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Sir Ken Robinson on Finding Your Passion

An inspiring force the world over, Sir Ken Robinson is a crusader for creativity. And not only in the classrooms. This time, Robinson wants each of us to find our passion — and our talents — and make them our life's work.

We’re all born with immense, natural, creative abilities. Children demonstrate them all. We all feel them. But we feel they slip away from us as we get older. And I think it’s vitally important for personal and every other kind of reason that we focus on them and try to develop them.

In 2009, two years after giving one of the most celebrated, watched, and downloaded TED Talks in history, Sir Ken Robinson published the tome, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. In his initial TED Talk, Robinson called our attention to the dire need for schools to nurture (rather than squash) creativity in our children, and give them the educational freedom to discover and foster their passion. 

Three years later, he's back with Finding Your Element: How to Discover Your Talents and Passions and Transform Your Life, a companion guide designed to help adults find theirs.

In an interview published in Forbes, Robinson claims that, "Whether or not you discover your talents and passions is partly a matter of opportunity."

If you've never been sailing, or picked up an instrument, or tried to teach or to write fiction, how would you know if you had a talent for these things? Human resources are like the earth's natural resources: they're often buried beneath the surface and you have to make an effort to discover them.

According to Robinson, "The Element is where natural talents meet personal passions. To be in your Element, it's not enough to be doing something you're good at... To be in your Element you have to love it: if you do, you'll never 'work' again."

Helping students and adults find their element (or at least get closer to it) is what we're all about. Which is why Robinson's latest book has just earned the top spot on our bookshelf.  

Read the rest of the Forbes interview here. You can also listen to an interview which aired yesterday, June 19, on NPR's On Point, and read excerpts from that interview here

Photo by Martin Mancha, courtesy of NPR's On Point.