Chapter 1: The Element

The Element is a different way of defining our potential. It manifests itself differently in every person, but the components of the Element are universal. Lynne, Groening, and Samuelson have accomplished a great deal in their lives. But they are not alone in being capable of that. Why they are special is that they have found what they love to do and they are actually doing it. They have found their Element. In my experience, most people have not. Finding your Element is essential to your well‐being and ultimate success, and, by implication, to the health of our organizations and the effectiveness of our educational systems. I believe strongly that if we can each find our Element, we all have the potential for much higher achievement and fulfillment. I don’t mean to say that there’s a dancer, a cartoonist, or a Nobel‐winning economist in each of us. I mean that we all have distinctive talents and passions that can inspire us to achieve far more than we may imagine. Understanding this changes everything. (Location 228)

Being in our Element depends on finding our own distinctive talents and passions. Why haven’t most people found this? One of the most important reasons is that most people have a very limited conception of their own natural capacities. This is true in several ways. (Location 230)

The first limitation is in our understanding of the range of our capacities. We are all born with extraordinary powers of imagination, intelligence, feeling, intuition, spirituality, and of physical and sensory awareness. For the most part, we use only a fraction of these powers, and some not at all. Many people have not found their Element because they don’t understand their own powers. The second limitation is in our understanding of how all of these capacities relate to each other holistically. For the most part, we think that our minds, our bodies, and our feelings and relationships with others operate independent of each other, like separate systems. Many people have not found their Element because they don’t understand their true organic nature. The third limitation is in our understanding of how much potential we have for growth and change. For the most part, people seem to think that life is linear, that our capacities decline as we grow older, and that opportunities we have missed are gone forever. Many people have not found their Element because they don’t understand their constant potential for renewal. This limited view of our own capacities can be compounded by our peer groups, by our culture, and by our own expectations of ourselves. A major factor for everyone, though, is education. (Location 235)

One Size Does Not Fit All

School systems everywhere inculcate us with a very narrow view of intelligence and capacity and overvalue particular sorts of talent and ability. In doing so, they neglect others that are just as important, and they disregard the relationships between them in sustaining the vitality of our lives and communities. This stratified, one‐size‐fits‐all approach to education marginalizes all of those who do not take naturally to learning this way. (Location 300)

What is true is that if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. (Location 325)

Education is the system that’s supposed to develop our natural abilities and enable us to make our way in the world. Instead, it is stifling the individual talents and abilities of too many students and killing their motivation to learn. (Location 335)

There was a time in our history when the steam engine reigned supreme. It was powerful, it was effective, and it was significantly more efficient than the propulsion system that came before it. Eventually, though, it no longer served the needs of the people, and the internal combustion engine ushered in a new paradigm. In many ways, our current education system is like the steam engine—and it’s running out of steam rather quickly. (Location 344)

As anyone in the corporate world knows, it’s very easy to be “typed” early in your career. When this happens, it becomes exceedingly difficult to make the most of your other—and perhaps truer—talents. If the corporate world sees you as a financial type, you’ll have a difficult time finding employment on the “creative” side of the business. We can fix this by thinking and acting differently ourselves and in our organizations. In fact, it is essential that we do. (Location 348)

The Pace of Change

There are two major drivers of change— technology and demography. (Location 354)

Some suggest that, in the near future, the power of laptop computers will match the computing power of the human brain. How is it going to feel when you give your computer an instruction, and it asks you if you know what you’re doing? Before too long we may see the merging of information systems with human consciousness. If you think about the impact in the last twenty years of relatively simple digital technologies on the work we do and how we do it—and the impact these technologies have had on national economies—think of the changes that lie ahead. Don’t worry if you can’t predict them: nobody can. (Location 365)

Add to this the impact of population growth. The world population has doubled in the past thirty years, from three to six billion. It may be heading for nine billion by the middle of the century. This great new mass of humanity will be using technologies that have yet to be invented in ways we cannot imagine and in jobs that don’t yet exist. (Location 369)

This combination of things that we do know—that more countries and more people are in the game than ever before, and that technology is in the process of changing the game itself as we speak—leads us to one inescapable conclusion: we can’t know what the future will be like. (Location 386)

The only way to prepare for the future is to make the most out of ourselves on the assumption that doing so will make us as flexible and productive as possible. (Location 388)

Many of the people you’ll meet in this book didn’t pursue their passions simply because of the promise of a paycheck. They pursued them because they couldn’t imagine doing anything else with their lives. They found the things they were made to do, and they have invested considerably in mastering the permutations of these professions. If the world were to turn upside down tomorrow, they’d figure out a way to evolve their talents to accommodate these changes. They would find a way to continue to do the things that put them in their Element, because they would have an organic understanding of how their talents fit a new environment. (Location 390)

Many people set aside their passions to pursue things they don’t care about for the sake of financial security. The fact is, though, that the job you took because it “pays the bills” could easily move offshore in the coming decade. If you have never learned to think creatively and to explore your true capacity, what will you do then? (Location 394)

What Is the Element?

