The Element

CHAPTER FOUR In the Zone

EWA LAURANCE is the most famous female billiards player on the planet. Known as “the Striking Viking,” she has been ranked number 1 in the world, won both the European and U.S. national championships, has appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, been featured in People, Sports Illustrated, Forbes, and many other publications, makes regular television appearances, and serves as a commentator on ESPN.

Growing up in Sweden, Ewa discovered the game while trailing after her older brother.

“Me and my best friend, Nina, we were always hanging around, just as close as friends can be. One day, when I was fourteen, the two of us followed my brother and his friend to this bowling alley to play and decided to check it out. We were there for a while and then got really bored. And then we found out that they had gone to something called a poolroom. I had never heard of pool. We followed them up there and I remember, the minute I walked in, I reacted to it right away. I loved the whole thing— this dark room with lights over each table and the clicking of the balls. I just thought it was mesmerizing right off the bat.

“There was this whole society there where everybody knew this thing about billiards and it grabbed me right away. We were intimidated and curious, but just sat and watched everything. When you sit and watch it, or do it yourself, everything disappears. It’s easy for that to happen with billiards because each table is a stage. So, everything around it disappeared for me and that’s all I saw. I was watching these players who knew exactly what they were doing. I realized that there’s more to this than just banging the balls around and hoping something goes in. There was one guy who ran ball, after ball, after ball, and made sixty, seventy, eighty balls in a row and I realized he was moving the white ball around to shoot his next shot. And somehow, it clicked in. It was their knowledge and skill that really amazed me—that chess part of billiards, of playing three, four moves ahead and then having to execute it on top of it.”

From that moment of epiphany, Ewa knew that she wanted to dedicate her life to billiards. Fortunately, her parents supported her, allowing her to spend six to ten hours a day playing at a local poolroom, doing her homework in between shots. “People there knew I was serious about the game, so they left me alone. But we also had a lot of fun there. If you find a place where everybody else likes the same thing that you do, it really becomes fun. So these odd characters—because we all had billiards together—we became like a family.”

In 1980, at sixteen, Ewa won the Swedish championship. At seventeen, she won the first‐ever European Women’s Championship. This led to an invitation to go to New York to represent Europe in the World Championship. “That whole summer I practiced. The poolroom didn’t open until five in the afternoon, so I would take the bus in the morning up to the part of town where the owner lived, get the key to the poolroom, and then take the bus into town and let myself in. I did that all summer and then played ten, twelve hours a day. Then I went to the tournament in New York. I didn’t win, though; I came in seventh. I was disappointed I didn’t do better, but at the same time I thought, ‘Wow, that’s like seventh in the world!’ ”

Though her parents didn’t like her being so far away, Ewa decided to stay in New York to continue her pursuit of the sport, knowing that in the United States, she would have the opportunity to play regularly against the best in the world. In addition to scoring victories, she also became a leading voice for women in billiards. Her talent, her passion, and her stunning good looks made her a media star and helped bring new levels of popularity to the game she loved.

Fame and financial reward accompanied Ewa Laurance on her rise to the top. But for her, the biggest charge continued to be the game itself.

“You’re almost unconscious to what’s going on around you. It’s literally the most peculiar feeling. It’s like being in a tunnel but you don’t see anything else. You just see what you’re doing. Time changes. Somebody could ask you how long you’ve been doing it and you could have said twenty minutes but it was actually nine hours. I just don’t know. I have never had it with anything before or since, even though I am very passionate about a lot of other things. But the feeling of playing billiards is unique for me.

“Part of the beauty that pool offers you is how much you can learn. It’s a never‐ending deal. Every layout is different, so there’s always something to keep you interested. I just love the physics and the geometry of it—learning and understanding the angles and finding out how far you can push to change the angle to get the cue ball where you want it to go. And learning what the limits and possibilities are. Being able to control the cue ball scooting forward two and a half inches instead of three is a pretty amazing feeling. So instead of fighting the elements, you actually figure out a way to work with them.

“I wasn’t at all interested or good at geometry or physics at school. For some reason, when I’m playing I see it a lot. I look at the table and I literally see lines and diagrams all over the place. I see ‘I’m going to make the 1 here, the 2 over here, the 3’s going to go down here, I’m going to have to go three rails around for the 4, the 6 is down here, no problem, I’ve got 7, 8, 9, I’m out.’ I see them all lined up. And then if you hit one ball a little bit incorrectly, all of a sudden a whole new diagram in your head pops up. You need to resolve the problem because you’re not where you wanted to be. You were six inches off, so now you have to reformulate the whole thing.

