The Element

CHAPTER SIX What Will They Think?

FINDING YOUR ELEMENT can be challenging on a variety of levels, several of which we’ve already discussed. Sometimes, the challenge comes from within, from a lack of confidence or fear of failure. Sometimes the people closest to you and their image and expectations of you are the real barrier. Sometimes the obstacles are not the particular people you know but the general culture that surrounds you.

I think of the barriers to finding the Element as three concentric “circles of constraint.” These circles are personal, social, and cultural.

This Time It’s Personal

Given the way his life has worked out, it’s interesting that several of Chuck Close’s teachers and classmates considered him a slacker when he was a child. The kids thought so because he had physical problems that made him poor at sports and even the most rudimentary playground games. The teachers probably thought so because he tested poorly, seemed lazy, and rarely finished his exams. It turned out later that he was dyslexic, but the diagnosis for this didn’t exist when he was younger. To many outsiders, it didn’t seem that Chuck Close was trying very hard to do anything with his life, and most thought that he wouldn’t amount to much.

On top of his learning disorder and his physical maladies, Close also faced more tragedy than any young boy should ever encounter. His father uprooted the family regularly and then died when Chuck was eleven. Around this time, his mother, a classical pianist, developed breast cancer, and the Close family lost their home when the medical bills overwhelmed them. Even his grandmother became terribly ill.

What got Close through all of this was his passion for art. “I think early on my art ability was something that separated me from everybody else,” he said in an interview. “It was an area in which I felt competent and it was something that I could fall back on.” He even devised innovative ways to use art to overcome the restrictions of his conditions. He created puppet shows and magic acts—what he called “entertaining the troops”—to get other kids to spend time with him. He supplemented his school‐work with elaborate art projects to show teachers that he wasn’t “a malingerer.”

Ultimately, his interest in art and his innate gifts allowed him to blossom into one of the singular talents in American culture. After graduating from the University of Washington and getting his MFA at Yale—several of his earlier teachers had told him that college would be out of the question for him—Close set off on a career that was to establish him as one of America’s most celebrated artists. His signature style involved a grid system he devised to create huge photorealistic images of faces alive with texture and expression. His method has drawn widespread attention from the media, and his paintings hang in top museums around the world. Through ceaseless dedication to his passion and his craft, Chuck Close overcame considerable constraints to find his Element and rise to the pinnacle of his profession.

But that’s only the beginning of the story.

In 1988, Chuck was making an award presentation in New York when he felt something wrong inside his body. He made his way to the hospital, but within hours, he was a quadriplegic, the victim of a blood clot in his spinal column. One of the greatest artists of his generation could no longer even grasp a paintbrush. Early rehabilitation efforts proved frustrating, and this latest roadblock in a life filled with roadblocks seemed to be the one that would at last stifle his ambitions.

One day, however, Close discovered that he could hold a paintbrush with his teeth and actually manipulate it well enough to create tiny images. “I suddenly became encouraged,” he said. “I tried to imagine what kind of teeny paintings I could make with only that much movement. I tried to imagine what those paintings might look like. Even that little bit of neck movement was enough to let me know that perhaps I was not powerless. Perhaps I could do something myself.”

What he could do was create an entirely new form of artwork. When he later regained some movement in his upper arm, Close began using rich colors to make small paintings that fit together to create a large mosaic image. His new work was at least as popular as his older work and earned him additional acclaim and notoriety.

Throughout his life, Chuck Close has had endless reasons to give in to his problems and to give up as an artist. He chose instead to push on beyond every limit his life presented and to stay in his Element no matter what new obstacles reared up in his way. He would not let any of these things prevent him from being who he felt he was meant to be.

Chuck Close is not alone in overcoming physical obstacles to pursue his passion. We’ll meet some other people who’ve done this, and some of them may surprise you. The problems they face are not only physical, though physical disabilities can be torturous and aggravating in themselves. They also faced problems arising from their own attitudes to their disability, and from the effects on their feelings of other people’s attitudes to their disabilities. To overcome these physical and psychological barriers, people with disabilities of every sort must summon enormous reserves of self‐belief and determination to do things that other people can do without a second thought.

