How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

Sir Ken Robinson, best known for his TED talk of last year (see second video below), is on the web again, this time talking about his new book The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. For those of us who have heard or used the expression "in his element," we understand phrase to mean that he is "doing what he is best at," or "doing what he was born to do."

That's The Element in a nutshell: a bold proclamation that people can do best what they actually enjoy and are good at (no news there), but that too often they are turned from the pursuit of what will ultimately fulfill them by the dictates of others, the "realities" of making a living, and (you guessed it) schools that limit their choices and dreams. Not saying he's wrong, mind you, but we all knew that was coming. And that's probably bad.

A favorite part:

Finding a purpose in the work we do or they way that we spend our time which resonates deeply with who we think we are, is an essential part of knowing who we are. In a way, if you don’t know what you can do, then you don’t really know what you might be.

Our own lives are not linear. Think not of linear metaphors for human growth and development, but organic metaphors… that our lives evolve around the responses we have to the opportunities that meet us. We, in turn, reciprocate with them. We still run our education systems as if life is linear. We run them as if it’s mechanistic. This is one of the reasons so many things get phased out of education, because people say, "Well, you’ll never get a job if you do this." Things are dropped off the end because they don’t meet the linear assumption.

If you've got the time, this is well worth a look.