Why We Fall in Love With What We Build

The popular story goes that in the early 1950’s General Mills started selling cake mix with little success, it just did not get the reach and sales they had hoped for. They made some tweaks to the recipe and by the mid 50’s had completely removed egg and milk from the mix, you now had to add your own egg and your own milk. As the story is often told, sales went through the roof because now it was my cake that I made and people had more ownership. It’s worth saying upfront: historians have never been able to pin an actual sales spike to this change, so treat it as a well known illustration rather than hard evidence.

In 2011, in a Harvard study, Norton, Mochon and Ariely got participants to build beautiful origami cranes out of paper. Participants folded their own cranes, and the researchers also brought in origami made by professional builders as a comparison. Of course the professional pieces were much better and neater. At the end, the amateur builders, the professionals’ work and non-builders’ opinions were all weighed against each other through bidding, and the amateur builders rated their own pieces as being of similar or higher significance and value compared to the expert-made ones.

A similar study was done that same year with cardboard IKEA boxes. They had people follow instructions and build boxes to completion, or build half the box, and then signify the value of the boxes. The people who completed the box build put a much higher significance on them than the half-built group.

There is a very clear and obvious pattern here, the more time and effort we invest into something the more we tend to value and appreciate it. Norton, Mochon and Ariely referred to it as a Labour of Love.

So how does this relate to us and being more influential in 2026?

Co-Creation and Effort
When trying to win someone to your way of thinking, get them actively involved in the process (sharing ideas, filling out feedback forms, helping to shape flow and direction). When people are invested they have a greater sense of connection to the idea or suggestion, after all they were the co-creator. Dale Carnegie said it best: “People support a world they helped to create.”

The risk:
Undoing someone’s labour costs you the value it created. In a related experiment from the same paper, people built Lego sets and then had them taken apart in front of them, and it produced a strong sense of dissociation and detachment from what they’d made, even though the pieces were the same and could easily have been rebuilt. The lesson for influence: if you ask someone to help shape a plan and then quietly rebuild it your own way afterwards, you don’t just lose their input, you lose the ownership you worked to create in the first place.

3 things you can do today?

• Fill in the blank, not a finished pitch. Bring a draft with gaps for them to complete.
• Get a small, real contribution early. Something that actually shapes the outcome, not just optics.
• Don’t undo their work. Revise together, not behind their back. 

Everyone can hand someone a finished idea. Few take the time to build it with them, that’s the difference between influence and intentional influence.