CandoCo is a professional contemporary dance company based in Great Britain that includes disabled and nondisabled dancers. Over the years, the dancers have included single and double amputees, paraplegics in wheelchairs, and people with a wide range of other conditions. The vision of the company, founded in 1982, is to inspire audiences and support participants “to achieve their highest aspirations in line with the Company’s ethos that dance is accessible to everyone.” CandoCo works to broaden the perception of dance through its performances and through its education and training program. The directors of the company say that CandoCo has always aimed high—“High in quality of movement, high in integrity of dance as an art form and high in expectations of ourselves as performers. Our focus is on dance not disability, professionalism not therapy.” One of a growing number of “integrated” companies in dance, theater, and music, their ambitions have been fulfilled through numerous international awards from professional dance critics and festivals around the world.

“To truly appreciate the CandoCo Dance Company,” one reviewer noted, “it has been said that one should discard all conventional notions of the dancing body. Why talk about swift and articulate footwork with pointed toes, when legs are of no consequence? [In these performances] representations of the perfect and physically complete body are thrown out of the window, introducing less‐than‐whole figures with no less talent than their able‐bodied counterparts… those who expected the CandoCo dancers to perform gravity‐defying stunts with crutches and wheelchairs would have been sorely disappointed. Instead, their performance was a visual and psychological confrontation that was not so much a slap in the face, but a lingering thought that warms the heart and caresses the mind.”

Whether you’re disabled or not, issues of attitude are of paramount importance in finding your Element. A strong will to be yourself is an indomitable force. Without it, even a person in perfect physical shape is at a comparative disadvantage. In my experience, most people have to face internal obstacles of self‐doubt and fear as much as any external obstacles of circumstance and opportunity.

The scale of these anxieties is clear from the burgeoning worldwide market for self‐help courses and books, many of which focus on just these issues. For me, the best in breed is Susan Jeffers’s landmark book Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway^®. It has been translated into thirty‐five languages and has sold millions of copies. In it, Jeffers writes with passion and eloquence about the gnawing fears that hold so many people back from living their lives in full and contributing to the world. These fears include the fear of failure, the fear of not being good enough, the fear of being found wanting, the fear of disapproval, the fear of poverty, and the fear of the unknown.

Fear is perhaps the most common obstacle to finding your Element. You might ask how often it’s played a part in your own life and held you back from doing the things you desperately wanted to try. Dr. Jeffers offers a series of well‐tested techniques to move from fear to fulfillment, of which the most powerful is explicit in the title of her book.

Social: It’s For Your Own Good

Fear of disapproval and of being found wanting are often entangled in our relationships with the people closest to us. Your parents and siblings, and your partner and children if you have them, are likely to have strong views on what you should and shouldn’t do with your life. They may be right, of course. And they can have positive roles as mentors in encouraging your real talents. However, they can also be very wrong.

People can have complex reasons for trying to clip other people’s wings. Your taking a different path might not meet their interests, or might create complications in their lives that they feel they can’t afford. Whatever the reasons, someone keeping you from the thing you love to do—or from even looking for it—can be a deep source of frustration.

There may no conscious agenda from others at all. You may simply find yourself enmeshed in a self‐sustaining web of social roles and expectations that forms a tacit boundary to your ambitions. Many people don’t find their Element because they don’t have the encouragement or the confidence to step outside their established circle of relationships.

Sometimes, of course, your loved ones genuinely think you would be wasting your time and talents doing something of which they disapprove. This is what happened to Paulo Coelho. Mind you, his parents went further than most to put him off. They had him committed repeatedly to a psychiatric institution and subjected to electroshock therapy because they loved him. The next time you feel guilty about scolding your children, you can probably take some comfort in not resorting to the Coelho parenting system.

The reason Coelho’s parents institutionalized him was that he had a passionate interest as a teenager in becoming a writer. Pedro and Lygia Coelho believed this was a waste of a life. They suggested he could do a bit of writing in his spare time if he felt the need to dabble in such a thing, but his real future lay in becoming a lawyer. When Paulo continued to pursue the arts, his parents felt they had no choice but to commit him to a mental institution to drive these destructive notions from his head. “They wanted to help me,” Coelho has said. “They had their dreams. I wanted to do this and that but my parents had different plans for my life. So there was a moment when they could not control me anymore and they were desperate.”

