Lego Submarine
A Lego submarine. How hard could it be?
That was the question in early 2022, after watching a YouTube video of someone building a working submarine out of Lego Technic. It looked achievable. A weekend project, maybe two. Something to build together with my son.
It took eighteen months.
Not because the model was impossibly complex — though it was harder than it looked — but because that's what real projects do. They reveal hidden complexity. They stall. They teach you what you didn't know you didn't know.
By the time it was done, the submarine had become something more than a toy. It was a record of what we learned about patience, iteration, and finishing things that stopped being fun somewhere in month four.