The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

The Element is uplifting and inspiring - and also just a heck of a good read! The author's main point is that many of the greatest creative geniuses of our times have had skill sets and abilities which are not captured by traditional measures of achievement. He illustrates this point brilliantly, informing us that Elvis was rejected from the glee club at his high school, while Paul McCartney tried out for a prestigious choir in England as a child but didn't get in. His is essentially a secular argument for the idea of a vocation or a God-given calling on every person's life. He interviews and describes various people in various professions - all of whom hae that spark that enables you to invent a device that people need, to craft a theory that's new and unique or to make a piece of art that moves people to tears. What I was NOT expecting in this book was his fascinating public policy analysis. For his is a call for a broader theory of education in which everyone's unique contributions and abilities would be recognized (a la the emotional intelligence theory of Goleman), as well as a call to all of us to trust ourselves and nurture our unique and individual gifts. A Brit who currently lives in the US, he comes down particularly harshly on our current climate of No Child Left Behind-driven standardized testing, arguing that it sets up only ONE standard of achievement and one way to measure it. He tells a story in the beginning about a Gillian Lynne, who became one of Britain's greatest dancers and choreographers. In the course of his description, he notes (almost as an aside) that she had trouble sitting still, and that in today's harsh educational climate, she probably would have been medicated with Ritalin for hyperactivity. Instead, a sensitive doctor discovered how much she loved movement and suggested that it be channeled into dance. It makes you wonder what other child's unique gifts and abilities are being medicated away at this very moment, and what other losses we might suffer as a society as a result. A brilliant, moving book.

"What I hope you will find here is a new way of looking at your own potential and the potential of those around you." "The Element: How finding your passion changes everything" by Sir Ken Robinson is a book on passion, creativity, and, most importantly, education. In this book, he tells you how different people ranging from Paul McCartney (The Beatles), Meg Ryan (the actress), Paul Samuelson (the economist), Paolo Coelho (The Alchemist.. sorry, the writer) found their passion, their Element. His contention is that intelligence is diverse, dynamic, and distinct and typical hierachical and standardised education squandered them. Sir Ken Robinson works in education and he caught eyes of millions in his all-time favourite talk in the TED conference in 2005. You might want to take a look at the 20 minutes talk before reading the book. I have found his talk tremendously inspirational and my review might be biased. But I would encourage you to also be biased and inspired by this intelligent and witty thinker. Contents (every chapter is filled with amazing stories of different amazing people in the world. In this briefing, I could not list all or even half of them) (I also copy (plagiarise) lots of words from the book and I hope it did not terribly violate the copyright!) Chapter One: The Element The chapter starts with Gillian Lynne and Matt Groening who were hopeless at school but ending up giving pleasure to millions around the world because they found their Element - "the place where the things you love to do and the things you are good at come together." Sir Ken Robinson explained that the Element has two main features and two conditions aptitude (I get it), passion (I love it), attitude (I want it), opportunity (Where is it?). Chapter Two: Think Differently We take things for granted. When asked how many senses we possess; people normally answer five or six. That is taking things for granted. Psychologists and scientists assert that there are four more. Likewise, when we talk about intelligence, people often refer it to IQ. That is taking things for granted. Sir Ken Robinson tells us that three features of intelligence are that it is diverse, dynamic, and distinct. And we should rather ask "How are you intelligent?" than "How intelligent are you?" Chapter Three: Beyond Imagining This chapter starts with three myths of creativity. One myth is that only special people are creative. Another myth is that creativity is about special activities like the arts, design, or advertising. The third myth is that people are either creative or not. Sir Ken said they are all not true. He wrote how imagination is different from creativity and how we should develop both. There are also stories of George Harrison (The Beatles) and how he and Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, and Jeff Lynne created a wonderful album and how an American physicist, Richard Faynman won a Nobel Prize. Chapter Four: In the Zone "To be in the zone is to be in the deep heart of the

Sir Ken Robinson is a must read for educators and parents. He not only writes about the importance of finding your passion and the intersection between what you love and what you're good at, he offers numerous suggestions for how educators and parents can help themselves and our children discover their Element. Interestingly, this book is a perfect companion to Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, a book about achieving success. Gladwell's suggestion that luck and practice contribute to achieving the pinnacle of success and Sir Ken's suggestions for how to increase the likelihood of that happening (through discovery and exposure that might help one discover what they might want to put 10,000 hours of practice into) make for something a lot greater than an interesting read. They give us the beginning of a roadmap.

I first learned of Sir Ken Robinson through watching his lecture "Do Schools Kill Creativity" free on the Internet last year (his talks have been viewed millions of times by people across the world). In that talk he mentions he was in the process of writing a book -- THE ELEMENT: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything -- is that book. I was thrilled to be able to attend a lecture, one of the first stops on the book tour to promote this book and was so inspired I bought the book immediately. This book's audience is every person in the world, every single one of us could benefit from reading and applying the information in this book. In addition to being about changes that a person can make in their own life during adulthood, the book also speaks to teachers and other adults who are involved in educating children. People interested in learning styles, learning disabilities, alternative education and education reform may be interested in this book. All types of artists and creative people may like to read THE ELEMENT. The books starts off discussing children, how all children are unique, have certain interests and natural talents; have an inborn curiosity and a capacity to learn. Sadly, school is sometimes a place where some children are stifled and changed for the worse. Despite best intentions by society for children `to become educated', the issues with designing a `one size fits all' curriculum for mass institutional schools creates its own set of problems. In an effort to raise everyone's educational level up, some fall through the cracks, or their square pegs don't fit in the round holes. The way modern schooling is conducted damages some children. Attempts to educate all children to one standard plan does not allow all children with varying natural talents to shine. The very method of institutional schooling with its standard teaching and standardized testing not to mention the effects in American public schools of No Child Left Behind (when teachers are spending lots of class time teaching to the test or perfecting test taking skills) trains children to think there is only one right answer, therefore killing the creativity that was present within the child before they stepped foot in school. The book is a call for education reformation (transformation) but the author stops short before actionable suggestions are made (I suspect because the issue has been discussed ad nauseum by others over many years time, and still the system is still far from ideal). But, the ideas in the book may plant seeds of change within the minds of school teachers, administrators and parents, and perhaps others can come up with creative ideas on how to affect real change. If not, the individual can always use the advice in this book on themselves when they are teenagers or adults. Discussed is the fact that children who were labeled with conditions such as ADD/ADHD or who are deemed learning disabled were made to feel they are broken, different (in a bad way