Coelho’s parents put Paolo in an asylum three times. They knew their son was extremely bright, believed he had a promising career ahead of him, and did what they felt they had to do to put him on the right track. Yet not even such an extreme approach to intervention stopped Paulo Coelho from finding his Element. In spite of the intense family opposition, he continued to pursue writing.

His parents were right in assuming he had a promising future ahead of him, but that future had nothing to do with the legal profession. Coelho’s novel The Alchemist was a major international best seller, selling more than forty million copies around the world. His books have been translated into more than sixty languages, and he is the best‐selling Portuguese‐language writer in history. His creative reach extends to television, newspapers, and even popular music; he has written lyrics for several hit Brazilian rock songs.

It’s entirely possible that Paulo Coelho would have made an excellent lawyer. His dream was to write, though. And even though his parents tried extraordinarily hard to put him on “the right course,” he kept his focus on his Element.

Few of us are encouraged to conform to our family’s expectations as firmly as Paulo Coelho was. But many people face barriers from family and friends: “Don’t take a dance program, you can’t make a living as a dancer,” “You’re good at math, you should become an accountant,” “I’m not paying for you to be a philosophy major,” and the rest.

When people close to you discourage you from taking a particular path, they usually believe they are doing it for your own good. There are some with less noble reasons, but most believe they know what’s best. And the fact is that the average office worker probably does have more financial security than the average jazz trumpeter. But it is difficult to feel accomplished when you’re not accomplishing something that matters to you. Doing something “for your own good” is rarely for your own good if it causes you to be less than who you really are.

The decision to play it safe, to take the path of least resistance, can seem irresistible, particularly if you have your own doubts and fears about the alternatives. And for some people it seems easier to avoid ruffling feathers and have the approval of parents, siblings, and spouses. But not for everyone.

Some of the people in this book had to pull away from their families, for a while at least, to become the person they needed to be. Their decision to take the less comfortable route and accept the price of troubled relationships, tense family holidays, and, in Coelho’s case, even lost brain cells eventually led them to considerable levels of fulfillment and accomplishment. What each of them managed to do was weigh the cost of disregarding their loved ones against the cost of relinquishing their dreams.

When Arianna Stasinopoulos was a teenager in Greece in the 1960s, she had a sudden and passionate dream. Leafing through a magazine, she saw a picture of Cambridge University in England. She was only thirteen years old, but she decided on the spot that she had to be a student there. Everybody she told about this, including her friends and her father, said it was ridiculous idea. She was a girl, it was too expensive, she had no connections there, and this was one of the most prestigious universities in the world. No one took her seriously. No one except Arianna herself, that is. And one other person.

Her mother decided that they had to find out if Arianna’s dream was even remotely possible. She made some inquiries and learned that Arianna could apply for a scholarship. She even found some cheap air tickets “so we could go to England and see Cambridge in person. It was a perfect example of what we now call visualization.” It was a long flight to London, and it rained the entire time they were in Cambridge. Arianna and her mother didn’t meet anyone from the university; they simply walked around and imagined what it would be like to be there. With her dream reinforced, Arianna applied as soon as she was eligible.

To her delight and everyone’s astonishment (except her mother’s), Cambridge accepted Arianna—and she won a scholarship. At the age of sixteen, she moved to England and went on to graduate from Cambridge University with an M.A. in economics. At twenty‐one, she became the first woman president of the famed debating society, the Cambridge Union.

Now based in the United States, Arianna Huffington is the author of eleven books on cultural history and politics, a nationally syndicated columnist, and cohost of Left, Right & Center, National Public Radio’s popular political roundtable program. In May 2005, she launched the Huffington Post, a news and blog site that has become “one of the most widely read and frequently cited media brands on the Internet.” In 2006, Time magazine put her on their list of the world’s hundred most influential people.