The Element is the meeting point between natural aptitude and personal passion. (Location 404)

How do we find the Element in ourselves and in others? There isn’t a rigid formula. The Element is different for everyone. In fact, that’s the point. We aren’t limited to one Element, by the way. Some people may feel a similar passion for one or more activities and may be equally good at them. Others may have a singular passion and aptitude that fulfills them far more than anything else does. There’s no rule about this. But there are, so to speak, elements of the Element that provide a framework for thinking about this and knowing what to look for and what to do. The Element has two main features, and there are two conditions for being in it. The features are aptitude and passion. The conditions are attitude and opportunity. The sequence goes something like this: I get it; I love it; I want it; Where is it? (Location 411)

I Get It

An aptitude is a natural facility for something. It is an intuitive feel or a grasp of what that thing is, how it works, and how to use it. (Location 418)

Our aptitudes are highly personal. They may be for general types of activity, like math, music, sport, poetry, or political theory. They can also be highly specific—not music in general, but jazz or rap. Not wind instruments in general, but the flute. Not science, but biochemistry. Not track and field, but the long jump. (Location 420)

I Love It

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. (Location 441)

I Want It

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. (Location 450)

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. (Location 455)

Where Is It?

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. (Location 461)

Chapter 2: Think Differently

Taking It All for Granted

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. (Location 519)

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. (Location 520)

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. (Location 523)

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. 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. 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. (Location 542)

The playwright Bertolt Brecht said that as soon as something seems the most obvious thing in the world, it means that we have… (Location 544)

Physiologists largely agree that in addition to the five we all know about, there are four more. The first is our sense of temperature (thermoception). This is different from our sense of touch. We don’t need to be touching anything to feel hot or cold. This is a crucial sense, given that we can only survive as human beings within a relatively narrow band of temperatures. This is one of the reasons we wear clothes. One of them. Another is the sense of pain (nociception). Scientists now generally agree that this is a different sensory system from either touch or temperature. There also seem to be separate systems for registering pains that originate from the inside or the outside of our bodies. Next is the vestibular sense (equilibrioception), which includes our sense of balance and acceleration. And then there is the kinesthetic sense (proprioception), which gives us our understanding of where our… (Location 548)

All of these senses contribute to our feelings of being in the world and to our ability to function in it. There are also some unusual variations in the senses of particular people. Some experience a phenomenon known as synesthesia, in which their senses seems to mingle or overlap: they may see sounds and hear colors. These are abnormalities, and seem to challenge even further our commonsense ideas about our common senses. But they illustrate how profoundly our… (Location 556)

How Intelligent Are You?

I’m convinced that taking the definition of intelligence for granted is one of the main reasons why so many people underestimate their true intellectual abilities and fail to find their Element. This commonsense view goes something like this: We are all born with a fixed amount of intelligence. It’s a trait, like blue or green eyes, or long or short limbs. Intelligence shows itself in certain types of activity, especially in math and our use of words. It’s possible to measure how much intelligence we have through pencil‐and‐paper tests, and to express this as a numerical grade. That’s it. (Location 601)

This way of thinking about intelligence has a long history in Western culture and dates back at least to the days of the great Greek philosophers, Aristotle and Plato. (Location 608)

We think we know the answer to the question, “How intelligent are you?” The real answer, though, is that the question itself is the wrong one to ask. (Location 688)

How Are You Intelligent?

The right question to ask is the one above. The difference in these questions is profound. The first suggests that there’s a finite way of gauging intelligence and that one can reduce the value of each individual’s intelligence to a figure or quotient of some sort. The latter suggests a truth that we somehow don’t acknowledge as much as we should—that there are a variety of ways to express intelligence, and that no one scale could ever measure this. (Location 690)

Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner has argued to wide acclaim that we have not one but multiple intelligences. They include linguistic, musical, mathematical, spatial, kinesthetic, interpersonal (relationships with others), and intra‐personal (knowledge and understanding of the self) intelligence. He argues that these types of intelligence are more or less independent of each other, and none is more important, though some might be “dominant” while others are “dormant.” He says that we all have different strengths in different intelligences and that education should treat them equally so that all children receive opportunities to develop their individual abilities. (Location 701)

Robert Sternberg is a professor of psychology at Tufts University and a past president of the American Psychological Association. He argues that there are three types of intelligence: analytic intelligence, the ability to solve problems using academic skills and to complete conventional IQ tests; creative intelligence, the ability to deal with novel situations and to come up with original solutions; and practical intelligence, the ability to deal with problems and challenges in everyday life. (Location 708)

Psychologist and best‐selling author Daniel Goleman has argued in his books that there is emotional intelligence and social intelligence, both of which are essential to getting along with ourselves and with the world round us. (Location 711)

Robert Cooper, author of The Other 90%, says that we shouldn’t think of intelligence as happening only in the brain in our skulls. He talks of the “heart” brain and the “gut” brain. Whenever we have a direct experience, he says, it does not go directly to the brain in our heads. The first place it goes is to the neurological networks of the intestinal tract and heart. He describes the first of these, the enteric nervous system, as a “second brain” inside the intestines, which is “independent of but also interconnected with the brain in the cranium.” He says that this is why we often experience our first reaction to events as a “gut reaction.” Whether or not we acknowledge them, he says, our gut reactions shape everything we do. (Location 714)

The clear fact of everyday experience is that human intelligence is diverse and multifaceted. For evidence, we need only look at the extraordinary richness and complexity of human culture and achievement. Whether we can ever capture all of this in a single theory of intelligence—with three, four, five, or even eight separate categories—is a problem for the theorists. (Location 720)

The Three Features of Human Intelligence

Human intelligence seems to have at least three main features. The first is that it is extraordinarily diverse. It is clearly not limited to the ability to do verbal and mathematical reasoning. These skills are important, but they are simply one way in which intelligence expresses itself. (Location 747)

Were mathematical and verbal intelligence the only kinds that existed, ballet never would have been created. Nor would abstract painting, hip‐hop, design, architecture, or self‐service checkouts at supermarkets. (Location 779)

