Someone said that
"if you want to find your purpose in life, think of what you did as a child that made the hours feel like seconds"
and that got me thinking; what made me feel like that as a child?
What comes to mind immediately is Mechanix. Mechanix was a "build it yourself" toolbox, which gave you parts, and an instruction manual that showed you how to use those parts to build, step by step, a lot of things: a car, a bike, a helicopter, etc.
What I'm now thinking about is: though I really like software engineering, I'd love to bring about this feeling, the sheer joy of play, into my field. How do I do that? Some particular things stand out to me.
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Having a clear end goal of what the finished product looks like: this gave an immediate justification to why I was doing what I was doing
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Knowing what the parts are and how the parts fit in with each other: this was really important because once you had decided to build a smaller sub-component of the project, you had to know what parts to use, and you would have to know how the smallest most atomic parts would be combined. Where would the screws go? Could you position it in that particular way? What about the other way?
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Using your tools well: almost every join required that you use a screw and a bolt to hold the parts together. Though it would have sufficed to know how to just "make it happen", for some joins you had to hold the spanner in one particular way, for the other you needed to know which hand to use for the screwdriver and which hand for the spanner for the easiest way to put that screw in place without messing things up
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Being able to test the joins: once you put a screw and bolt in place, it was super important to jiggle the parts a little to see if the join was done correctly. i remember this being an important part of making sure that the thing you build wouldn't just fall apart.
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The joy of seeing it finally working: once it was done, being able to see all the parts you put in place work in harmony to make the final build work was awesome. Building it and showing it off was a viscerally happy part of the entire process.
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Cleanup: working on a sheet on the floor or on a table meant that I was able to easily spot screws that I've dropped and could easily find the stuff I put down.