Thought of the Day 05.08.09

I’ve always loved playing with Legos, and now that my boys are old enough, I finally have a decent excuse for regularly doing so. One of my real pleasures is making something at night to surprise Spencer with when he wakes up in the morning.

Well, given his affection for all things Star Wars, I recently constructed a Lego Death Star about a foot in diameter, an extremely difficult project which took about 4-5 hours to complete. Sadly, that’s not the tragedy.

The real letdown was that Spencer admitted to me that he didn’t really like it all that much. In contrast, a simple spaceship I can build in about two minutes usually thrills him for days.

Since he’s old enough to know that telling me this would disappoint me, I praised him for his honesty, a gift which is far more important to me than my own self-indulgent need to receive approval for having wasted so much time on something as trivial as a Lego Death Star. It’s also a good reminder that effort and value are not always the same thing.