The Element

CHAPTER TEN For Love or Money

GABRIEL TROP is an accomplished academic scholar. When I met him, he was at Berkeley studying for a Ph.D. in German literature. This work means a great deal to him, but it is not the only thing about which he is passionate. He also has an overwhelming attraction to music. “If I were to lose the use of my hands,” he said to me, “my life would be over.”

Yet Gabriel has never entertained the thought of becoming a professional musician. In fact, for a long time he didn’t want to be involved in music at all. In his first years of high school, Gabriel would look pityingly at the music students, struggling across the campus with their bulky instrument cases, turning up at school for rehearsals hours before anyone else had to be there. That wasn’t a life for him, especially the part about getting to school extra early. He vowed secretly to avoid music.

However, one day, in the music class that was part of his school’s standard curriculum, he was tinkling idly on the piano and realized that he found it easy to pick out tunes. With a sinking feeling, he realized too that that he actually enjoyed doing it. He tried to disguise his obvious pleasure from the music teacher, who had wandered over to listen. He must not have done this particularly well, because the teacher told Gabriel that he had a good ear and suggested that Gabriel go into the music storeroom to see if any of the instruments there appealed to him.

A friend of Gabriel’s played the cello, and for this reason and no other, Gabriel decided to try out one of those in the storeroom. He found that he loved the shape and size of the instrument and the deep, sonorous noise it made when he plucked the strings. One cello in particular, had “a wonderful smell of middle school varnish.” He decided to break his vow and to give the cello a chance. When he began practicing, he took it very casually. But he quickly found that he loved playing this instrument, and that he was spending more and more time doing so.

From there, Gabriel practiced so often and with such intensity that within a couple of months he was playing reasonably well. Within a year, he was the principal cellist in the school orchestra. This meant, of course, that he arrived at school early in the morning, dragging his bulky instrument case across the campus to the pitying looks of the nonmusicians he had left behind.

Gabriel also loves literature, the German language, and academic work. At some point, he had to make a hard decision between music and academics as his primary focus in life. After a long internal struggle, he chose German literature because he felt that doing so would allow him to continue to spend time as a cellist, while if he dedicated himself to a profession in music, the time required to do so would have made it nearly impossible for him to explore German poetry in depth. “I chose literature because it seemed to me compatible with an intensity of music playing, and if I were to be a professional musician, my attachment to literature would have been disproportionately sidetracked. So this arrangement was really the one I could find where I could remain a dedicated cellist and sustain a high degree of involvement with literary language.”

Still, he plays for hours every day and continues to perform (he recently played a cello concerto with the University of California Berkeley Symphony Orchestra). He doesn’t know how he would survive without regular immersion in the practice and enjoyment of music. To call this a hobby, he says, would be ridiculous. Music is elemental in his life, and in music, he has found his Element.

In the truest meaning of the word, Gabriel is an amateur musician. And he wouldn’t have it any other way.

For the Love of It

At the most basic levels, professionals in any field are simply those people who earn their living in that field, while amateurs are people who don’t. But the terms amateur and professional often imply something else—something about quality and expertise. People often think of amateurs as second‐rate, as those who perform well below professional levels. Amateurs are the ones who gesticulate too wildly in the local theater production, who score over a hundred on the golf course, or who write cute stories about pets in the town’s free newspaper. When we call something “amateurish,” we use the word as a pejorative. We’re suggesting that the thing upon which we’re commenting is nowhere near professional, that the effort is something of an embarrassment.

Sometimes it’s perfectly reasonable to draw sharp distinctions between professionals and amateurs. There can, after all, be enormous differences of accomplishment between them. If I had to have a vasectomy, I’d greatly prefer to put myself in the hands of someone who did this sort of thing for a living rather than someone who occasionally dabbled in it. But often the differences between professionals and amateurs have less to do with quality than with choice. Many people, like Gabriel, do perform at professional levels in the fields they love. They simply choose not to make their living that way. They aren’t professionals in this field because they don’t make money that way. They are, by definition, amateurs. But nothing about their skill is “amateurish.”

