“When I think about it, I think the main reason I enjoy writing comedy is because I feel witty and smart when I am doing it. For so many years I felt stupid because I never excelled at school. My writing gives me confidence and makes me feel like a more complete version of myself.”
The objective of this form of recreation is to bring a proper balance into our lives—a balance between making a living and making a life. Whether or not we can spend most of our time in our Element, it’s essential for our well‐being that we connect with our true passions in some way and at some point. More and more people are doing this through formal and informal networks, clubs, and festivals to share and celebrate common creative interests. These include choirs, theater festivals, science clubs, and music camps. Personal happiness comes as much from the emotional and spiritual fulfillment that this can bring as from the material needs we meet from the work we may have to do.
The scientific study of happiness is a relatively new field. It got off to something of a false start with Abraham Maslow six decades ago, when he suggested that we spend more time understanding the psychology of our positive traits rather than focusing exclusively on what makes us mentally ill. Unfortunately, most of his contemporaries found little inspiration in his words. The concept gained a great deal of traction, though, when Martin Seligman became president of the American Psychological Association and, coining the term Positive Psychology, announced that the goal of his yearlong term in office was to provoke further exploration into what made human beings flourish. Since then, scientists have conducted dozens of studies on happiness. “Happy individuals seem to have a whole lot more fun than the rest of us ever do,” Dr. Michael Fordyce said in his book Human Happiness. “They have many more activities they enjoy doing for fun, and they spend much more of their time, on a given day or week, doing fun, exciting, and enjoyable activities.”
Discovering the Element doesn’t promise to make you richer. Quite the opposite is possible, actually, as exploring your passions might lead you to leave behind that career as an investment banker to follow your dream of opening a pizzeria. Nor does it promise to make you more famous, more popular, or even a bigger hit with your family. For everyone, being in their Element, even for part of the time, can bring a new richness and balance to their lives.
The Element is about a more dynamic, organic conception of human existence in which the different parts of our lives are not seen as hermetically sealed off from one another but as interacting and influencing each other. Being in our Element at any time in our lives can transform our view of ourselves. Whether we do it full‐time or part‐time, it can affect our whole lives and the lives of those around us.
The Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn saw this clearly. “If you want to change the world,” he said, “who do you begin with, yourself or others? I believe if we begin with ourselves and do the things that we need to do and become the best person we can be, we have a much better chance of changing the world for the better.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN Making the Grade
MANY OF THE PEOPLE we’ve met in this book didn’t do well at school, or at least didn’t enjoy being there. Ofcourse, many people do do well in their schools and love what they have to offer. But too many graduate or leave early, unsure of their real talents and not knowing what direction to take next. Too many feel that what they’re good at isn’t valued by schools.
Too many think they’re not good at anything.
Sometimes, getting away from school is the best thing that can happen to a great mind. Sir Richard Branson was born in England in 1950. He attended Stowe School, and he was very popular there, making friends easily and excelling at sports. He was so good at athletics, in fact, that he became the captain of the soccer and cricket teams. He also showed an early flair for business. By the time he was fifteen, he’d started two enterprises, one selling Christmas trees and the other selling small Australian birds known as budgerigars. Neither business was particularly successful, but Richard had an obvious aptitude for this kind of thing.
What he didn’t seem to have an affinity for was school. His grades were poor, and he disliked the whole business of attending classes. He tried to make a go of it, but it just wasn’t a comfortable fit. At the age of sixteen, he decided he’d had enough and left, never to return.
Richard’s experience at school confounded those who taught him. Clearly he was bright, clearly he was industrious, clearly he was personable and capable of putting his mind to good use—but equally clearly, he was completely unwilling to conform to the school’s standards. Commenting on Richard’s decision to drop out, his head teacher said, “By the time he is twenty‐one, Richard will either be in jail or be a millionaire, and I have no idea which it will be.”
Out in the real world now, Richard needed to find something to do with his life. Sports were not an option; he wasn’t skilled enough to be a professional athlete. However, something else stirred his passions at least as much, and he had a strong feeling that he was very good at this—he would become an entrepreneur.
Richard Branson soon started his first real enterprise, a magazine called Student. He followed this in 1970 with a mail‐order business selling records. The mail‐order business ultimately became a chain of record stores—you might know them now as Virgin Megastores. This was the first of his enterprises to carry the Virgin name. But it was hardly the last. Not long after he launched the stores, he started Virgin Records. Then, in the 1980s, he took on an entirely new business with Virgin Atlantic Airways, starting the airline with virtually no cash outlay and one 747 that he leased from Boeing. Today, his empire also includes Virgin Cola, Virgin Trains, Virgin Fuel, and, one of his most ambitious ventures, Virgin Galactic, the first commercial endeavor to send people into space. His decision to forgo school and become an entrepreneur was inspired. And his head teacher’s prophecy did turn out to be true—at least the part about his becoming a millionaire by the time he was twenty‐one.
Branson eventually learned that one of the reasons for his poor academic performance was dyslexia. Among other things, this caused him to have serious difficulties understanding math. Even now, in spite of the billions he is worth, he still can’t navigate his way around a profit‐and‐loss sheet. For a long time, he couldn’t even grasp the difference between net and gross income. One day, in exasperation, his director of finance took him aside after a Virgin board meeting and said, “Richard, think of it this way: if you go fishing and throw a net into the sea, everything you catch in the net is yours to keep. That’s your ‘net’ profit. Everything else is the gross.”
“Finally,” Richard said, “I got the difference.”
Branson’s flamboyant style of entrepreneurship and huge success in so many fields earned him a knighthood in 1999. None of this seemed remotely likely when he was struggling to make passing grades at school. Perhaps it should have been, though.