“Geometry at school did not get my attention. Maybe if I’d had a different teacher it would have been different—somebody that just said, ‘Ewa, think of it this way,’ or, ‘Look at it this way and you will get it.’ Or they could have taken our whole class to a poolroom and said, ‘Check this out!’ But it was so boring at school. I couldn’t even keep my eyes open in class, you know? But now, when I give lessons to someone, I try to figure out as quickly as I can if they have hand‐eye coordination and also, are they just interested in the game or are they interested in the geometry and the physics of it. Are they math‐oriented.”

Ewa has been playing billiards professionally for nearly thirty years. Yet she still gets the same charge that the sport has always given her. “Even when I do an exhibition, after all these years, I get nervous. People say, ‘Well you’ve done it so many times.’ But it doesn’t matter; it’s about being in that moment.”

Playing billiards puts Ewa Laurance in the zone. And being in the zone puts Ewa Laurance face to face with the Element.

The Zone

To be in the zone is to be in the deep heart of the Element. Doing what we love can involve all sorts of activities that are essential to the Element but are not the essence of it—things like studying, organizing, arranging, limbering up, etc. And even when we’re doing the thing we love, there can be frustrations, disappointments, and times when it simply doesn’t work or come together. But when it does, it transforms our experience of the Element. We become focused and intent. We live in the moment. We become lost in the experience and perform at our peak. Our breathing changes, our minds merge with our bodies, and we feel ourselves drawn effortlessly into to the heart of the Element.

Aaron Sorkin is the writer of two Broadway plays, A Few Good Men and The Farnsworth Invention; three television series, Sports Night, The West Wing, and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip;and five feature films, A Few Good Men, Malice, The American President, Charlie Wilson’s War, and the soon‐to‐be‐released Trial of the Chicago 7. He’s been nominated for thirteen Emmy Awards, eight Golden Globes, and the Academy Award for Best Picture.

“I never set out to be a writer,” he told me. “I always saw myself as an actor. I got an acting degree at college. I was so passionate about this that when I was in high school, I’d take the train into New York City when I was broke and wait until the second half of a play when there would be empty seats to sneak into after the intermission. Writing for fun was not something I was ever introduced to. It always seemed like a chore. I had written one sketch for a college party and my teacher, Gerard Moses, had said to me, ‘You could do this for a living, you know, if you wanted.’ But I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. Do what? I thought, and moved on.

“A few months after I left school, a friend of mine was going out of town. He had his grandfather’s antique typewriter and asked me to hang onto it for him. At this time I was paying a friend of mine fifty dollars a week to sleep on his floor in a tiny apartment on the Upper East Side of New York. I’d got a job with a children’s theater company for a while and some work on a soap. This was in 1984 and I was doing the rounds of auditions.

“This particular weekend all of my friends were out of town. It was one of those Friday nights in New York where you feel like everyone but you has been invited to a party. I was broke, the TV wasn’t working, and all there was to do was muck around with this piece of paper and the typewriter. I sat down at it and wrote from nine o’clock at night until noon the next day. I fell in love with it all.

“I realized that all those years of acting classes and taking the train to the theater was not about acting but about what the play actually was. I’d been a cocky actor—I wasn’t ever a wallflower— but writing had been so far removed from my consciousness until that night.

“The first play I wrote was a one‐act play called Hidden in This Picture, and that was well received and reviewed. Then my sister, who is a lawyer, told me about a case in Guantánamo Bay involving some marines accused of killing a fellow marine. The story intrigued me and I spent the next year and a half writing the stage play for A Few Good Men.

“When it was playing on Broadway, I remembered that conversation with Gerard. I rang him up. ‘Is this what you meant?’ I asked him.”

I asked Aaron how feels when he’s writing. “When it’s going well,” he said, “I feel completely lost in the process. When it’s going poorly, I’m desperately looking for the zone. I have flashlights on and I’m desperately looking for it. I wouldn’t speak for other writers, but I’m basically an on‐and‐off switch. When I feel that something I’m writing is going well, everything in my life is good and the things in my life that aren’t good are completely manageable. If it’s not going well, Miss America could be standing there in a swimsuit handing me a Nobel Prize and I wouldn’t be happy about it.”

Doing the thing you love to do is no guarantee that you’ll be in the zone every time. Sometimes the mood isn’t right, the time is wrong, and the ideas just don’t flow. Some people develop their own personal rituals and for getting to the zone. They don’t always work. I asked Aaron if he had techniques of his own. He said he doesn’t and he wished that he had. But he does know when to stop pushing.

“When it’s not going well, I put it away and try again tomorrow or the next day. One thing I do is drive around in my car with music on. I try to find someplace where I don’t have to think about driving too much, like a freeway, where you don’t have to stop at red lights or turn or anything.

“What I don’t do is watch other people’s movies or television shows or read their plays for fear that they’re going to be very good and either make me feel worse or simply make me inclined to imitate what they’re doing.”