The word amateur derives from the Latin word amator, which means lover, devoted friend, or someone who is in avid pursuit of an objective. In the original sense, an amateur is someone who does something for the love of it. Amateurs do what they do because they have a passion for it, not because it pays the bills. True amateurs, in other words, are people who have found the Element in something other than their jobs.

In “The Pro‐Am Revolution,” a report for the British think tank Demos, Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller underline the rise of a type of amateur that works at increasingly higher standards and generates breakthroughs sometimes greater than those made by professionals—hence the term Pro‐Am. In many cases, new technology is providing a wider group with apparatus once unaffordable to the amateur—CCD chips for telescopes, Pro Tools for musicians, sophisticated video editing software for home computers, and so on. Leadbeater and Miller point to the emergence of hip‐hop, a musical genre that started with the distribution of handmade tapes.

They note that the Linux computer operating system is a collaborative work created by a large community of programmers in their spare time. The Jubilee 2000 debt campaign, which has resulted in the relief of tens of billions of dollars in debt from Third World countries, started with the petitions of people with no professional lobbying experience. And an amateur astronomer using a ten‐inch telescope is credited with the discovery of a supernova.

“A Pro‐Am pursues an activity as an amateur, mainly for the love of it, but sets a professional standard,” Leadbeater and Miller say. “Pro‐Ams are unlikely to earn more than a small portion of their income from their pastime but they pursue it with the dedication and commitment associated with a professional. For Pro‐Ams, leisure is not passive consumerism but active and participatory; it involves the deployment of publicly accredited knowledge and skills, often built up over a long career, which has involved sacrifices and frustrations.”

Leadbeater and Miller call Pro‐Ams “a new social hybrid,” noting that they pursue their passions outside of the workplace, but with an energy and dedication rarely given to acts of leisure. Pro‐Ams find this level of intensity restorative, often helping to compensate for less‐than‐inspiring jobs.

Some people do truly remarkable work as amateurs. Arthur C. Clarke was a best‐selling science fiction writer, author of, among other novels, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rendezvous with Rama. He’d already begun his writing career when he became an officer in the British Royal Air Force. While there, he observed scientists in the air force’s radar division and became fascinated with their work. In 1945 he published an article in Wireless World magazine entitled “Extra‐Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give World‐Wide Radio Coverage?” In it, he posited the use of satellites in geostationary orbit to broadcast television signals around the globe.

Most scientists dismissed this proposition as yet another work of science fiction. However, Clarke had a very keen interest in the subject, and he had studied it carefully. His proposal was solid technically and, as we all now know, utterly prescient. The specific geostationary orbit Clarke proposed is now known as the Clarke orbit, and hundreds of satellites use it. And while Clarke made his living in the upper stratospheres of the New York Times best‐seller list, it’s the work he did as an amateur (specifically a letter to the editors of Wireless World that preceded his article) that sits in the National Air and Space Museum.

Susan Hendrickson hasn’t had a particular profession at all. She dropped out of high school, became a skilled scuba diver, taught herself to identify rare marine specimens, became an expert at finding amber insect fossils, and has lived a multifaceted life as an explorer and adventurer. In 1990, Hendrickson joined an archaeological expedition in South Dakota led by the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research. The work started extremely slowly. The group explored six outcrops and made no significant discoveries. Then one day, while the rest of her team was in town, Hendrickson decided to explore the only other mapped outcrop. There, she came upon a few small bones. These bones would lead to the uncovering of the largest and most complete fossil skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex ever discovered—and one of the few female T. rexes ever found.

The skeleton is now on display at the Field Museum in Chicago. Her name: Tyrannosaurus Sue, after the amateur archaeologist who unearthed her.

In his book The Amateurs, David Halberstam wrote about four athletes in their pursuit of Olympic gold in 1984. Unlike the track champions or basketball players who could leverage Olympic success into huge professional contracts (the Olympic Committee didn’t allow NBA stars to participate back then) or endorsement deals, the subjects Halberstam followed—scullers— had no chance of cashing in on their victories. They were doing it purely for the love of the sport and the sense of accomplishment that would come from being the best.

