When I was 14, the only manual labor I had to do was mow the lawn with a ride-on mower.  I went to school with no fears of being sent home for being unable to pay.  I spent afternoons doing homework, playing baseball and video games knowing a filling meal was coming for dinner every night.

Growing up in Malawi, William Kamkwamba worked his family’s maize and tobacco fields, had to drop out of school when there wasn’t enough money and suffered along with his parents and siblings through a massive drought that left them with one small meal a day.

At 14, as he described in his book “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind,” William went to a library and found texts on physics and energy and first learned about how a windmill works.  After studying and studying he decided to make his own, and went on an extensive search to pick parts from a local junkyard.

People in his village thought he was insane, but when he attached the bicycle with PVC pipe blades sticking out the side to the top of his wooden tower and let it play with the wind, they were amazed as the light bulb he attached lit up.  In a place where no one except the super, super rich had electricity at home, his family suddenly did with a system that eventually included the switches, plugs and a circuit breaker that William again fashioned himself.

14-year-old Chris just finished some pizza rolls and dove into a new level of Goldeneye on N64.  Totally the same thing.

The achievement brought William some local fame, and then attention from Malawian media and eventually an invitation to a TED conference and a trip to the U.S.

“To think, my journey had begun in my tiny library at Wimbe — its three shelves of books like my entire universe.  But now standing here, I was seeing the true size of the world and how little access I had to it.  There was so much to see and do.  I felt a bit light-headed.”

He got to tour the giant windmills in California, which he had only seen in pictures and which provided him further inspiration to keep working.

“But whatever it was I decided to do, I would apply this one lesson I’d learned: If you want to make it, all you have to do is try.”

His story is a great reminder of what we can do when motivated and how people can overcome so many basic hardships that a lot of us take for granted.