The Element (22 page)

Under Wilson’s direction, the organization conducted three million cataract operations and treated twelve million others at risk of becoming blind. They also administered more than one hundred million doses of vitamin A to prevent childhood blindness and distributed braille study packs to afflicted people throughout Africa and Asia. In all, tens of millions can see because of the commitment John Wilson made to preventing the preventable.

When Wilson retired, he and his wife devoted their considerable energies to Impact, a program of the World Health Organization that works on the prevention of all types of disabling diseases. Knighted in 1975, he also received the Helen Keller International Award, the Albert Schweitzer International Prize, and the World Humanity Award. He continued to be an active and prominent voice for the cause of preventing blindness and all avoidable disability until his death in 1999.

John Coles, in his biography
Blindness and the Visionary: The Life and Work of John Wilson
, wrote, “By any standards, his achievements rate comparison with those of other great humanitarians.” Others have compared his accomplishments with those of Mother Teresa.

Many people, faced with the circumstances Sir John Wilson encountered, would have bemoaned their existence. Perhaps they would have considered themselves cursed by ill fortune and frustrated in their attempts to do anything significant with their lives. Wilson, however, insisted that blindness was “a confounded nuisance, not a crippling affliction,” and he modeled that attitude in the most inspiring possible way.

He lost his sight and found a vision. He proved dramatically that it’s not what happens to us that determines out lives—it’s what we make of what happens.

There is a risk in giving examples of people who have found their Element. Their stories can be inspiring, of course, but they can also be depressing. After all, these people seem blessed in some way; they’ve had the good fortune to do what they love to do and to be very good at doing it. One could easily ascribe their good fortune to luck, and certainly many people who love what they do say that they’ve been lucky (just as people who don’t like what they’re doing with their lives often say they’ve been unlucky). Of course, some “lucky” people have been fortunate to find their passions and to have the opportunities to pursue them. Some “unlucky” people have had bad things happen to them. But good and bad things happen to all of us. It’s not what happens to us that makes the difference in our lives. What makes the difference is our attitude toward what happens. The idea of luck is a powerful way of illustrating the importance of our basic attitudes in affecting whether or not we find our Element.

Describing ourselves as lucky or unlucky suggests that we’re simply the beneficiaries or victims of chance circumstances. But if being in your Element were just a matter of chance, all you could do is cross your fingers and hope to get lucky as well. There’s much more to being lucky than that. Research and experience show that lucky people often make their luck because of their attitudes.

Chapter 3 looked at the concept of creativity. The real message there is that we all create and shape the realities of our own lives to an extraordinary extent. Those who simply wait for good things to happen really would be lucky to encounter them. All of the people I’ve profiled in this book have taken an active role in “getting lucky.” They’ve mastered a combination of attitudes and behavior that lead them to opportunities and that give them the confidence to take them.

One of these is the ability to look at situations in different ways. There’s a difference between what we are able to perceive—our field of perception—and what we actually do perceive. As I mentioned in the last chapter, there are significant cultural differences in how people perceive the world around them. But two different people with the same cultural orientations may still see the same scene in completely different ways, depending upon their preconceptions and their sense of mission. Best-selling author and top motivational speaker Anthony Robbins demonstrates this with a simple activity. In his three-day seminars, he asks the thousands of people in attendance to look around and count how many items of green clothing they can see. He gives them a few minutes to do this and then asks them for their findings. He then asks them how many items of red clothing they saw. Most people can’t even begin to answer the question because Robbins told them to look for items of green clothing, and they only focused on those.

In his book
The Luck Factor
, psychologist Richard Wiseman writes about his study of four hundred exceptionally “lucky” and “unlucky” people. He found that those who considered themselves lucky tended to exhibit similar attitudes and behaviors. Their unlucky counterparts tended to exhibit opposite traits.

Wiseman has identified four principles that characterize lucky people. Lucky people tend to maximize chance opportunities. They are especially adept at creating, noticing, and acting upon these opportunities when they arise. Second, they tend to be very effective at listening to their intuition, and do work (such as meditation) that is designed to boost their intuitive abilities. The third principle is that lucky people tend to expect to be lucky, creating a series of self-fulfilling prophecies because they go into the world anticipating a positive outcome. Last, lucky people have an attitude that allows them to turn bad luck to good. They don’t allow ill fortune to overwhelm them, and they move quickly to take control of the situation when it isn’t going well for them.

Dr. Wiseman performed an experiment that speaks to the role of perception in luck. He set up a nearby café with a group of actors told to behave the way people normally did in that setting. He also put a five-pound note on the sidewalk just outside the café. He then asked one of his “lucky” volunteers to go down to the shop. The lucky person saw the money on the ground, picked it up, walked into the shop, and ordered a coffee for himself and the stranger at the next chair. He and the stranger struck up a conversation and wound up exchanging contact information.

Next, Dr. Wiseman sent one of his “unlucky” volunteers to the café. This person stepped right over the five-pound note, bought coffee, and interacted with no one. Later, Wiseman asked both subjects if anything lucky happened that day. The lucky subject talked about finding the money and making a new contact. The unlucky subject couldn’t think of anything.

One way of opening ourselves up to new opportunities is to make conscious efforts to look differently at our ordinary situations. Doing so allows a person to see the world as one rife with possibility and to take advantage of some of those possibilities if they seem worth pursuing. What Robbins and Wiseman show us is that if we keep our focus too tight, we miss the rest of the world swirling around us.