At its best, the process of writing for Aaron is completely absorbing. “Writing for me is a very physical activity. I’m playing all the parts, I’m getting up and down from my desk, I’m walking around. When it’s going well, in fact, I’ll find that I’ve been doing laps around my house, way out in front of where I type. In other words, I’ve been writing without writing. Then I have to go back to where I am on the page and make sure I actually type what I just did.”

In all likelihood, you’ve had instances in your life where you’ve become “lost” in an experience the way Aaron Sorkin did when he finally connected with writing. You begin to do something you love, and the rest of the world slips away. Hours pass, and it feels like minutes. During this time, you have been “in the zone.” Those who have embraced the Element find themselves in this place regularly. This is not to suggest that they find every experience of doing the thing they love blissful, but they regularly have optimal experiences while doing these things, and they know they will again.

Different people find the zone in different ways. For some it comes through intense physical activity, through physically demanding sports, through risk, competition, and maybe a sense of danger. For others it may come through activities that seem physically passive, through writing, painting, math, meditation, and other modes of intense contemplation. As I said earlier, we don’t only get one Element apiece, nor is there only one road for each of us to the zone. We may have different experiences of it in our lives. However, there are some common features to being in that magical place.

Are We There Yet?

One of the strongest signs of being in the zone is a sense of freedom and of authenticity. When we are doing something that we love and are naturally good at, we are much more likely to feel centered in our true sense of self—to be who we feel we truly are. When we are in our Element, we feel we are doing what we are meant to be doing and being who we’re meant to be.

Time also feels very different in the zone. When you’re connecting this way with your deep interests and natural energy, time tends to move more quickly, more fluidly. For Ewa Laurance, nine hours can feel like twenty minutes. We know the opposite is true when you have to do things to which you don’t feel a strong connection. We’ve all had experiences where twenty minutes can feel like nine hours. At those times, we’re not in the zone. In fact, we’re probably zoning out.

For me, this time shift (the good one, not the bad one) happens most often when I’m working with people, and especially when I’m giving presentations. When I am deep in the throes of exploring and presenting ideas with groups, time tends to move more quickly, more fluidly. I can be in a room with ten or twenty people or several thousand, and it’s always the same. For the first five or ten minutes, I’m feeling for the energy of the room and trying things out to catch the right wavelength there. Those first minutes can feel slow. But then, when I do make the connection, I slip into a different gear. When I have the pulse of the room with me, I feel a different energy—and I think they do too— which carries us forward at a different pace and in a different space. When that happens, I can look at the clock and see that almost an hour has gone by.

The other feature common among those familiar with this experience is the movement into a kind of “meta‐state” where ideas come more quickly, as if you’re tapping a source that makes it significantly easier to achieve your task. You develop a facility for the thing you are doing because you’ve unified your energy with the process and the efforts you are making. So there’s a real sense of ideas flowing through you and out of you; that you’re in some way channeling these things. You’re being an instrument of them rather than being obstructive to them or struggling to reach them. Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Eric Clapton describes it as being “in harmony with time. It’s a great feeling.”

You can see and experience this shift in all sorts of performances, in acting, in dance, in musical performances, and in sports. You see that people have suddenly entered a different phase. You see them relaxed, you see them loosen up and become instruments of their own expression.

Grand Prix racer Jochen Rindt said simply that when he’s racing, “You ignore everything and just concentrate. You forget about the rest of the world and become part of the car and track. It’s a very special feeling. You’re completely out of this world and completely into it. There’s nothing like it.”

Aviator Wilbur Wright described it this way: “When you know, after the first few minutes, that the whole mechanism is working perfectly, the sensation is so keenly delightful as to be almost beyond description. More than anything else the sensation is one of perfect peace mingled with an excitement that strains every nerve to the utmost, if you can conceive of such a combination.”

Superstar athlete Monica Seles says, “When I am consistently playing my best tennis, I am also consistently in the zone,” but notes, “Once you think about being in the zone, you are immediately out of it.”

Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (it’s pronounced “chicks‐sent‐me‐HIGH‐ee,” if you’d like to try it at home) performed “decades of research on the positive aspects of human experience—joy, creativity, the process of total involvement with life I call flow.” In his landmark work Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Dr. Csikszentmihalyi writes of a “state of mind when consciousness is harmoniously ordered, and [people] want to pursue whatever they are doing for its own sake.” What Dr. Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow” (and what many others call “being in the zone”) “happens when psychic energy—or attention—is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action. The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else.”

