In one of my favorite studies on the meaning of life, researchers asked a group of students to write about their “true self”. Another group of students were asked to write about their “everyday self” and a third group of students were asked to write about the campus bookstore. After the writing task, the students were then asked to rate their meaning of life.

The researchers were interested in how much detail the participants provided in their various essays. Their assumption is that the more detailed description one provides about one’s true self, the more likely one authentically (真实地) connects with that sense of self. Not surprisingly, for those writing about their “everyday self” or about the campus bookstore, the amount of detail didn’t have any connection with their sense of meaning of life. However, when people wrote about their “true self”, the more detailed the essay was, the more the person was exposed to the meaning of life.

To live a meaningful life, then, make sure you are in touch with yourself. If you don’t follow your own values and dreams, you are most probably following values set by others. And there is nothing more disappointing in life than living someone else’s dream. As Oscar Wilde put it, it is better to be yourself, as everyone else is already taken.

Meaningfulness is about connection. While this means that a major part of the meaningfulness in our lives comes from connecting with others through intimate, caring relationships and through being able to contribute to society and those one cares about, you cannot connect with others unless you are first in touch with yourself. Otherwise it is not you who are connecting to others but just an empty shell. Only by knowing what you are, can you start to authentically connect with others.

So, set out to write about your true self and who you believe you really are as a person, what your most important values are, and what you yourself would like to pursue and have in life. Then figure out how you could make that “true self” more the self that is realized in your everyday life and work.

At 27, after serving in World War II, I dreamed of owning a piece of land. So I moved from central Illinois to Shelbina, Missouri, and bought 236 acres for $6,000. The plot of land was situated on a dirt road and was half farmland and half trees, with an old house that had no running water or electricity. Obviously, it was not what you’d call prime real estate. But it was mine.

I was alone for the first time in my life, and I found it liberating. My days were filled from dawn until dusk with plowing and planting corn. Dinnertime came and went, and I barely remembered to eat.

I wouldn’t say I was a great success at farming in Missouri. However, when I went to the store to buy some plowshares, I met a nice woman named Claudette working behind the counter. I also ran into her at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Shelbina each week. I found out later that her manager kept asking her about “that tall boy (and eligible bachelor) from Illinois living out in the country in an old house with no water, no electricity and no housekeeper.”

Claudette and her sister soon visited my farm and put up some curtains. To show my appreciation, I took Claudette out for a ride in my 2½-ton Studebaker truck. We married in 1954 and have now been together for more than 62 years!

I later sold the Missouri farm for a $3,500 profit and bought 40 acres in Illinois. For many reasons, buying the Missouri farm was a good idea. I will always cherish memories of owning the farm and meeting my beloved.

When I was about five years old, I was living with my parents in New York. It was the 1980s and one day I sat in front of my favourite lunchbox. This one held my huge collection of crayons (蜡笔). Like most children, I was curious and I wanted to “discover” what was inside my crayons. So I broke them in two. I was rather disappointed to find nothing but more crayon inside of them. Growing up, I saw my television taken apart to see the parts inside. In fact, my childhood interest in the building blocks (构成要素) of things led me to pursue a career in engineering.

I realized that inside all of the human-made things in the world around us are fundamental building blocks. Without them our complex machinery wouldn’t exist.

It is this idea that inspired my book, one in which I have selected what I believe to be the seven core elements that form the basis of the modern world: the nail, the wheel, the spring, the magnet (磁铁), the lens, the pump (泵) and string. Together they have a vast range of innovations. They have created and changed our technology and our history, society, communication, transportation, arts and culture.

I-selected these seven objects during the first 2020 lockdown. Trapped at home, I let my mind wander freely while looking around at my possessions dismantling them to see what lay inside each of them. For example, the speaker on my phone through which I could hear the voices of my family and friends relied on a magnet. Even as I thought about larger and more complex objects-skyscrapers, tunnels, satellites and so on, I came back to the same seven basic innovations.

Look around yourself and ask questions about what you see: reignite (重新燃起) that childhood curiosity. Hopefully, this will inspire you to investigate the increasingly complicated world of engineering, and is something which will lead you to form a better understanding of the building blocks of our world.