Another attitude that leads to what many of us would consider “good luck” is the ability to reframe, to look at a situation that fails to go according to plan and turn it into something beneficial.

If things had worked out differently, there is a very good chance that I would not be writing this book at all now and you would therefore not be reading it. I might be running a sports bar in England and regaling anyone who’d listen with tales of my glittering soccer career. I grew up in Liverpool as one of a large family of boys and one sister. My father had been an amateur soccer player and boxer, and like everyone in my extended family, he was devoted to our local soccer team, Everton. It was the dream of every household in the neighborhood to have one of their own kids play for Everton.

Until I was four, everyone in my family assumed the Everton soccer player 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 epidemics reached their 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 never cried much as a child, so my misery concerned her deeply. Our doctor came to the house and decided I had the flu. By the next morning, it became clear that his diagnosis was off. I woke up completely paralyzed—I could not move at all.

I spent the next few weeks on the emergency list in the polio isolation unit of our local hospital. I’d completely lost the use of my legs and much of my body. For eight months, I found myself in the hospital surrounded by other kids who were struggling with sudden paralysis. Some of them were in iron lungs. Some of them didn’t survive.

Very slowly, I began to recover some use of my left leg and, thankfully, the full use of my arms and the rest of my body. My right leg remained completely paralyzed. I eventually left the hospital at the age of five in a wheelchair, wearing two braces.

This pretty much put an end to my planned career in soccer—although, given the way Everton has been playing lately, I might still have a shot at making the team.

This blow was devastating to my parents and everyone in my family. As I grew up, one of their biggest concerns was how I would make a living. My father and mother recognized from the outset that I needed to make the best use my other talents, though it wasn’t clear at that point what those talents might be. Their first priority was for me to get the best education possible. As I moved through school, I was under extra pressure to study and do my well in my exams. This was not easy. After all, I was one of a large, very close family living in a house that was constantly full of visitors, noise, and laughter.

On top of this, the house was in Merseyside in the early ’60s. Rock music—loud rock music—was everywhere. My brother Ian played drums in a band that rehearsed every week in our house right next door to the room where I was trying to find some relevance in algebra and Latin. In the battle for my attentions between the books and the beat, the books were losing badly.

Still, as much as any boy could, I understood that there was a future to consider and that I needed to do the most with what I had. Soccer was no longer an option, and as much as I loved music, I didn’t have any musical talent to speak of. With the benign pressure of my father, I eventually got through school. I went on to college, and it was there that the interests that have shaped my life began to take form.

I don’t know what kind of soccer player I would have been. I do know that catching polio opened many more doors for me than the one it so firmly closed at the time. I certainly didn’t see this when it happened, and neither did anyone in my family. But my parents’ ability to reframe our situation by doing their best to focus me on my schoolwork, and my ability to reframe my circumstance, turned a disaster into a completely unexpected set of opportunities, which continue to evolve and multiply.

Someone else who was denied a career in soccer went in a very different direction. Vidal Sassoon is one of the most celebrated names in hairdressing. In the 1960s, his clients included the biggest stars and iconic models of the time, including Mary Quant, Jean Shrimpton, and Mia Farrow. His revolutionary creations included the bob, the five-point geometric cut, and the Greek goddess style, taking over from the beehive styles of the 1950s.

When Vidal was a child in the East End of London, his father abandoned his mother. An aunt took them all in, and Vidal and four other children lived together in her two-bedroom tenement flat. Things got so bad that eventually his mother sent Vidal and his brother to an orphanage, and it was nearly six years before she was able to get them home again. As a teenager, he had a passionate ambition be a soccer player, but his mother insisted that he apprentice as a hairdresser. She thought that would be a more secure job for him.

“I was fourteen years old,” he said, “and in England unless you were privileged, that was when you left school and started to earn a living. I was apprenticed to this wonderful man called Adolph Cohen on Whitechapel Road and what a disciplinarian he was! I was fourteen, it was 1942, and the war was on. Bombs were dropping practically every night, the Luftwaffe was giving London hell, and we still had to come in with our nails clean, our trousers pressed, and our shoes polished. Those two years with him definitely gave me the structure I needed in my life: the inconvenience of discipline.

“I took some time out after that because I still wasn’t sure if I wanted to be a hairdresser. I loved football so much. In the end, I suppose it was the prospect of all the pretty girls and, of course, my mother that swung it for me. At first I couldn’t get a proper job in the West End of London at a big salon like Raymond’s because I had a cockney accent. That’s the way it was in those days.”

For three years, he took voice lessons to improve how he sounded so he could get a job at one of the better salons. “I knew I had to learn how to project myself, so I got a job teaching in different salons in the evenings. I used my tips to take a bus to the West End and go to the theater. I’d catch the matinee and see great Shakespearean actors like Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud and try to copy their voices.”

He went regularly to London’s many art museums and began to educate and inspire himself with the history of painting and architecture. “I really think that was what set me on my course. I was developing my own vision for hairdressing. The shapes in my head were always geometric. I have always been working toward a bone structure so as to define a woman rather than just make her ‘pretty pretty.’ I knew hair dressing could be different, but it took a lot of work and nine years to develop the system we use in our salons.”

In 1954, he and a partner opened a very small salon on the third floor of a building in London’s fashionable Bond Street. “Bond Street was magic to me because it meant the West End. It was where I couldn’t get a job earlier. The West End meant I was going to make it. I was determined to change the way things were done or leave hairdressing. For me it wasn’t a case of bouffants and arrangements. It was about structure and how you train the eye.”