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

by Adam Savage

They bake it into lots of catchy phrases: “Fail fast,” “Move fast and break things,” “Learn to fail or fail to learn.” And we lap this rhetoric up.

“Fail” is one hell of a four-letter f-word. It’s sticky, in marketing parlance. It’s useful because it is universal. We have all failed in our lives and we will continue to fail. It’s called being human. Failing at things, genuinely screwing up, is an inescapable part of the human condition. I frankly don’t trust people who say they haven’t failed at anything.

Because creativity does not move in a straight, unbroken line. It is a path that twists and turns and doubles back on itself sometimes. It’s never linear. There will be “wrong turns” that feel right and seem to be taking you in the general direction of your goal, but gradually veer far

enough off course that you have to backtrack to the fork in the road and take the other spur—the other branch on the decision tree.

doesn’t matter if you’re a model maker, a potter, a dancer, a programmer, a writer, a political activist, a teacher, a musician, a milliner, whatever. It’s all the same. Making is making, and none of it is failure. It is an iterative process. It is how you learn new skills. It is how you gain knowledge and experience. It’s how you improve yourself. It is how you make new things.

Still I love learning new ways of thinking and organizing, new techniques, new ways of solving old problems.

My son was bummed out by that concept at first because he inherited my impatience and wanted to be able to make his holster once and be done with it, but if you expect to nail it the first go-round every time you build something new—or worse, you demand it of yourself and you punish yourself when you

come up short—you will never be happy with what you make and making will never make you happy.

we just have the guts to admit what we’re really digging up.”

Kurt Vonnegut was fond of saying, “Travel plans gone astray are dancing lessons from God.”

We just have to loosen our tolerance with ourselves and give ourselves the space to make all those mistakes. It’s the only way we’ll learn, the only way we’ll grow, the only way we’ll make anything truly great.

Heat makes things expand more than you think. The main cables that hold up the Golden Gate Bridge are nearly seventeen feet longer in the middle of a sunny day than they are in

the middle of the night. That size change is different for all materials.

Sharing what I know is a personal mission. It’s a key part of how I balance the scales for the incredible gifts I’ve been given. Whatever success I’ve enjoyed in my life has always been directly related to those who’ve supported me, and to all of the amazing people I’ve been lucky enough to meet, know, collaborate with, and learn from.

will never understand it. Why would you not want to share the things you love? Why would you not want to share the cool things you’ve made? Or the triumph of a challenging project that you’ve

In my experience, the more you give away, the richer you will be (to paraphrase Paul McCartney).

was astonished by the fact that we did not share the same opinion of the movie we’d just seen, and then concluded in about six femtoseconds that my father, for the first time in my short life, was clearly wrong on this one.

I would have worked that out on my own eventually, I’m sure, but at the time I just couldn’t believe that there was employment to be had and money to be made in doing the kind of thing I’d already been doing in my uncle’s workshop,

If you are struggling to figure out how to move forward in your job or your environment, whether you’re in a creative field or not, my best advice is to figure out any aspect(s) you find interesting, and share that interest with colleagues and bosses in an effort to learn more about it.

Mel turned out to be a natural. This immediately increased the projects I could give Mel. My teaching moment provided a direct benefit to both of us, something I’d

learned long before from Jamie. A good boss will encourage this type of chutzpah and support a culture that produces more of it.

I appreciate when the people who work with me want to learn more, and express that, and I’m happy to provide the space for them to increase their skill base. A shop is a possibility engine. More skills among its inhabitants ...

engine as a whole. A net benefit ...

entirely to put that stuff right into the hands of the person who decides whether or not you get the job. As a supervisor myself now,

done—showing your work—is the closest you can get, because each of those objects is an embodiment of the skills you’ve acquired and the lessons you’ve learned over time.

Go to ’cons and meetups and exhibitions. Give yourself a name. Embrace the noun (Maker, Painter, Writer, Designer) by sharing with the world evidence that you’ve been living the verb (making, painting, writing, designing).

Believe me everyone can tell the difference between someone who just talks the talk and someone who can walk the walk.

“We want our people to be egotistical, we want them to take pride in what they do,”

SHARE YOUR KNOWLEDGE

“You have to give everyone complete autonomy within a narrow bandwidth,” he replied. What he meant was that after you get their buy-in on the larger vision, you need to strictly define their roles in the fulfillment of that vision, and then you need to set them free to do their thing. You want the people helping you to be energized and involved; you want them contributing their

creativity, not just following your orders. Giving them creative autonomy rewards their individual genius while keeping them oriented to the North Star of your larger shared vision.

I believe the world is a better place when we’re all pulling on the same rope.

great

TAKE A STEP BACK TO MAKE A LEAP FORWARD

In my professional life, I have worked with every conceivable type of client and collaborator, from those who were makers with the same or greater expertise as me, who understood deeply what I was talking about when we discussed a build, to clients who couldn’t glue two blocks of wood together if you put the blocks in their hands, covered with glue, and told them to clap. Being able to communicate your ideas to clients and collaborators is one of the most important skills to possess as a maker, otherwise some of your projects may never get off the ground.

Making a cardboard model of your living space or your work space is super fun. It gives you a fantastic perspective of where you are, and it’s easy.

Any maker space (or recording studio, or drawing table, or sewing machine) is a place wherein the maker can safely experience the vicissitudes of life. We can screw up, and the stakes are far from life and death. We can triumph, and the crushing expectations of success do not immediately land on our shoulders.

it has to be a meditation that works for you as a person and for what you do as a maker.

“Spending time sweeping up and knolling at the end of the day is a way of reflecting on what you did, and putting everything away makes it really easy to start the next day. But I think it’s important that everything is there for how it works for you, and that it’s a pleasure.” There are few pleasures I now enjoy more than walking into and working out of a clean shop. It’s the rare day I leave the shop in a state that’s less than perfectly clean. And yet, it still happens. I still run into days where the build was brutal, and I can’t stand to be there one more minute. Sometimes I still need to bolt, to put an end to a crappy day and just unplug. On those days, I don’t beat myself up about it. I try to face myself, but I’m also trying to be gentle in the process. Present me has a quiet conversation with future me and promises that this isn’t going

to become a habit. The next day, a recharged future me usually responds that it’s okay from time to time to abandon your best-laid plans and just get out. It’s okay for you, too. In the world of making...