For all her success, Huffington knows that the biggest obstacles to achievement can be self‐doubt and the disapproval of other people. She says this is especially true for women. “I am struck by how often, when I asked women to blog for the Huffington Post, they had a hard time trusting that what they had to say was worthwhile, even established writers.… So often, I think, we as women stop ourselves from trying because we don’t want to risk failing. We put such a premium on being approved of, we become reluctant to take risks.

“Women still have an uneasy relationship with power and the traits necessary to be a leader. There is this internalized fear that if we are really powerful, we are going to be considered ruthless or pushy or strident—all those epithets that strike right at our femininity. We are still working at trying to overcome the fear that power and womanliness are mutually exclusive.”

Huffington says there were two key factors in pursuing her early dream. The first was that she didn’t really understand what she was getting herself into. “My first taste of leadership came in a situation in which I was a blissfully ignorant outsider. It was in college, when I became president of the Cambridge Union debating society. Since I had grown up in Greece, I had never heard of the Cambridge Union or the Oxford Union and didn’t know about their place in English culture, so I wasn’t weighed down with the kinds of overwhelming notions that may have stopped British girls from even thinking about trying for such a position…. In this way, it was a blessing that I started my career outside my home environment. It had its own problems in that I was ridiculed for my accent and was demeaned as someone who spoke in a funny way. But it also taught me that it is easier to overcome people’s judgments than to overcome our own self‐judgment, the fear we internalize.”

The second factor was the unwavering support of her mother. “I don’t think that anything I’ve done in my life would have been possible without my mother. My mother gave me that safe place, that sense that she would be there no matter what happened, whether I succeeded or failed. She gave me what I am hoping to be able to give my daughters, which is a sense that I could aim for the stars combined with the knowledge that if I didn’t reach them, she wouldn’t love me any less. She helped me understand that failure was part of any life.”

Groupthink

Positively or negatively, our parents and families are powerful influences on us. But even stronger, especially when we’re young, are our friends. We don’t choose our families, but we do choose our friends, and we often choose them as a way of expanding our sense of identity beyond the family. As a result, the pressure to conform to the standards and expectations of friends and other social groups can be intense.

Judith Rich Harris is a developmental psychologist who has looked at the influences on young people of their friends and peer groups. She argues that three main forces shape our development: personal temperament, our parents, and our peers. The influence of peers, she argues, is much stronger than that of parents. “The world that children share with their peers,” she says, “is what shapes their behavior and modifies the characteristics they were born with, and hence determines the sort of people they will be when they grow up.”

Children get their ideas of how to behave by identifying with the group and taking on its attitudes, behaviors, speech, and styles of dress and adornment. “Most of them do this automatically and willingly. They want to be like their peers, but just in case they have any funny ideas, their peers are quick to remind them of the penalties of being different.… The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.”

Since breaking the rules is a sure way to find ourselves out of the group, we may deny our deepest passions to stay connected with our peers. At school, we disguise an interest in physics because our circle finds it uncool. We spend afternoons playing basketball when what we really want to do is master the five mother sauces. We never mention our fascination with hip‐hop because the people we travel with consider something so “street” to be beneath them. Being in your Element may depend on stepping out of the circle.

Shawn Carter was born in the housing projects in Brooklyn, New York. Now known as Jay‐Z, he is one of the most successful musicians and businesspeople of his generation, and an icon to millions of people around the world. To become all of that, he first had to confront the disapproval and the skepticism of the friends and peers he grew up with on the Brooklyn streets. “When I left the block, everyone was saying I was crazy,” he has said of his early success. “I was doing well for myself on the streets, and cats around me were like, ‘These rappers are hos. They just record, tour, and get separated from their families, while some white person takes all their money.’ I was determined to do it differently.”

His role model was the music entrepreneur Russell Simmons, and like him, Jay‐Z now heads a diverse business empire that’s rooted in his success as a musician but goes beyond it to include a clothing line and a record label. All of this has generated a huge personal fortune for Jay‐Z and the renewed respect of many of the friends in Brooklyn he had to move aside to make his way.

In extreme cases, peer groups can become trapped in what psychologist Irving Janis has called “groupthink,” a mode of thinking “that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in‐group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.” The prevailing belief here is that the group knows best, that a decision or a direction that seems to represent the majority of the group stands beyond careful examination— even when your instincts suggest otherwise.

