The Element by Ken Robinson

Author:Ken Robinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.

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.

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