Sir Ken Robinson: Finding Your Element

Hello and welcome, I'm Ken Robinson and I want to talk to you about how people can discover their true talents and passions and the difference it makes in their lives if they do. It's what I finally call the

element

of it and I mean. A few words about what it is, why it's important, and what you can do about it if you feel like you haven't found

your

s yet. I know some people, many people who really feel like they don't have any real talent. They don't have any special talents to speak of and they don't really enjoy the work they do either.

If they work, they don't enjoy their lives much. You know what I'm talking about, right? I say it's true for you, but you know it's true for a lot of people, they don't enjoy their lives, they move on and wait for the weekend, but I also know people who absolutely love what they do and couldn't imagine it. doing anything else if you said why don't you quit this and try something else for a change they wouldn't know what you were talking about because they would say this is not what I do this is who I am this defines me when I do this I feel like I am my most natural and authentic self, can be anything, absolutely anything, but they would describe themselves if I hadn't already done it for them as if they were in their

element

.

I didn't make it up. The term element, by the way, is a common expression if we talk about people who are in their element and what I've really tried to do, Tris, is to describe what that means and how you can achieve it in

your

life if you don't. I don't have it anymore, it's something you get and we all understand things very differently, right? I mean, some people walk onto a sports field and immediately feel at home, you know, jump on a high swing and think I know what that is. I mean, we all know what it is, but it depends on what condition when we jump into the pool swing.

Ready girlfriend, we don't know what it is, but let's leave aside those people who don't know what the pool is, but we don't care. these people or the element, frankly, I mean, for example, one of the people I remember talking about in the first book and it's called element, the sequel operation is called find relevant, one of the people we talked about There he is a mathematician who when he was four years old learned to read by watching Sesame Street, so he has a rather curious accent, as a result, when he was eight years old he took a mathematics exam to enter university and got a 98%, when he was 20 years old he did his doctorate in pure mathematics. and he got it and when he was 30 years old he was awarded the field medal in mathematics, which is the equivalent of the Nobel Prize.

It's very reasonable to say it, doesn't he understand mathematics? He dominates them like I never did. exhausted I'm putting my energy elsewhere I was on a plane and recently I started talking this woman was sitting next to me by the way I don't normally do that I don't mean I don't talk to women and I do, but I usually don't talk to people in airplanes, if you fly, do you know why you don't do it on a long flight? You don't want it, do you? I'm a people person, I just don't particularly want it. On a long flight, like five hours, the worst thing that can happen to me is that people start a conversation with you before I close the plane door and I mean, I'm happy to talk to people while we land.

Perfectly happy regretting the five conversations we didn't have instead of one we actually had. I didn't want any. I was chatting with this woman next to me and as far as what she did, she's an accountant and I said how long has she been doing it? She's been an accountant my whole life and I said what do I do to you? She said well, I've always been good with numbers, I just understood them, I just understood them, you know what I'm talking about, some people take a trumpet and just run it. they take. I don't want to say they're perfect at it, but they know what they're doing.

Some people learn a word process and words start coming out of them. Some people you know have a natural talent for sports. What I mean is that we all have natural talents. They are all different but many people never discover them and the reason is that natural talent is like natural resources on earth, it is often buried beneath the surface, there have to be conditions that bring it out and then it has to be refined and cultivate it. The resources you have and the people we consider highly talented are among those who found their particular talents.

People often think that they have no special talent. I often think it's because they just don't know what's inside them. I had the opportunity to find that, but so big in your arms, it's partly that it's

finding

your natural talents, but it's more than that, you see it because you can be good at something but you don't like it. I know what kind of people do things that they're not You're not very careful to be in your element, you have to love it and if you love something that you're good at, you know, you know, they say you never work that time again years ago. , but it was one of the first books I was involved in.

We had a fantastic editor and I started chatting with her, she was really good, I mean, annoyingly good, you know, she kept pointing out little flaws in my writing style, which I bought into, you know, with admirable fortitude, frankly, from everyone. anyway, I forgave her for being so interesting horrible good change the subject with her I told her when did you become a book editor the parentheses what qualifications did you feel you had to be criticized for writing and she said about five years I said how did that happen I said well I said it What we were doing before this, she said I was a concert pianist, I said really, so why don't you do that now?

