By Mike Savage of New Canaan, CEO of 1-800Accountant and founder of the Savage-Rivera Foundation
People who don’t collect LEGO tend to assume it’s a children’s pastime — something you outgrow along with Saturday morning cartoons and training wheels. I used to get a knowing smile when I mentioned my collection at business dinners. That smile usually fades when I explain what two or three hours at the building table actually does for the way I think, plan, and lead.
I have been running businesses for more than two decades. I founded 1-800Accountant and spent years building it into one of the country’s leading virtual accounting firms for small businesses. I have navigated economic downturns, rapid growth, personnel decisions, technology shifts, and the particular stress that comes with being responsible for hundreds of employees and thousands of clients. If there is a version of high-stakes professional pressure, I have probably experienced it.
And throughout all of it, one of the most reliable things I have found to reset my thinking, sharpen my focus, and return to the office with fresh perspective is sitting down with a LEGO set.
I know how that sounds. But stay with me — because the connection between serious LEGO building and serious business thinking is more direct than most people realize.
The Planning Problem
Every entrepreneur knows the planning problem. You have a goal. You have resources. You have constraints. And you have to figure out how to move from where you are to where you want to be, usually with incomplete information and time pressure working against you.
LEGO sets the same problem in miniature — quite literally.
When you open a complex LEGO set, you are not simply following instructions like an assembly line worker. You are managing a project. You have hundreds or thousands of pieces that need to be sorted, sequenced, and assembled in a specific order. Skip a step and you will spend thirty minutes disassembling completed sections to correct the error. Rush the foundation and the structure above it will be unstable. Move too slowly and the pleasure of the build evaporates.
The parallels to running a company are not accidental. Both require you to hold the end state clearly in mind while executing on the immediate task in front of you. Both reward patience and punish shortcuts. Both demand that you develop systems — ways of organizing your materials, your time, your attention — that can scale with the complexity of what you are building.
For me, LEGO has become a kind of physical rehearsal for the cognitive demands of entrepreneurship. The problems are smaller. The stakes are lower. But the mental muscles are the same.
Focus in an Age of Fragmentation
Here is something I have noticed about the modern business environment that I suspect resonates with a lot of entrepreneurs and executives: sustained, deep focus has become genuinely rare. The combination of constant connectivity, notification culture, and the sheer volume of decisions that land on any leader’s desk in a given day has made it harder than ever to think at length about a single problem.
This is not just a productivity complaint. It is a strategic concern. The most important decisions I make as CEO — hiring, positioning, technology investment, partnership strategy — require the kind of slow, integrative thinking that is nearly impossible to do between emails and calls. You need space. You need a brain that has been allowed to settle.
LEGO, almost uniquely among my hobbies, creates that condition. When I am building, I am not reachable. I am not monitoring anything. I am focused entirely on the task in front of me — not because I am forcing concentration, but because the nature of the activity demands it. A 3,000-piece LEGO Technic set does not allow for distracted assembly. It pulls you in and holds you there.
Researchers who study attention and cognitive recovery have documented this phenomenon. The concept of restorative attention — the idea that certain focused activities replenish rather than deplete mental resources — has been studied extensively in the context of creative and craft-based hobbies. LEGO, with its combination of manual engagement and spatial problem-solving, sits squarely in this category.
What I can tell you from direct experience is that I consistently return from a LEGO session with sharper thinking than I arrived with. Problems that felt stuck become unstuck. Decisions that felt murky become clear. I do not fully understand the neuroscience of it, but I trust the pattern.
Systems Thinking, Brick by Brick
One of the concepts I find myself returning to most often in business is systems thinking — the discipline of understanding how individual components interact within a larger whole, and how changing one element affects everything downstream.
It turns out that LEGO is an extraordinarily good teacher of systems thinking, for reasons that go beyond simple metaphor.
When you build a complex LEGO structure — a modular building, a large Technic vehicle, a detailed architectural replica — you are constantly managing dependencies. Piece A has to be in place before piece B can attach. Subassembly C needs to connect to subassembly D in a specific orientation, or neither will fit properly with the frame. A decision you make in the first hour of a build has consequences you will not encounter until the third hour.
This is exactly how organizations work. A hiring decision made in January creates ripple effects that show up in team dynamics in April. A product decision made in Q1 affects customer experience in Q3. Systems have memory. Actions have delayed consequences. Learning to track those dependencies — to hold the whole system in mind while working on its individual parts — is one of the most valuable skills any leader can develop.
LEGO teaches it at the level of the hands. And what the hands learn, the mind tends to remember.
The Discipline of Following Instructions — And Knowing When to Break Them
There is a tension in LEGO collecting that mirrors a tension in entrepreneurship: the relationship between following established method and trusting your own judgment.
For new builders, the instruction manual is gospel. And rightly so — LEGO’s engineering teams have designed the build sequence for structural integrity and aesthetic outcome. Deviating from the sequence without deep knowledge of the system is a reliable path to frustration.
But experienced collectors know that the instructions are a framework, not a cage. Once you understand how LEGO pieces interact — once you have internalized the system — you can begin to modify, to customize, to combine sets in ways the designers did not anticipate. This is where LEGO building becomes genuinely creative rather than purely procedural.