The diversity of intelligence is one of the fundamental underpinnings of the Element. If you don’t embrace the fact that you think about the world in a wide variety of ways, you severely limit your chances of finding the person that you were meant to be. (Location 780)

The second feature of intelligence is that it is tremendously dynamic. The human brain is intensely interactive. You use multiple parts of it in every task you perform. It is in fact in the dynamic use of the brain—finding new connections between things—that true breakthroughs occur. (Location 790)

The third feature of intelligence is that it is entirely distinctive. Every person’s intelligence is as unique as a fingerprint. There might be seven, ten, or a hundred different forms of intelligence, but each of us uses these forms in different ways. (Location 804)

How are you intelligent? Knowing that intelligence is diverse, dynamic, and distinctive allows you to address that question in new ways. This is one of the core components of the Element. For when you explode your preconceived ideas about intelligence, you can begin to see your own intelligence in new ways. (Location 808)

No person is a single intellectual score on a linear scale. And no two people with the same scores will do the same things, share all of the same passions, or accomplish the same amount with their lives. Discovering the Element is all about allowing yourself access to all of the ways in which you experience the world, and discovering where your own true strengths lie. Just don’t take them for granted. (Location 810)

Chapter 3: Beyond Imagining

The Promise of Creativity

I firmly believe that you can’t be creative without acting intelligently. Similarly, the highest form of intelligence is thinking creatively. In seeking the Element, it is essential to understand the real nature of creativity and to have a clear understanding of how it relates to intelligence. (Location 872)

There are myths surrounding creativity as well. One myth is that only special people are creative. This is not true. Everyone is born with tremendous capacities for creativity. The trick is to develop these capacities. Creativity is very much like literacy. We take it for granted that nearly everybody can learn to read and write. If a person can’t read or write, you don’t assume that this person is incapable of it, just that he or she hasn’t learned how to do it. The same is true of creativity. When people say they’re not creative, it’s often because they don’t know what’s involved or how creativity works in practice. Another myth is that creativity is about special activities. It’s about “creative domains” like the arts, design, or advertising. These often do involve a high level of creativity. But so can science, math, engineering, running a business, being an athlete, or getting in or out of a relationship. The fact is you can be creative at anything at all—anything that involves your intelligence. (Location 881)

The third myth is that people are either creative or they’re not. This myth suggests that creativity, like IQ, is an allegedly fixed trait, like eye color, and that you can’t do much about it. In truth, it’s entirely possible to become more creative in your work and in your life. The first critical step is for you to understand the intimate relationship between creativity and intelligence. This is one of the surest paths to finding the Element, and it involves stepping back to examine a fundamental feature of all human intelligence—our unique powers of imagination. (Location 884)

It’s All in Your Imagination

We tend to underestimate the range of our senses and our intelligence. We do the same with our imaginations. In fact, while we largely take our senses for granted, we tend to take our imaginations for granted completely. (Location 889)

People will pride themselves on being “down to earth,” “realistic,” and “no‐nonsense,” and deride those who “have their heads in the clouds.” And yet, far more than any other power, imagination is what sets human beings apart from every other species on earth. (Location 892)

Imagination led us from caves to cities, from bone clubs to golf clubs, from carrion to cuisine, and from superstition to science. The relationship between imagination and “reality” is both complicated and profound. And this relationship serves a very significant role in the search for the Element. (Location 894)

If you focus on your actual, physical surroundings, you generally assume, I’m sure, that there’s a good fit between what you perceive and what’s actually there. This is why we can drive cars on busy roads, get what we’re looking for in shops, and wake up with the right person. (Location 897)

My initial definition of imagination is “the power to bring to mind things that are not present to our senses.” (Location 903)

Through imagination, we can visit the past, contemplate the present, and anticipate the future. We can also do something else of profound and unique significance. We can create. (Location 906)

Through imagination, we not only bring to mind things that we have experienced but things that we have never experienced. We can conjecture, we can hypothesize, we can speculate, and we can suppose. In a word, we can be imaginative. As soon as we have the power to release our minds from the immediate here and now, in a sense we are free. We are free to revisit the past, free to re‐frame the present, and free to anticipate a whole range of possible futures. Imagination is the foundation of everything that is uniquely and distinctively human. It is the basis of language, the arts, the sciences, systems of philosophy, and the all the vast intricacies of human culture. (Location 908)

The Power of Creativity

Imagination is not the same as creativity. Creativity takes the process of imagination to another level. My definition of creativity is “the process of having original ideas that have value.” Imagination can be entirely internal. You could be imaginative all day long without anyone noticing. But you would never say that someone was creative if that person never did anything. To be creative you actually have to do something. It involves putting your imagination to work to make something new, to come up with new solutions to problems, even to think of new problems or questions. You can think of creativity as applied imagination. (Location 974)

Creative Dynamics

Creativity is the strongest example of the dynamic nature of intelligence, and it can call on all areas of our minds and being. (Location 1022)

Creativity involves several different processes that wind through each other. The first is generating new ideas, imagining different possibilities, considering alternative options. This might involve playing with some notes on an instrument, making some quick sketches, jotting down some thoughts, or moving objects or yourself around in a space. The creative process also involves developing these ideas by judging which work best or feel right. Both of these processes of generating and evaluating ideas are necessary whether you’re writing a song, painting a picture, developing a mathematical theory, taking photographs for a project, writing a book, or designing clothes. These processes don’t come in a predictable sequence. Instead, they interact with each other. For example, a creative effort might involve a great deal of idea generation while holding back on the evaluation at the start. But overall, creative work is a delicate balance between generating ideas and sifting and refining them. (Location 1039)