She said well because I had been playing for years and one night I was doing a gig in London. doing a gig on the South Bank in London and at the end the director and I went out to dinner and during dinner she turned to me and said, you know you were fantastic tonight, she said, well, thank you very much, she said. but he said forget me she said this he said she but you didn't really enjoy it did you? She said how do you mean? He said well you didn't really seem to enjoy the performance she said well no I guess not really he said right? enjoy playing she said well no I'm not ready he said well why are you doing it she said what I guess because I'm good at it and he said you know being good at something is not a good enough reason to spend your life doing it So she said I finished the season I closed the lid of the piano I canceled all my engagements and I haven't played since She said I've spent my life since immersed in books and she said I've never been happier in my life I've never been Poorer but never happier, this is the point: you have to love it, if you love something it just doesn't feel like work, it's a calming passion so you have to be in your element, like those two things are doing something you have an aptitude for. that you love and if you find that meeting point your life goes in a completely different direction as Confucius once said you will never work again Confucius had not read

finding

your element by the way but I feel that in some ways he has, why does this matter ?

It is very important that there are three reasons, I think why it is important. I want to say that there are many, but I have time to talk about three of them quickly. The first is personal, it matters to you, to your life, to what you do with your life. and the quality of it, I mean, I was born in Liverpool in 1950 and I know you don't believe that, by the way, the 1950 thing now I felt like I was breathing hard, I thought the wave of disbelief was coming over the audience. I'm Agnes. beet you're thinking here so childish you know I live in Los Angeles, it's okay I've worked at anything, if you think about all the circumstances, meetings, missed occasions and opportunities, as well as the natural choices that led to your birth, it's a Situation quite extraordinary, although you are here and of course many more people don't make it, so congratulations, yes we got here and many people didn't and for many people life is not as long and fruitful as many others.

The only thing people said that seemed like a wonderful comment to me was that you should never resent getting older is a privilege that is denied to many. It's funny that in this city people spend so much time pretending that they aren't growing up as if it were somehow a mistake. of nature that should happen and mature is a natural process. I'm going to come back to this, but being born is a miracle and what amazes me is how little people are willing to accept in their lives and will just put it in. Putting up with things but not really enjoying being here, so finding your me element is essential to self-fulfilment because it is about discovering the truth within yourself, who you are and what you are capable of.

The things that make you feel your most authentic self. like people do when they are in their element things that awaken more things i have to get to this unlike awakened people something else oh god i have to do this again i have the privilege of talking about finding your element in different parts of the country and signing books for the previous book also the element and I often ask people what they do and say if you like it and I am intrigued by how often people say they will spontaneously correct me. I love it and you know. so they have discovered this, by the way, it may not be the same forever, you can progress through various incarnations in your own life as you evolve, but it is personal, but there is a second reason which is social, I guess we can .

Put that way, it's amazing now. I think in most surveys, how many people feel disconnected from what they do, if you ask them what they want out of their lives, they will respond with some version of saying I want to be happy or I want to be happy. May my children be happy or I want my family to be happy. Happiness is one of those Ottoman goods that people buy, but happiness is not being happy. Happiness is a state of well-being. It doesn't mean you're constantly in a good mood. but somehow you feel settled within yourself, but it is not an exaggeration to say that a large horde of people do not feel centered in their own lives or live lives that have purpose and meaning according to the World Health Organization for 2020, the second largest cause of mortality.

Among human beings there will be depression, depression in all its innumerable forms and depressions that you already know as a combined term. I mean, it covers all kinds of different conditions, of course, but depression in general is one of the things that is believed to be the leading cause of mortality. It is estimated that 30% of adults in the United States currently suffer from some form of depression, so last year the category of medications called antipsychotics that used to be available only to people who are under supervised care in mental institutions was eliminated. Know the recognized conditions Last year's sales of prescription antipsychotic drugs are free and freely available for the first time surpassed sales of cholesterol and acid reflux drugs to become the highest category of drug sales.

It's those drugs that now make up a $14 billion market for these drugs. Companies in the United States, recent studies have suggested by Gallup that a large proportion of adults disengage from the work they do again, they show up for work and appear to be working, but if you are their boss, they wait until you leave work. room and come back to Facebook, you know it's not this, it's not what they want, it's not what they love, so there is a social reason to think about finding your element, the social reason is that everyone has the right, I think, to discover it. that gives purpose and meaning to your life and if you do that, there is a different character and quality to the lives that we lead not only individually but collectively, but there is a third reason why it is ultimately so relevant, which is economic, We spend most of our lives at work and we should do satisfying work if we can or find something in the work we do that is satisfying and if we don't find it at work there should be some part of our lives where we find it and all the evidence is If people find there some part of their lives that deeply satisfies them, even if the work they do doesn't satisfy them, then at least their life has a different kind of balance, but by the way, people have all kinds of things that could It's not love at all I recently tweeted a phrase that wouldn't have made sense ten years ago and I mean, ten years ago people wouldn't tweet today, I mean, if they did, they were put off when people said: I'm sorry, what would that be?

