Finding Your Purpose in Life

“I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is a sort of splendid torch, which I’ve got held up for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.” George Bernard Shaw

__________________ Article Excerpted from: The Optimism Cure

At 68, I found myself with too much time on my hands. My wife ran a dance company at a local Community College and was very busy. We rarely saw each other except for weekends.

As I related in the last chapter, I had built a physics tutoring business that occupied only about ten hours a week. I was looking for something else to do. My wife suggested that I look for another high school physics job. “You need to do something that excites you, Mike, and we could certainly use the money. Find a purpose for your life.”

A sense of purpose is integral to the human experience, says Professor Anthony L. Burrow of Cornell University. “Purpose is forward looking, an intention to do something in the world,” he says. “It’s different than a goal, which can be accomplished. Having a sense of purpose brings lifelong benefits. Purposeful people tend to live longer and are less sick.”

I started teaching physics again and it felt good. I had a purpose. I first met my four classes on the Monday after Thanksgiving. Three of these had thirty students each and the classroom was overflowing.

The fourth class had ten students. I met them in the last period of the day, introduced myself and ask them their names. One of the students interrupted me and said, “Hey Doc, glad you are here. But you need to know that we’re a bunch of losers. They put us here because we needed take a science course and we’ve failed every other course. So go easy on us because we’re not that smart.” The other students nodded their heads. “We hate science,” a girl said. “It’s boring and it doesn’t mean a thing to us. So good luck to you, Doc.”

For a brief moment, I was sorry that I had accepted the position. This class didn’t look like it was going to be fun. How could I engage them, I wondered. Then I remembered the falling monkey experiment that I used to get this job. My rubber band pencil gun and the monkey poster were still on the desk. I said to the students, “Would you like to see something interesting? Physics doesn’t have to be boring. Watch this.”

I set up the rubber band gun and pencil and asked a student to shoot the pencil at the monkey. The pencil speared the monkey about two feet from the ground. The students were impressed. Several wanted to shoot the pencil, and I let them. We spent the next twenty minutes shooting the poor monkey. The students wanted to know why it worked, and that gave me confidence that I could interest them in physics.

I explained that every falling body accelerates at the same rate, and that even a projectile rising in the air is also falling. “But the pencil is rising, not falling,” one student said. “Yes, but while it’s in the air it falls at the same rate as the monkey. When you throw a baseball into the air, it comes down. Right?” Yes, they agreed. But I knew this wasn’t a good enough explanation.

Then I remembered a trick I’d used many years before to demonstrate this principle. I placed two dimes at the edge of a table and flicked the top one, shooting it across the room. At the same instant, the other dime fell directly down. They both hit the floor at the same time. Wow, the students said. The bell rang but the students stayed to try it again and again. We were off and running, I thought.

The following week, my son-in-law Peter in California attended a conference on science and society, and he said that I should watch a video he had attached in an email. “You may want to do a project on this with your students, Mike,” he said. In the video a retired engineer named Jock Brandis demonstrated a peanut shelling machine that he had invented. He told this story: After his wife’s death from cancer, he went on a trip across Africa. While touring in Malawi, one of the world’s poorest countries, he saw a group of women sitting on rocks arranged in a large circle. They were chanting while shelling peanuts by hand from a big pile in the center. He asked if they spoke English, and a few did.

He asked them about their lives. They told him that everything revolved around peanuts. They said that it takes a dozen women, sitting on rocks in a circle an entire day to shell one bushel of peanuts by hand. And by the end of the day their fingers are bleeding.

Brandis told the women that he was an engineer and asked if they would like him to make a machine to shell peanuts. No such machine existed at that time The women were enthusiastic about the possibility, although he could see that they did not believe he would be able to do it. It took him a year and a half to develop the machine, which he demonstrated in the video we were watching. It looked like a meat grinder into which you poured unshelled peanuts. He turned a handle on the side that pushed the peanuts between two conical metal cylinders. The friction between the peanuts and the cylinders removed the shells without breaking any of the peanuts.

In a few seconds, a steady stream of shelled peanuts began to fall into a container. I was amazed as I watched the clean peanuts emerge from the bottom. Brandis said that one person could shell a bushel in 10 minutes with this machine. “It increases productivity up to 50 times,” said Brandis.

He also showed some pictures of the machine attached to a bicycle wheel. A person peddling at a comfortable rate could shell several bushels of peanuts in minutes. He said, “If villagers in Malawi had access to these machines, they could increase their income manyfold. Then they could afford to send their children to school. And they could afford to purchase health care for their families.”

He started to produce the machines with student volunteers, forming an organization which they named the Full Belly Project. In a few months they were producing kits for the machine and shipping them to villages throughout Africa. A kit cost about $100 and contained all the parts.

“One machine will serve an entire village,” said Brandis, “so when we’re talking about 100 machines, we’re not talking about 100 families — we’re talking about 100 villages.”

I showed my students this video, and their eyes lit up. I said, “Can you imagine how much good we could do if we could send machines to a half dozen villages? They would transform their economy. Parents would be able to send their children to school and pay for adequate medical care, neither of which they can afford now. We would change the lives of a large number of people and even future generations. Do you want to get behind this?”