People who work creatively usually have something in common: they love the media they work with. (Location 1059)

You can think of creativity as a conversation between what we’re trying to figure out and the media we are using. (Location 1090)

Creativity in different media is a striking illustration of the diversity of intelligence and ways of thinking. (Location 1093)

Opening Your Mind

Creative thinking involves much more than the sorts of logical, linear thinking that dominate the Western view of intelligence and especially education. (Location 1106)

The frontal lobes of the brain are involved in some higher‐order thinking skills. The left hemisphere is the area that’s most involved in logical and analytical thinking. But creative thinking usually involves much more of the brain than the bits at the front and to the left. (Location 1107)

Being creative is about making fresh connections so that we see things in new ways and from different perspectives. In logical, linear thinking, we move from one idea to another through a series of rules and conventions. We allow some moves while rejecting others because they’re illogical. If A + B = C, we can figure out what C + B equals. Conventional IQ exams typically test for this type of thinking. The rules of logic or linear thought don’t always guide creative thinking. On the contrary. (Location 1110)

Creative insights often come in nonlinear ways, through seeing connections and similarities between things that we hadn’t noticed before. Creative thinking depends greatly on what’s sometimes called divergent or lateral thinking, and especially on thinking in metaphors or seeing analogies. This is what Richard Feynman was doing when he saw a connection between the wobbling plate and the spin of electrons. (Location 1113)

Logic can be very important at different stages in the creative process, according to what sort of work we’re doing, particularly when we’re evaluating new ideas and how they fit into or challenge existing theories. Even so, creative thinking goes beyond linear and logical thought to involve all areas of our minds and bodies. (Location 1119)

It’s now widely accepted that the two halves of the brain have different functions. The left hemisphere is involved in logical, sequential reasoning—with verbal language, mathematical thinking, and so on. The right hemisphere is involved in recognition of patterns, of faces, with visual perception, orientation in space, and with movement. However, these compartments of the brain hardly work in isolation from each other. If you look at images of the brain at work, you’ll see that it is highly interactive. Like the rest of our bodies, these functions are all related. (Location 1122)

Creativity also uses much more than our brains. Playing instruments, creating images, constructing objects, performing a dance, and making things of every sort are also intensely physical processes that depend on feelings, intuition, and skilled coordination of hands and eyes, body and mind. In many instances—in dance, in song, in performance—we do not use external media at all. We ourselves are the medium of our creative work. (Location 1142)

There is far more to our minds than the deliberate processes of conscious thought. Beneath the noisy surface of our minds, there are deep reserves of memory and association, of feelings and perceptions that process and record our life’s experiences beyond our conscious awareness. So at times, creativity is a conscious effort. At others, we need to let our ideas ferment for a while and trust the deeper unconscious ruminations of our minds, over which we have less control. Sometimes when we do, the insights we’ve been searching for will come to us in a rush, like “letting a cork out of a bottle.” (Location 1148)

Getting It Together

The power of human creativity is obvious everywhere, in the technologies we use, in the buildings we inhabit, in the clothes we wear, and in the movies we watch. But the reach of creativity is very much deeper. It affects not only what we put in the world, but also what we make of it—not only what we do, but also how we think and feel about it. (Location 1170)

“The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitude of mind.… If you change your mind, you can change your life.” This is the real power of creativity and the true promise of being in your Element. (Location 1189)

Chapter 4: In the Zone

The Zone

To be in the zone is to be in the deep heart of the Element. Doing what we love can involve all sorts of activities that are essential to the Element but are not the essence of it—things like studying, organizing, arranging, limbering up, etc. And even when we’re doing the thing we love, there can be frustrations, disappointments, and times when it simply doesn’t work or come together. But when it does, it transforms our experience of the Element. We become focused and intent. We live in the moment. We become lost in the experience and perform at our peak. Our breathing changes, our minds merge with our bodies, and we feel ourselves drawn effortlessly into to the heart of the Element. (Location 1246)

Doing the thing you love to do is no guarantee that you’ll be in the zone every time. Sometimes the mood isn’t right, the time is wrong, and the ideas just don’t flow. Some people develop their own personal rituals and for getting to the zone. (Location 1277)

Different people find the zone in different ways. For some it comes through intense physical activity, through physically demanding sports, through risk, competition, and maybe a sense of danger. For others it may come through activities that seem physically passive, through writing, painting, math, meditation, and other modes of intense contemplation. As I said earlier, we don’t only get one Element apiece, nor is there only one road for each of us to the zone. We may have different experiences of it in our lives. However, there are some common features to being in that magical place. (Location 1292)

Are We There Yet?

One of the strongest signs of being in the zone is a sense of freedom and of authenticity. When we are doing something that we love and are naturally good at, we are much more likely to feel centered in our true sense of self—to be who we feel we truly are. When we are in our Element, we feel we are doing what we are meant to be doing and being who we’re meant to be. (Location 1297)

The other feature common among those familiar with this experience is the movement into a kind of “meta‐state” where ideas come more quickly, as if you’re tapping a source that makes it significantly easier to achieve your task. You develop a facility for the thing you are doing because you’ve unified your energy with the process and the efforts you are making. So there’s a real sense of ideas flowing through you and out of you; that you’re in some way channeling these things. You’re being an instrument of them rather than being obstructive to them or struggling to reach them. Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Eric Clapton describes it as being “in harmony with time. It’s a great feeling.” (Location 1310)