Dr. Csikszentmihalyi speaks of the “elements of enjoyment,” the components that comprise an optimal experience. These include facing a challenge that requires a skill one possesses, complete absorption in an activity, clear goals and feedback, concentration on the task at hand that allows one to forget everything else, the loss of self‐consciousness, and the sense that time “transforms” during the experience. “The key element of an optimal experience,” he says in Flow, “is that it is an end in itself. Even if initially undertaken for other reasons, the activity that consumes us becomes intrinsically rewarding.”

This is a crucial point to grasp. Being in the Element and especially being in the zone doesn’t take energy away from you; it gives it to you. I used to watch politicians fighting elections or trying to stay in office and wonder how they kept going. You see them traveling all over the world, under constant pressure to perform, making critical decisions with every appearance and living irregular hours in a constant spotlight of attention. I wondered how they didn’t fall over from sheer exhaustion. The fact is, though, that they love most of it, or they wouldn’t do it. The very thing that would wear me out is fueling them up.

Activities we love fill us with energy even when we are physically exhausted. Activities we don’t like can drain us in minutes, even if we approach them at our physical peak of fitness. This is one of the keys to the Element, and one of the primary reasons why finding the Element is vital for every person. When people place themselves in situations that lead to their being in the zone, they tap into a primal source of energy. They are literally more alive because of it.

It is as though being in the zone plugs you into a kind of power pack—for the time you are there, you receive more energy than you expend. Energy drives all of our lives. This isn’t a simple matter of physical energy we think we have or don’t have but of our mental or psychic energy. Mental energy is not a fixed substance. It rises and falls with our passion and commitment to what we are doing at the time. The key difference is in our attitude, and our sense of resonance with an activity. As the song says, “I could have danced all night.”

Being in your Element, having that experience of flow, is empowering because it’s a way of unifying our energies. It’s a way of feeling deeply connected with our own sense of identity and it curiously comes about through a sense of relaxing, of feeling perfectly natural to be doing what you’re doing. It’s a profound sense of being in your skin, of connecting to your own internal pulse or energy.

These peak experiences are associated with physiological changes in the body—there may be a release of endorphins in the brain and of adrenaline through the body. There may be an increase in alpha wave activity and changes in our metabolic rates and in the patterns of our breathing and heartbeats. The specific nature of these physiological changes depends on the sorts of activities that have brought us to the zone and on what we’re doing to keep ourselves there.

However we get there, being in the zone is a powerful and transformative experience. So powerful that it can be addictive, but an addiction that is healthy for you in so many ways.

Reaching Out

When we connect with our own energy, we’re more open to the energy of other people. The more alive we feel, the more we can contribute to the lives of others.

Hip‐hop poet Black Ice learned at a very young age that his words could bring out emotions in himself and others. “My mom used to make me write about everything,” he told an interviewer. “When I got in trouble, when I was happy or even when I was scared. I was a giddy little kid. When I started liking little girls, I used to write letters for my friends. Mine were better than the ‘circle yes, no, maybe so.’ I came upon spoken word as an adult. I went to a poetry spot, looking to meet women. It was ‘open mic’ night and when this cat messed up, the audience gave him lots of love and support. I was blown away. Being the aggressive person that I am, it surprised me to see what I would talk about everyday in the barbershop in spoken word form at the club. I was able to release what was on my chest and people would understand what I was saying.”

Black Ice, born Lamar Manson, moved from those early performances to increasingly bigger stages. He appeared for five consecutive seasons on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, was a lead cast member in the Tony Award–winning Def Poetry on Broadway, released his first album on a major label, and appeared in front of millions at the Live 8 concert. His message is life‐affirming and motivating, speaking of the importance of family and the power of youth. To back up his words, he started the Hoodwatch Movement Organization to help inner‐city kids stay on the right track and understand the extent of their potential. Critics laud his work and audiences respond passionately, and when you see him on‐stage, you can sense that he is very much in the zone.

For Black Ice, though, this entry into the zone comes from a sense of mission. “My life has been so meaningful I have to write something that touches folks,” he said in another interview. “I have a legacy to uphold. I grew up around great men. My father, my uncles, and my grandfather are my heroes and just in that alone, there are some things I could never say. I could never look my father in his face knowing I have something that’s playing on the radio that’s absolutely asinine.

“My voice is my gift,” Black Ice says. “It’s pointless if I’m not going to say anything. It’s mad important. I can see in society now, how important it is. Sometimes I’m discouraged, but I definitely know what I can contribute. We are who we are, but I want to get at the kids and stay in the seven‐ and eight‐year‐old’s ears. Telling them, ‘you’re going to be something… there is no other compromise, there is no if or you might; you are going to be something.’ ”

This is another secret of being in the zone—that when you are inspired, your work can be inspirational to others. Being in the zone taps into your most natural self. And when you are in that place, you can contribute at a much higher level.

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.

Being Yourself

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.

Getting Out of the Box

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.

Do the Math

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.