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My son Dante graduated from Savannah College of Art and Design with a B.F.A in immersive reality. I\u2019m very, very proud of him.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I want to share with you a powerful lesson Dante taught me – and one that helped him on many college projects.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Growing up, Dante loved Lego. When he started high school, he began creating more complex designs from scratch. One day, he worked on a gumball machine for 7 hours, the kind you put a quarter in and it dispenses peanut M&M\u2019s. He thought and thought about it, he drew the design, engineered the mechanics of it, painstakingly searched for every right piece, and click-locked them in.<\/span><\/p>\n And then at dinner time, he emerged from his room and announced that he had taken the gumball machine apart.<\/span><\/p>\n We all gasped:\u00a0Why?\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n He explained how a Lego piece that he put into the design early on was not the right piece. No matter how hard he tried to fix the mistake and make the gumball machine work,\u00a0it\u00a0just\u00a0didn\u2019t work right<\/em>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The moment he realized he was spending too much time on something that would never be right, was the moment he knew that he had to start over.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Dante very stoically explained that although he felt disappointed and sad, he would have been\u00a0way more<\/em>\u00a0disappointed and sad if he ended up with a faulty gumball machine.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The next day, after many more hours of work, we all took turns putting in our quarters and getting peanut M&Ms – it worked perfectly. Dante even made a few dollars off of our excitement.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I sat down with him and brought to his attention the value of what he had done. Because of this new awareness, that little \u2018wrong\u2019 piece of Lego became a wonderful teaching moment.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Sometimes we have to admit something we are building is not working.<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Dismantle what we have, become aware of the pieces that don\u2019t fit, and start over. The pain of watching it all crumble – in order to be put together again – might be significant and scary, but it will always be less than the pain we would be experiencing from prolonged struggle (and even suffering)…<\/span><\/p>\n How many of us are willing to admit that there is a faulty piece in our designs\u00a0<\/strong>(w<\/strong>hether we are designing projects, systems, thought patterns, relationships, or our lives)?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n How many of us are more comfortable with band-aiding the problems and looking to pacify and manage the symptoms, rather than dismantling the whole thing and starting over?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n What is the cost of sticking to the way things are at this moment – broken, faulty, not useful any more, even harmful? What might be the benefits if we changed and created something new?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n