The Element (24 page)

Finding our Element often requires the aid and guidance of others. Sometimes this comes from someone who sees something in us that we don’t see in ourselves, as was the case with Gillian Lynne. Sometimes it comes in the form of a person bringing out the best in us, as Peggy Fury did with Meg Ryan. For me, Charles Strafford saw that I would only reach my potential if my educators offered me greater challenges. He took the necessary steps to assure that it happened.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the person who was to mentor me for most of my adult life this far was also at school in Liverpool at the time, just a few miles away from 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 course for teachers. She was teaching drama in a difficult, low-income area of the city. We had an instant connection—which had absolutely nothing to do with teaching, education, or the Element—and we’ve been together ever since. She’s one of the finest mentors I know, not just to me but to friends, family, and everyone who works with her and for her. She knows intuitively the power and importance of mentors because they have been so important in her own life. While I was being mentored by Charles, she had a childhood mentor of her own. This is how she tells it:

“I went to an all-girls Catholic high school run by an order of nuns known as the Sisters of Mercy—a misnomer if ever there was one. This was the ‘swinging sixties,’ and we weren’t doing any swinging, but we were doing a lot of praying and in particular, I was praying for a way out. By the time I was seventeen my only ambition was to leave home, move away from the suburbs and get to the bright lights of London fast. From there I was planning on getting to America and marrying Elvis Presley.

“My academic career had been one abject failure 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, Sister Mary Columba, a tiny young woman who had a passion for W. B. Yeats and a passion for teaching. At the very first seminar, she picked me to read a poem to the class and, as I did, the hairs on the back of my neck tingled. I still have never read anything more beautiful or powerful:

 

“For the first time I really wanted to learn more and over the next two years she guided me to a love of Dickens and E. M. Forster to Wilfred Owen, Shakespeare, and Synge. We were a small tutorial group and every one of us was intensely engaged in her classes. She encouraged my writing, she made me give of my best and with her guidance I was able to challenge others intellectually and to shine.

“These books opened me to a world of possibilities and what intrigued me most was how open-minded she was. After all, she was a Catholic nun and here we were discussing love and sex and the occult. No subject was taboo. We would spend hours discussing any theme that was thrown up, from the Oedipus complex in
Coriolanus
to the infidelity in
Howards End
. For a girl who had rarely been out of Liverpool this was heady stuff.

“I was her top pupil that year and I passed my English exams cum laude. At her suggestion I 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’s lives at opportune times, though, as we saw with Eric Drexler and Marvin Minsky, sometimes “mentees” take an active role in choosing their mentors. Warren Buffett, a man who has himself inspired legions of investors, points to Benjamin Graham (known as the father of security analysis) as his mentor. Graham taught Buffett at Columbia University—giving Buffett the only A-plus he ever bestowed in twenty-two years of teaching—and then offered Buffett a job at his investment company. Buffett stayed there several years before heading off on his own. In his book
Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist
, Roger Lowenstein writes, “Ben Graham opened the door, and in a way that spoke to Buffett personally. He gave Buffett the tools to explore the market’s manifold possibilities, and also an approach that fit his student’s temper. Armed with Graham’s techniques, Buffett could dismiss his oracles and make use of his native talents. And steeled by the example of Graham’s character, Buffett would be able to work with his trademark self-reliance.”

In a different domain entirely, the singer Ray Charles was a guiding light to countless people for his remarkable musical talent and his ability to overcome adversity. His story starts, though, with a man who taught him to tap into the music that was deep inside him.

In an interview with the Harvard Mentoring Project posted on
www.WhoMentoredYou.org
, Charles recalled, “Wiley Pittman, he was a cat. I mean, if it hadn’t been for him, I don’t think I’d be a musician today. We lived next door to him. He had a little café, a general store, and he had a piano in there. Every afternoon 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 to practicing and 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 leave them, and go inside and 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 say to me, ‘Look kid, you don’t hit the keys with your whole fist like this if you like music so much,’ and he knew how much I liked music because I’d stop everything I was doing and listen to him.

“So he started to teach me how to play little melodies with one finger. And, of course, I realize today that he could’ve said, ‘Kid, get away from me, can’t you see I’m practicing?’ But he didn’t. He took the time. Somehow, he knew in his heart, ‘this kid loves music so much, I’m going to do whatever I can to help him learn how to play.’ ”

Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund, discovered her mentor when she went away to school at Spelman College, a place she describes as “a staid women’s college that developed safe, young women who married Morehouse men, helped raise a family, and never kicked up dust.” While she was there, she met the history professor Howard Zinn. They were in the South in the late 1950s, and Zinn felt it was important to motivate his students to play an active part in the civil rights struggle.

Inspired by Zinn, Edelman engaged in the early civil rights protests that opened the door to a national movement. Her essential role as a voice for change and justice, and the extraordinary work she has done for children for more than three decades, found its path through the mentorship of Howard Zinn.

I came upon the stories about Ray Charles and Marian Wright Edelman while reading about National Mentoring Month, a campaign orchestrated by the Harvard Mentoring Project of the Harvard School of Public Health, MENTOR/National Mentoring Partnership, and the Corporation for National and Community Service. Sponsors for the campaign (eight years old, as of January 2009) include many huge corporations. In addition, a large number of major media companies serve as partners, doing everything from offering hundreds of millions of dollars of free public service announcements to incorporating mentoring stories into the plots of television shows.

