Lego as a hobby

Lego building is a fast-growing hobby for adults for a range of different reasons:

• There's something in it for everybody: Since you can build practically everything, you can build whatever interests you in the real world or make your fantasies come real.
• Creativity and innovation: You can excercise your creativity and challenge your abilities for innovation - everybody can participate and get something out of the hobby regardless of how good they are at building.
• Bargain hunting: Just as with other hobbies based on collecting, you'll experience the excitement of bargain hunting and thrill of catching good sets or cool parts at good prices - and unlike porcelain dogs, you can actually use them afterwards:
• Meditation: After buying new lego, you'll often either build the set or start sorting the parts out - both are a fairly undemanding tasks and good opportunities to empty your mind and unwind after work while you listen to good music or audio-books.
• Community: The internet has not only helped a lot of isolated lego hobbyists find eachother, but also helped to increase the quality of work, raise public awareness and recruit more people to the hobby:
• Showing off: There's nothing like hanging out with a group of people with similar interests that understand what you try to achieve and is able to both appreciate and praise your work - because with experience, a good design concept, and determination to spend the nessecary time to achieve a perfect result - you will occasionally be able to create a world-class model, and get praise and respect from some of the top-builders in the world.
• Ogling instead of building: Although the lego hobby is primarily building-oriented, the sheer number of talented builders on the net, means that every day another amazing model is published on the internet, and most of us spend far too much time surfing for lego compared to building ourselves.
• Meetings and exhibitions: Last but definitly not least, the internet community has spawned a host of local lego clubs and exhibitions where people can meet, build, socialize and exhibit their work to the general public.

If the stuff above has made you interested in starting with the lego hobby, I've created a little guide to the most important general pages about lego in Where to start, in order to help you find your way around the vast number of pages and fora on the net - or perhaps a local lego club in your area?

Furthermore I've planned pages about collecting and sorting strategies in this section.