As a wee lad, I had dreams of the perfect future career. Like we all do. But where other kids wanted to be astronauts, firemen, policemen, I wanted to be a LEGO Designer. I wanted to work for LEGO designing kits. I still remember clearly sitting on my floor in 3rd grade and talking to my Mom about what kinds of kits I wanted to design and asking if she thought that was a job that I could get. (She emphatically said “yes!”)

Flash forward many years and I was in Denmark a few months into my employment at LEGO as a Senior Web Designer. My boss sat across a conference room table where I presenting about how we were building programs to engage adult LEGO fans. Next to him sat Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, the third generation family owner of the LEGO Company. I can’t tell you how full circle life felt in that moment.

Kjeld is one of many large company CEOs I’ve met, presented to, engaged with. He’s the only billionaire I know personally. And he’s also one of the nicest humans I’ve ever encountered.

The last meeting on the last day of my LEGO employment was with Kjeld in his office. By this time he had stepped down as the day-to-day CEO leading the company and was working on projects he was passionate about and supporting the company from the board. I asked to meet with him to share my appreciation for all that LEGO had given me and the joy it had brought me. I could barely get him to let me say how grateful I was because he was so excited to share a community project that had organically come up in Eastern Europe.

Some months back when I was painting the Medieval Soldier bust, I wanted a design for the shield that wasn’t the same old designs I’d seen so many people using. After a few minutes of thought, I chuckled to myself how funny it would be to paint it as a homage to the original LEGO Castle shield design. So I did.

As I was wrapping up the figure I needed a nameplate. A stroke of hilarious genius struck me and I thought: “Kjeld Kirk The Warrior”! This was hilarious because I absolutely couldn’t imagine Kjeld as an angry battle weary soldier. Again, one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. So I had to do it.

On a lark, I dropped him an email with a couple pictures attached thinking he’d get a kick out of it.

A couple days later his assistant reached out and asked if Kjeld could get the figure from me to display on his desk. I asked her if he was really serious or if he was just being nice. She said “No no, he’s really interested. He loves it!”

To that point, this bust was absolutely the best figure I’ve painted. Nobody outside my immediate family had even seen the completed figure in person. I debated whether I could send it to Denmark and have it arrive in one piece. Should I do it? I waffled for a week or two.

Then my teenage daughter said, “I don’t know why you’re waiting to send it, you know you have to…”

She was right. This man and his family and his company had provided me so much joy and growth and identity, I was morally obligated to try to give some joy back. So I packed up the figure and sent it off.

Apparently a figure I painted is now sitting on the desk of Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, hopefully making him smile. That’s better than any award this could have potentially won at a local contest.

I’m not crying, you’re crying.