A Life Lesson from Tesla's Memoir, My Inventions

One of the things I like about autobiographies is how they enable you to directly engage with the mind of the author. An autobiography shows what a person thinks about and reveals what is important to them. Samuel Goldwyn jokingly said "No one should write an autobiography until after they are dead," but Mark Twain did him one better. He wrote his while living but would not permit its publication till he had been dead 100 years. That way he could be totally honest, yet not hurt people who were living, some of who he perhaps still cared about.

Nikola Tesla's autobiography is more about his ideas, a very different account than the "tell-all" pilf of gossip columns, though it is not absent of interesting anecdotes about others. The title alone shows that it is of a different character, just as he was a different kind of man.

Tesla's autobiography was originally published in 1919 as a series of six articles in the publication Electrical Experimenter. The chapters are as followes:
(1) My Early Life
(2) My First Efforts in Invention
(3) My Later Endeavors
The Discovery of the Rotating Magnetic Field
(4) The Discovery of the Tesla Coil and Transformer
(5) The Magnifying Transmitter
(6) The Art of Teleautomatics

Like many other influential people, Tesla was a lover of books. "Of all things I liked books the best," he writes. "My father had a large library and whenever I could manage I tried to satisfy my passion for reading."

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The opening paragraph of the first chapter, My Early Life, contains the lesson I wanted to relay:

The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention. It is the most important product of his creative brain. It’s ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of the forces of nature to human needs. This is the difficult task of the inventor who is often misunderstood and unrewarded. But he finds ample compensation in the pleasing exercises of his powers and in the knowledge of being one of that exceptionally privileged class without whom the race would have long ago perished in the better struggle against pitiless elements.

Here it is, the conviction that formed the foundation of his life quest, his belief that invention is not only a vitally important undertaking, but the most important undertaking of a creative mind.

He saw himself as part of something bigger than himself that was essential to the betterment of the human race. Even if the work was misunderstood and unrewarded, it was a vital and privileged undertaking.

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The great minds of philosophy likewise considered themselves as participants in a great dialogue that extended back through history through the Enlightenment and back all the way to the Greeks. A man like Nietzsche believed that his work of cultural analysis and commentary was of importance to the larger body of humanity.

The emerging Information Age and thought leaders behind the Internet were fully aware of its potential power to alter our lives in the same manner as the Gutenberg press contributed to the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the expansion of Western Civilization. I recall a 1980s article drawing attention to this information revolution occurring in our lifetimes.

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Perhaps this is why so many people remain unfulfilled in their careers. They fail to see any connection between their actions and a higher purpose beyond a paycheck. 

There are countless jobs which could easily be shown to have a greater value than even their owners are aware of. Our souls languish when it feels like our activities have no meaning, our labors vain. 

What are you doing to make a difference?