This mirrors the arc of entrepreneurial development almost exactly. Early in a business career, you follow the frameworks. You study the established playbooks. You learn the rules before you break them. But the goal of that learning is not permanent obedience — it is the deep understanding that eventually allows you to innovate with confidence, to know which rules are load-bearing and which can be safely redesigned.
I think about this often when I am working with younger team members at 1-800Accountant. The ones who grow fastest are the ones who take the time to genuinely understand how our systems work before they start proposing changes. Not because change is bad — it is frequently necessary and often brilliant — but because the best changes come from understanding, not impatience.
LEGO has made me a better mentor of that principle because it has given me a physical experience of it.
Patience as a Competitive Advantage
One of the quieter lessons I have taken from years of LEGO collecting is the value of patience — not as a personality trait but as a competitive strategy.
The LEGO secondary market rewards patient collectors. Certain sets appreciate substantially in value after retirement, but only if you are willing to hold them through the years of gradual price increase rather than selling at the first sign of appreciation. The collectors who do best are not the ones who react fastest — they are the ones with the longest time horizons and the steadiest nerves.
Business works the same way. Some of the most consequential decisions I have made at 1-800Accountant were decisions to wait — to hold a position through short-term pressure rather than react to it. To invest in infrastructure before the revenue justified it, because we could see what the revenue would eventually be. To take a longer view on partnerships, on hiring, on product development, than the quarterly calendar would seem to allow.
Patience in business is not passivity. It is a form of discipline — the discipline of not letting the urgency of the moment override the logic of the strategy. LEGO collecting, in its quiet way, has been one of my ongoing teachers of that discipline.
What Hobbies Do for Leaders
I want to be direct about something, because I think it is underappreciated in business culture: the hobbies of leaders matter. Not as lifestyle accessories or executive brand elements, but as genuine cognitive and psychological infrastructure.
The pressure on senior leaders — founders, CEOs, executives at any level — is not just about hours worked or decisions made. It is about the sustained management of complexity and uncertainty over long periods of time. That kind of sustained effort requires recovery mechanisms that actually work. Checking your phone in the evening is not recovery. Scrolling through industry news is not recovery. What recovery requires is genuine mental disengagement from work — something that lets the brain shift into a different mode entirely.
For me, LEGO provides that. As does the time I spend at my koi pond, watching my fish move through the water with an almost meditative slowness. As does the work Sandra and I do through the Savage-Rivera Foundation, which requires a kind of attention and presence that is entirely different from running a business — and precisely because of that difference, genuinely restorative.
The specific hobby matters less than the principle: find something that pulls your full attention into a different domain, and protect the time for it. Not because you deserve a break (though you do), but because the version of you that returns from that break is a more effective leader.
LEGO Sets Worth Exploring for Busy Professionals
If you are an entrepreneur or executive who has never seriously engaged with LEGO building as an adult, and you are curious after reading this, here are a few starting points worth considering.
The LEGO Architecture series offers beautiful, relatively compact builds that celebrate iconic structures from around the world — the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, the Guggenheim Museum. They are excellent for a first serious build: sophisticated enough to be engaging, manageable enough not to be overwhelming.
The LEGO Technic series is where things get genuinely complex. These sets feature working gears, motors, pneumatics, and mechanical systems that replicate real engineering. If systems thinking appeals to you, Technic is where LEGO becomes something close to a mechanical education.
The LEGO Icons series (formerly Creator Expert) includes some of the most visually spectacular sets available — detailed representations of classic cars, iconic buildings, and elaborate scenes. These are collector-grade builds that take significant time and produce genuinely impressive display pieces.
For anyone interested in exploring the broader landscape of LEGO collecting — including how sets are valued, which themes hold the strongest collector interest, and how to begin building a serious collection — the resources at Mike Savage New Canaan Collections offer a deeper look at the hobby from a collector’s perspective.
The Unexpected Education
I did not pick up LEGO as an adult because I thought it would make me a better CEO. I picked it up because I enjoyed it — because there is something genuinely satisfying about building something with your hands, seeing a complex structure emerge piece by piece from a pile of components.
The business insights came later, and they came gradually. But they came.
What I understand now that I did not understand when I started is that the hobbies we sustain over years teach us things that our professional lives cannot — precisely because they operate by different rules, reward different qualities, and demand different kinds of attention. The lessons transfer, but not in any way you can plan for. They seep in, slowly, and show up when you least expect them — in a meeting, in a decision, in a moment where patience and systems thinking and the ability to hold a complex whole in mind turn out to matter.
If that sounds like an argument for taking your hobbies seriously, it is. Not to the exclusion of everything else, and not in a way that turns recreation into another form of performance. But with genuine investment — the kind of investment that lets a hobby become, over time, one of the more interesting teachers you have ever had.
You can follow more of Mike Savage of New Canaan’s perspective on business, collecting, and the habits that sustain long-term leadership on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/savage-new-canaan. And for a look at the travel experiences that round out Mike Savage of New Canaan’s worldview — including destinations that have informed both his business thinking and his humanitarian work — visit the Michael Savage New Canaan Travel Blog.