How LEGOs Shaped My Career
I wouldn’t have a Software Engineering internship right now without the skills and lessons I learned playing with LEGOs. I doubt I would have 62,000 followers on my author Instagram either. I certainly wouldn’t have written two novels during college.
I remember shouting with glee when my mother told me I was old enough to graduate from Duplos to LEGOs. I was three at the time. What started as a way to spend time with my brother and sister quickly grew into an obsession. Every dollar I earned doing chores I spent on LEGOs. Every Christmas, my list consisted of the different sets I wanted. I even convinced my parents to install shelves in my bunk bed so I could build my creations right up to lights-out. At the time, I could hardly believe they agreed to it. Now I understand what they already knew — LEGOs stimulated the creative and logical parts of my brain better than any amount of schoolwork or piano lessons ever could.
My love for LEGOs only grew when I discovered MOCpages, a website where people posted their MOCs (My Own Creations) and even told stories with them. I uploaded my first post within hours of discovering the platform. I had no idea how much I would learn because of it.
Skills I Acquired Because of LEGOs
While the creativity of building with LEGOs has plenty of its own benefits, I gained much more than this. Many of the skills most fundamental to my career and to my passions now were a direct result of the little plastic bricks.
Web Development
The website on which my stories were hosted allowed users to customize their posts and their user homepage with HTML. This was my first taste in web development. I learned to create links from one creation to the next, customize my fonts and backgrounds to fit the mood of the story, format paragraphs and titles, and much more.
<!-- A snippet of the first custom HTML I wrote at age 12: -->
<p style="font-size:72px;color:green">
ISLAND LOCKED
</p>
This simple introduction into the world of development helped me realize the internet wasn’t an unknowable black box. I understood that people like me could contribute. I even created a website on Weebly to host a Choose Your Own Adventure game. It featured a man who woke up in the back of a police car with no memory. It took me weeks of writing, building, photographing, and editing to create.
I actually found the website if you want a look inside my teenage brain and play the game. Fair warning, it’s a bit gory.
These first tastes in the world of web development would subtly guide me to my field of study in college seven years later: computer science.
Photography
As I continued to create stories for my surprisingly large audience (most of my posts on the website received over 2,000 views and dozens of comments), I learned how to take better pictures so the audience wouldn’t get distracted by blurriness, shadows, or bad angles. I learned to light the set better, to use the settings on my camera, and to touch up the images up in Photoshop later.
As my stories delved deeper into sci-fi and fantasy, I reached the capacity for what I could do with LEGOs. I learned to use GIMP so I could create my own visual effects. It taught me the basics of extracting elements from photos, adding blurs, adjusting shadows and lighting, drawing over empty sections, and much more. I use these skills on a weekly basis in my own design projects now.
Writing
From the onset, my goal was to tell captivating stories with the visual aid of LEGO figures. The sets I built were to enhance the story and were never the focus of my efforts. I started off telling “forgotten” stories of my favorite fictional heroes from the Lord of the Rings, Narnia, and other classics. I soon tired of this and drew up characters of my own and placed them worlds I’d dreamed up. Thus began a lifetime storytelling.
My early stories were riddled with grammatical blunders like this one:
“He looked around himself, he was sitting in sand, surrounded but a few pants.”
As I wrote more and as my audience continued to point out my errors, my writing and proofreading skills improved. But the most beneficial aspect of my new hobby was seeing the kind of stories people did or did not enjoy. The comment sections were always filled with other kids my age talking their favorite character, the most recent plot twist, or about how such-and-such didn’t seem realistic. Over the next 4–5 years, I absorbed this feedback and tuned my craft accordingly. I didn’t realize how lucky I was to have dozens of free and involved beta readers. Most authors would pay good money for that kind of feedback.
Design
I quickly realized that stories with eye-catching covers grabbed readers’ attention. This concept became the foundation of my design knowledge — knowledge that would help me create stylistic social media posts in the future. This process forced me to download new fonts, watch tutorials on generating paper textures in GIMP, research lens-flares, and create countless other effects most kids my age had never even heard of. I enjoyed every moment of it, and it taught me an incredibly valuable lesson — you can learn anything on the internet.
Stop-Motion Animation
For about a year, I spent most of my free time animating LEGO “movies” frame by frame. While it’s not exactly a skill I use day-to-day, it taught me other, more transferable skills. I learned that a good product takes patience (often, a ten-second clip took hours of work). Constantly having to redo shots because of a single misplaced piece taught me to pay close attention to detail and continuity. These videos were also my first venture into running a YouTube channel and growing an authentic audience, both of which are skills I use regularly.
Lessons I Learned Because of LEGO
Just as important as the skills I learned from my years of building stories with LEGOs are the lessons I learned. Without them, I may not have enjoyed as much success in college or in my career.
“I Can Figure That Out”
This is the mindset every good programmer has. There is no feasible way to know every programming language, algorithm, framework, or methodology. The beauty (and value) comes from the ability to continually teach yourself anything and everything.
If I needed to make adjustments to my camera’s settings to capture night scenes for my stories, I Googled it and figured it out. When my computer was too slow to run Photoshop, I found out how to de-fragment the disk and to uninstall unused programs. If I needed to add a rain effect to my image or make the LEGO flames come to life in post, I pulled up a tutorial on YouTube. This process gave me a love of learning no formal education could have instilled.
The Flow of Community
When I first joined MOCpages, it was all about me. How many likes would my next MOC get? Would more people join the official fan group? How long could I stay on the homepage? As the years went by, I learned to have a broader perspective on creativity. After I had established myself on the site, I took the time to leave positive and helpful feedback for other creators. I learned to be a supporter and a fan too and not just another desperate kid trying to get people to add him to their “Favorite Builders” list.
These lessons transitioned remarkably well to my Instagram page. I was already accustomed to the give-and-take nature of the platform and quickly built relationships with other, book-minded users. It was through these early followers and their support and feedback that I built write_or_left to where it is now.
One-Man-Brand
My stories were always a one-man (or boy) operation. I built the sets, took the pictures, added the visual effects, wrote, formatted, and uploaded the story, and promoted the post. That’s a lot for a 12–15-year-old to figure out. It gave me an independent mindset from a very young age that prepared me for my current job as a full stack developer.
The Value of Hobbies
I have more hobbies than I can count or keep up with, and I will never change that. I love creating and learning new things. I can’t imagine coming home from work every day and not engaging with a project or researching a new idea I have. These things give me so much joy, and I owe them to my first hobby — LEGOs. In fact, it’s still a big hobby of mine. Building with my hands does wonders for curing writer’s block and relieving stress. Some of my best ideas come while I’m creating something else.
I never fully realized the full extent of LEGO’s influence in my life until I wrote this blog. It’s strange to think so many of my interests — and even my career — started with a few LEGO figures, a camera, and my mom’s laptop. I’ll forever be grateful for the experiences, skills, and lessons I gained from the little plastics bricks.
