find your groove…

Book review:

The Element:

How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

by Ken Robinson, with Lou Aronica

New York: Viking, Penguin Group, 2009

274 pages

The theme of The Element is an exciting concept to think about.

I love his telling of this story: the six-year-old girl is hunched over her drawing, and she tells her teacher that she’s “drawing a picture of God,” and the teacher says “nobody knows what God looks like,” and the girl replies: “They will in a minute.”

Robinson tackles his inspirational advice: find your own distinctive talents and passions, and, when you recognize them, you’ll know you’re in the Zone, and you’ll love it.

Here’s what hinders us from finding our own Elements: we don’t fully understand the range of our capacities, how these salient capacities relate to each other, and how much potential we have to get better at stuff that makes us feel really good. (p. 9)

“The Element is the meeting point between natural aptitude and personal passion.” (p. 21)

“The highest form of intelligence is thinking creatively.” (p. 56)

“You can think of creativity as applied imagination.” (p. 67)

I think the first few chapters of The Element are enough to open your eyes and your mind to the wonderful challenge of tracking down and embracing your personal Element, if you haven’t done it already.

The rest of the book suggests that Robinson’s Element does not cover the talent for ending a book after you’ve said all that needs to be said. He wanders, and you might get bored.

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The “dime novels” in the Civil War

Think “blood-and-thunder”…

click here

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Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 73 free verse poems,

and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)

and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”