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Finding Your Element
How to Discover Your Talents and Passions and Transform Your Life
Finding Your Element (2013) offers engaging advice on ways you might discover your true passions and talents, and then reorient your life to incorporate more time for them. Written with a keen sense of wit, Finding Your Element offers entertaining and inspiring wisdoms that will help you not only to be more productive but also to improve your overall happiness and quality of life.
- Anyone who would like to focus on their passions more
- Anyone who'd like advice on how to discover their passions
- Anyone interested in improving the quality of their life in general
Sir Ken Robinson, PhD, is an internationally renowned writer, speaker and educationalist. He's best known for his books and TED talks on the value of human creativity, which he feels is the most important trait that schools should help foster. His work aims at encouraging people to get more in touch with their creative side, to improve not only their own lives but also society at large.
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Finding Your Element
How to Discover Your Talents and Passions and Transform Your Life
- Read in 13 minutes
- Audio & text available
- Contains 9 key ideas
Synopsis
Finding Your Element (2013) offers engaging advice on ways you might discover your true passions and talents, and then reorient your life to incorporate more time for them. Written with a keen sense of wit, Finding Your Element offers entertaining and inspiring wisdoms that will help you not only to be more productive but also to improve your overall happiness and quality of life.
Key idea 1 of 9
Appreciate your uniqueness: you are the first person to ever have your exact genes and experiences.
We all know that every person is special and different, but have you ever considered the full extent of what exactly that means? You are special not only because of your unique thoughts but also because of your biology and your environment.
First of all, you are the first person ever to be born with your exact genetic makeup. Throughout the entirety of human evolution, there have been billions of different genetic permutations that have produced billions of different humans. In this unimaginably long genetic history, you are the first instance of your specific combination of genes. This makes you unique biologically, but also psychologically, because the makeup of your brain is also completely new and unique.
In fact, scientists have found that vast psychological and biological differences can even occur between identical twins.
A second factor that makes you unique is the environment you grew up in. You were born into a certain time period (which will never be repeated), and you've been a part of several groups and communities that will never exist again quite as they were: the people in your neighborhood, your family, your school class, etc. Our environments shape us tremendously, and only you have experienced your exact cocktail of environments, which will never influence another person in exactly the same way again.
So appreciate how unique your life is, both socially and biologically. Your exact experience has never existed in human history, and it will not exist again. You were born with an entirely unique biological makeup, and entered into entirely unique social circumstances. This results in a life experience that can never be recreated.
Key ideas in this title
- Appreciate your uniqueness: you are the first person to ever have your exact genes and experiences.
- Forget long-term plans and accept the unpredictability of life: you'll find lots of new opportunities to achieve your goals.
- You have skills or inborn abilities you may not know about, so give yourself opportunities to discover them.
- Institutional education often discourages us: don't assume you're bad at something just because you got poor grades in that subject.
- Don't let your attitude prevent you from reaching your full potential.
- Find your passions: they are the key to your physical and mental well-being.
- Forget established preconceptions about happiness and find out what it means to you.
- Finding a community of people who share your passions will help you realize your goals.
- Final summary
