The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.
What you’re doing now, or have done in the past, need not determine what you can do next and in the future.
Whatever your aptitudes, the greatest source of achievement is passion. Aptitude matters, but passion often matters more… If you love doing something, you’ll be constantly drawn to get better at it.
Never underestimate the vital importance of finding early in life the work that for you is play. This turns possible underachievers into happy warriors.
If you are considering earning your living from your Element, it’s important to bear in mind that you not only have to love what you do; you should also enjoy the culture and the tribes that go with it.
The word amateur derives from the Latin word amator, which means lover, devoted friend, or someone who is in avid pursuit of an objective. In the original sense, an amateur is someone who does something for the love of it.
In my experience, most people have a narrow view of intelligence, tending to think of it mainly in terms of academic ability. This is why so many people who are smart in other ways end up thinking that they’re not smart at all. There are myths surrounding creativity as well.
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.
Musicians love the sounds they make, natural writers love words, dancers love movement, mathematicians love numbers, entrepreneurs love making deals, great teachers love teaching. This is why people who fundamentally love what they do don’t think of it as work in the ordinary sense of the word. They do it because they want to and because, when they do, they are in their Element.
Dr. Henry Lodge, coauthor of Younger Next Year, makes the point sharply. “It turns out,” he says, “that 70% of American aging is not real aging. It’s just decay. It’s rot from the stuff that we do.
Expert teachers fulfill four main roles: they engage, enable, expect, and empower. ENGAGE
Our schools have a doubly hard task, not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.
Whatever you woke up worrying about this morning, get over it. How important in the greater scheme of things can it possibly be? Make your peace and move on.
Kids aren’t particularly worried about being wrong. If they aren’t sure what to do in a particular situation, they’ll just have a go at it and see how things turn out. This is not to suggest being wrong is the same thing as being creative. Sometimes being wrong is just being wrong. What is true is that if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.
Dan Baker agrees: “The myth that money brings you happiness is one of the happiness traps,” he says. In a study of 792 well-off adults, “more than half reported that wealth didn’t bring them more happiness and half of those with assets greater than $ 10 million said that money brought more problems than it solved.
The fun factor isn’t essential to creative work—there are many examples of creative pioneers who were hardly a laugh a minute. But sometimes when we’re playing around with ideas and laughing, we’re most open to new thoughts. In all creative work, there may be frustrations, problems, and dead ends along the way. I know some wonderfully creative people who find parts of the process difficult and deeply exasperating. But there’s always profound pleasure at some point, and a deep sense of satisfaction from “getting it right.”
Page 12
