The Element (16 page)

Understanding Meg’s domain and her connection to her field helps explain how the shy girl who couldn’t give a valedictorian speech became an accomplished, world-renowned actor. “When I was working, it was just me and a couple of other actors in a black room with a camera team. I wasn’t worried about an audience, because there wasn’t one. The everyday of it has no audience. The everyday of it is a black sound stage with cameras and one other person you’re doing scenes with. And the activity was so absorbing; these people were so great that I just got carried away in the whole process.”

The confidence she got from that experience was strong enough to carry her further into her domain and to fresh fields of people. Even now, though, she still dislikes talking in public or television talk show interviews. “I do it if I have to. I’d just rather not. It’s just not who I am. I really don’t feel comfortable in that spotlight”

Brian Ray is an accomplished guitarist who has worked with Smokey Robinson, Etta James, and Peter Frampton and toured on bills with the Rolling Stones and the Doobie Brothers. He came to his domain early, and it ultimately led him into the inner circle of a hero that as a child he never dreamed he would meet.

Brian was born in 1955, in Glendale, California, the year that Alan Freed coined the term
rock and roll
. He was one of four kids, including a half sister, Jean, who was fifteen years his elder.

“Jean would take me over to her girlfriend’s house, and they would be playing Rick Nelson, Elvis Presley, and Jerry Lee Lewis while poring over photos of these guys. It had such a visceral impact on me, the reactions of these girls to this music that was pouring out of the radio and their response to these photos. There was a part of me that just got the whole thing, right then and there at age three. My dad played piano, and we had a little phonograph-making kit. It had a microphone, and you could cut a record and put this other needle on it to play the record. I remember sitting, at two or three, with my dad at the piano and cutting records.

“Right out of high school Jean started getting into music, and she joined a folk band called the New Christy Minstrels. They did a tour throughout the country. She’d tell us stories and would be glowing from this life she had grown into. Jean imparted to me her love and joy of music and sealed that by bringing me to clubs and concerts when I was nine and ten years old. I would see and meet people that I worshipped.

“My brother was given a really nice Gibson guitar plus lessons. He didn’t have a big desire to play music, and while he was busy not caring about the lessons, I was busy practicing on his guitar. Then I was given a $5 nylon string guitar by my sister Jean that she bought in Tijuana. I just started crying. My passion for music was so big that it was almost a crusade, without my meaning to or knowing that I wanted to share it and spread it around a little. I started a band with guys before I even knew how to tune a guitar.”

“One Sunday night when I was ten or eleven we heard this new band on
The Ed Sullivan Show
, the Beatles. It was such a different kind of music. It was a mixture of that black R&B that I loved so much, but it was mixed with some other X factor or element that I didn’t know. It was from Mars. It changed everything.

“I knew I wanted to play music, but now they’d closed the deal for me. It was just the most exciting thing I had ever seen. It made being in a band seem like something that was doable and attractive and something I could do for a living. They took away all the ‘maybe I’ll be a fireman.’ I was driven now to what ended up being my life.”

In the next twenty years, Brian played with some of the most outstanding musicians of his generation. Then came the call he never expected—an invitation to audition for Paul McCartney’s new band. He has been touring and playing with McCartney ever since.

“Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that, you know, this little blond kid sitting Indian-style in front of the TV in 1964 would end up playing with that guy singing ‘All My Lovin’ ’ and ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ on
The Ed Sullivan Show
. There is something really gratifying about this story, this, you know, just being a part of this scene.”

The people in this book have found their Element in different domains and with different fields of people. No one is limited to one domain, and many people move in several. Often, breakthrough ideas come about when someone makes a connection between different ways of thinking, sometimes across different domains. As Pablo Picasso explored the limits of his Blue and Rose periods, he became fascinated with the collections of African art at the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris. This work was vastly different from his, but it sparked a new level of creativity in him. He incorporated influences from the ceremonial masks of the Dogon tribe into his landmark painting
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
, and thus launched himself into the Cubist work for which he is most celebrated.

