It took me longer than I thought. It was more fun than I thought. It’s garnered more attention than I thought. After a month of hard work, the Death Star has been built.
I impulsively bought a $400 Death Star Lego set for my birthday last month. Many were shocked: $400 for a Lego set?! Others were impressed: you are the coolest geek girl ever! Ok, so the only people who were really impressed were my die hard Star Wars guy friends. Most people are in the you-could-have-bought-an-ipad-for-400-dollars camp. But as this article I read today once again confirmed, buying experiences brings you much more happiness than things. And the Death Star building experience has been a great one that’s totally worth the price.
To give you a bit of background, I don’t love Star Wars, and I’ve never owned any other Lego sets. I love building things, but growing up in China, the toys I had were poor imitations to actual Legos. And as much as I love sci-fi, I didn’t really see what the big deal is with Star Wars. So, here’s the story that I’d been hesitant to share with my enthusiastic fans who thought I was the coolest geek girl. I had been looking at this Lego set for the past 3 years for the right time to buy it for a boy. I thought it would be the perfect present, and it would be a super fun experience to build it together. Just one small problem: there’s never a right time to buy such an expensive present for someone who keeps breaking up with me -__- But I had looked at it for so long that I have grown to love it myself, and finally, I came up with the craziest idea: why don’t I just buy it for myself instead! So yes, it was an impulse buy, but still a well thought out one.
The building process itself as been documented somewhat sporadically in pictures. The pictures don’t show what an awesome creation this is. Whoever designed it was ingenious and probably watched Star Wars way too many times for his own good (yes, I’m being totally gender-biased here, I’m going to make the assumption it’s a dude). You just have to come over and play with it to see how cool it is. What I want to talk about today is (cue Star Wars main theme) — Lessons from Death Star!
I actually started thinking about these lessons this weekend. I had almost completed the final level, and realized that I had way too many left over pieces than I should at this stage (Lesson #1: Follow directions carefully when you don’t know what you are doing). I discovered a few missed steps, and the perfectionist in me made the regretful decision to take off the top two layers of the model to replace two tiny pieces that no one else probably would have noticed missing. It was then I discovered Lesson #2: Don’t always try to be a perfectionist. Those two tiny pieces found their destined home. Unfortunately I couldn’t put the rest of the model back together properly and things started falling apart, BIG TIME. At the end of the night, my almost-done Death Star had broken into 7 or 8 big chunks with random small pieces falling all over the place. I was determined to finish it that day, and the harder I tried, the more of the disaster it seemed to become. Here comes Lesson #3: Set realistic goals, and be flexible when circumstances change.
At some ungodly hour, I finally gave up and decided to go to sleep. I left everything as is on my floor, and didn’t even touch them the next day because of my frustration. And when I returned to my project, I was much calmer and had a plan. Lesson #4: Take a break when things get too rough. I saw that my problem was trying to take shortcuts by putting whole levels together, and the pieces just wouldn’t fit snugly. As tedious as it was going to be, I would just have to break them into reasonable pieces and redo a lot of work. Lesson #5: Lazy shortcuts sometimes end up costing you more time. So I took my time, followed instructions and slowly put my Death Star back together. I told myself that there is no deadline and I don’t need to rush to finish. Lesson #6: Enjoy the experience, not just the end result. It took me another 2 days, but the Death Star is finally in good shape.
I didn’t want to say complete, because I still had some “extra” pieces. Unfortunately I don’t think I can find their rightful places without starting from scratch, and it’s probably not worth my while to do so. Lesson #7: Not everything has to be perfect, make sure you remember the lessons from the mistakes. It still looks great and I had a lot of fun in the process. My experience was a success.
My roommate’s boyfriend was visiting last night as I put together the last pieces, and the three of us constructed some hilarious scenes with the mini-figures before putting them onto the final model. Here’s one final lesson: Lesson #8: Experience is more fun when shared with others. As much fun as this journey has been, it would have been more fun if we got to do it together. I look forward to my next project, and I hope I’ll have someone to share the experience with 🙂
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