BOOK OF THE DAY: JOHN S DOYLEreviews The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes EverythingBy Ken Robinson with Lou Aronica, Allen Lane 274pp; £16.99
IT IS not widely known that the character Elizabeth Hoover in The Simpsonsis named after the cartoon family creator's first-grade teacher. In all Matt Groening's years at school she was the only teacher who inspired him, and she saved paintings he did in class.
“She actually saved them, I mean, for years,” he says.
Ken Robinson’s book is about how people find their element, the “sweet spot” that fulfils their potential.
Groening found his by ignoring the suggestions of his teachers and parents that he should get a real job. He decided he was going to live by his wits.
“My vision was that I’d be working in a tire warehouse. I have no idea why I thought it was a tire warehouse. I thought I’d be rolling tires around, and then on my break, I’d be drawing cartoons.” As Robinson remarks, things turned out rather differently.
Robinson uses the term “the element” to describe the place where the things we love to do and the things we are good at come together.
“I believe it is essential that each of us find his or her element, not simply because it will make us more fulfilled but because, as the world evolves, the very future of our communities and institutions will depend on it,” he writes.
And the more apocalyptic our visions of the world have become, even since he wrote that, the more we agree he might have a point.
The author found his element in a special school in Liverpool – he had contracted polio in 1954 – where a visiting inspector reckoned he had the potential to pass the 11-plus exam.
It was a correct assessment: he was the only one in the school to pass. The inspector continued to be a mentor, and Robinson credits him as an inspiration for seeing the potential in people and creating opportunities for them to show what they can really do.
Robinson is now an authority on creativity and innovation, orbiting the earth to be consulted by governments and big companies, knighted for his contribution to education and the arts, and now living happily in Los Angeles.
He illustrates his thoughts with anecdotes, about the famous, many of whom he has interviewed, and the not famous. We have Paul McCartney and John Lennon taking the bus across town to see someone who knew how to play the B7 chord on the guitar.
And we have the absorbed six-year-old in a drawing class. After 20 minutes the teacher asked what she was drawing.
A picture of God, she said. But nobody knows what God looks like, said the teacher.
“They will in a minute,” the girl said.
You can see Sir Ken telling that one in his Ted (technology, entertainment, design) lecture – at www.ted.com – on how schools stifle creativity. Ted is an annual conference of “the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers”.
Self-help, books about self-improvement, courses on motivation – these are things that we in Ireland, and Britain too, always tended to be sceptical about.
We preferred to leave to the Americans that sense that everything is improvable. In the same way, there was a fatalistic strain in our personalities that, when the topic of achieving fitness came up, asked dourly: “Fit for what?”
But times change and we change with them, and now that the world is looking to America to solve its problems, we may embrace the subtle difference between the vacuous Blairite message, “Things can only get better”, and the positive Obamian one, “Things can get better”.
We can start with ourselves, and there is a lot of absorbing material in The Elementto set us off on the journey.
John S Doyle is a freelance journalist