As cultures and technologies evolve, new domains emerge, new fields of practitioners populate them, and old domains fade away. The techniques of computer animation have generated an entire new domain of creative work in cinema, television, and advertising. These days, though, people aren’t spending quite as much time as they used to illuminating manuscripts.

Finding your tribe can have transformative effects on your sense of identity and purpose. This is because of three powerful tribal dynamics: validation, inspiration, and what we’ll call here the “alchemy of synergy.”

Debbie Allen’s career in dance, acting, singing, producing, writing, and directing has dazzled and touched millions. Her career soared in 1980 with the hit TV series
Fame
. She holds the distinction of having choreographed the Academy Awards for six consecutive years, and she has won many awards herself, including the Essence Award in 1992 and 1995. She is the founder and director of the Debbie Allen Dance Academy, which offers professional training for young dancers and professionals. It also commissions opportunities for new choreographers and provides an introduction to dance for all ages.

“As a young child,” she told me, “very young, four or five years old, I can remember putting on my pink shiny bathing suit and tying a towel around my neck, climbing a tree, and dancing on the roof of my house performing to the birds and the clouds. I was always dancing as a little girl; I was inspired by the beautiful pictures of ballerinas. Because I was black and lived in Texas, I hadn’t seen a dance performance but I watched musical films, Shirley Temple, Ruby Keeler, the Nicholas Brothers.

“When the Ringling Brothers Circus came to town, when I saw the spectacle, the people in beautiful costumes and the dancers flying in the air, toes pointed, I just thought it was amazing! I was so inspired by movies. Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev were the most incredible things I had ever seen.

“As a young girl, I couldn’t go to serious dance schools because everything was segregated. I joined Debato Studios. I got a full grant scholarship and attended ten dance classes a week. I still remember my first dance recital—I wore a white shiny satin skirt, a white jacket and orange blouse, white tap shoes and was playing a triangle. The feeling of performing was like being on top of the world! I was always wearing leotards as a child. In fact, at my fiftieth birthday party one of my aunts brought a picture of me at age five in my leotard. I knew I was a dancer very early on.

“I first saw the Alvin Ailey Company at age seventeen. I knew then that I was going to throw away my point shoes, put on high heels and long white skirts, and dance to that kind of music. I identified myself with them so much onstage. It was glorious.

“One summer I went to the Spoleto Dance Festival in the Carolinas. That was when it all fell into place for me. I had ideas as a child but I was challenged by segregation, and so this opportunity to be taught by Dudley Williams in those classes was amazing. Alvin Ailey was there, the resident dance company taught Revelations Dance Classes, and I just shone. They wanted me in the company but Alvin thought I was too young. I never joined them but I knew I had to do that kind of dancing and teach.

“The Academy is born out of my desire to give back. It offers all styles of dance from flamenco, African, modern, and character to tap and hip-hop. We have incredible teachers from all over the world. Every child has the right to learn to dance. It is an incredible language. These are not the kids that are going to get into trouble, believe me.”

Connecting with people who share the same passions affirms that you’re not alone; that there are others like you and that, while many might not understand your passion, some do. It doesn’t matter whether you like the people as individuals, or even the work they do. It’s perfectly possible that you don’t. What matters first is having validation for the passion you have in common. Finding your tribe brings the luxury of talking shop, of bouncing ideas around, of sharing and comparing techniques, and of indulging your enthusiasms or hostilities for the same things. Making this connection was a significant spur to many of the people we’ve met so far in this book—from Matt Groening to Ewa Laurance to Meg Ryan to Black Ice—and to many of those ahead.

Being among other artists at Cranbrook gave Don Lipski a deeper sense that what he was doing mattered and was actually worth doing. He said, “In graduate school I started taking seriously for the first time the little doodles I had made. If I saw a rubber band in the street, I’d pick it up and then start looking for something to wrap it around or combine it with. That’s the sort of activity I’d always done, but when I was in graduate school, I realized that that indeed was sculpture. Although modest, it really was art making and not just passing time.”