Would you mind not doing that? People trying to read it here, could you? I asked people to say if there is a job that they couldn't stand, a job that other people do that they couldn't stand, but they know they love this other person. live it's amazing the response I got I mean I got things you would expect you know as a proctologist because people misunderstand proctology and proctologists love the work they do at least I imagine that means it must be and I'm glad that they do it. I recently spoke at the National Convention of pathologists who not only deal with allfabrics and then analyze them they are passionate about the work they do they love it they actually love it.

You often know that when you give talks at these events they give you a small gift at the end just an idea if it's public television to think about before finishing there are two aspects to being in your element there is aptitude and passion but there are also two conditions to It is not enough to know what these things are that you need to really want, so the two conditions for our attitude and opportunity to find your element to finally be relevant is about what this process implies and it is really a two-way journey, that It is the point that I want to make you see that we all live.

Aren't we in two worlds, quite different worlds? What I mean is that there is a world that exists whether you exist or not, a world that was born before you and we will be there when you are gone, a world that pre-existed. you and there will exist afterwards a world of other people of objects events of phenomena but there is a world that exists only because you exist a world that was born when you did and will end or change when you end or change according to your beliefs in these areas a world of your consciousness the world that is you that place that only you know correctly if you know it correctly but other people really cannot know it correctly is the world in which it was once said that there are only a pair of footprints the world of your private self and you see the outer world that we all share through this inner world Anais Nin once said this beautifully: I don't see the world as it is, I see it as I am and we frame it within our own conceptions and attitudes and belief systems that is why that we all live in often very different worlds, we see the same world very differently to find it, to begin with, it is an inner journey, in my experience, the reason why people do not understand their own talents is because they do not understand them. they understand. knowing ourselves very well we live in a world of terrible distractions and noises and we need, if we want to find ours, to know ourselves better, it is also an external journey to the world around us if we live a close life with repetitive experiences it is not enough You probably have those new experiences that can trigger a new discovery in yourself.

You need to be bold to try new things that you haven't tried before and put yourself to different types of tests. I think this is not so much a journey in the conventional sense, but as a quest, you see, a quest is a medieval conception, doesn't it have links to chivalry? I thought it was quite appropriate to mention it at this point, frankly, but a quest is a journey you take. whose outcome is not certain, you left with great spirit and optimism, but it is not like saying that we are done from here to San Francisco.

I know San Francisco is there and I know how to get there. A quest is a journey of discovery and you may discover things along the way that you hadn't anticipated. You may find yourself in unexpected places. It's like embarking on the high seas. You know you can set out with a clear destination in mind, but some people may lead you astray. You actually sink, but you may end up on some foreign shore you hadn't anticipated, which turns out to be a better option than the one you had in mind, it's all part of being alive, although there are principles that apply to this journey, first it is this. that every life is unique now it is easy to say this and it is often forgotten can I ask you something how many people do you think have ever lived how many human beings let me be clear with this I am talking about modern human beings? not about prehistoric creatures, you were walking around with your knuckles growling, you know, I'm talking about attractive people like us, you know, with striking profiles and a sense of irony that it's worth thinking that we evolved, but maybe a hundred thousand years ago .

I mean the behavior of modern humans, we evolved on their thinking about a hundred thousand years ago, the arguments go on, but that kind of range, so how many of us do you think there have been? I mean, people like us have woken up in the morning worried about what the day will be like. they can bring raising families, if they only knew, they wonder what their lives as a whole can adapt to, but with our kind of thought process, access to language, etc., how many do you think have gone before us? or and and now I hear what The number comes to your mind out loud, you have to do it out loud because I'm what ten billion ten trillion one hundred one hundred billion seven billion bits of a range, isn't that okay? seven billion 1 billion to a trillion ok let me tell you no one knows, okay of course there are no people who have friends since the beginning of time with calculators, that one, wait, there are four more around here, wait , no, sorry, it's six, but there have been reported attempts to get to the bottom of this.