The book focuses most closely on Christopher “Tiff” Wood. Halberstam calls Wood “the personification of the amateur. He had put aside career, marriage, pleasure in his single‐minded pursuit of excellence in a sport that few of his fellow countrymen cared about and that was, therefore, absolutely without commercial rewards.” At thirty‐one, Wood was old for the sport (at least at the Olympic level), but he was on a mission. He’d been an alternate at the 1976 Olympics and never got to compete. He was the captain of the 1980 team that was supposed to go to Moscow. But, as a protest over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, America chose not to attend those games.

The 1984 Olympics would be Wood’s last chance for a gold medal. Within the small but devoted sculling community, he’d become something of a favorite son. Tiff Wood, as it turns out, did not come away with the gold. That fact, though, is only a sidebar to the story. What comes across in Halberstam’s depiction of Wood and the other scullers is the passion and satisfaction associated with a purely amateur pursuit. Tiff Wood discovered the Element through his nonprofessional efforts. His job was just a job. Rowing was his life.

To be in your Element, it isn’t necessary to drop everything else and do it all day, every day. For some people, at some stages in their lives, leaving their current jobs or roles to pursue their passions simply isn’t a practical proposition. Other people choose not to do that for a whole range of reasons. Many people earn their living doing one thing, and they then create time and space in their lives to do the thing they love. Some people do this because it makes greater sense emotionally. Others do it because they feel they have no alternative but to pursue their passions “on the side.”

A couple of years ago, I was leasing a new car from a dealership in Santa Monica. As it turned out, this was not easy. There was a time when the only decision you had to make when buying a car was whether to have it or not. Now you have to take a full‐scale multiple‐choice test to navigate your way between the hundreds of finishes, trims, accessories, and performance features that stand between you and the version you actually want. I’m not good at this kind of excessive decision‐making. I need help deciding what to wear in the morning, where there’s much less choice and the stakes are far lower. By the time I’d made up my mind about the car, my salesman, Bill, and I had bonded and were planning our annual reunion.

While we were waiting for the final paperwork—another lengthy process—I asked him what he did when he wasn’t working. Without missing a beat, he said he was a photographer. I asked him what he photographed, assuming he meant family weddings and pets. He said he was a sports photographer. I asked him what sports he covered. “Just surfing,” he said. I was intrigued and asked him why. He said that he’d been a surfer when he was younger and simply loved the beauty and dynamics of the sport. He went to the beach at Malibu after work, weekends, holidays—whenever he could—just to take pictures. He’d been doing this for years and had accumulated thousands of dollars’ worth of cameras, tripods, and specialized lenses. Over longer holidays, he traveled to Hawaii and Australia to catch the big surf on camera.

I asked him if any of his pictures had been published. He said they had, and pulled open the drawer of his desk. It was full of high‐production, glossy surfing magazines. He had pictures in every one of them. His work was very, very good.

I asked him if he’d ever thought of doing this type of work for a living. “I’d love to,” he said, “but there isn’t enough money in it.” Nonetheless, surfing photography was his passion, and one of the things that made his life worthwhile. As I leafed through these amazing, professional images, I asked him what his boss at the dealership thought of them. “He doesn’t know anything about them,” Bill told me. “It’s not really relevant to how I do my job, is it?”

I’m not sure he was right about that. I actually think it might have had a great deal to do with how Bill did his job, as is likely the case with all people who discover the Element in a pursuit other than their jobs. My guess is that the satisfaction and excitement Bill found photographing surfers made it so much easier for him to be effective at what he thought of as the relative drudgery of helping customers choose from dozens of paint samples, finish options, and decisions about running boards. The creative outlet he found in his photography made him that much more patient and helpful in his day job.

The need for an outlet of this sort manifests itself in many forms. One that I find fascinating is the emergence of the corporate rock band. Unlike the company softball team, which tends to fill its roster with young people from the mailroom, these bands tend to include a lineup of senior executives (unless someone in the mailroom is a great bass player) who once dreamed of being rock stars before settling into other careers. The passion with which many of these amateur musicians play shows that such an avocation offers a level of fulfillment they can’t find in their work, regardless of how accomplished they are at their jobs.

For four years now, there has been a rock festival of sorts put together in New York to benefit the charity A Leg to Stand On. What distinguishes this rock benefit show from all others is that every member of every band (with the exception of a couple of ringers) is in the hedge fund business. “By day, most of the performers manage money,” states one of the press releases for Hedge Fund Rocktoberfest, “but when they turn off their trading screens, they turn on the music.”

