Finding Your Element

Finding Your Element shows you how to find your talents and passions, embrace them, and come up with your own definition of happiness, so you can combine what you love with what you’re good at to live a long, happy life.

Has someone ever told you “you really are one-of-a-kind?” To express they think you’re special? It’s a really nice thing to happen, isn’t it? But have you ever stopped to consider how profoundly right they were when they paid you that compliment? Because they literally were.

I’d like you to stop for a second and really think about this. No human person in the history of the world has had the same biology and psychology as you do.

Throughout human evolution, genes have been combined, changed, tweaked and permuted countless billions, trillions of times even. Yet you are the first and only instance of your exact combination of genes. No one will ever have the same genetic code, ever again (even if you have an identical twin). Of course this includes your brain, which is responsible for the second, absolutely unique thing about you: your experience.

You were born at a certain place (which will never be the same it was that day) at a certain time (which will never come again) into a certain set of circumstances (which will never be the same again). Nobody can ever have the same experiences with the same people in the same moment as you. No do-overs.

You can never recreate as you’ve lived it – so far and until you die. One time. Take a second to appreciate this. It really is one-of-a-kind. Just like you.

Logically following this uniqueness, you’d have to think that no human life plays out in the same way, which should hold true for our work too, right? How come then that millions of people end up doing the same thing and making the same career choices? This is where one of the most basic, yet strongest human fears kicks in: the fear of the unknown. Our brains scream for certainty and reassurance, and society is happy to offer both of those to us. “Follow the plan,” it whispers “you know, the well-established path, the one where you know how it plays out.” Usually that’s finishing high school at 17 or 18, entering college, graduating, getting a professional job as a lawyer, doctor, teacher or manager, then settling down, getting married and starting a family. But since we’re living through the biggest shift in education and work since the Industrial Revolution, the pressure to follow this plan makes us even more uncomfortable. How can we expect humans who’ve just become adults to commit to a plan…