PNTV: The Element by Ken Robinson (#166)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great book, the Element. The Element by Sir Ken Robinson. Sir Ken is one of the world's leading experts on creativity, genius, all that good stuff. This book is his distillation of some of his best ideas. You may have seen his TED Talk, one of the most popular TED talks ever. He was also in a great documentary called Finding Joe, all about your 21st century hero's journey. I happen to be in that as well. He's awesome in it, and I think you'll dig that. I'll put a link to that below. For now, let's jump in. Philosopher's Note. Bunch of big ideas. My five favorite ones are these five ideas. We're going to start by defining the element. What is the element? Well, the element is the nexus point of these two things. What you love and what you're good at. What you love and what you're good at. Right at that nexus point, if you love doing something so much, maybe you'd even pay to do it. And you're good at it. You have a talent for it. You put those two together, you have talent, passion, you have the element. Sir Ken's idea is, look, we all need to discover our element, not only for our own personal fulfillment, but for the world. The world needs more people who have come alive by discovering this nexus point of what we totally love to do and what we're really good at. That's how we're going to be able to serve the world most profoundly. Now, I like to add a third little circle here often and talk about what the world needs, what it will pay for. So when we talk about how to discover our purpose, I love to lean into Jim Collins's work, who wrote Good to Great Build to Last and a bunch of other great business books. And he talks about something called the Hedgehog concept, which is basically these three ideas. What do you love to do? Again, so much you pay to do, it fires you up, time evaporates. It's just you doing what you absolutely dig. What are you good at? And Collins says, what are you so good at that you could, in fact be among the best in the world at Great businesses are focused on what they love to do and what they can think, what they think they can be the best in the world at? Truly great at, Right? So where's that for you? Great individuals do the same thing. And then three, what does the world need? Finding a way to meet the world's needs in a way that they're willing to pay for it is a big part of discovering our purpose in the 21st century. So, two ideas for the element. What do you love? What are you good at? Applying? The third needs. What the world will pay for is always a good idea. That's our first big idea. The second one is, how are you intelligent? Now, that's a very different question then. Are you intelligent? Are you intelligent? Wow, that sounds a little finite. But if you say, how are you intelligent? You're asking a very different question. You're going to get a very different set of answers. So Sir Ken goes off on the typical IQ test, Myers, Briggs, etc. And he says, look, those are just ways to measure a finite level of intelligence. But each of us has a unique constellation of strengths and intelligences. And the question is not, are you intelligent? Yes or no? The question is, how are you intelligent? We're all intelligent. Now, some of the standard intelligence measures may or may not reveal our deep intelligence. In fact, they won't comprehensively. So ask yourself this question. How are you intelligent? That's a way to help us get at this. What are you good at? What are you naturally good at? How are you intelligent? Take some time and think about that right now. Journal about it. Document the things that you're truly good at that your intelligence is expressed in. That's our second big idea. Talk about that for a lot longer. For now, we will go to the third big idea, Creativity. Again, Sir Ken Robinson is one of the world's leading experts on creativity. What is creativity? He says creativity is applied imagination. Applied imagination. Now that's important to distinguish. It's not just coming up with ideas and having a good imagination. That's not true creativity. True creativity is applying that imagination and finding needs in the world that you can fulfill, creating value in the world, whether that's through entertainment or education or whatever else you. Whatever else you come up with creatively. Think about that. Imagination. Applied equals creativity. It's a big idea. And that's our third one. The fourth big idea for the element is perseverance. So we talk about this all the time. He says, look, if you want to bring your element into the world, it's not a matter of snapping your fingers. Oh, I found it. Oh, it's cool. You know, I love doing this. I'm good at that. Bam. Done. Not how it works. You need to have sheer, dogged determination, quote, unquote. It's worth writing down. Sheer, dogged determination. In other words, perseverance. Sheer dogged determination. The people that we admire who have figured out what their element is and have figured out how to create a life in which they do that demonstrate a sheer high level of dogged determination. They persevere in the face of