“By 11 p.m., everyone is either thinking about their 4 a.m. train ride the next morning or the fact that the Tokyo markets are now open,” noted Tim Seymour, one of the performers. But while the show is on, it’s pure revelry, with managers covering classic hits or even donning skimpy outfits to serve as backup singers. The contrast between the day job and this is dramatic and, by all indications, liberating for everyone who participates.

Transformation

Finding the Element is essential to a balanced and fulfilled life. It can also help us to understand who we really are. These days, we tend to identify ourselves by our jobs. The first question at parties and social gatherings is often, “What do you do?” We dutifully answer with a top‐line description of our professions: “I’m a teacher,” “I’m a designer,” “I’m a driver.” If you don’t have a paid job, you might feel somewhat awkward about this and find the need to give an explanation. For so many of us, our jobs define us, even to ourselves—and even if the work we do doesn’t express who we really feel we are. This can be especially frustrating if your job is unfulfilling. If we’re not in our Element at work, it becomes even more important to discover that Element somewhere else.

To begin with, it can enrich everything else you do. Doing the thing you love and that you do well for even a couple of hours a week can make everything else more palatable. But in some circumstances, it can lead to transformations you might not have imagined possible.

Khaled Hosseini immigrated to America in 1980, got a medical degree in the 1990s, and set off on a career practicing internal medicine in the Bay Area. In his heart, though, he knew he wanted to be a writer and that he wanted to tell the story of life in Afghanistan prior to the Soviet invasion. While continuing his medical practice, he began work on a novel about two boys growing up in Kabul. That novel became The Kite Runner, a book that has sold more than four million copies and generated a recent film.

Hosseini’s pursuit of his most intense interests, even while he was working hard at another profession, transformed him in profound ways. The success of The Kite Runner has allowed him to go on an extended sabbatical from medicine and to concentrate on writing full‐time. He published his second novel, the best‐selling A Thousand Splendid Suns, in 2007. “I enjoyed practicing medicine and was always honored that patients put their trust in me to take care of them and their loved ones,” he said in a recent interview. “But writing had always been my passion, since childhood. I feel ridiculously fortunate and privileged that writing is, at least for the time being, my livelihood. It is a dream realized.”

Like Khaled Hosseini’s, Miles Waters’s first career was in the medical profession. He began practicing as a dentist in England in 1974. And like Hosseini, Waters had a burning passion for an entirely different field. In Waters’s case, it was popular music. He’d played in bands at school and started writing songs along the way. In 1977, he scaled back his dental practice to spend more time at songwriting. It took him several years to make inroads, but he eventually wrote several hit songs and began to earn a living in the music field. He quit dentistry for a period and worked full‐time as a writer and producer, contributing to an album by Jim Capaldi (from the legendary rock band Traffic) that featured work from Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, and George Harrison. He’s traveled in the same circles as Paul McCartney and Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour. These days, he shuttles between music and dentistry, maintaining a practice while still composing and producing.

John Wood made a fortune as a marketing executive for Microsoft. During a trip to the Himalayas, though, he came upon a school in an impoverished village. The school taught four hundred and fifty students, but had only twenty books—and not one of these was a children’s book. When Wood asked the school’s headmaster how the school got by with such a paucity of books, the headmaster enlisted his aid. Wood began collecting books and raising money for this school and others, doing the work on nights and weekends while dealing with a hugely demanding day job. Finally, he walked away from Microsoft for his true calling— Room to Read, a nonprofit organization with the goal of extending literacy in poor countries. Several of his Microsoft colleagues thought he’d lost his mind. “It was incomprehensible to many of them,” he said in an interview. “When they found out I was leaving to do things like delivering books on the backs of donkeys, they thought I was crazy.” Room to Read has been transformational not only for Wood, but for thousands and thousands of others. The nonprofit organization has created more than five thousand school libraries in six countries with plans to extend that reach to ten thousand libraries and fifteen countries by 2010.