If you Google the question which is what I asked, you'll find places like the Center for Population Studies and things that the UN and people have been trying to figure out taking into account demographic changes and birth changes. and migration, that's all a complicated equation, what happens to someone in the past, was very close to that, they said, I think the number that people will come together now to say is probably the total number of people who ever time they have lived is between 80 and 110. billion, so let's say a hundred billion, like you said, let's go with a hundred billion, the thing is that each of those lives is different and unique, as you want, no one has lived your life and no one else will, you are unique. moment in all of human history now you can be like other people, of course, you mean, I, for example, you know, I think about things that I thought were special and unique to me, but I look an awful lot like my father now that my father. in 1914 and we looked alike and you know it's one of the times when you get older, you start to have thoughts that your father shared with you when you were young and that you condemned him for and you know you become someone like people become their mothers, but I look a lot like my father, so some of what is unique is inherited.

I am also, but I am not a clone of my father. I'm also a lot like my mother, you know, in many ways and I have five brothers and a sister and we all share some of these attributes, but we're all different. Can I ask how many of you have children? Well, how about two or more? Well, look, let me make you a Bet and I am sure that I will win this bet if you have two or more children. I bet they are completely different from each other, aren't they? You would never confuse them. Would you like which one of you to remind me when it is?

Mother and I are introducing this color coded system so that we can tell you apart from now on, even identical twins are different and we are different because our biology is subtly different, we carry within us the traces of all our ancestors, but in particular combinations only ones we have. We are also different because of our cultural circumstances, the lives we have led and that have led us down certain paths. I can't live the life my dad lived because he was born in a different time with different opportunities than him and me. that is the second principle that life is creative, you create your own life, we are distinguished from most species on earth in this sense, in most aspects you look good like the rest of the life on earth earth, not me, but in one respect we are very different. we have powerful imaginations by imagination I mean the ability to bring to mind things that are not present to our senses with the imagination you can visit the past you have a past with the imagination you can enter other people's world you can empathize with the imagination you can anticipate the future, you can't predict it very easily, by the way, I mean, you can predict certain things, you can generate events in the physical world, that's what natural science is about, but the human world is very dedicated to predicting what is going to happen. . is what Jay K Galbraith once had in mind when, as an economist, he said that the main purpose of economic forecasts is to make astrology look respectable.

He was looking at the iPhone has been available for a few years. I don't know, if you know. but if you buy an iPhone, you know when they designed it, they built in this ability to receive apps and now there are hundreds of thousands of them. I don't know, but the iPhone has an app that you can buy and download. that turns the iPhone into a blues harmonica really a blues harmonica you put it on its side the Oklahoma notes come next to it you blow on it and play the delta blues on your phone I can't imagine that was part of the original design specification at Apple, does it?

Do you know what we are going to play? We are going to build this phone, it will destroy the competition, but don't forget that it is vital that you can play the Delta blues because businessmen get depressed and businesswomen do too, and at the end of the beatings they are going to play Howlin' Wolf you know, your eyes are not going to buy the phone no, what happens is a generally powerful idea that attracts other powerful ideas to itself, that's why human life is very difficult to predict because we bounce off each other in all kinds In very interesting ways, you create your life and you can recreate it.

I think about things that have happened in my life until I was four years old. Everyone in my family was convinced that I was going to be a local soccer player. football team because apparently it was good as a kid at that age and then I remember it was those big polio epidemics that swept through Europe and America in the fifties and I got it. I was the only one in the family who contracted the disease despite my best attempts to infect the entire community, but no, I mean, I was someone in the family who contracted it and Janko was paralyzed overnight, since You know, being this kind of healthy kid, I was in the hospital for almost a year and then I came out and I was in a wheelchair, so that really put an end to my football aspirations or at least my parents' aspirations for me.

I mean, it wouldn't stop me from getting into the home team now because of the way you're giving now that they're performing, I think so. I would be quite happy if I put myself at the disposal of the system, but the idea, you know, when I was a kid in Liverpool with this big family in the 50s, that I would be living in Los Angeles talking to you is not such a rigidly improbable idea and I say . It's not as some kind of compliment to me, but to say that his life is also completely improbable. I mean how many of you really anticipated the lives you lead now and have led so far as children.

I mean, they can be. work in a field that you wanted to get into but this job these people this place the life you've really had the partners you've had the children if you have grown ones you can't that's the point at which you create your life as you advance to through it and you create it according to the opportunities that you see around you and the talents that you find within yourself and if you are open to both and you can recreate it so that life is unique, every life here is unique, it is creative and, Thirdly, it is organic, what I mean by that is that life is not linear, it is organic, you compose it as you go, it is a constant process of improvisation, right?

