation Finding the Elementis essentialto a balancedand fulfilled life. It can also help us to understandwho we really are.Thesedays,we tend to identify ourselvesby our jobs. The first questionat parties and social gatheringsis often, "\fhat do you do?" We dutifully answer with a topJine description of our professions:"I'm a teacher,""I'm a designer,""I'm a driver." If you don't havea paid job, you might feel somewhatawkward about this and find the needto givean expianation.For so many of us, our jobs defineus, even to ourselves-and even if the work we do doesn'texpress who we really feel we are. This can be especiallyfrustrating if your job is unfulfilling. If we're not in our Elementat work, it becomeseven more important to discoverthat Element somewhere else. 'Io begin with, it can enrich everythingelseyou do. Doing the thing you love and that you do well for even a coupleof hours a week can make everything elsemore palatable.But in somecircumstances,it can lead to transformationsyou rnight not have imaginedpossible. Khaled Hosseiniimmigratedto Americain 1980,got a medical degreein the 1990s,and setoffon a careerpracticinginternal medicine in the Bay Area. ln his heart, though, he knew he wanted to be a writer and that he wanted to tell the story of life in Afghanistan prior to the Soviet invasion.\While continuing his medicalpractice,he beganwork on a novel about two boysgrowing up in Kabul. That novel becameTheKite Rwnner,altookrhat has sold more than four million copiesand generateda recent film. Hosseini'spursuit of his most intense interests,even while he was working hard at another profession,transformed him in profound ways.The successof TheKite Runner has allowed him

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to go on an extendedsabbaticalfrom medicineand to concentrate on writing full-time. He publishedhis secondnovel,the best-sellingA ThousandSplendidSuns,in2007. "I enjoyedpracticingmedicine and was alwayshonoredthat patientsput their trust in me to take careof them and their loved ones,"he said in a recentinterview. "But writing had alwaysbeen my passion,sincechildhood. I feel ridiculously fortunate and privilegedthat writing is, at least for the time being, my livelihood. It is a dream realized." Like Khaled Hosseini's,Miles \Taters'sfirst careerwas in the medical profession.He beganpracticing as a dentist in England In 1974.And like Hosseini,\Tatershad a burning passionfor an entirely different field. In \Taters'scase,it was popular music. He'd played in bands at school and started writing songsalong the way.In 1977,he scaledbackhis dental practiceto spendmore time at songwriting. It took him severalyearsto make inroads, but he eventuallywrote severalhit songsand beganto earn a living in the music field. He quit dentistry for a period and worked full-time as a rn'riterand producer,contributing to an album by Jim Capaldi (from the legendaryrock band Traffic) that featured work from Eric Clapton, Steve\7inwood, and GeorgeHarrison. He's traveledin the same circles as Paul McCartney and Pink Floyd's David Gilmour. These days, he shuttlesbetween music and dentistry,maintaininga practicewhile still composingand producing. \Woodmadea fortune asa marketingexecutivefor MicroJohn soft. During a trip to the Himalayas, though, he came upon a school in an impoverishedvillage. The school taught four hundred and fifty students,but had only twenty books-and not one of thesewas a children'sbook. \When \Wood askedthe school's headmasterhow the schoolgot by with such a paucity of books, the headmasterenlisted his aid. \7ood began collecting books and raising moneyfor this schooland others,doing the work on

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nights and weekendswhile dealingwith a hugelydemandingday job. Finally,he walked awayfrom Microsoft for his true callingRoom to Read,a nonprofit organizationwith the goal of extending literacy in poor countries.Severalof his Microsoft colleagues to many of thought he'd lost his mind. "It was incomprehensible them," he said in an interview."'W'henthey found out I was leaving to do things like delivering books on the backsof donkeys, they thought I was crazy."Room to Read has been transformational not only for \Wood, but for thousandsand thousandsof others. The nonprofit