The Element (5 page)

Being in your Element is not only a question of natural aptitude. I know many people who are naturally very good at something, but don’t feel that it’s their life’s calling. Being in your Element needs something more—passion. People who are in their Element take a deep delight and pleasure in what they do.

My brother Ian is a musician. He plays drums, piano, and bass guitar. Years ago, he was in a band in Liverpool that included an extremely talented keyboard player named Charles. After one of their gigs, I told Charles how well I thought he’d played that night. Then I said that I’d love to be able to play keyboards that well. “No, you wouldn’t,” he responded. Taken aback, I insisted that I really would. “No,” he said. “You mean you like the idea of playing keyboards. If you’d love to play them, you’d be doing it.” He said that to play as well he did, he practiced every day for three or four hours in addition to performing. He’d been doing that since he was seven.

Suddenly playing keyboards as well as Charles did didn’t seem as appealing. I asked him how he kept up that level of discipline. He said, “Because I love it.” He couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

Attitude is our personal perspective on our selves and our circumstances—our angle on things, our disposition, and emotional point of view. Many things affect our attitudes, including our basic character, our spirit, our sense of self-worth, the perceptions of those around us, and their expectations of us. An interesting indicator of our basic attitude is how we think of the role of luck in our lives.

People who love what they do often describe themselves as lucky. People who think they’re not successful in their lives often say they’ve been unlucky. Accidents and randomness play some part in everybody’s lives. But there’s more to luck than pure chance. High achievers often share similar attitudes, such as perseverance, self-belief, optimism, ambition, and frustration. How we perceive our circumstances and how we create and take opportunities depends largely on what we expect of ourselves.

Without the right opportunities, you may never know what your aptitudes are or how far they might take you. There aren’t many bronco riders in the Antarctic, or many pearl divers in the Sahara Desert. Aptitudes don’t necessarily become obvious unless there are opportunities to use them. The implication, of course, is that we may never discover our true Element. A lot depends on the opportunities we have, on the opportunities we create, and how and if we take them.

Being in your Element often means being connected with other people who share the same passions and have a common sense of commitment. In practice, this means actively seeking opportunities to explore your aptitude in different fields.

Often we need other people to help us recognize our real talents. Often we can help other people to discover theirs.

In this book, we will explore the primary components of the Element in detail. We will analyze the traits that people who have found the Element share, look at the circumstances and conditions that bring people closer to it, and identify the deterrents that make embracing the Element harder. We’ll meet people who have found their way, others who pave the way, organizations that lead the way, and institutions that are going the wrong way.

My goal with this book is to illuminate for you concepts that you might have sensed intuitively and to inspire you to find the Element for yourself and to help others to find it as well. What I hope you will find here is a new way of looking at your own potential and the potential of those around you.

CHAPTER TWO

Think Differently

MICK FLEETWOOD is one of the most famous and accomplished rock drummers in the world. His band, Fleetwood Mac, has sold tens of millions of copies of their recordings, and rock critics consider their albums
Fleetwood Mac
and
Rumours
to be works of genius. Yet when he was in school, the numbers suggested that Mick Fleetwood lacked intelligence, at least by the definitions many of us have come to take for granted.

“I was a total void in academic work, and no one knew why,” he told me. “I had a learning disability at school and still do. I had no understanding of math at all. None. I’d be hard pushed right now to recite the alphabet backward. I’d be lucky if I got it right going forward quickly. If someone were to say, ‘What letter is before this one?’ I’d break out into a cold sweat.”

He attended a boarding school in England and found the experience deeply unsatisfying. “I had great friends, but I just wasn’t happy. I was aware of being squeezed out. I was suffering. I had no sense of what I was supposed to be because everything academic was a total failure, and I had no other reference points.”

Fortunately for Mick (and for anyone who later bought his albums or attended his concerts), he came from a home where his family saw beyond the limits of what they taught and tested in schools. His father was a fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force, but when he left the service, he followed his true passion for writing. He took his family to live on a barge on the river Thames in Kent for three years so he could follow this dream. Mick’s sister Sally went to London to become a sculptor, and his sister Susan pursued a career in the theater. In the Fleetwood household, everyone understood that brilliance came in many forms and that being poor at math, or unable to recite the alphabet backward, hardly doomed one to an inconsequential life.

And Mick could drum. “Playing the piano is probably a more impressive signal that there’s something creative going on,” he said. “I just wanted to beat the shit out of a drum or some cushions on the chair. It’s not exactly the highest form of creative signal. It’s almost, ‘Well, anyone can do that. That’s not clever.’ But I started doing this tapping business, and it turned out to be the make or break for me.”

Mick’s epiphany moment—the point at which the “tapping business” became the driving ambition in his life—came when he visited his sister in London as a boy and went to “some little place in Chelsea with this piano player. There were people playing what I now know was Miles Davis and smoking Gitanes cigarettes. I’d watch them and saw the beginnings of this other world and the atmosphere sucked me in. I felt comfortable. I wasn’t fettered. That was my dream.

“Back at school, I held on to these images and I dreamt my way out of that world. I didn’t even know if I could play with people, but that vision got me out of the morass of this academic bloody nightmare. I had a lot of commitment internally, but I was also incredibly unhappy because everything at school was showing me that I was useless according to the status quo.”

