The Element (14 page)

One of the ideas we’ve already discussed—and which we will come back to again (no point using a good idea only once)—is that intelligence is distinct for every individual. This is an especially important point to recognize when exploring the concept of being in the zone. Being in the zone is about using your particular kind of intelligence in an optimal way. This is what Ewa Laurance touches on when she talks about pool and geometry. It’s what Monica Seles connects with when her physical intelligence and her mental acuity become one, what Black Ice conjures when he weaves his words born of both careful observation and a refined ear for rhythm.

When people are in the zone, they align naturally with a way of thinking that works best for them. I believe this is the reason that time seems to take on a new dimension when you are in the zone. It comes from a level of effortlessness that allows for such full immersion that you simply don’t “feel” time the same way. This effortlessness has a direct relationship to thinking styles. When people use a thinking style completely natural to them, everything comes more easily.

It’s obvious that different people think about the same things in different ways. I saw a great example of this a few years ago with my daughter. Kate is very visual in her approach to the world. She’s extremely bright, articulate, and well read, but she loses interest quickly during lectures (of all types, not simply the ones involving the need for her to clean her room). Not long after we moved to Los Angeles from England, her history teacher began a section on the Civil War. Not being American, Kate knew little about this period in American history, and she got little out of her teacher’s recitation of dates and events. This approach—filling students’ heads with bullet points—had little impact on her. With a test coming up on the subject, though, she couldn’t simply ignore the topic.

Knowing that Kate had a very strong visual intelligence, I suggested that she consider creating a mind map. Mind mapping, a technique created by Tony Buzan, allows a person to create a visual representation of a concept or piece of information. The primary concept sits at the center of the map, and lines, arrows, and colors connect other ideas to that concept. I had the feeling that, as someone who tends to think visually, Kate would benefit from looking at the Civil War from this perspective.

A few days later, Kate and I went out to lunch, and I asked her if she’d had a chance to try out the mind map. As it turned out, she’d done much more than try it. Through this technique, she’d created such a strong visual representation of the Civil War in her mind that she spent the next forty minutes telling me about the major events and the consequences of those events. By looking at it from this new perspective—one that made use of one of the primary ways in which she thinks—Kate was able to understand the war in a way that bullet points never would have provided. Because she’d produced a mind map, she was seeing the images in her mind clearly, as if she had photographed them.

There have been various attempts to categorize thinking styles, and even whole personality types, so that we can understand and organize people more effectively. These categories can be more or less helpful, as long as we remember that they are just a way of thinking about things and not the things themselves. These systems of personality types are often speculative and not very reliable because our personalities often refuse to sit still and tend to flutter restlessly between whatever boxes the testers devise.

Anyone who has ever taken a Myers-Briggs test knows about the various box-placing tools out there. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is something that human resource departments seem to enjoy using to “type” people. More than two and a half million people take the MBTI annually, and many of the companies in the Fortune 100 use it. It’s essentially a personality quiz, though more sophisticated than what you might find in the pages of a pop magazine. People answer a series of questions in four basic categories (energy attitude, perception, judgment, and orientation to life events), and their answers indicate whether they are more one thing or another in each of these categories (for example, more extroverted or introverted). From the four categories and the two places in which people fall in these categories, the test identifies sixteen personality types. The underlying message of the test is that you and each of the other six billion people on the planet fit into one of these sixteen boxes.

There are several problems with this. One is that neither Ms. Briggs nor her daughter, Ms. Myers, had any qualifications in the field of psychometric testing when they designed the test. Another is that test takers often don’t settle neatly into any of the categories when they take the MBTI. They tend to be just a little more to one side of the line or the other (a little more extroverted than introverted, for example), rather than being clearly one thing or the other. Most telling, though, is that many people who repeat the test end up in a different box when they do so. It’s true in at least half of the cases, according to some studies. This suggests either that a huge percentage of the population has serious personality disorder problems, or that the test might not be such a reliable indicator of “type” after all.

My guess is that sixteen personality types might be a bit of an underestimate. My personal estimate would be closer to six billion (though I’ll need to revise that estimate in future editions of this book, because the population keeps growing).

Another test is the Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument. I feel a bit more relaxed about this one, because it talks about cognitive preferences in terms that I believe most people would find acceptable. Like the MBTI, the Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI) is an assessment tool that uses participants’ answers to a series of questions. It doesn’t seek to put people in a box. Instead, it tries to show people which of four brain quadrants they tend to use more often.