You fool yourself sometimes there are times in your life when you have to write your resume and you put it all on one side of the paper, you know, you put key dates, you put certain titles in bold, some in italics and you make it all look like it's A plan, isn't it? Because it's the last thing you want. What you need to do is give a potential employer the impression of the real chaos you've been experiencing; You want to convey to him that this was a strategic plan you've been faithfully executing since you were 15, not that you actually do. all this so life is organic and non linear there are three key principles now I say funny relevant is that it is a two way journey it is an inner journey on an outer journey the inner journey is to get to know yourself better what are you trying to discover more in your life if you are finding your element it is firstly what your attitudes are the things you are good at one of the problems you face is that we live in cultures with a very narrow conception of aptitude and it is an idea that is has been systematically enacted throughout many of our educational systems.

We have a very narrow view of capacity in schools. We tend to confuse all forms of intellectual ability with IQ or academic ability. In reality, human talent is tremendously diverse. My brother Derek, for example, was always taking apart engines and putting them back together himself. He had a natural aptitude for mechanics when he was 10 years old. People brought their motorcycles from all over the neighborhood for him to fix. He was fixing these things for the teachers at his school who failed him at the end of every term for not being very interested in academic work, you know what I'm talking about, some things people are good at, our despised, discouraged or marginalized, and the consequence of that is that people often conclude that you're not very good at anything because I haven't found something that they might be good at, so one of the relevant principles ofFany is having a much broader conception of fitness, but the second part of finding it irrelevant is knowing more about your passions. let me tell you a few short words about this, my passion.

I mean the things you love to do. In English, we only have a couple of words for love and they aren't very useful. We use the same word for your feelings. Wars Donuts and your fiancé, so it's not very useful, we need to do more nuances. I think that around this the Greeks have a word to refer to this, which is filos, which is that sense of amorous activities, it is the word that is added to the end of words like being a bibliophile or a francophile, your love for certain forms of doing things, certain things, that's what I mean, you see that finding your passion is an intriguing process, you know that the word passion itself has changed its meaning, what it originally meant was suffering and resistance is in that sense in the that people in Christianity talk about the Passion of Christ suffering of course now means exactly the opposite it means things that you love doing things that fulfill you things that give you a sense of deep reward and meaning a purpose and that went from a feeling of suffering and resistance to a sense of Israeli wholeness on this journey that I am describing finding your arm is in that sense not in a religious sense I don't mean it that way here funny not in that sense it is a spiritual process what I mean by that is that there are some activities that don't exist that feed your spirit that lifts you up, that gives you energy, you have to think about a distinction here between physical energy and spiritual energy, which you know some conversations about, if you're doing something that you love at the end of week, you may feel physically exhausted, but at a High spiritually, your energy changes if you are doing things you don't care about, you may be physically fine, but depressed if you do something you love to do, an hour seems like five minutes , Isn't it like that if you do things you don't like?

You don't care about five minutes, it seems like an hour, if you do something that resonates with your spirit, your entire sense of time changes, it is as if you are surfing on an energy that lifts you up, so the inner journey is also about finding the things that resonate. with your spirit and very often they are things that you take for granted and that we haven't thought about for a long time, we think about our child, we don't think, yes, I would love to do that, why did I stop doing it? Sometimes, maybe you do.

You walked away from it and maybe you won't, so the inner journey is about those two things: finding your aptitude and your passion, but then there's the outer journey. I just want to say that I have gained a couple of words on this before I finish. above you see to find your student you have to want when I say that we live in these two worlds it is true that we create our own vision of the world that is what niacin meant when she said see the world sir - I see this Like me, you know there have been many attempts, not in the entire cultural history of human culture, to create classifications of human beings, you know, like the signs of the zodiac, the humors that were prevalent in medieval times.

Sociologists have gotten into this. Much like psychologists, Jung came up with his ideas about introverts and extroverts, people have talked about different temperaments. I remember reading a sociologist once who said that there were, I think, 14 people, 14 types of people in the world, I think a 15th was recently found outside Cleveland, it's helpful to think about it that way, but we shouldn't confuse theory with reality, we are in different roles, in different situations, with different people, people bring out different things in us, suppress different things. as different aspects of ourselves or revealed in different types of situations, so we have tried to talk a little about these forms of classification, but I urge you to never take them seriously if there are a certain number of types of people in the world. of people, my rough assessment would probably be a hundred billion of them, that we are all unique instances and that we can learn from these classifications, but we should not be imprisoned by them.

