The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything by Ken Robinson

Its difficult to have missed Sir Ken Robinson's talk which is available on TED and perhaps one of the most devoured talk of our time. His wry sense of humor, nailing the ailments of current education system, all laced with his profound understanding on the topic which he talks with ease. One of the recent watch made me impulsively buy his book, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything.

His book is a fine extension of things he talks about: creativity, education, its manifestation in a system, a system that perhaps has gone wrong in a severe way. And is looking for ways to change, louder than ever: change that he professes, transformation in a revolutionary way rather than just revising a system. And he does it with pure examples of many creative people who rejected the system, found themselves misfit in a system and kept looking for their creative passion till they discovered it. He urges to look away from the current industrialized model of education and find ways which leverages human diversity in a rich way to save ourselves from an impending crisis of severely damaged human ecology.

He emphasizes that culture itself is strict system, a manifestation, a structure to organize ourselves in an earnest attempt to define our identities.

Culture is a system of permissions.

First we create a system of culture, we put certain parameters of behavior, acceptable & non- acceptable ones. And in doing so, we start putting expectations and sub-consciously demand things and indirectly command people to behave in certain ways in a restrictive way. But things do not always behave in a pre-determined or a predictable manner. Life is not linear, in fact it is extremely organic. To deal with unpredictability and non-linearity, we need to be flexible enough to explore alternate creative paths. And thus he rejects uniformity and homogeneity of a systematic pre-approved thinking.

We put such a premium on being approved of, we become reluctant to take risks.

Book is a celebration of his revolutionary thinking which he has formed over a period of time after interacting with several diverse people across the globe, their journey (sometimes a difficult one) to find their passion and being in one's element, their only element which places them in this magical space in mind where they cannot imagine doing anything else. It breaks all the shackles of a system and frees people to follow that inner inkling of heart whatever that talent might be. For example, so many cultures still emphasize and define a women's secondary role in the system, her delusional image of nurturing the humanity, motherhood and a gender which should bring glamor and gloss to the settings. He says,

Women still have an uneasy relationship with power and the traits necessary to be a leader. There is this internalized fear that if we are really powerful, we are going to be considered ruthless or pushy or strident- all those epithets that strike right at our femininity. We are still working at trying to overcome the fear that power and womanliness are mutually exclusive.