You can see and experience this shift in all sorts of performances, in acting, in dance, in musical performances, and in sports. You see that people have suddenly entered a different phase. You see them relaxed, you see them loosen up and become instruments of their own expression. (Location 1315)

Aviator Wilbur Wright described it this way: “When you know, after the first few minutes, that the whole mechanism is working perfectly, the sensation is so keenly delightful as to be almost beyond description. More than anything else the sensation is one of perfect peace mingled with an excitement that strains every nerve to the utmost, if you can conceive of such a combination.” (Location 1319)

Superstar athlete Monica Seles says, “When I am consistently playing my best tennis, I am also consistently in the zone,” but notes, “Once you think about being in the zone, you are immediately out of it.” (Location 1322)

In his landmark work Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Dr. Csikszentmihalyi writes of a “state of mind when consciousness is harmoniously ordered, and [people] want to pursue whatever they are doing for its own sake.” (Location 1326)

What Dr. Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow” (and what many others call “being in the zone”) “happens when psychic energy—or attention—is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action. The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else.” (Location 1327)

Dr. Csikszentmihalyi speaks of the “elements of enjoyment,” the components that comprise an optimal experience. These include facing a challenge that requires a skill one possesses, complete absorption in an activity, clear goals and feedback, concentration on the task at hand that allows one to forget everything else, the loss of self‐consciousness, and the sense that time “transforms” during the experience. “The key element of an optimal experience,” he says in Flow, “is that it is an end in itself. Even if initially undertaken for other reasons, the activity that consumes us becomes intrinsically rewarding.” This is a crucial point to grasp. Being in the Element and especially being in the zone doesn’t take energy away from you; it gives it to you. (Location 1330)

Activities we love fill us with energy even when we are physically exhausted. Activities we don’t like can drain us in minutes, even if we approach them at our physical peak of fitness. This is one of the keys to the Element, and one of the primary reasons why finding the Element is vital for every person. When people place themselves in situations that lead to their being in the zone, they tap into a primal source of energy. They are literally more alive because of it. It is as though being in the zone plugs you into a kind of power pack—for the time you are there, you receive more energy than you expend. (Location 1339)

Energy drives all of our lives. This isn’t a simple matter of physical energy we think we have or don’t have but of our mental or psychic energy. Mental energy is not a fixed substance. It rises and falls with our passion and commitment to what we are doing at the time. The key difference is in our attitude, and our sense of resonance with an activity. As the song says, “I could have danced all night.” Being in your Element, having that experience of flow, is empowering because it’s a way of unifying our energies. It’s a way of feeling deeply connected with our own sense of identity and it curiously comes about through a sense of relaxing, of feeling perfectly natural to be doing what you’re doing. It’s a profound sense of being in your skin, of connecting to your own internal pulse or energy. (Location 1344)

These peak experiences are associated with physiological changes in the body—there may be a release of endorphins in the brain and of adrenaline through the body. There may be an increase in alpha wave activity and changes in our metabolic rates and in the patterns of our breathing and heartbeats. The specific nature of these physiological changes depends on the sorts of activities that have brought us to the zone and on what we’re doing to keep ourselves there. However we get there, being in the zone is a powerful and transformative experience. So powerful that it can be addictive, but an addiction that is healthy for you in so many ways. (Location 1350)

Reaching Out

When we connect with our own energy, we’re more open to the energy of other people. The more alive we feel, the more we can contribute to the lives of others. (Location 1355)

This is another secret of being in the zone—that when you are inspired, your work can be inspirational to others. Being in the zone taps into your most natural self. And when you are in that place, you can contribute at a much higher level. (Location 1376)

Being in the zone is about using your particular kind of intelligence in an optimal way. (Location 1379)

Being Yourself

When people are in the zone, they align naturally with a way of thinking that works best for them. I believe this is the reason that time seems to take on a new dimension when you are in the zone. It comes from a level of effortlessness that allows for such full immersion that you simply don’t “feel” time the same way. This effortlessness has a direct relationship to thinking styles. When people use a thinking style completely natural to them, everything comes more easily. (Location 1383)

Getting Out of the Box

The risk in saying that there is a set number of personality types, a set number of dominant ways of thinking, is that it closes doors rather than opening them. To make the Element available to everyone, we need to acknowledge that each person’s intelligence is distinct from the intelligence of every other person on the planet, that everyone has a unique way of getting in the zone, and a unique way of finding the Element. (Location 1431)

Chapter 5: Finding Your Tribe

FOR MOST PEOPLE , a primary component of being in their Element is connecting with other people who share their passion and a desire to make the most of themselves through it. (Location 1476)

Meg Ryan could have been many things. She has genuine skill as a writer. She has considerable academic talents. She has a wide variety of interests and fascinations. However, when she’s acting, she finds herself with a group of people who see the world the way she does, who allow her to feel her most natural, who affirm her talents, who inspire her, influence her, and drive her to be her best. She is close to her true self when she is among actors, directors, camera and lighting people, and all of the others who populate the film world. Being a part of this tribe brings her to the Element. (Location 1506)

A Place to Discover Yourself

Tribe members can be collaborators or competitors. They can share the same vision or have utterly different ones. They can be of a similar age or from different generations. What connects a tribe is a common commitment to the thing they feel born to do. This can be extraordinarily liberating, especially if you’ve been pursuing your passion alone. (Location 1511)

Domains and Fields

When I talk about tribes, I’m really talking about two distinct ideas, both of which are important for anyone who is looking to find their Element. The first is the idea of a “domain” and the second, of a “field.” Domain refers to the sorts of activities and disciplines that people are engaged in—acting, rock music, business, ballet, physics, rap, architecture, poetry, psychology, teaching, hairdressing, couture, comedy, athletics, pool, visual arts, and so on. Field refers to the other people who are engaged in it. (Location 1585)

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. (Location 1624)

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.” (Location 1632)

It’s Not Just Me

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. (Location 1667)

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.” (Location 1678)

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.” (Location 1679)

How Do They Do That?