What I talked about before. Happiness, many people are not happy. The key reasons for this are something obvious that we agree on. I think there is a terrible tendency to confuse happiness with material well-being. The main topic is rarely modern culture, isn't it with materialism? You will be happy, all the evidence, of course, is to the contrary. Some of the richest countries in the world are also home to some of the least happy people in the world. There is no correlation between wealth and happiness. We must know that you. I just have to look at the people who win the lottery and see how desperate their lives are often shattered as a result.

I mean, I grew up in a big working class family in Liverpool. By the way, I'm not romanticized into poverty because of the way I feel. I'm not saying we all become poor, it will be great. I'm not saying that I'm not saying that you know there are some things that we like but that by themselves don't bring you happiness. Happiness is not something material. If you look at the history of psychology and psychiatry, it is interesting that the vast majority of what has been written and researched in these fields since the 19th century, since the 19th century, has been about the negative effects of feelings. feelings, fear, anxiety and depression have been discussed, very little has been written or researched about what contributes to positive emotions such as joy, happiness and understanding.

At last viewing, that has begun to reverse. There's a big movement now called positive psychology, which is trying to look more. properly what makes us feel satisfied and the conditions under which these things occur and there is a very interesting article by Sonja Lyubomirsky, who is in the mainstream, as some positive thinking psychologists say that there are several factors that contribute to a feeling of spiritual well-being. -being part of your biology, you know that some people are naturally a little more miserable than others, something will become more buoyant than other people, you know, so biology explains part of it, circumstances explain part, but none explains everything because there is a third factor that is very powerful, which is behavior, what you really do, what you choose to do with what is at your disposal internally and externally, and the people who are most satisfied are the ones who take steps to be that way. way and one of the ways you can be like this is to discover these talents and passions to find your element.

It is one of the great sources of well-being and spiritual fulfillment. I said I probably had my father who supported me a lot as a football player because he was a great sport in itself, I thought it was the worst tragedy for our family when I contracted polio when I was four years old and until then I was, but five years later, completely independently, my father at the time was working as a steel fitter in Liverpool he had been out of work and he got this job that the family needed the other job there are nine of us Canton he and my mother and he went to work.

One morning and upon returning to work just a few weeks my uncle knocked on the door looking for my mom and he said what's wrong and she said: you know Jim had an accident and he thought: well, now what's wrong with him because you know that in that line of work you often have accidents so she broke her arm and fell on her head and then she looked up, I said no now what and she said they went to the hospital expecting to see him sitting there with a smile saying here we go again and she said she walked down the center of the hospital room.

They walked past all these different people looking to see where she was and they got to the end of the room and there was just one bed left that had the curtain pulled down and she said they opened the curtains and she walked in and there was a figure, she said on the bed. , wrapped from head to toe in bandages with tubes coming out and they said, Miss Robbins, this is your husband and her and they said you have to get ready. I don't think she would be able to accomplish what happened if she had been procrastinating. a big wooden beam to put in this boiler on the rope broke this thing had companions a teak wooden beam and it fell on his neck from about 30 feet and broke his neck and they said, I mean, at the end, that he broke his neck the thickness of a cigarette paper above the point where your neck breaks if you're judicially hanged, so they literally said he was hanging by a thread here and they said he'd probably make it, but the thing is he never lost the knowledge and he did it.

He didn't make it through the night and the next day and then the next week went by and a vegetarian was transferred to a different hospital but he was left a quadriplegic for the rest of his life for 18 years. Quadriplegics often don't. I didn't live that long, you know, it was about nine years. They told me that he lived to be 18 and the reason was pure willpower. He remained the head of the family. My mother and him were very, very close and laughed incessantly. They had a fantastic relationship. my house was full of laughter the whole time I was growing up and he was the center of that and together they created this wonderful atmosphere in the family what he showed me is that the power of attitude is almighty and that if you can get into that state of spirit despite the pain, he wasn't some kind of Pollyanna life the way he was, he was a very funny, vigorous and critical guy, you know we just respected him and always wanted to see what he had. to say about anything, but he was vibrantly alive the entire time and this power within him inspired everyone who knew him and also illustrated one thing that the positive psychology movement talks a lot about, which is that people have a kind of of predetermined happiness. are that you know that if someone wins the lottery, he was excited for a while but then goes back to being miserable like he was before, but if he is naturally happy, terrible things will happen and he will probably be happy again.

