Passion — Its the “extra” in extraordinary !!

I would like to share a wonderful story I recently came across in the book titled The Element by Ken Robinson. The story goes like this-

An elementary school teacher was giving a drawing class to a group of six-year-old children. At the back of the classroom sat a little girl who normally did not pay much attention in school. In the drawing class she did. For more than twenty minutes, the girl sat with her arms curled around her paper, totally absorbed in what she was doing. The teacher found this fascinating. Eventually, she asked the girl what she was drawing. Without looking up, the girl said “I’m drawing a picture of God.” Surprised, the teacher said,”But nobody knows what God looks like

The girl said , “They will in a minute.”

The thing I find most striking about this story is the level of confidence young children have in their own imaginations. Young minds believe in dreaming and their innocence fosters their faith in the possibility of dreams turning to reality. No dream is silly for them. No dream unrealistic. This belief and confidence fades away as we grow up. As Robinson correctly points out, ask a class of first graders which of them thinks they are creative and they’ll put their hands up; ask a group of college seniors the same question and most of them won’t.

As we grow we all try to fit in the same conventional framework laid down by our society instead of seeking and trying to connect to the pool of talents within us.

But many success stories have been the result of recognizing one’s passion and following it with undaunting courage; and their journeys have been unconventional; not easy and straightforward but one full of twists and turns. I would present three different stories of three totally different people in diverse conditions :

GILLIAN LYNNE — British Ballerina,dancer, choreographer, actress, and theatre-television director, noted for her popular theatre choreography associated with two of the longest-running shows in Broadway history, Cats and The Phantom of the Opera

It is a story of the 1930s.Eight-year-old Gillian had a seemingly bleak future ahead of her as she was constantly underperforming at school. According to her teachers, she turned in assignments late, had a terrible handwriting and faired poorly in tests. Moreover she was always fidgety and distracted which was a constant source of disturbance to the other kids around her. Her school thought that Gillian had a learning disability of some sort, what would now be called an Attention Deficit HyperActivity Disorder, and recommended putting her in a special school. When school wrote this to her parents, they took her to a psychologist for inspection. The psychologist took Gillian to the far end of the large room and sat her on a sofa. Nervous about the impression she would make, she sat on her hands so that she wouldn’t fidget. The psychologist then went back to his desk and for the next twenty minutes, as he asked her mother about the difficulties she was facing at school, Gillian sat there highly uneasy and confused. She did not think there was anything wrong about her and did not want to go to a special school. Finally the psychologist approached her. “Gillian, you’ve been very patient, and I thank you for that,” he said. “But I’m afraid you’ll have to be patient for a little longer. I need to speak to your mother privately now. We’re going to go out of the room for a few minutes. Don’t worry; we won’t be very long.” While leaving the room the psychologist turned on the radio. Once in the corridor, he told her mother to look closely at Gillian. Immediately Gillian stood up and danced around the room to the music playing on the radio. At last, the psychologist turned to Gillian’s mother and said, “You know, Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn’t sick. She’s a dancer. Take her to a dance school.”

Her mother did exactly what the psychologist suggested and Gillian started going to the dance school every week.

Eventually, she auditioned for the Royal Ballet School in London, and they accepted her. She went on to join the Royal Ballet Company itself, becoming a soloist and performing all over the world.

MATT GROANINGS — American cartoonist, Creator of The Simpsons

Unlike Gillian, Matt always did fine in school getting decent grades and passing all the important tests. But he was always extremely bored. In order to keep himself amused, he started drawing during the classes and got so good at it that he could then draw without even seeing so that the teacher thought he was paying attention. This went to another level in high school. As the kids sat bored in art class and art supplies unused, he started using the supplies to create as many paintings he could- upto thirty paintings in a single class!!

As quoted in The Element by Ken Robinson, he said in an interview ““There was the thrill of making something that did not exist before. As my technical prowess increased, it was fun to be able to go, ‘Oh, that actually looks, vaguely, like what it’s supposed to look like.’ But then I realized that my drawing was not getting much better so I started concentrating on stories and jokes. I thought that was more entertaining.”

His teachers and his parents — even his father, who was a cartoonist and filmmaker — tried to encourage him to do something else with his life. They suggested that he go to college and find a more solid profession.But his true passion lied in an intersection of art and storytelling. He’d found only one teacher who truly inspired him. “My first-grade teacher saved paintings I did in class. She actually saved them, I mean, for years. I was touched because there’s like, you know, hundreds of kids going through here. Her name is Elizabeth Hoover. I named a character on The Simpsons after her.”

DR. PAUL SAMUELSON — American economist- First American to win Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences

Not all successful people disliked school or did badly there. Paul was still a high school student, one with very good grades, when he walked into a University of Chicago lecture hall for the first time. He didn’t realize as he did so that the college was one of the leading institutions in the world for the study of economics. He only knew that it was close to his home. Minutes later, he was “born again,” as he wrote in an article. “That day’s lecture was on Malthus’s theory that human populations would reproduce like rabbits until their density per acre of land reduced their wage to a bare subsistence level where an increased death rate came to equal the birth rate. So easy was it to understand all this simple differential equation stuff that I suspected (wrongly) that I was missing out on some mysterious complexity.”

At that point, Dr. Paul Samuelson’s life as an economist began. It is a life he describes as “pure fun,” one that has seen him serve as a professor at MIT, become president of the International Economic Association, write several books (including the bestselling economics textbook of all time) and hundreds of papers, have a significant impact on public policy,and, in 1970, become the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.

So what do these stories portray?

Three different people from different times, places and domains connected by a single fact — they all achieved great heights when they connected with their true passions.

Passion ignites the heart and rekindles your spirits like nothing else and true success is achieved only when you love what you do!!