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.” (Location 1683)

Circles of Influence

Tribes are circles of influence, and they can take many forms. They may be scattered far and wide or huddled closely together. They may be present only in your thoughts or physically present in the room with you. They may be alive or dead and living through their works. They may be confined to a single generation or cross over them. (Location 1719)

When tribes gather in the same place, the opportunities for mutual inspiration can become intense. In all domains, there have been powerful groupings of people who have driven innovation through their influence on each other and the impetus they’ve created as a group. (Location 1726)

The Alchemy of Synergy

Great creative teams are diverse. They are composed of very different sorts of people with different but complementary talents. (Location 1788)

Creative teams are dynamic. Diversity of talents is important, but it is not enough. Different ways of thinking can be an obstacle to creativity. Creative teams find ways of using their differences as strengths, not weaknesses. They have a process through which their strengths are complementary and compensate for each other’s weaknesses too. They are able to challenge each other as equals, and to take criticism as an incentive to raise their game. (Location 1792)

Creative teams are distinct. There’s a big difference between a great team and a committee. Most committees do routine work and have members who are theoretically interchangeable with other people. Committee members are usually there to represent specific interests. Often a committee can do its work while half the members are checking their BlackBerrys or studying the wall‐paper. Committees are often immortal; they seem to persist forever, and so often do their meetings. Creative teams have a distinctive personality and come together to do something specific. They are together only for as long as they want to be or have to be to get the job done. (Location 1796)

Lost in the Crowd

There’s an important difference between being in a tribe as I’m defining it and being part of a crowd, even when the members of a crowd are all there for the same reason and feel the same passions. (Location 1811)

Element as a means of self‐realization. In fact, fandom is in many ways a form of what psychologists rather awkwardly call “deindividuation.” This means losing your sense of identity through becoming part of a group. Extreme forms of deindividuation lead to mob behavior. If you’ve ever been to a European soccer match, you know how this can apply to the sports world. (Location 1837)

Chapter 6: What Will They Think?

I think of the barriers to finding the Element as three concentric “circles of constraint.” These circles are personal, social, and cultural. (Location 1884)

This Time It’s Personal

Fear is perhaps the most common obstacle to finding your Element. You might ask how often it’s played a part in your own life and held you back from doing the things you desperately wanted to try. (Location 1943)

Social: It’s For Your Own Good

When people close to you discourage you from taking a particular path, they usually believe they are doing it for your own good. There are some with less noble reasons, but most believe they know what’s best. And the fact is that the average office worker probably does have more financial security than the average jazz trumpeter. But it is difficult to feel accomplished when you’re not accomplishing something that matters to you. Doing something “for your own good” is rarely for your own good if it causes you to be less than who you really are. (Location 1976)

The decision to play it safe, to take the path of least resistance, can seem irresistible, particularly if you have your own doubts and fears about the alternatives. And for some people it seems easier to avoid ruffling feathers and have the approval of parents, siblings, and spouses. But not for everyone. (Location 1980)

Groupthink

Positively or negatively, our parents and families are powerful influences on us. But even stronger, especially when we’re young, are our friends. We don’t choose our families, but we do choose our friends, and we often choose them as a way of expanding our sense of identity beyond the family. As a result, the pressure to conform to the standards and expectations of friends and other social groups can be intense. (Location 2020)

Being in your Element may depend on stepping out of the circle. (Location 2033)

There are several famous—and sometime infamous—studies of the effects of groupthink, including the Solomon Asch conformity experiments. In 1951, (Location 2046)

“The tendency to conformity in our society is so strong,” Asch wrote, “that reasonably intelligent and well‐meaning young people are willing to call white black. This is a matter of concern. It raises questions about our ways of education and about the values that guide our conduct.” (Location 2055)

The power of groups is that they validate the common interests of their members. The danger of groupthink is that it dulls their individual judgment. The group thinks in unison and behaves en masse. In this respect, schools of people are like schools of fish. (Location 2079)

A Single Ant Can’t Ruin a Picnic

Ants depend on what’s known as swarm intelligence, the nature of which is currently the subject of intense study. (Location 2092)

ants achieve their goals by fulfilling their own very specific roles with military precision. (Location 2093)

For instance, when looking for food, one ant starts on a path, leaving a 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 source and carries it back as a team to the colony. Each ant works toward a global goal, while no one ant takes the lead. In fact, there seems to be no hierarchy at all within ant colonies. Even the queen’s one function seems to be to lay eggs. These patterns of coordinated group behavior in fish, ants, mosquitoes, and most other creatures are principally to do with protection and security, with mating and survival, and with getting food and not becoming food themselves. (Location 2094)

It’s much the same with human beings. We aggregate as groups for the same essential and primal purposes. The upside for us is that groups can be tremendously supportive. The downside is that they encourage uniformity of thought and behavior. The Element is about discovering yourself, and you can’t do this if you’re trapped in a compulsion to conform. You can’t be yourself in a swarm. (Location 2099)

Culture: Right and Thong

Beyond the specific social constraints we may feel from families and friends, there are others that are implicit in the general culture. I define culture as the values and forms of behavior that characterize different social groups. Culture is a system of permissions. It’s about the attitudes and behaviors that are acceptable and unacceptable in different communities, those that are approved of and those that are not. If you don’t understand the cultural codes, you can look just awful. (Location 2103)