Public/Private Ventures, a national nonprofit organization focused on improving “the effectiveness of social policies, programs, and community initiatives, especially as they affect youth and young adults,” performed a landmark impact study on mentoring beginning in 2004. Randomly pairing 1,100 fourth- through ninth-graders in more than seventy schools around the country with volunteers from Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, they reached some encouraging findings about the value of mentoring. The mentored students improved in overall academic performance, quality of class work, and delivery of homework. They also got into serious trouble in school less often and were less likely to skip school.

It was good to see these results, but they didn’t surprise me at all. Many of these kids probably did better in school simply because they appreciated someone taking an interest in them. This is an essential point, and I’ll come back to it later on when I look at the issues and challenges of education. At the very least, good mentoring raises self-esteem and sense of purpose. But mentoring takes an elevated role for people when it involves directing or inspiring their search for the Element. What the psychologist saw with Gillian Lynne and what Wiley Pittman saw with Ray Charles was the opportunity to lead someone toward his or her heart’s fulfillment. What Howard Zinn saw with Marian Wright Edelman and Ben Graham saw with Warren Buffett was rare talent that could blossom into something extraordinary if nurtured. When mentors serve this function—either turning a light on a new world or fanning the flames of interest into genuine passion—they do exalted work.

Mentors connect with us in a variety of ways and remain with us for varying lengths of time. Some are with us for decades in an evolving role that might start as teacher/student and ultimately evolve into close friendship. Others enter our lives at a critical moment, stay with us long enough to make a pivotal difference, and then move on. Regardless, mentors tend to serve some or all of four roles for us.

The first role is
recognition.
Charles Strafford served that function in my life, identifying skills that my teachers had not yet noticed. One of the fundamental tenets of the Element is the tremendous diversity of our individual talents and aptitudes. As we’ve discussed earlier, some tests are available that aim to give people a general indication of their strengths and weaknesses based on a series of standardized questions. But the real subtlety and nuances of individual aptitudes and talents are far more complex than any existing tests can detect.

Some people have general aptitudes for music, or for dance, or for science, but more often than not, their aptitudes turn out to be much more specific within a given discipline. A person may have an aptitude for a particular type of music or for specific instruments: the guitar, not the violin; the acoustic guitar, not the electric guitar. I don’t know of any test or software program that can make the kinds of subtle, personal distinctions that differentiate an interest from a potential burning passion. A mentor who has already found the Element in a particular discipline can do precisely that. Mentors recognize the spark of interest or delight and can help an individual drill down to the specific components of the discipline that match that individual’s capacity and passion.

Lou Aronica, my coauthor on this book, spent the first twenty years of his professional life working for book publishers. His first job out of college was for Bantam Books, one of New York’s publishing powerhouses. Not long after he started at the company, he noticed a wizened, gnomish man wandering the halls. The man didn’t seem to have any particular job, but everyone seemed to pay attention to him. Lou finally asked about 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 person who introduced the paperback book to the United States in the 1940s. Over the next couple of years, Lou passed Ballantine in the hall numerous times, nodding to him politely, and feeling a bit intimidated in the presence of a man who was such a legend in his chosen profession.

Lou got his first “real” job at Bantam around this time, a position in the editorial department, trying to piece together a science fiction and fantasy publishing program. One day not long after this, Lou was sitting at his desk when Ian Ballantine strolled in and sat down. This part was surprising enough to Lou. The next several minutes, however, left him stunned. “Ian had a distinctive way of speaking,” Lou told me. “You got the sense that every thought was a pearl, but his language was so circuitous that it seemed the pearl still had the oyster around it.” What became 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 declarative statements like that. But he suggested he might enjoy dropping by regularly, and I made it clear that he could drop by whenever he wanted and that I’d be happy to go halfway across the world to get to him if he didn’t feel like coming to me.”

Over the next several years, Lou and Ian spent a considerable amount of time together. Ballantine taught Lou much about the history and, more importantly, the philosophy of book publishing. One of Ballantine’s lessons to Lou was to “zig when everyone else is zagging,” his way of suggesting that the fastest path to success is often to go against the flow. This struck a special chord with Lou. “From the time I started in the business, I’d been hearing about the ‘conventions’ of book publishing. It seemed there were a lot of rules about what you could and couldn’t do, which didn’t seem to make much sense to me, since readers don’t read by rules. Ian didn’t believe any of that, and he’d been overwhelmingly more successful than the people spouting these rules were. Right then, I decided to become a publisher who would publish books I loved with only a nodding glance to ‘the rules.’ ”

The approach served Lou well. He had his first book imprint by the time he was twenty-six and became deputy publisher at Bantam and then publisher at Berkley Books and Avon Books before turning his attentions to writing. Before Ian Ballantine chose to mentor him, Lou knew he wanted a career in books. But in addition to teaching him the nuances of the industry, Ballantine helped him identify the particular part of publishing that truly brought him to his Element.