That point again and it was the case that, although we had to make terrible adjustments and all kinds of things had to be resolved, you know, several years after the accident, my father was the same again, he couldn't do what he could do before. he was trustworthy to everyone, but he became him again and fought with this kind of willpower and it was always to me an object lesson that you can create your life to be one kind of life or another. In this type of life, as we know, you can manifest things in your life if you work hard enough at them.

That's Joseph Campbell's point, isn't it in the hero's journey that if you apply yourself to certain opportunities, if you look within yourself properly, opportunities will appear that simply weren't available to you before doors open that you didn't even know about? They were there, so it's about attitude and opportunities. I want to end here with just two quick stories, one of them is that you have to create opportunities in your life to have the life you want would be my characteristic and finally your element is a wonderful girl named Ellen MacArthur Ellen MacArthur was born in England in a small mining in the place called Derbyshire, which is as far from the ocean as you can get in England.

England doesn't really compare to America in size, as you know. I mean, when I came here, I was with my son James the night we were going to Portland, Oregon, and we thought, well, we'll drive and we told someone to what extent. Is that so? And we were surprised by the fact that the answer was given to us in hours, not miles. They said approximately 16 hours. I thought, how far is that? Because in England you can't or in Britain you can't drive for 16 hours in a straight line, yeah if you keep going around the country you'll get checked in anyway, she was born as far away from the ocean as possible and in a mining town with no money and when he was four years old he said she was his aunt.

Thea bought an old boat and our grandmother Ellen's grandmother took Ellen and her brother to the port in the south of England to see this old boat that she had traveled on. She never thought about ships that had never seen the sea properly. When they lost the ship, there was a lot of noise out there, he said he went down to the cabin, he said he loved it because it was like a dollhouse, like a little house, but he said he will never forget what happened when his grandmother, when our aunt, theater aunt, Thea. She raised the sail on this boat she said the wind Billard on this sail and she said it just sent me like an electric shock it was the greatest feeling of freedom I had ever had feeling this thing pulling the boat and should I just In that moment He fell in love with the ocean and sailing, so he returned to Derbyshire and said there was no one else who shared his interest in boats.

They had no money for ships. It was a mining town, so she started saving her pocket money. She bought a boat and it took her a year. She makes fun, yes, but she had fun buying a boat. She went to university and was going to be a veterinarian, but she didn't do well enough there, so she started some other studies and then she said. she has glandular fever she said it's the best thing that's ever happened to her because she was lying in bed with glandular fever and the television was on and there was a film of the Whitbread yacht racearound the world I said it took my breath away that you could do that that baby didn't need to be bought but you get someone to sponsor you to get a boat anyway at the age of 22 Ellen became the first person or the fastest person to sail alone around the world.

She went on to be one of the most successful sailors in modern history, now she is on the wrong footing and is funding educational projects around the world and also other global philanthropic work in progress. Now I mention it because Ellen's determination to fulfill this passion that she felt when she had to create the opportunity that she could then take advantage of and the goal of saying that your life is unique, creative and organic is that we can all do that, you don't have to navigate around the world alone, fast, no one else to be in your element it can be working with children at your school it can be working with animals it can be being a carer it can be anything you can think of that makes you feel alive because in the end you don't It's not about winning some global award but about winning the award of your life back and having that life is one of the people I just wanted to mention that I have become very friendly.

I am able to work a lot in Oklahoma in recent years. Oklahoma wants to become the state of creativity now. Stop that, I don't see when I say that outside the United States people go really inside the United States people go really really Oklahoma is full of wonderful people, three and a half million people, it's an incredible place anywhere where there are so many cents where with its people there is such a deep depth. resource of natural talent so believing in that is really important, it's very interesting, you know, if you look at the famous failures, you know, like Steve Jobs was fired from Apple.

Oprah Winfrey was told she was demoted as a news anchor because they said she wasn't fit for television. Michael Jordan was kicked off the school basketball team Walt Disney was fired from his job at the newspaper because they said he lacked imagination, you can continue with this. Einstein was told that he would never amount to anything. Winston Churchill was not expelled from school because of his Englishness. The results were so bad that he won the Nobel Prize in Literature after having done all the things he did in military life, so you know, I say that resources are often buried deep beneath the surface, you have to look for them and believe that They are there. in you and the people around you and it's true in Oklahoma and I've become an ambassador, you know, it's like you know people have never been to Los Angeles, you know, you think it's the whole movie business and nothing more and plastic surgeons, you know it and we know it.

