Every Tool's a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It

by Adam Savage

Everyone has something valuable to contribute. It is that simple. It is not, however, that easy. For, as the things we make give us power and insight, at the same time they also render us vulnerable. Our obsessions can teach us about who we are, and who we want to be, but they can also expose us. They can expose our weirdness and our insecurities, our ignorances and our deficiencies.

There is no skill in the world, I have since discovered, at which you get better the less sleep you have.

the fact remains that none of us is an island. We are each of us part of a community, never more so than when we are makers, creating new worlds out of our imaginations. It’s nice to think we can do it alone. It pushes all our ego buttons to consider ourselves the singular genius. But experience shows all makers that every success is a shared success, and every shared success is an investment into the culture that produced the success in the first place. I believe the world is a better place when we’re all pulling on the same rope.

Budding actors obsess about “process,” budding writers obsess about routine, budding makers obsess about tools. Like being more worried about how to dress for an interview than how to answer the questions you’ll be asked, each imagines that the magic lies somewhere in the approach to the act of making, as opposed to the making itself. The reality is that tool choice is both less important and more important than you think it is. It is less important to the extent that tool usage is entirely subjective, which means there is no one right way to do things. But it is more important, because the best tool for any job is the one you’re most comfortable with, the one that you can make do what you want it to do, whose movements you fully understand.

“Remember, in every tool, there is a hammer.”I What he meant was that every tool can be used for a purpose for which it wasn’t intended, including the most basic of operations, like hammering.