The A quadrant (cerebral left hemisphere) relates to analytic thinking (collecting data, understanding how things work, and so on). The B quadrant (limbic left hemisphere) relates to implementation thinking (organizing and following directions, for example). The C quadrant (limbic right hemisphere) relates to social thinking (expressing ideas, seeking personal meaning). The D quadrant (cerebral right hemisphere) relates to future thinking (looking at the big picture, thinking in metaphors).

The HBDI acknowledges that everyone is capable of using each of these thinking styles, but tries to indicate which of these styles is dominant in any individual. The function of this seems to be that people are more likely to be effective at work, at play, at any pursuit, if they understand how they approach each of these tasks. Though I’m suspicious of typing people categorically, and I still think four modes may be too few, this seems to me to be a more open approach than Myers-Briggs.

The risk in saying that there is a set number of personality types, a set number of dominant ways of thinking, is that it closes doors rather than opening them. To make the Element available to everyone, we need to acknowledge that each person’s intelligence is distinct from the intelligence of every other person on the planet, that everyone has a unique way of getting in the zone, and a unique way of finding the Element.

At the age of two, Terence Tao taught himself to read by watching
Sesame Street
, and he tried to teach other kids to count using number blocks. Within the year, he was doing double-digit mathematical equations. Before his ninth birthday, he took the SAT-M (a math-specific version of the SAT given primarily to college candidates) and scored in the ninety-ninth percentile. He received his Ph.D. at age twenty. And when he was thirty, he won a Fields Medal, considered the Nobel Prize of mathematics, and a MacArthur Fellowship.

Dr. Tao is extraordinarily gifted. He’s earned the moniker “the Mozart of Math,” and his lectures—his
math lectures—
draw standing-room-only crowds. His academic record suggests that he could have been successful in several disciplines, but his real calling, his discovery of the Element, came via math when he was still a toddler.

“I remember as a child being fascinated with the patterns and puzzles of mathematical symbol manipulation,” he told an interviewer. “I think the most important thing for developing an interest in mathematics is to have the ability and the freedom to play with mathematics—to set little challenges for oneself, to devise little games, and so on. Having good mentors was very important for me, because it gave me the chance to discuss these sorts of mathematical recreations; the formal classroom environment is of course best for learning theory and applications, and for appreciating the subject as a whole, but it isn’t a good place to learn how to experiment. Perhaps one character trait which does help is the ability to focus, and perhaps to be a little stubborn. If I learned something in class that I only partly understood, I wasn’t satisfied until I was able to work the whole thing out; it would bother me that the explanation wasn’t clicking together like it should. So I’d often spend a lot of time on very simple things until I could understand them backwards and forwards, which really helps when one then moves on to more advanced parts of the subject.”

“I don’t have any magical ability,” Dr. Tao told another interviewer. “I look at a problem, and it looks something like one I’ve already done; I think maybe the idea that worked before will work here. When nothing’s working out then I think of a small trick that makes it a little better, but still is not quite right. I play with the problem, and after a while, I figure out what’s going on. If I experiment enough, I get a deeper understanding. It’s not about being smart or even fast. It’s like climbing a cliff—if you’re very strong and quick and have a lot of rope, it helps, but you need to devise a good route to get up there. Doing calculations quickly and knowing a lot of facts are like a rock climber with strength, quickness, and good tools; you still need a plan—that’s the hard part—and you have to see the bigger picture.”

Terence Tao probably finds himself in the zone regularly. In addition to being born with rare skills, he is also extremely fortunate because he arrived at his version of the Element when he was very, very young. He found the place where his brilliance and his passion met, and he never looked back.

What we can glean from his devotion to math and the magnetic pull it has for him has resonance for all of us. I think it is significant that he discovered his passion at such a young age and could express it before he was out of diapers (I’m not certain about whether Dr. Tao was still in diapers at age two, actually; I suppose he could have been a toilet-training genius as well). He could be what he was naturally inclined to be before the world put any restrictions on him (we’ll talk more about these restrictions later in this book). No one was going to tell Terence Tao to stop doing math because he’d make more money if he were a lawyer. In that way, he and others like him have an unencumbered path toward the Element.

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.