Swimming Against the Tide

All cultures have an unwritten “survival manual” for success, to quote cultural anthropologist Clotaire Rapaille. (Location 2161)

This survival manual comes from generations of adaptation to the particular climate in which the culture resides. But in addition to helping those within the culture thrive, it also sets out a series of constraints. Such constraints can inhibit us from reaching our Element because our passions seem inconsistent with the culture. (Location 2163)

All cultures—and subcultures—also embody systems of constraints that can inhibit individuals from reaching their Element if their passions are in conflict with their context. (Location 2169)

The contagious behavior of schools of fish, insect swarms, and crowds of people is generated by close physical proximity. For most of human history, cultural identities have also been formed through direct contact with the people who are physically nearest to us: small villages, the local community. Large movements of people once were limited to invasions, military conquests, and trade, and these were the main ways in which cultural ideas were disseminated and different languages and ways of life imposed on other communities. All of this has changed irreversibly in the last two hundred years or so with the growth of global communications. We now have patterns of contagious behavior being generated on a massive scale through the Web. Second Life has millions of people online from different parts of the world potentially affecting how they each think and taking on new virtual identities and roles. Many of us now live like Russian dolls nestled in multiple layers of cultural identity. (Location 2186)

in seeking your Element, you’re likely to face one or more of the three levels of constraint—personal, social, and cultural. (Location 2199)

Ultimately, the question is always going to be, “What price are you willing to pay?” The rewards of the Element are considerable, but reaping these rewards may mean pushing back against some stiff opposition. (Location 2203)

Chapter 7: Do You Feel Lucky?

BEING GOOD AT SOMETHING and having a passion for it are essential to finding the Element. But they are not enough. Getting there depends fundamentally on our view of ourselves and of the events in our lives. The Element is also a matter of attitude. (Location 2207)

Attitude and Aptitude

It’s not what happens to us that makes the difference in our lives. What makes the difference is our attitude toward what happens. (Location 2256)

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. (Location 2259)

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. (Location 2272)

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. (Location 2287)

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. (Location 2290)

We all shape the circumstances and realities of our own lives, and we can also transform them. People who find their Element are more likely to evolve a clearer sense of their life’s ambitions and set a course for achieving them. They know that passion and aptitude are essential. They know too that our attitudes to events and to ourselves are crucial in determining whether or not we find and live our lives in the Element. (Location 2377)

Chapter 8: Somebody Help Me

The Life‐Changing Connection

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, (Location 2448)

The Roles of Mentors

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. (Location 2522)

The first role is recognition. (Location 2525)

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. (Location 2526)

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. (Location 2533)

The second role of a mentor is encouragement. Mentors lead us to believe that we can achieve something that seemed improbable or impossible to us before we met them. They don’t allow us to succumb to self‐doubt for too long, or the notion that our dreams are too large for us. They stand by to remind us of the skills we already possess and what we can achieve if we continue to work hard. (Location 2558)

The third role of a mentor is facilitating. Mentors can help lead us toward our Element by offering us advice and techniques, paving the way for us, and even allowing us to falter a bit while standing by to help us recover and learn from our mistakes. (Location 2568)

The fourth role of a mentor is stretching. Effective mentors push us past what we see as our limits. Much as they don’t allow us to succumb to self‐doubt, they also prevent us from doing less with our lives than we can. A true mentor reminds us that our goal should never be to be “average” at our pursuits. (Location 2580)

Mentors serve an invaluable role in helping people get to the Element. It might be overstating things to suggest that the only way to reach the Element is with the help of a mentor, but it is only a mild overstatement. We all encounter multiple roadblocks and constraints on the journey toward finding what we feel we were meant to do. Without a knowledgeable guide to aid us in identifying our passions, to encourage our interests, to smooth our paths, and to push us to make the most of our capacities, the journey is considerably harder. (Location 2596)

Mentorship is of course a two‐way street. As important as it is to have a mentor in your life, it is equally important to fulfill these roles for other people. It is even possible that you’ll find that your own real Element is as a mentor to other people. (Location 2600)

More and more people are discovering that being a mentor, for them, is being in the Element. (Location 2605)

Chapter 9: Is It Too Late?

Some dreams truly are “impossible dreams.” However, many aren’t. Knowing the difference is often one of the first steps to finding your Element, because if you can see the chances of making a dream come true, you can also likely see the necessary next steps you need to take toward achieving it. (Location 2723)

One of the most basic reasons for thinking that it’s too late to be who you are truly capable of being is the belief that life is linear. (Location 2726)

The people at realage.com have pulled together a set of metrics designed to calculate your “real age” as opposed to your chronological age. It takes into consideration a wide range of factors regarding lifestyle, genetics, and medical history. What’s fascinating about this is that their work suggests that it’s actually possible to make yourself younger by making better choices. (Location 2775)

Keeping Things Plastic

What this really comes down to is our capacity to continue to develop our creativity and intelligence as we enter new stages in our lives. (Location 2790)

Young brains are in a constant process of evolution and change, and extremely reactive to their environment. During early stages of development, our brains go through a process that cognitive scientists call “neural pruning.” Essentially, this involves trimming away neural pathways that we determine at an unconscious level to have little long‐term value to us. (Location 2820)

As a result, the enormous natural capacities with which we are all born become shaped and molded, expanded or limited, through a constant process of interaction between internal biological processes and our actual experiences in the world. (Location 2825)