There are several famous—and sometime infamous—studies of the effects of groupthink, including the Solomon Asch conformity experiments. In 1951, psychologist Asch brought together college students in groups of eight to ten, telling them he was studying visual perception. All but one of the students were “plants.” They knew the nature of the experiment, and Asch had instructed them to give incorrect answers the majority of the time. The real subject—the only one who Asch had not prepared ahead of time—answered each question only after hearing most of the other answers in the group.

Asch showed the students a card with a line on it. He then held up another card with three lines of different lengths and asked them to say which one was the same length as the line on the other card. One was an obvious match but the planted students had been instructed by Asch to say that the match was one of the other lines. When it was time for the subject to answer, the effects of groupthink kicked in. In a majority of cases, the subject answered with the group, and against clear visual evidence, at least once during the session.

When interviewed later, most of the subjects said they knew they were giving the wrong answers but did so because they didn’t want to be singled out. “The tendency to conformity in our society is so strong,” Asch wrote, “that reasonably intelligent and well‐meaning young people are willing to call white black. This is a matter of concern. It raises questions about our ways of education and about the values that guide our conduct.”

Management writer Jerry B. Harvey gives another famous example, known as the Abilene Paradox: On a hot afternoon in Coleman, Texas, the story goes, a family is comfortably playing dominoes on a porch, until the father‐in‐law suggests they take a trip to Abilene, fifty‐three miles north, for dinner. As Harvey describes it, “The wife says, ‘Sounds like a great idea.’ The husband, despite having reservations because the drive is long and hot, thinks that his preferences must be out of step with the group and says, ‘Sounds good to me. I just hope your mother wants to go.’ The mother‐in‐law then says, ‘Of course I want to go. I haven’t been to Abilene in a long time.’ The drive is hot, dusty, and long. When they arrive at the cafeteria, the food is as bad. They arrive back home four hours later, exhausted. One of them dishonestly says, ‘It was a great trip, wasn’t it.’

“The mother‐in‐law says that, actually, she would rather have stayed home, but went along since the other three were so enthusiastic. The husband says, ‘I didn’t want to go. I only went to satisfy the rest of you.’ The wife says, ‘I just went along to keep you happy. I would have to be crazy to want to go out in the heat like that.’ The father‐in‐law says that he only suggested it because he thought the others might be bored.

“The group sits back, perplexed that they together decided to take a trip which none of them wanted. They each would have preferred to sit comfortably, but did not admit to it when they still had time to enjoy the afternoon.”

This is a benign but dramatic illustration of the consequences of groupthink. Every member of the group agreed to do something they didn’t want to do because they thought the others were committed to doing it. The result was that no one came away happy.

Allowing groupthink to inform our decisions about our futures can lead to equally unpleasant—and much more consequential— results. Accepting the group opinion that physics is not cool, playing basketball is better than learning to be a chef, and hiphop is beneath you is counterproductive not only to the individual but to the group. Perhaps, like those in the Abilene Paradox, others in the circle secretly disagree too but are afraid to stand alone against the group. Groupthink can diminish the group as a whole.

The major obstacles to finding the Element often emerge in school. This is partly because of the hierarchy of subjects, which means that many students never discover their true interests and talents. But within the general culture of education, different social groups form distinctive subcultures. For some groups the code is that it’s just not cool to study. If you’re doing science, you’re a geek; if you’re doing art or dance, you’re effete. For other groups, doing these things is absolutely essential.

The power of groups is that they validate the common interests of their members. The danger of groupthink is that it dulls their individual judgment. The group thinks in unison and behaves en masse. In this respect, schools of people are like schools of fish.

A Single Ant Can’t Ruin a Picnic

You’ve probably seen images of huge schools of fish swimming in tight formation that instantly move in a new direction like a single organism. Perhaps you’ve seen swarms of insects crossing the sky that spontaneously swoop and swirl like an orchestrated cloud. It’s an impressive display that seems like controlled and intelligent behavior. But the individual herrings or mosquitoes are not acting on free will, as we think of it in humans. We don’t know what may be on their minds as they go along with the crowd, but we do know that when they do it, they act almost as a single creature. Researchers are now understanding more about how this happens.