“Yes!” the students shouted. I said, “It takes $70 to send a kit to Malawi.” “We need a fundraiser to purchase a machine” a girl said. “We know how to do this, Doc. Leave it to us. We can make cookies and cakes and sell them at lunchtime outside the cafeteria.”

I reminded them that this was, after all, a science class. “There’s a lot of physics in this machine. You’ll learn it as we go along. Let’s buy a machine and see how it works.”

I realized that now I had two new purposes: The first was to help my students gain self-respect and stop thinking of themselves as losers. The second was to provide the people in a poor Malawi village a way to increase their income, thus changing their lives and the lives of their children.

Well, I thought, my life has just changed for the better. I also noticed a transformation in my students. I could sense that they no longer felt like losers. After all, they were working to improve the lives of hundreds or thousands of people in Malawi. And perhaps learn some physics along the way.

The school administration sent its public relations person to interview the students and write an article about the project. The article appeared in the local newspaper, and I could see the pride in my students’ faces.

The students opened a bank account to hold the money they earned from bake sales. One day we invited a local resident who had grown up in Malawi, to give us a talk. We learned that the peanut was the primary crop in her country. The students told her that a peanut shelling machine had been invented and showed her the video. She was excited. She told us how badly Chilumbi, her native village, needed several shelling machines. “These machines will transform the villagers’ lives,” she said. “Please try to send them as many as you can as soon as possible.”

We needed to raise $100 to buy the sample machine, and the students organized a bake sale for the following week. They baked cookies and cakes and set up a table near the gymnasium to sell these during lunch hour. In two days, they earned more than $300. The money went into their bank account. After ordering a working model of the shelling machine we had nearly $200 left. My students and I realized that we were embarking on a more significant journey than we had anticipated. For a few of them, at least one high school class had become meaningful. I looked forward to the day when we shipped the peanut shellers to Chilumbi.

Teaching my three conventional physics classes became tedious and difficult. Each day I slogged through the lessons, waiting for the last period to arrive so that I could jump back into the project. The students in my conventional classes were interested in the project, and a few asked if they could participate. I spoke with my students in the project class, and they told me that they didn’t need any help and didn’t want anyone else involved. I related their decision to my other classes, and they accepted the situation.

I used the peanut project to teach my students the physics of the shelling machine: friction, gravity and levers. I saw that that they enjoyed learning how the machine worked. They did well on quizzes about the physics I had taught them. I wondered whether they still thought of themselves as losers.

After a few months my students and I had come to trust one another. I stepped back and gave them free reign to run the project. They held several more bake sales and accumulated enough money by mid-April to order seven machines from the Full Belly Project for shipping to Chilumbi. On that day, we celebrated by shelling a bunch of peanuts and eating them, together with diet soda, potato chips and some of the stale cookies left over from the bake sales.

I told my students how proud I was of them for completing our life-changing project. They thanked me, and a few said that it felt good to have accomplished what they set out to do.

I reminded them that the machines would help the peanut farmers lessen their labor, increase their income and transform their lives. I said, “Generations of Malawian children will grow up with an education and health care because of you.”

I had found my purpose and they had found theirs. “You are all winners,” I said. “No class in this high school has ever done a project that meant so much to so many people in another country. I will never forget this experience, and I hope you don’t either. Most of you will go on to college and then enter the workforce as adults. You now have the both the experience and the will to contribute in unique ways. I hope you each develop a purpose that drives you to do something great.”

In late June I received a link to a YouTube video from Malawi. I opened it and saw a Black man standing in front of a garage. He was surrounded by peanut shelling machines. He said two words in his native language, which I did not understand. But the next words that he said I did understand: “Thank you, Michael Franzblau.”

That summer I wrote an article about our project for The Science Teacher, a national magazine. I anticipated receiving numerous questions and comments from science teachers across the country, but I didn’t get a single response. I knew that our high school permitted experiments in teaching, which few schools across the country are comfortable with. I also recalled that the administration had shoved these students into a physics class, the most difficult in the high school curriculum, and had no expectations that they would learn anything. The students knew this, which is why they had introduced themselves as “losers.”

Our town abutted Long Island Sound and had a beach for the residents. I was there nearly every day in the summer. A few of the lifeguards had been in my special physics class.

Sitting in the sand, we discussed our experience with the peanut shelling machines. I reminded them that what they did was remarkable. One young woman told me that she has been feeling happier than usual and realized that our project was still impacting her.

I told her that the same thing was happening to me. “You should always remember that you affected the lives of so many people by lifting them out from poverty. We won’t ever know the exact impact that we had, but you can be certain that we made a huge difference in the quality of their lives.”

Researchers have defined having a purpose as a feeling that one’s life is significant and positively impacts others. A 2020 study from the University of California, San Diego, found that if people feel that they have a purpose, they are more likely to feel both physically and mentally well on a daily basis.

A 2016 study in the Journal of Research in Personality revealed that having a purpose can not only extend one’s lifespan but also cause increased income and net worth.

My students and I discovered a purpose that meant something to us. Someday, I would like to visit Chilumbi and meet some of the people who benefitted from our peanut shelling machines. I sometimes imagine happy, healthy children coming back from school and telling their parents what they learned that day.

I imagine the villagers living better lives, because of us, and because of a simple machine that created miracles.