But they provide a path as well. For they show all of us the value of asking a vitally important question: If left to my own devices—if I didn’t have to worry about making a living or what others thought of me—what am I most drawn to doing? Terence Tao probably never had to wonder what he was going to do with his life. He probably never used the Myers‐Briggs Type Indicator or the Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument to determine which career options offered a spark for him. What the rest of us need to do is to see our futures and the futures of our children, our colleagues, and our community with the childlike simplicity prodigies have when their talents first emerge.
This is about looking into the eyes of your children or those you care for and, rather than approaching them with a template about who they might be, trying to understand who they really are. This is what the psychologist did with Gillian Lynne, and what Mick Fleetwood’s parents and Ewa Laurance’s parents did with them. Left to their own devices, what are they drawn to do? What kinds of activities do they tend to engage in voluntarily? What sorts of aptitude do they suggest? What absorbs them most? What sort of questions do they ask, and what type of points do they make?
We need to understand what puts them and us in the zone. And we need to determine what implications that has for the rest of our lives.
CHAPTER FIVE Finding Your Tribe
FOR MOST PEOPLE , a primary component of being in their Element is connecting with other people who share their passion and a desire to make the most of themselves through it. Meg Ryan is the popular actor best known for her work in such movies as When Harry Met Sally… and Sleepless in Seattle. Her acting career has been buoyant for more than a quarter of a century, yet she didn’t imagine a lifetime in that profession when she was at school. In fact, the whole thought of acting or even speaking in public terrified her. She told me that at school performances, she’d always preferred to be on the bleachers than on the stage. She was a good student, though, and in the eighth grade, she was valedictorian. She was thrilled at her achievement until she realized that she had to give a speech in front of the whole school.
Although she practiced for weeks, when she found herself at the podium she simply froze in terror. She said that her mother had to go up onto the platform and bring her back down to her seat. And yet she went on to become one of the most accomplished comedy actresses of her generation. This was, in part, because she found her tribe.
Following a successful career at school, Meg won a scholarship to New York University to study journalism. She had always loved to write, and her intention was to focus on becoming a writer, something she considered at the time to be her true passion. To help pay for tuition, though, she found work in the occasional commercial. This led to producers choosing her for a regular role in the soap opera As the World Turns, and to Meg’s discovery that she loved traveling in this circle.
“I found the world of actors fascinating,” she told me. “I was around hilarious people. The job was like being in this nutty extended family. It was a kick. I was doing sixteen‐hour days and I became more and more comfortable with the ‘everyday’ of it. I loved the fact that we were always talking about why someone would do something and examining human behavior. I found I had all these opinions about what my character would or wouldn’t do. I didn’t know where I got them from but I had lots and lots of them. I would say things like, ‘OK, that’s what the subtext is. So why am I speaking my subtext?’ I would find myself rewriting lines and really engaging in the character and their world. Every day we’d get a new script and I had to memorize all these lines. It was absolutely, overwhelmingly engaging. There was no time to think about anything else. It was complete immersion.”
Still, after leaving As the World Turns and graduating from college, Meg did not set off immediately for Hollywood. Believing she had more to discover about herself, she spent some time in Europe and even considered joining the Peace Corps. But when a movie offer took her to Los Angeles and she returned to the acting milieu, she found once again that she was in a rare place when doing this work.
“I met up with this really great acting teacher. Her name was Peggy Fury. Peggy started talking to me about the art and craft of acting and what being an artist meant to her. Sean Penn was in the class above me, and Anjelica Houston, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Nicolas Cage were there, too. I was surrounded by people who worked from really deep, deep down in themselves and were interested in the human condition and the idea of bringing writing to life. All these things just started to bloom in my mind and in my heart and in my soul. So I stayed in Los Angeles and got an apartment. My agent in New York hooked me up with an L.A. agent, and that’s when it all came together for me.
“Various movies have come along and taught me so many things and helped me grow as a human being. When I decide to do a movie, it may be because I think it’s funny, or I want to work with a particular actor, but in the end, it always has a profound effect on my life. If it’s not the subject matter, it may be a particular group of people. My evolution is served by the different incarnations that are part of every single movie.”
Meg Ryan could have been many things. She has genuine skill as a writer. She has considerable academic talents. She has a wide variety of interests and fascinations. However, when she’s acting, she finds herself with a group of people who see the world the way she does, who allow her to feel her most natural, who affirm her talents, who inspire her, influence her, and drive her to be her best. She is close to her true self when she is among actors, directors, camera and lighting people, and all of the others who populate the film world.
Being a part of this tribe brings her to the Element.
A Place to Discover Yourself
Tribe members can be collaborators or competitors. They can share the same vision or have utterly different ones. They can be of a similar age or from different generations. What connects a tribe is a common commitment to the thing they feel born to do. This can be extraordinarily liberating, especially if you’ve been pursuing your passion alone.
Don Lipski, one of America’s most acclaimed sculptors and public artists, always knew that he had an artistic bent. There were some early signs that he had unusual creative energy. “When I was a child,” he told me, “I was always making things. I didn’t think of myself as a creative person but as someone with nervous energy. I had to be doodling and putting things together. I didn’t think of it as an asset. If anything, it was a peculiarity.” This “nervous energy” made him feel different from other kids, and sometimes uncomfortable. “As a child,” he said, “more than anything else you just want to be like all the other kids. So rather than me seeing my creativity as something special, it seemed to set me apart.”
Through elementary school and into junior high, Lipski was pulled in different directions. He was academically bright but bored by academic work. “Academic work came very easily to me. I would finish assignments very quickly and with the least effort rather than the most depth.” He was gifted in math, and his school moved him into an accelerated math group, but in other respects teachers thought of him as an underachiever because he did just enough to get by. He spent more time drawing on his books than thinking about what to write in them: “When I should have been doing academic work, I was drawing or folding paper. Rather than being encouraged, I was chided for it.”