The probability is that fish make those dramatic tight shifts in direction by following the movements of the fish that lie directly in their field of perception. What appears to be a masterwork of choreography is probably little more than an especially elegant version of follow‐the‐leader. To illustrate the point, there are now computer programs that simulate the effects of swarms and schools with remarkable accuracy.

A similar principle seems to drive the operations of one of the oldest and most successful creatures on earth, the ant. If you’ve seen an ant wandering aimlessly across your kitchen floor in search of a morsel to eat, you don’t get a sense of a highly developed intelligence at work. Yet the work of ant colonies is a miracle of efficiency and success. Ants depend on what’s known as swarm intelligence, the nature of which is currently the subject of intense study. While they have yet to understand fully how ants have developed such sophisticated teamwork, researchers do know that ants achieve their goals by fulfilling their own very specific roles with military precision.

For instance, when looking for food, one ant starts on a path, leaving a trail of pheromones. The next ant follows this trail, leaving a trail of its own. In this way, a large collection finds its way to the food source and carries it back as a team to the colony. Each ant works toward a global goal, while no one ant takes the lead. In fact, there seems to be no hierarchy at all within ant colonies. Even the queen’s one function seems to be to lay eggs. These patterns of coordinated group behavior in fish, ants, mosquitoes, and most other creatures are principally to do with protection and security, with mating and survival, and with getting food and not becoming food themselves.

It’s much the same with human beings. We aggregate as groups for the same essential and primal purposes. The upside for us is that groups can be tremendously supportive. The downside is that they encourage uniformity of thought and behavior. The Element is about discovering yourself, and you can’t do this if you’re trapped in a compulsion to conform. You can’t be yourself in a swarm.

Culture: Right and Thong

Beyond the specific social constraints we may feel from families and friends, there are others that are implicit in the general culture. I define culture as the values and forms of behavior that characterize different social groups. Culture is a system of permissions. It’s about the attitudes and behaviors that are acceptable and unacceptable in different communities, those that are approved of and those that are not. If you don’t understand the cultural codes, you can look just awful.

I’ll always remember a man I saw who got it miserably wrong on a beach in Malibu in California. He strutted slowly into our midst, a vision of the unexpected that caused a beach full of strangers to form a deep bond of helpless camaraderie. He was about forty. My guess was that he was some sort of executive, and I could imagine that in certain settings he cut a distinguished figure. But here, he did not. In a land of physical culture and tread‐mills, he was pale, hairy, and inhabited a sagging body that clearly spent its days at a desk and its nights on a barstool. One can forgive a man for all of these things. But not for wearing a nylon, leopard‐print thong.

The thong clung to his groin like an oxygen mask. A stretch of elastic held it in place, skirting his waist and threading tightly between his bare buttocks. He paraded down the length of the beach, apparently delighted that every eye was turning to him in a slow Mexican wave of amazement. He gave the impression of a self‐appointed role model of physical attraction and sexual magnetism bathing in the bright sunlight of popular acclaim. This wasn’t the majority opinion, however. “At least he might have waxed,” said the man next to me.

Why was this so hypnotically amusing for us all? It wasn’t just that he had such an outrageously high opinion of his attractiveness. It was also that he was so far out of context. The outfit and attitude might have worked in the south of France, but in Malibu, for various reasons, it was all wrong. There’s an unspoken code for men on California beaches. It’s a curious mixture of peacock display and public modesty. Oiled torsos and rippling muscles are fine, but naked buttocks are not. All over America, there’s this intricate mixture of prurience and prudishness.

Shortly afterward, my wife, Terry, and I were in Barcelona. There are beaches there that line the harbor in the city center, and every lunchtime during the summer the local offices spill out and young men and women head to the city beaches and sunbathe topless, in thongs at the very most. In Spain, that’s completely accepted. It would be odd there to see someone in a pair of knee‐length shorts and a T‐shirt. The culture simply accepts that people can wander around virtually naked on the beach.