Harvard neurobiologist Gerald Fischbach has performed extensive research in brain cell counting and has determined that we retain the overwhelming majority of our brain cells throughout our lives. The average brain contains more neurons than it could possibly use in a lifetime, even given our increased life expectancies. (Location 2829)

There is strong evidence to suggest that the creative functions of our brain stay strong deep into our lives: we can recover and renew many of our latent aptitudes by deliberately exercising them. Just as physical exercise can revitalize our muscles, mental exercise can revitalize our creative capabilities. (Location 2833)

There’s extensive research going on now regarding neurogenesis, the creation of new brain cells in adult humans. It’s becoming clear that, contrary to what we believed for more than a century, the brain continues to generate new cells, and certain mental techniques (such as meditation) can even accelerate this. (Location 2835)

There’s Time

As the actor Sophia Loren once said, “There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of the people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.” (Location 2898)

Chapter 10: For Love or Money

For the Love of It

The word amateur derives from the Latin word amator, which means lover, devoted friend, or someone who is in avid pursuit of an objective. In the original sense, an amateur is someone who does something for the love of it. Amateurs do what they do because they have a passion for it, not because it pays the bills. True amateurs, in other words, are people who have found the Element in something other than their jobs. (Location 2942)

To be in your Element, it isn’t necessary to drop everything else and do it all day, every day. For some people, at some stages in their lives, leaving their current jobs or roles to pursue their passions simply isn’t a practical proposition. (Location 2990)

Transformation

Finding the Element is essential to a balanced and fulfilled life. It can also help us to understand who we really are. These days, we tend to identify ourselves by our jobs. (Location 3027)

Doing the thing you love and that you do well for even a couple of hours a week can make everything else more palatable. But in some circumstances, it can lead to transformations you might not have imagined possible. (Location 3033)

Beyond Leisure

The scientific study of happiness is a relatively new field. It got off to something of a false start with Abraham Maslow six decades ago, when he suggested that we spend more time understanding the psychology of our positive traits rather than focusing exclusively on what makes us mentally ill. Unfortunately, most of his contemporaries found little inspiration in his words. The concept gained a great deal of traction, though, when Martin Seligman became president of the American Psychological Association and, coining the term Positive Psychology, announced that the goal of his yearlong term in office was to provoke further exploration into what made human beings flourish. Since then, scientists have conducted dozens of studies on happiness. “Happy individuals seem to have a whole lot more fun than the rest of us ever do,” Dr. Michael Fordyce said in his book Human Happiness. “They have many more activities they enjoy doing for fun, and they spend much more of their time, on a given day or week, doing fun, exciting, and enjoyable activities.” (Location 3126)

Discovering the Element doesn’t promise to make you richer. Quite the opposite is possible, actually, as exploring your passions might lead you to leave behind that career as an investment banker to follow your dream of opening a pizzeria. Nor does it promise to make you more famous, more popular, or even a bigger hit with your family. For everyone, being in their Element, even for part of the time, can bring a new richness and balance to their lives. The Element is about a more dynamic, organic conception of human existence in which the different parts of our lives are not seen as hermetically sealed off from one another but as interacting and influencing each other. Being in our Element at any time in our lives can transform our view of ourselves. Whether we do it full‐time or part‐time, it can affect our whole lives and the lives of those around us. The Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn saw this clearly. “If you want to change the world,” he said, “who do you begin with, yourself or others? I believe if we begin with ourselves and do the things that we need to do and become the best person we can be, we have a much better chance of changing the world for the better.” (Location 3134)

Chapter 11: Making the Grade

Sometimes, getting away from school is the best thing that can happen to a great mind. (Location 3149)

Conformity or Creativity

Public education puts relentless pressure on its students to conform. Public schools were not only created in the interests of industrialism—they were created in the image of industrialism. (Location 3221)

Schools divide the curriculum into specialist segments: some teachers install math in the students, and others install history. They arrange the day into standard units of time, marked out by the ringing of bells, much like a factory announcing the beginning of the workday and the end of breaks. Students are educated in batches, according to age, as if the most important thing they have in common is their date of manufacture. They are given standardized tests at set points and compared with each other before being sent out onto the market. (Location 3224)

In fact, in January 2004, the number of unemployed American college graduates actually exceeded the number of unemployed high school dropouts. (Location 3242)

But the plain fact is that a college degree is not worth a fraction of what it once was. A degree was once a passport to a good job. Now, at best, it’s a visa. It only gives you provisional residence in the job market. (Location 3251)

Reforming Education

Nearly every system of public education on earth is in the process of being reformed—in Asia, the Americas, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. There are two main reasons. The first is economic. Every region in the world is facing the same economic challenge—how to educate their people to find work and create wealth in a world that is changing faster than ever. The second reason is cultural. Communities throughout the world want to take advantage of globalization, but they don’t want to lose their own identities in the process. (Location 3284)

The most powerful method of improving education is to invest in the improvement of teaching and the status of great teachers. (Location 3325)

tests. The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn’t need to be reformed—it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardize education but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions. (Location 3327)

Afterword

The Climate Crisis

One climate crisis is probably enough for you. But I believe there’s another one, which is just as urgent as and has implications just as far‐reaching as the crisis we’re seeing in the natural world. This isn’t a crisis of natural resources. It is a crisis of human resources. I think of this as the other climate crisis. (Location 3554)

The Other Climate Crisis

We’re living in times when hundreds of millions of people can only get through their day by relying on prescription drugs to treat depression and other emotional disorders. (Location 3564)