Finding the Element Within

1. Why Some People Don't Wear Out

You've surely met someone like this: while doing a certain thing, he forgets to eat, forgets the time, forgets himself. To everyone watching it looks exhausting, yet the more he does it the more alive he becomes — as if the thing were feeding him back.

And you've surely met the opposite: someone who has barely done a thing all day, yet is tired from morning to night, can't summon any drive, and goes through everything as if behind a pane of glass.

Same person, same reserve of strength — so why does one kind of work wring a person dry, while another kind charges him up?

Ken Robinson answered that question with a single phrase: the Element.

2. Where Talent and Love Meet

In *The Element*, Robinson tells story after story: the girl who couldn't sit still in class, written off as hyperactive, who grew up to be one of the world's great choreographers; the people judged hopeless inside school who only found their real gift once they left it. From these lives he drew out one thing they shared.

The Element is the meeting of two things: what you are naturally good at (aptitude) and what you genuinely love (passion).

Aptitude alone isn't enough — plenty of people work jobs they're skilled at but loathe, and it hollows them out. Passion alone isn't enough either — all fire and no gift is usually just wasted effort. But when the two overlap at a single point, something remarkable happens: a person stops "doing work" and starts "being himself." A person in his Element, Robinson said, feels a particular thing — I belong here. This is where I'm meant to be.

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described the same thing from another angle. He called it flow: when a person throws himself into something whose difficulty just matches his ability, and that he truly wants to do, he enters a self-forgetting concentration. The sense of time falls away, self-consciousness falls away, and doing the thing is its own reward. He studied great numbers of the most absorbed people across every walk of life, and found that the best hours of a life nearly all happen inside flow — not while lying back in pleasure, but while going all out and loving it.

The Element is simply the patch of ground where a person can enter flow again and again.

3. A Systemic Exhaustion, and Its Cure

Now turn the gaze back to our children.

That bone-deep tiredness a child carries at school — can't get up, sits in the classroom with his soul somewhere else, opens a book and gets drowsy — very often isn't physical tiredness at all. It's the tiredness of meaning. He's been required, year after year, to do something he is neither good at nor in love with and can see no point in. This exhaustion doesn't come from doing too much; it comes from a life that hasn't been connected to anything he cares about. Robinson reminds us: good learning feeds a person, bad learning consumes him — and this is exactly where the difference lies.

This systemic exhaustion can't be slept off. A few more nights of sleep, a few days off, back to the same spot — and he withers the same as before.

Its one cure is love. It is giving this child the chance to run into something he's willing to lose track of time for. Even one thing — cooking, diving, caring for an animal, fixing a machine, whittling a block of wood into the shape he wants. The first time he tastes "so I can be this alive, this absorbed, inside one thing," that sense of being connected will wake him more powerfully than any lecture ever could.

4. Education's Real Job Is to Help a Person Find It

The Element is not the private privilege of a few geniuses. Robinson insisted that it is in every single person — most people have simply never been given the chance to discover it, because our education, from start to finish, teaches the standard answer and leaves no time for a person to feel his way toward "who I actually am, and what I'm really living for."

So what education ought to do is not stuff every child down the same narrow lane, but go find, for each particular person, his own patch of ground. Give him enough things to bump into, a space safe enough to fail in, and patience enough to wait while he slowly works out — what is the thing that can put the light back in his eyes.

A child who has found his Element, you no longer have to push to study. He'll run forward on his own, because he is finally doing something that feeds him back.

What we want to do is keep a long-withered child company, and help him find that thing again.