That's not true, there are dentists here anyway, one of the people I have so prepared, well, his wonderful guy's name is Bart Connor, don't you know about Connor? But Bart Connor has a very interesting story. When he was eight years old, I think, he discovered that he could walk with his hands as easily as he could walk with his feet. Now we don't know how he discovered this, but he did and then he discovered that they could go up and down stairs with their hands and also ease their feet. If he were here he would do it for you now.

No one thought much about this, although he was in high demand socially, I mean, but you didn't think much about it, but his mother did and I think it's eight or nine, some of them his mother talked to the school in the center of Morton Grove Illinois, he went to school and said he thought Bart would benefit from going to the local gym and the school agreed so he took him there and Bart said he would never do it. I forgot the feeling he had when he walked into that gym I said what it was he said it took my breath away it was like Ellen MacArthur saw the wind fill the sails she said it took my breath away she said it was like Santa's House at Disneyland in one place I said, go on, he said, well, you know there were trellises, there were trampolines, there were trapezes, they're ropes, he said it was intoxicating now, that's how you feel when you walk into the gym. they find it intoxicating and looking around not all of you I think I'm just saying I'm just saying you see, no.

I'll also be honest that I don't find going to the gym in the country intoxicating. You needed to get drunk within 50 yards of a gym and if you loved it and went every day or as often as you could and 10 years later walked on the mat at the Montreal Olympics, you represent the United States that the gymnastics team male he went to. he went on to be the most decorated male gymnast in US history up to that point, he now lives in Norman Oklahoma, he is married to Nadia Comaneci, remember, don't you think the perfect top ten in women's gymnastics has a wonderful little boy named Dylan in honor to Bob Dylan? their own gymnastics center and Nadia here are leading members of the global Special Olympics movement, so between them they have helped unlock the gymnastic capabilities of thousands upon thousands of athletes with special needs.

But none of that would have happened, you could rewind. the whole movie no, none of that would have happened if his mother hadn't encouraged him, it's not right, you know, she could have said and when Bart was eight years old, Bart, could you stop him with your hands? We're over it now. don't quit and don't focus on your homework, but she didn't encourage it, but by the way, we do it a lot in our public institutions and especially as the curriculum in schools becomes more limited and standardized and we exclude options that More and more we are telling our children or other people to stop with their hands, whatever it is for them, it can be art, music, dance or physical education, whatever it is the narrowing of the curriculum that excludes many of these programs particularly art programs I think humanities programs are a catastrophe because they deny people access to some of their deepest talents all children, but in institutions I'm sorry they say stop it with your hands, but The thing is, even though she encouraged it, she couldn't have done it.

Did she know when she took him to the gym the life she was opening up to him? She couldn't have seen through that door into the road that line on her head and the reason she couldn't is because you can't, you can't. Don't plan the whole journey because it's not like life isn't linear, it's organic, all you can do is take the first step and then the next and respond to what's in front of you and of course if you're in your element while he was there, you meet new people, new people come into your life, you affect other people's lives and your life goes in a different direction, you know, I'm pretty sure his mother didn't have a linear plan, I'm sure she did. .

I don't think when Bart was 8 years old I, his Bart, would do this with your hands. I guess there's a girl in Romania and I have a Bob Dylan collection. Everything is working wonderfully. You know, even if abandoned, you can't live it that way. What you can do is open up to the world around you and the world inside you and see new opportunities a la MacArthur took that position and I say you don't have to win an Olympic medal, you don't have to be the fastest person. In the world you have to live the life that is most authentic to you, whatever direction it takes you, it is a search and the outcome is different for everyone, but it is worth taking the first step.

There's a wonderful quote from Teilhard de Chardin, who said something about the fact that instead of staying on the shore wondering if the ocean should transport us, we should go to the waters just to see where that journey will take us, but the court with the What I would like to leave you with is again a niacin. engine, I'm not really sure if she wrote it, but it's often a tributary. She wrote a short poem called risk that speaks to me about this organic nature of human life and the gains we should have to be open to ourselves and the world around us. to find our element spoke about his own creative journey he said there came a point where the risk of staying tight in a cocoon was greater than the risk it took to flourish I think that's right I think if we leave limited lives against what we feel which are our natural talents, the effort we put into not being ourselves is greater than the effort it would take to become ourselves and, although we cannot predict the outcome of that, the organic nature of human life, its inherent creativity, The diversity that characterizes it means that I believe that if we make this determined effort to find our element we will all be open to a new harvest, a possibility that will enrich not only our own lives but the lives of all those around us.

Thank you so much.