All social cultures promote what I’d describe as “contagious behavior.” One of the best examples is language, and more particularly accents and dialects. These are wonderful illustrations of the impulse to copy and conform. It would be odd for someone born and raised in the Highlands of Scotland or the Badlands of Montana not to speak the local dialect of English with the local accent. We’d be amazed, of course, if a child born there spontaneously started speaking French or Hebrew. But we’d be just as taken aback if the child spoke the local language in an entirely different dialect or accent from everyone else. The natural instinct of children is to copy and imitate, and as they grow they absorb not only the sounds they hear but the sensibilities they express and the culture they convey. Languages are the bearers of the cultural genes. As we learn a language, accents, and ways of speaking, we also learn ways of thinking, feeling, and relating.

The cultures in which we are raised do not only affect our values and outlook. They also shape our bodies and may even restructure our brains. Language, again, is a prime example. As we learn to speak, our mouths and vocal organs adapt to make the sounds our languages use. If you grow up speaking only one or two languages, it can be physically difficult to create the sounds that other languages require and that other cultures take for granted—those guttural French sounds, or the lispy sounds of Spanish, or the tonal sounds of some Asian languages. To speak a new language, we may have to retrain our bodies to make and understand the new sounds. But the effects of culture may go deeper still—into the actual structures of the brain.

In the last few years there has been a series of fascinating studies into differences in visual perception between people from the West and from East Asia. These studies suggest that the cultures we grow up in affect the basic processes by which we see the world around us. In one such study, Westerners and Asians were asked to look at a series of photographs and to describe what they saw. A number of marked differences emerged. In essence, Westerners tend to focus more on the foreground of the pictures and on what they consider the subject. Asians focus more on the whole image, including the relationships between the different elements. For example, one photograph showed a jungle scene with a tiger. Typically, the Western observers, when asked what they saw, said, “A tiger.” To Western readers of this book, that may seem reasonable enough. However, Asian observers typically said, “It’s a jungle with a tiger in it,” or “It’s a tiger in a jungle.” The difference is significant, and it relates to larger cultural differences in the Western and Asian worldviews.

In Asian art there is often much less emphasis on portraiture and the individual subject of the sort that is common in Western art. In Asian cultures, there is less emphasis on the individual and more on the collective. Western philosophy since the ancient Greeks has emphasized the importance of critical reasoning, logical analysis, and the separation of ideas and things into categories. Chinese philosophy is not based as much on logic and deductive reasoning and tends to emphasize relationships and holism. These differences in perception may lead to differences in memory and judgment. At least one study suggests that over time they may also lead to structural differences in the brain.

Researchers in Illinois and Singapore monitored brain activity in young and elderly volunteers as they looked at a series of images with different subjects and backgrounds. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), they focused on the part of the brain known as the lateral occipital complex, which processes visual information about objects. All the younger participants showed similar brain activity, but there were marked differences in neural responses between the older Western and Asian observers. In the Westerners, the lateral occipital complex remained active, while in the Asian participants it responded only minimally.

Dr. Michael Chee is a professor with the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory in Singapore and coauthor of the study. He concluded, “The parts of the brain involved in processing background and objects are engaged differently across the two sets of elderly people coming from different geographical and—by inference— cultural backgrounds.” Dr. Denise Park is professor of psychology at the University of Illinois and a senior researcher on the project. In her view, these different results may be because East Asian cultures “are more interdependent and individuals spend more time monitoring the environment and others. Westerners focus on individuals and central objects because these cultures tend to be independent and focused more on the self than others.” She says that these studies show that culture can sculpt the brain.

Whether and to what extent this happens is now attracting a wider field of researchers. What is already clear is that what we actually see of the world is affected by culture, not only what we think of what we see. Culture conditions all of us in ways that are imperceptible.

Swimming Against the Tide

All cultures have an unwritten “survival manual” for success, to quote cultural anthropologist Clotaire Rapaille. The rules and guidelines are transparent to most of us (if not to the thong man), and those who move from one culture to another can gain insight into the different rules and guidelines relatively easily. This survival manual comes from generations of adaptation to the particular climate in which the culture resides. But in addition to helping those within the culture thrive, it also sets out a series of constraints. Such constraints can inhibit us from reaching our Element because our passions seem inconsistent with the culture.