Mick’s school performance continued to confound his teachers. They knew he was bright, but his scores suggested otherwise. And if the scores said otherwise, there was little they could do. The experience proved extremely frustrating for the boy who dreamed of being a drummer. Finally, in his teens, he’d had enough.

“One day, I walked out of school and I sat under a large tree in the grounds. I’m not religious, but with tears pouring down my face, I prayed to God that I wouldn’t be in this place anymore. I wanted to be in London and play in a jazz club. It was totally naive and ridiculous, but I made a firm commitment to myself that I was going to be a drummer.”

Mick’s parents understood that school was not a place for someone with Mick’s kind of intelligence. At sixteen, he approached them about leaving school, and rather than insisting that he press on until graduation, they put him on a train to London with a drum kit and allowed him to pursue his inspiration.

What came next was a series of “breaks” that might never have occurred if Mick had stayed in school. While he was practicing drums in a garage, Mick’s neighbor, a keyboard player named Peter Bardens, knocked on his door. Mick thought Bardens was coming to tell him to be quiet, but instead, the musician invited him to play with him at a gig at a local youth club. This led Mick into the heart of the London music scene in the early 1960s. “As a kid, I had no sense of accomplishment. Now I was starting to get markers that it was okay to be who I was and to do what I was doing.”

His friend Peter Green proposed him as the replacement for the drummer in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, a band that, at various times, included Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce of Cream, and Mick Taylor of the Rolling Stones. Later, he joined with Green and another Bluesbreakers alumnus, John McVie, to form Fleetwood Mac. The rest is a history of multiplatinum recordings and sold-out stadiums. But even as one of the most famous drummers in the world, Mick’s analysis of his talent still bears the marks of his experiences in school.

“My style has no structured math to it. I would go into a complete petrified mess on the floor if someone said, ‘Do you know what a four/eight is?’ Musicians that I work with know that I’m actually like a kid. They might say, ‘You know in the chorus, in the second beat . . . ,’ and I’ll say, ‘No,’ because I don’t know what a chorus is from a verse. I can recognize it if you play the song, because I’ll listen to the words.”

For Mick Fleetwood, getting away from school and the tests that judged only a narrow range of intelligence was the path to a hugely successful career. “My parents saw that the light in this funny little creature certainly wasn’t academics.” It happened because he understood innately that he had a great aptitude for something that a score on a test could never indicate. It happened because he chose not to accept that he was “useless according to the status quo.”

One of the key principles of the Element is that we need to challenge what we take for granted about our abilities and the abilities of other people. This isn’t as easy as one might imagine. Part of the problem with identifying the things we take for granted is that we don’t know what they are because we take them for granted in the first place. They become basic assumptions that we don’t question, part of the fabric of our logic. We don’t question them because we see them as fundamental, as an integral part of our lives. Like air. Or gravity. Or Oprah.

A good example of something that many people take for granted without knowing it is the number of human senses. When I talk to audiences, I sometimes take them through a simple exercise to illustrate this point. I ask them how many senses they think they have. Most people will answer five—taste, touch, smell, sight, and hearing. Some will say there’s a sixth sense and suggest intuition. Rarely will anyone offer anything beyond this.

There’s a difference, though, between the first five senses and the sixth. The five all have particular organs associated with them—the nose for smell, the eyes for sight, ears for hearing, and so on. If the organs are injured or compromised in any way, that sense is impaired. It isn’t obvious what
does
intuition. It’s a kind of spooky sense that girls are supposed to have more of. So, the general assumption among the wide range of people I’ve spoken with over the years is that we have five “hard” senses and a “spooky” one.

There’s a fascinating book by the anthropologist Kathryn Linn Geurts called
Culture and the Senses
. In it, she writes about her work with the Anlo Ewe people of southeastern Ghana. I have to say that I have a certain degree of sympathy for marginalized ethnic groups these days. It seems as though anthropologists are always stalking them—as if their average family unit includes three children and an anthropologist who sits around asking what they have for breakfast. Still, Geurts’s study was illuminating.

One of the things she learned about the Anlo Ewe is that that they don’t think of the senses in the same way that we do. First, they never thought to count them. That entire notion seemed beside the point. In addition, when Geurts listed our taken-for-granted five to them, they asked about the
other
one. The
main
one. They weren’t speaking of a “spooky” sense. Nor were they speaking of some residual sense that has survived among the Anlo Ewe but that the rest of us have lost. They were speaking of a sense that we all have, and that is fundamental to our functioning in the world. They were talking about our sense of balance.

The fluids and bones of the inner ear mediate the sense of balance. You only have to think of the impact on your life of damaging your sense of balance—through illness or alcohol—to get some idea of how important it is to our everyday existence. Yet most people never think to include it in their list of senses. This isn’t because they don’t have a sense of balance. It’s because they’ve become so accustomed to the idea that we have five senses (and maybe a spooky one) that they have stopped thinking about it. It’s become a matter of common sense. They just take it for granted.

One of the enemies of creativity and innovation, especially in relation to our own development, is common sense. The play-wright Bertolt Brecht said that as soon as something seems the most obvious thing in the world, it means that we have abandoned all attempts at understanding it.