Beyond Leisure

There’s an important difference between leisure and recreation. In a general sense, both words suggest processes of physical or mental regeneration. But they have different connotations. Leisure is generally thought of as the opposite of work. It suggests something effortless and passive. We tend to think of work as something that takes our energy. Leisure is what we do to build it up again. Leisure offers a respite, a passive break from the challenges of the day, a chance to rest and recharge. Recreation carries a more active tone—literally of re‐creating ourselves. It suggests activities that require physical or mental effort but which enhance our energies rather than depleting them. I associate the Element much more with recreation than with leisure.

Dr. Suzanne Peterson is a management professor at the W. P. Carey School of Business and Center for Responsible Leadership at Arizona State University and a consultant for an executive coaching firm. She’s also a championship dancer, twice winning the Holiday Dance Classic in Las Vegas and grabbing the 2007 Hotlanta US Open Pro‐Am Latin Championship, among others.

Suzanne took some dance classes when she was a teenager, but she never seriously considered dance as a career. Suzanne knew from the time she was in high school that she wanted to be an executive. “I didn’t grow up knowing exactly what I wanted to be, but I knew that I wanted to wear business suits, speak to large groups of people and have them listen to me, and have a title. I always saw myself as being able to wear great business suits for some reason. And I liked the idea that I could visualize myself in front of groups of people and have something important to say. But dancing was not a passion when I was young. It was something you did because what else do girls do as a hobby if they don’t want to play soccer and baseball?”

Her rediscovery of dance and the intense excitement that accompanied it this time around came nearly accidentally. “I was just looking for a hobby and my achievement and motivation got the best of me. I was about twenty‐six, and I was in graduate school. At this time, salsa and swing dancing were getting popular, so I’d just go into the social dance studio and I would watch. I’d mimic what the teachers were doing. Slowly but surely I started taking group lessons and then some private lessons. The next thing I know, it’s this huge part of my life. So it really was a progression based on my belief that I had the requisite talent for it and sort of the basic ability level. But probably my academic side allowed me to study it and focus on it just like any other subject.

“And I literally would study it like any other academic science. Huge visualization. I would sit on planes and I would visualize myself going through all the dances. So anytime I couldn’t physically practice, I would mentally practice. I could feel the music. I could feel the emotions. I could see the facial expressions. And I would come the next day to the dance studio after being gone and I would be better. And my dance partner would say, ‘How did you get better overnight? Weren’t you traveling to Philadelphia?’ and I would say, ‘Oh, I practiced on the plane.’ And I literally would practice up to two hours in my head totally uninterrupted.

“I went into dancing the same way I go into my career—you give 110 percent and you go in strong and powerful. And I realized that when you do that in dancing, it’s too much. You lose the femininity and, all of a sudden, you’re in everybody’s face so much. The business side is power and confidence and all these things. And the dancing is vulnerability and sensuality, everything soft. You go from one to the other and I enjoy them equally.”

Suzanne in fact seems to have found her Element in multiple ways. She loves her profession, and she loves what she does for recreation. “If I’m really teaching something about leadership that I’m passionate about, I get the same exact feeling except that it’s just a different emotion. I mean I feel confident and powerful and very connected to the audience and I want to make a difference. And then in the dancing I feel more vulnerable, a little less confidence. But they’re both escapes in different ways and I get completely engulfed in them and get very moved by them emotionally.”

Ultimately, though, her life has added meaning because she’s chosen a recreational pursuit that is fulfilling, rather than simply entertaining. “It’s taught me more about communication than studying communication ever could. You realize the effect that you have on another person. If you were in a bad mood, that person knows it in a second just touching your hand. And so in my head I could feel the perfect connection that’s in a partnership, the perfect communication. I would feel extremely happy.

“It’s a flow experience. I mean it’s a complete release. I don’t think about anything. I don’t think about anything good in my life. I don’t think about anything bad in my life. Literally, I would not get distracted if gunshots went off. It’s really amazing.”

Suzanne’s sister, Andrea Hanna, is an executive assistant working in Los Angeles. Like Suzanne, she’s found a pursuit beyond her job that adds dimension to her life.