Some people are most in their Element when they are working alone. This is often true of mathematicians, poets, painters, and some athletes. Even with these people, though, there’s a tacit awareness of a field—the other writers, other painters, other mathematicians, other players, who enrich the domain and challenge their sense of possibility.

The great philosopher of science Michael Polanyi argues that the free and open exchange of ideas is the vital pulse of scientific inquiry. Scientists like to work on their own ideas and questions, but science is also a collaborative venture. “Scientists, freely making their own choice of problems and pursuing them in the light of their own personal judgment,” he said, “are in fact cooperating as members of a closely knit organization.”

Polanyi argues passionately against state control of science because it can destroy the free interactions on which genuine science depends. “Any attempt to organize the group . . . under a single authority would eliminate their independent initiatives and thus reduce their joint effectiveness to that of the single person directing them from the centre. It would, in effect, paralyze their cooperation.” It was partly this pressure on science that made Helen Pilcher jump ship from stem cells to the comedy stage.

Interaction with the field, in person or through their work, is as vital to our development as time alone with our thoughts. As the physicist John Wheeler said, “If you don’t kick things around with people, you are out of it. Nobody, I always say, can be anybody without somebody being around.” Even so, the rhythms of community life vary in the Element just as they do in daily life. Sometimes you want company; sometimes you don’t. The physicist Freeman Dyson says that when he’s writing, he closes the door, but when he’s actually doing science, he leaves it open. “Up to a point you welcome being interrupted because it is only by interacting with other people that you get anything interesting done.”

Finding your tribe offers more than validation and interaction, important as both of those are. It provides inspiration and provocation to raise the bar on your own achievements. In every domain, members of a passionate community tend to drive each other to explore the real extent of their talents. Sometimes, the boost comes not from close collaboration but from the influence of others in the field, whether contemporaries or predecessors, whether directly associated with one’s particular domain or associated only marginally. As Isaac Newton famously said, “If I saw further it was because I stood on the shoulders of giants.” This is not just a phenomenon of science.

Bob Dylan was born in Hibbing, Minnesota, in 1942. In his autobiography,
Chronicles
, he tells of his sense of alienation from the people there, from his family, and from the popular culture of the day. He knew he had to get away from there to become whoever he was going to be. His one lifeline was folk music. “Folk music,” he said, “was all I needed to exist. . . . I had no other cares or interests besides folk music. I scheduled my life around it. I had little in common with anyone not like-minded.”

As soon as he could, he moved on instinct to New York City. There he found the artists, the singers, the writers, and the “scene” that began to unleash his own talents. He had begun to find his people. But among all of those who inspired and shaped his passion, there was one who led him to an artistic place that he had never imagined. When he first heard Woody Guthrie, he said, “It was like a million megaton bomb had dropped.”

One afternoon in the early 1960s in New York City, a friend invited Dylan to look through his record collection. It included a few record albums of old 78s. One was
The Spirituals to Swing Concert at Carnegie Hall
, a collection of performances by Count Basie, Meade Lux Lewis, Joe Turner and Pete Johnson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and others. Another was a Woody Guthrie set of about twelve double-sided records. Dylan had listened casually to some of Guthrie’s recordings when he was living in Hibbing, but hadn’t paid them close attention. This day in New York City was going to be different.

Dylan put one of the old 78s on the turntable, “and when the needle dropped, I was stunned. I didn’t know if I was stoned or straight.” He listened entranced to Guthrie singing solo a range of his own compositions: “Ludlow Massacre,” “1913 Massacre,” “Jesus Christ,” “Pretty Boy Floyd,” “Hard Travelin’,” “Jackhammer John,” “Grand Coulee Dam,” “Pastures of Plenty,” “Talkin’ Dust Bowl Blues,” and “This Land Is Your Land.”