obstacles. So again, this is a recurring theme. We need to expect obstacles and we need to move through them again and again and again and use them. The obstacle is the way. It's not a pain in the butt, it's what makes us stronger. Just like going to the gym, we lift weights, we get stronger. Going through obstacles makes us stronger. And we don't want to kid ourselves by thinking that we're going to manifest our ideal life and live from the element consistently without challenges. So fourth big idea. Rock your perseverance. The fifth big idea. We need to decrease conformity. He tells a story that's just amazing. But first, context. If you want again, live from your element, you need to buck trends, you need to buck conforming to what most people do. Most people watch hours of TV every day, check their phones 100 plus times a day. They're constantly reacting to what life is bringing to them and not taking the time to step back, unplug and create their ideal life. If you want to create a life in which you live from your element, you need to be a non conformist. Don't be like everybody else. A lot of authors jokingly say, look, if the only thing you ever did was the opposite of what most people did, that'd be a pretty good rule to follow. Just don't do what most people do, don't conform. But he tells this story which is absolutely fascinating about our tendency as human beings to conform. So here's the basic idea. You bring people into a lab and 10 people show up in this little laboratory experiment, right? So you have 10 people, right? Nine of those people are plants. Nine of those people were put there by the experimenter to see what they can make the other one person do. They want to see if they're going to conform in this experiment, right? And then what they do is they show everybody, all 10 people a line. Then they say, hey, tell us which line matches that line, right? So it's a really simple experiment. And let's say that's the first line, right? And then we want to know which line matches that one, line two or line three. Now I'm exaggerating it a little bit, so you can see on the white on the chalkboard here, right? But basically this is the experiment. Bunch of people in the lab. A very obvious answer to the question. Clearly this number two matches number one, not number three. Right. But what's interesting is you get these 10 people, nine of whom are plants, and you get these nine people to say that this one matches. Oh yeah, it's three. Second person. Yeah, it's three. Yeah, it's three. It's three. It's three. This one little guy over here is sitting here saying, wow, really? It sure looks like number two is the proper match. Right, but what will he say or she say? He'll conform. The majority of the time. Not every time, but the majority of the time. This one person will be influenced by these nine people who are being silly on purpose and saying this matches that when it clearly doesn't. But they'll conform and we conform. The experiment is mind boggling. Again, the majority of people would go along with the crowd. Well, what does that look like in the world? That looks like some of the most atrocious things that have ever happened in history because everybody is conforming. Oh well, this person's doing it. They said it's okay, so it must be okay, I'll do it. It's the heroic among us who say, no, that's not okay. I don't care how many people are doing that, that's not right. I'll be the 1 out of 10 that says that's the truth. And that takes heroic everyday courage. We need to have that. So that's our final idea here. If you want to bring the element to life, you need to have that same level of non conforming courage. Ralph Waldo Emerson called it self reliance. And he says truly, it takes something godlike in him or her to trust himself as a taskmaster. And he says, for your nonconformity, society will whip you with its displeasure. Society doesn't like non conformists. Everyone wants to be comfortable. Don't challenge me, just let me go home and do whatever I feel comfortable doing. But we need to have the audacity to dream and to see what's possible and to not conform. So there you go. Fifth big idea. Fourth one was persevering. When you don't conform and you're willing to challenge the norms and go for it, guess what? Not everyone's going to be super supportive. We want to have deep relationships and honor those and be willing to go against the challenges and obstacles we're going to face in individuals and in life circumstances. Creativity is not enough just to have good ideas. You need to apply that imagination to creating value for people. That's the third big idea. The fourth one, don't ask. Are you intelligent? Am I intelligent? No. Or maybe? Or even yes. It's how are you intelligent? What are you good at? Figure that out and then figure out how you map that over with what you love to do. And have fun connecting to your element. We've got a ton of stuff going on now, love, plus what you're good at, plus how do you meet some needs in the world and create value for people? It's a winning combination. I hope you enjoyed and I look forward to sharing more with you soon. Have another awesome day. See you.