Finding Your Element by Ken Robinson, Lou Aronica

People in all walks of life really do achieve their best when they find their Element.

As Confucius said, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” Confucius had not read The Element, but it feels like he did.

These days it’s probable that you will have various jobs and even occupations during your working life. Where you start out is not likely to be where you will end up. Knowing what your Element is will give you a much better sense of direction than simply bouncing from one job to the next. Whatever your age, it’s the best way to find work that really fulfills you.

If you know what your Element is, you’re more likely to find ways to make a living at it.

When you’re in your Element, your sense of time changes. If you’re doing something that you love, an hour can feel like five minutes; if you are doing something that you do not, five minutes can feel like an hour.

Being in your Element gives you energy. Not being in it takes it from you.

You only know the outer world through your inner world. You perceive it through your physical senses and you make sense of it through the ideas, values, feelings and attitudes that make up your worldview.

 The poet Anaïs Nin once said, “I don’t see the world as it is: I see it as I am.” She meant that no one has a neutral point of view. We see the world around us from the world within us and each shapes our perspective on the other. As human beings, we do not always see the world directly; we interpret our experiences through patterns of ideas, values and beliefs. Some of these have to do with our own dispositions and some have to do with the cultures we’re part of and the times we live in. In all areas of our lives, whether and how we act is affected by how we think and feel. Your own attitudes and those of the people around you may help or hinder you in finding what your Element is and pursuing it.

Being born at all, as the Dalai Lama once said, is a miracle.

It is often said that you cannot change the past but you can change the future.

As Carl Jung puts it, “I am not what has happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”

Life is not linear, it is organic.

“The saddest thing to me,” says Dr. Brooks, “is seeing someone take the job because it pays well and then spend all that money on toys to cheer themselves up for being so miserable in their jobs. The people who are doing what they love hardly feel they’re working at all, just living.”

You gotta find that thing that you love so much that you’re gonna be the best at it. I didn’t care if I was going to be poor or rich—I was gonna do this no matter. This was what was calling me. This was what made me happy. When I was cutting pieces of wood in the basement, I really felt that there was something grabbing my hand and showing me how to do it. There was no doubt in my mind that I was going where I was supposed to be going. -- Randy Parsons

There's a lot more to be learned, and I'm going to learn all the way up to the stairway to the stars

Mimi Weddell

From <https://www.azquotes.com/author/81744-Mimi_Weddell>

“Doesn’t time go really fast its moment by moment by moment, and you’ve got to grab it”

From <https://www.advanced.style/2010/11/ten-inspiring-quotes-from-mimi-weddell.html>

“Like Piaf I have no regrets, Oh mercy you have to have the downers and the uppers to be a complete person”

From <https://www.advanced.style/2010/11/ten-inspiring-quotes-from-mimi-weddell.html>

As Joseph Campbell says, if you move in the direction of your passions, opportunities tend to appear that you couldn’t have imagined and that weren’t otherwise there.

The thing I realized was that if I didn’t take the risk of living, I was guaranteed to fail. In the law firms I was working at I could see guys who had taken that route. They’d sit around having bitter conversations about how awful their lives were. I could hit the fast-forward button and see that I was headed there. I figured if I left the practice of law, I had at least a fifty-fifty chance.

Chris Jordan found his Element when he decided that risking everything was better than the alternative. He stays in his Element by continuously pushing himself. It has led to a richly rewarding life, though not necessarily a comfortable one.

“There are a lot of anxieties that go along with this. If there’s one thing I would say to someone who wants to take the risk of doing what they love, it would be to learn to bear anxiety.” It’s the price of allowing yourself to answer the question, “What’s next?” But paying that price can lead to a completely different level of fulfillment.

Mark Frankland, for example, might never have discovered his true passion if he hadn’t suddenly found himself without a job. Mark had once written a song for his wife that included the African proverb, “Life is like eating an elephant; you need to do it one mouthful at a time.” He didn’t realize it at the time, but this lyric captured the essence of his search for his Element.

“I think that part of the process of overcoming a big hurdle,” he said to me, “is not looking at how big the problem is, but just trying to find out the next step you should take. Sometimes it’s drastic, and sometimes it’s very little. Sometimes a little thing can make massive changes to your life.”

As the old proverb says, “Don’t regret becoming old: it’s a privilege denied to many.” And it is.

When she asked her patients whether they had any regrets in their lives or if they would have done anything differently, a number of themes came up again and again. These are the most common ones:

I WISH I’D HAD THE COURAGE TO LIVE A LIFE TRUE TO MYSELF, NOT THE LIFE OTHERS EXPECTED OF ME.

This was the most common regret of all. When people realize that their life is almost over and look back on it, they often realize how many of their dreams have been unfulfilled. “Most people had not honored even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.”

Mark Twain used the same metaphor. Reflecting on his own life and achievements he had this advice: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

“Risk” is a short poem often attributed to the writer Anais Nin. It uses a powerful, organic metaphor to contrast the risks of suppressing your potential with the rewards of releasing it:

And then the day came,

when the risk

to remain tight

in a bud

was more painful

than the risk

it took

to blossom.