“I didn’t like writing until my senior year of high school,” she told me. “My English teacher told us to write a compelling college entrance essay about anything of our choice. Like most assignments, I dreaded the idea of sitting down and writing a five‐paragraph essay that was just going to end up covered in red pen. Nonetheless, I finally sat down and wrote about how unprepared I felt for college but how excited I was to start a new chapter of my life. This was the first essay I had ever written for school that had humor in it. It was also the first essay where I was able to write about something I was an expert on: me. To my surprise, my teacher loved it and read it in front of the class. She also entered it into a writing contest. I won first place and was asked to read my paper in front of a large group of professional women writers. I even got my picture in the paper! It was exciting for me and gave me a boost of confidence as I entered college.

“I have always been told I have a very strong writer’s voice. People always tell me, ‘I can hear you while I read this.’ In college I started sending friends the occasional comedic e‐mail recapping our weekends. I would turn each one of my friends into a character and embellished the story just enough to get the laugh I wanted. My e‐mails started getting circulated amongst groups of friends and pretty soon I would get a reply from someone I wouldn’t know telling me how great my writing was. It felt great to be so good at something that came so naturally for me.

“The summer between my sophomore and junior year, I got a job as a receptionist at a radio station. Within a month, I had started writing funny advertising spots for the station. The station manager loved my ideas and put them on air. All my friends would tune in to hear my funny commericals, many of which I starred in myself. It felt really good to hear my work produced and get the response I had sought out to get.

“As my work got recognized, I started realizing I had a talent for something that could possibly be a career. I entered the entertainment industry right after college. I had several jobs working for television writers and film producers, learning the ropes. After years of coffee runs and executive car washes, I realized that many of these ‘dream jobs’ were some of the least creative jobs out there. At one point, I dreamt of being a writer for Saturday Night Live, but learned weekly deadlines and high‐stress environments take any enjoyment out of it for me. I began to think, why does a paycheck validate my talent? When it comes down to it, I just love to make people laugh and if one of my sketches, short stories, or funny e‐mails makes someone crack up, well that’s really enough for me. I became a much happier person when I came to that realization.

“When I think about it, I think the main reason I enjoy writing comedy is because I feel witty and smart when I am doing it. For so many years I felt stupid because I never excelled at school. My writing gives me confidence and makes me feel like a more complete version of myself.”

The objective of this form of recreation is to bring a proper balance into our lives—a balance between making a living and making a life. Whether or not we can spend most of our time in our Element, it’s essential for our well‐being that we connect with our true passions in some way and at some point. More and more people are doing this through formal and informal networks, clubs, and festivals to share and celebrate common creative interests. These include choirs, theater festivals, science clubs, and music camps. Personal happiness comes as much from the emotional and spiritual fulfillment that this can bring as from the material needs we meet from the work we may have to do.

The scientific study of happiness is a relatively new field. It got off to something of a false start with Abraham Maslow six decades ago, when he suggested that we spend more time understanding the psychology of our positive traits rather than focusing exclusively on what makes us mentally ill. Unfortunately, most of his contemporaries found little inspiration in his words. The concept gained a great deal of traction, though, when Martin Seligman became president of the American Psychological Association and, coining the term Positive Psychology, announced that the goal of his yearlong term in office was to provoke further exploration into what made human beings flourish. Since then, scientists have conducted dozens of studies on happiness. “Happy individuals seem to have a whole lot more fun than the rest of us ever do,” Dr. Michael Fordyce said in his book Human Happiness. “They have many more activities they enjoy doing for fun, and they spend much more of their time, on a given day or week, doing fun, exciting, and enjoyable activities.”

Discovering the Element doesn’t promise to make you richer. Quite the opposite is possible, actually, as exploring your passions might lead you to leave behind that career as an investment banker to follow your dream of opening a pizzeria. Nor does it promise to make you more famous, more popular, or even a bigger hit with your family. For everyone, being in their Element, even for part of the time, can bring a new richness and balance to their lives.

The Element is about a more dynamic, organic conception of human existence in which the different parts of our lives are not seen as hermetically sealed off from one another but as interacting and influencing each other. Being in our Element at any time in our lives can transform our view of ourselves. Whether we do it full‐time or part‐time, it can affect our whole lives and the lives of those around us.

The Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn saw this clearly. “If you want to change the world,” he said, “who do you begin with, yourself or others? I believe if we begin with ourselves and do the things that we need to do and become the best person we can be, we have a much better chance of changing the world for the better.”