The Element by Ken Robinson

How finding your passion changes everything

The Element is the intersection where the things we love to do and the things we are good at come together.

Epiphany stories — find high levels of achievement and personal satisfaction upon discovering the thing they one naturally do well and ignites their passions

Why haven’t people found their element?

• Limitation in our understanding of our range of capacities, most of us are born with extraordinary powers of imagination, intelligence, feeling, intuition, spirituality and physical and sensory awareness.
• Limitation in our understanding of how all these capacities relate to each other holistically.
• Limitation in our understanding of how much potential we have for growth.

What’s wrong with education?

• Preoccupation with certain sorts of academic ability, certain sorts fo critical analysis, and reasoning, with words and numbers
• Hierarchy of subjects — science, humanities, and the arts
• Growing reliance on standardized testing.

The element: features are aptitude and passion, the conditions are attitude and opportunity — I get it, I love it, I want it, Where is it?

• Challenge what you take for granted about your abilities and the abilities of other people.

Intelligence includes linguistic, musical, mathematical, spatial, kinesthetic, interpersonal and intrapersonal. Intelligence is diverse, distinct, and dynamic.

Creativity myths

• Only special people are creative! Creativity is like literacy.
• Creativity is about special domains like art design and advertising
• People are either creative or not!
• Creativity is applied imagination, now what’s the medium?

Flow:

• One of the signs of being in the zone is a sense of freedom and authenticity. We feel the power of the one, and feel we are doing what we are meant to be doing.
• Once you think you are in the zone, you are immediately out of it.
• Happens when psychic energy or attention is invested in realistic goals” | when skills match the opportunities for action.

Domain and Fields

• Domain refers to activates and disciplines that people are engaged in — acting, rock music, rap, architecture, poetry, etc
• Field refers to the other people who are engaged in the same domain
• Find the synergy, validation, and inspiration in your domains and fields.

What will they think?

• Barriers to finding your element — personal, social and cultural
• Groupthink — a mode of thinking “that people engage in when they are deeply involved in cohesive in-group, when the members; strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”
• Conformity is valued higher than diversity!

Reforming Education

• Curriculum, emphasized, vast and expansive
• Pedagogy, sacrificed, what?
• Assessment, emphasized, obsession with standardization

Aphorisms (some of my favorites, from the book)

• If you are not prepared to be wrong, you’ll come up with nothing creative.
• Our systems of education put a high premium on knowing the single right answer to a question. [ Conformity ]
• We don’t know who we can be until we know what we can do.
• As soon as something becomes obvious in this world, we have abandoned all attempts at understanding it.
• How intelligent are you? OR How are you intelligent?
• Zig when the others zag, more than often the route to success is going against the flow.
• In fact, in any discipline where experience plays a significant role, age is an asset rather than a liability.
• Your job ought not to define you even if you are in the element.

This summary was previously published in booksummaries.co by @cggaurav