The great social movements are those that are stimulated when the boundaries are broken. Rock music, punk, hip‐hop, and other great shifts in the social culture usually derive their energy from young people looking for some alternative way of being. Youthful rebellion often expresses itself through distinctive styles of speech and dress codes, which usually turn out to be just as conformist and orthodox within their subculture as they are at odds with the dominant culture they’re trying to escape. It’s very hard to pass as a hippie if you’re wearing an Armani suit.

All cultures—and subcultures—also embody systems of constraints that can inhibit individuals from reaching their Element if their passions are in conflict with their context. Some people born in one culture end up adopting another because they prefer its sensibilities and ways of life, like cultural cross‐dressers; a French person may become an Anglophile, or an American a Franco‐phile. Like people who change religions, they can become more zealous about their adopted culture than those who were born into it.

The urban culture may not be best for someone who wants to run a small shop where he knows everyone’s name. Parts of heart‐land American culture are not prime territory for those who want careers as scathing political comics. This is why Bob Dylan had to get out of Hibbing, and why Arianna Stasinopoulos wanted to leave Greece. Finding your Element sometimes requires breaking away from your native culture in order to achieve your goals.

Zaha Hadid, the first woman ever to win the Pritzker Prize for Architecture, grew up in Baghdad in the 1950s. Iraq was a different place then, much more secular and more open to Western thought. During this time, there were many women in Iraq developing ambitious careers. But Hadid wanted to be an architect, and she found no female role models of this sort in her homeland. Driven by her passions, Hadid moved first to London and then to America, where she studied with the greatest architects of her time, honed a revolutionary style, and, after a rocky start—her work requires considerable risky conceptual leaps, which many clients were loath to make at first—built some of the most distinctive structures in the world.

Her work includes the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, Ohio, which the New York Times called “the most important new building in America since the Cold War.” Moving out of her culture and into a milieu that celebrated invention gave Hadid the opportunity to soar. If she’d stayed in Iraq, she might have had a good career, at least until political circumstances changed for women. But she would not have found her Element in architecture, because her native culture simply didn’t afford women that option.

The contagious behavior of schools of fish, insect swarms, and crowds of people is generated by close physical proximity. For most of human history, cultural identities have also been formed through direct contact with the people who are physically nearest to us: small villages, the local community. Large movements of people once were limited to invasions, military conquests, and trade, and these were the main ways in which cultural ideas were disseminated and different languages and ways of life imposed on other communities.

All of this has changed irreversibly in the last two hundred years or so with the growth of global communications. We now have patterns of contagious behavior being generated on a massive scale through the Web. Second Life has millions of people online from different parts of the world potentially affecting how they each think and taking on new virtual identities and roles.

Many of us now live like Russian dolls nestled in multiple layers of cultural identity. I was amused to read recently, for example, that nowadays being British “means driving home in a German car, stopping off to pick up some Belgian beer and a Turkish kebab or an Indian takeaway, to spend the evening on Swedish furniture, watching American programs on a Japanese TV.” And the most British thing of all? “Suspicion of anything foreign.”

The complexities and fluidity of contemporary cultures can make it easier to change context and break away from the pressures of groupthink and feeling stereotyped. They can also make for a profound sense of confusion and insecurity. The message here isn’t as simplistic as “Don’t let anything get in your way.” Our families, friends, culture, and place in the human community are all important to our sense of fulfillment, and we have certain responsibilities to all of them. The real message here is that, in seeking your Element, you’re likely to face one or more of the three levels of constraint—personal, social, and cultural.

Sometimes, as Chuck Close found, reaching your Element requires devising creative solutions to strong limitations. Sometimes, as we learned from Paulo Coelho, it means maintaining a vision in the face of vicious resistance. And sometimes, as Zaha Hadid showed us, it means walking away from the life you’ve known to find an environment more suited to your growth.

Ultimately, the question is always going to be, “What price are you willing to pay?” The rewards of the Element are considerable, but reaping these rewards may mean pushing back against some stiff opposition.