Note
This post originally appeared on lemonpointbricks.com
At the end of 2023, I was still recovering from some burnout and maybe having a slight identity crisis. While we were at my parents' for Christmas, my mom pulled out a LEGO train she had bought. We had never gotten a LEGO train. It felt like a fulfillment of a lifelong dream. The missing piece[1]. Something clicked in my mind and I just felt the urge to go home and build a LEGO city, leading to 2024 becoming my year of LEGO.
I joke that my hobby is hobbies. I tend to have high churn on hobbies. I go in deep for a few months, then move on—not too dissimilar to the aliens in Independence Day...
But all the sudden, watching the train go around the track, LEGO seemed like the perfect hobby. It could involve so many things I love:
- Building LEGO
- Buying LEGO
- Putting a LEGO city in my office
- Organization
- Photography
- Blogging
- Programming
- Making spreadsheets
- etc.
LEGO can be so broad, with so many elements[1:1], I can stay in the LEGO universe, even as my interests fluctuate. There's so much to do, and that is exciting to me.
BrickLink seemed like another way to keep my foot in the door of the LEGO world. It was something I thought about doing back when I was in college like 10 years ago. It definitely wasn't feasible then. Arguably isn't feasible now, but...here we are. Buying and selling LEGO. It just sounded fun to me.
A scratch I've always wanted to itch is selling stuff online. Something in my DNA attracts me to shipping supplies and all that. If the office supply store is your happy place, you are my people. I cannot tell you how excited I was to package up my first BrickLink order, print out a label, and drive it to the post office. So I get to mail stuff and manage an inventory of thousands of LEGO bricks? Sign me up.
I didn't start a BrickLink store to make money. I did it because it sounded fun. I did it so I'd have an excuse to buy tiny drawers and fill them with LEGO pieces. I did it because I love LEGO and wanted another way to stay involved with LEGO. I did it to explore. I'm just a beginner, I'm small, and I have no idea what I'm doing, but that's the fun part—there's so much room to learn and experiment. That's kinda the whole ethos of LEGO right?