Why do you love the wobbly shelf you built more than a perfect one from the store?

The clumsy thing you made with your own hands somehow feels worth more than the flawless one on the shelf.

The IKEA effect is the tendency to place higher value on things you partly built yourself. Once you pour your own effort into something, that effort feels like a piece of you, and your brain quietly marks up the result. The kicker: the boost holds even when what you made is rougher than the ready-made version, as long as you actually finished it.

You spend a sweaty afternoon assembling a flat-pack shelf. It leans a little, but you would not sell it for 500,000 VND, while a straighter one in the shop barely tempts you. The effort, not the wood, set the price.

Your own labor inflates how much a thing is worth to you, often without you noticing.

Before you defend a plan or a draft you sweated over, ask whether it is actually good or just yours - that gap is where bad decisions hide.

IKEA: I Keep Even Awful stuff, because I built it.

Learn the idea and practice English at the same time.