Building with Lego’s is a lot like building a person life. When creating a single Lego building you have to work one block at a time, and you have to work meticulously yet at your own pace. As a young kid, you start off with an individual plane and minute holes designed so only a correlating piece can fit in perfectly. You build not only on top of that piece, but around as well, creating a complete figure, or in this case, person. From beginning to end, the transformation is drastic yet necessary. The finished work should ideally be flawless with no missing spaces, scratches and bends. But in reality, that’s simply not attainable. As humans we all go through adversity, sorrow, and learn about our shortcomings. We all have missing spaces in the Lego buildings we call life. I speak from personal experiences when I say have skipped steps, missed building blocks, and altogether forgot things. But life isn’t about dwelling on what you haven’t accomplished, it’s about taking steps in the right direction- and sometimes going back in order to move forward.

I remember my Junior year of high school, I was doing poorly in math. I struggled with wholeheartedly grasping concepts and began doing worse and worse as the year went on. Questioning my methods I had to ask “why”. Why was I so insufficient? How come I can’t understand this? Am I really just this bad at math? I thought about it but didn’t come up with an answer. But once I talked to my dad about my problems in math he said to me “If you don’t understand the fundamentals when you’re first taught them, once you get to more complex things, you won’t be able to solve them.” And that’s exactly what I was missing. I never thought having a strong foundation in math would equate to having success later on. But it most definitely did. And now that it was the end of the year, I had to prove it. Staying after school almost everyday until 7-8pm, working with friends helped tremendously. All the hard work paid off in full as I got an 100% on my final. “All hard work brings a profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty.” (Proverbs 14:23) I put that proverb into practice and got the results that I needed.

In the past, I had, like most kids, played with Legos. I used my imagination and produced, in my mind, elaborate cities. During childhood, I would have never made a building with a unnecessary hole in it. But now that I look back at it, it would have been okay. A building is only as unique as it is distinct. And the same goes for people. I had to learn the hard way about how indispensable each building block is. But not having a building block doesn’t make you any worse than someone else but quiet frankly it just makes you different- your own person. That’s not to say that you can go on with life without doing anything, but I am saying that you have to be able to know when and where you need to grow.

If you’re measly going on with life with no order, you won’t be prepared for the future. I’ve done both the bare minimum and overachieved, and I have to say that overachieving has so much more value, even if it takes more work. And after a new Lego is placed on top of an old one, the snug fit sure is refreshing.