Are you in your element?

I think what Csikszentmihalyi calls 'Flow' is in the same field as what Ken Robinson discusses in 'The Element'.

Robinson's book is subtitled: 'How finding your passion changes everything.' I have only read the first chapter, but it is a book I having been looking forward to for a long time.

We have all had those moments when time just seems to fly by, when you are completely engaged in what you are doing and at your creative peak. Robinson's crusade in 'Out of our Minds' was to show just how wrong Industrial Style education has got it in narrowing down the range of teaching and definition of intelligence. In this book, he tells stories. Stories of people who have been lucky enough to find their element, to have found the thing that gives them flow and made it what they do.

I am not one of those people who claim you can be in a constant state of flow. No matter what your job there is drudgery and admin and bits that you don't like. My approach is just that we need to figure out ways of ruthlessly removing those tasks by automating and working ourselves out of those tasks. Find a better way. A more efficient way. Slowly but surely, we can get to the point where more and more of our day allows for flow, and less and less for drudge.

Finding your flow is important. Robinson makes a very valid point that the people starting school now are due to retire around 2070. We don't know what the world is going to be like in 10 years, let alone what the demands of the working environment are going to be in 2070.

What we do know is that things are changing dramatically. Today, you may be a doctor, maybe in 10 years time you will be in business. Today you may be an accountant, maybe in 10 years you are going to be a bare foot hippie travelling from country to country planting strawberries as you go. Today you may be an engineer, in 10 years you may be writing books and a sought after speaker.

There are no limits. Or at least, the limits are falling away.

What's your passion? Got a plan to make it what you do most of the day?

Exciting Times.