The CRP, she says, aims to prove scientifically the hypothesis that science can be funny. “We are methodologically sound. During each show, a control audience is locked in an identical, adjoining room without comedians. We then assess whether this control audience laughs more or less than the experimental audience who are exposed to jokes about science. Preliminary data gathered from shows around the country looks promising.”
For Helen Pilcher, a life in science has given way to a life of writing and communicating about science. Leaving the lab was scary, she says, “but not as scary as the prospect of staying. My advice, should you be contemplating making that leap, is to make like a lemming and jump.”
Domains and Fields
When I talk about tribes, I’m really talking about two distinct ideas, both of which are important for anyone who is looking to find their Element. The first is the idea of a “domain” and the second, of a “field.” Domain refers to the sorts of activities and disciplines that people are engaged in—acting, rock music, business, ballet, physics, rap, architecture, poetry, psychology, teaching, hairdressing, couture, comedy, athletics, pool, visual arts, and so on. Field refers to the other people who are engaged in it. The domain that Meg Ryan discovered was acting, particularly soaps. The field was the other actors she worked with who loved acting the way she did, and who fed Meg’s creativity. Later, she moved to another part of the domain, to film acting and within that from comedy to more serious roles. She extended her field as well, especially when she met Peggy Fury and the other actors in her class.
Understanding Meg’s domain and her connection to her field helps explain how the shy girl who couldn’t give a valedictorian speech became an accomplished, world‐renowned actor. “When I was working, it was just me and a couple of other actors in a black room with a camera team. I wasn’t worried about an audience, because there wasn’t one. The everyday of it has no audience. The everyday of it is a black sound stage with cameras and one other person you’re doing scenes with. And the activity was so absorbing; these people were so great that I just got carried away in the whole process.”
The confidence she got from that experience was strong enough to carry her further into her domain and to fresh fields of people. Even now, though, she still dislikes talking in public or television talk show interviews. “I do it if I have to. I’d just rather not. It’s just not who I am. I really don’t feel comfortable in that spotlight”
Brian Ray is an accomplished guitarist who has worked with Smokey Robinson, Etta James, and Peter Frampton and toured on bills with the Rolling Stones and the Doobie Brothers. He came to his domain early, and it ultimately led him into the inner circle of a hero that as a child he never dreamed he would meet.
Brian was born in 1955, in Glendale, California, the year that Alan Freed coined the term rock and roll. He was one of four kids, including a half sister, Jean, who was fifteen years his elder.
“Jean would take me over to her girlfriend’s house, and they would be playing Rick Nelson, Elvis Presley, and Jerry Lee Lewis while poring over photos of these guys. It had such a visceral impact on me, the reactions of these girls to this music that was pouring out of the radio and their response to these photos. There was a part of me that just got the whole thing, right then and there at age three. My dad played piano, and we had a little phonograph‐making kit. It had a microphone, and you could cut a record and put this other needle on it to play the record. I remember sitting, at two or three, with my dad at the piano and cutting records.
“Right out of high school Jean started getting into music, and she joined a folk band called the New Christy Minstrels. They did a tour throughout the country. She’d tell us stories and would be glowing from this life she had grown into. Jean imparted to me her love and joy of music and sealed that by bringing me to clubs and concerts when I was nine and ten years old. I would see and meet people that I worshipped.
“My brother was given a really nice Gibson guitar plus lessons. He didn’t have a big desire to play music, and while he was busy not caring about the lessons, I was busy practicing on his guitar. Then I was given a $5 nylon string guitar by my sister Jean that she bought in Tijuana. I just started crying. My passion for music was so big that it was almost a crusade, without my meaning to or knowing that I wanted to share it and spread it around a little. I started a band with guys before I even knew how to tune a guitar.”
“One Sunday night when I was ten or eleven we heard this new band on The Ed Sullivan Show, the Beatles. It was such a different kind of music. It was a mixture of that black R&B that I loved so much, but it was mixed with some other X factor or element that I didn’t know. It was from Mars. It changed everything.
“I knew I wanted to play music, but now they’d closed the deal for me. It was just the most exciting thing I had ever seen. It made being in a band seem like something that was doable and attractive and something I could do for a living. They took away all the ‘maybe I’ll be a fireman.’ I was driven now to what ended up being my life.”
In the next twenty years, Brian played with some of the most outstanding musicians of his generation. Then came the call he never expected—an invitation to audition for Paul McCartney’s new band. He has been touring and playing with McCartney ever since.
“Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that, you know, this little blond kid sitting Indian‐style in front of the TV in 1964 would end up playing with that guy singing ‘All My Lovin’ ’ and ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ on The Ed Sullivan Show. There is something really gratifying about this story, this, you know, just being a part of this scene.”
The people in this book have found their Element in different domains and with different fields of people. No one is limited to one domain, and many people move in several. Often, breakthrough ideas come about when someone makes a connection between different ways of thinking, sometimes across different domains. As Pablo Picasso explored the limits of his Blue and Rose periods, he became fascinated with the collections of African art at the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris. This work was vastly different from his, but it sparked a new level of creativity in him. He incorporated influences from the ceremonial masks of the Dogon tribe into his landmark painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and thus launched himself into the Cubist work for which he is most celebrated.
As cultures and technologies evolve, new domains emerge, new fields of practitioners populate them, and old domains fade away. The techniques of computer animation have generated an entire new domain of creative work in cinema, television, and advertising. These days, though, people aren’t spending quite as much time as they used to illuminating manuscripts.
Finding your tribe can have transformative effects on your sense of identity and purpose. This is because of three powerful tribal dynamics: validation, inspiration, and what we’ll call here the “alchemy of synergy.”
It’s Not Just Me