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

by Adam Savage

“CODING IS MAKING!” I said enthusiastically to that young man. Whenever we’re driven to reach out and create something from nothing, whether it’s something physical like a chair, or more temporal and ethereal, like a poem, we’re contributing something of ourselves to the world. We’re taking our experience and filtering it through our words or our hands, or our voices or our bodies, and we’re putting something in the culture that didn’t exist before. In fact, we’re not putting what we make into the culture, what we make IS the culture. Putting something in the world that didn’t exist before is the broadest definition of making, which means all of us can be makers. Creators.

Passion (the good side of obsession) can create great things (like ideas), but if it becomes too singular a fixation (the bad side of obsession), it can be a destructive force.

In the beginning of his incredible essay “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson says: “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius.”

Beyond that, there is no magic formula for getting started, I promise. It merely requires that you participate in your world, that you pay attention to what interests you, that you follow the thrills they produce, and that you never be afraid to go deep on them, to obsess over them, to dig through the bottom of the rabbit hole, if necessary, to find that great idea that has been waiting there for you all along.

but I also make them for assessment, for momentum, as a stress reliever, and, counterintuitively (at least to my eighteen-year-old self), as a means to improve my creativity and free my thinking.

they free up all that brainpower you would have otherwise been using to remember all this information.

I could see the whole thing, the show became a singular, manageable project in my head instead of an endless series of separate, overwhelming tasks. This, I quickly understood, is the abiding power of a well-made list.

In each case, the thing lists solve for—the beast they tame—is complexity.

any list is better than no list.

If a task was completed, he colored in the corresponding box on the list. If a task was halfway or mostly complete, he colored in half its box diagonally. If a task hadn’t been started or measurable progress had yet to be achieved, that box stayed empty.

physics-related approach to creativity. In my mind, a list is how I describe and understand the mass of a project, its overall size and the weight that it displaces in the world, but the checkbox can also describe the project’s momentum. And momentum is key to finishing anything.

a series of lists that helps me define it as it goes. The first series is a process of refinement whereby I begin to wrap my head around the scope of the project in front of me.

a sacrificial list,

Using more cooling fluid is a reminder to myself to sloooooow doooooown, to reduce the friction in my life—in my work, in my schedule, in relationships, everywhere, really.

mise en place.

But it’s about more than just clamping and cooling fluid, or even saving time. It’s about looking forward, into the near and far future, and making an assessment of what you truly value, so you are not reckless with it, or so impatient that you don’t do what’s necessary to see it through to fruition.

Jamie referred to as “the closest we’d ever get to seeing the future.”

We were working with each other, running countless failure scenarios in our heads, and cutting each off at the pass before it had the chance to bone us. THIS is what I mean by addressing your work. It’s not too much to say that in slowing yourself down, locking your process down, and doing everything the right way, you’re looking into the future that you want to create, with the things you value at its center.

alliteration

delegation can be a Herculean task. “One of the things I struggle with is sometimes it’s easier to do something yourself than to train somebody else to think the way that you think about something,” she said. “I don’t want to take the time out of what I’m doing to have to bring somebody else into the fold.”

procrastination, perfectionism, analysis paralysis, Hick’s Law, the paradox of choice.

Deadlines are about helping yourself. I LOVE DEADLINES! They are the chain saw that prunes decision trees. They create limits, refine intention, and focus effort.

ILM veteran and a legendary sculptor named Ira Keeler.

He’d be sanding, shaping something like a beautiful curve between the body of the shuttle and its wing, step back, scrutinize it for a moment, then casually say, “You know with a couple more weeks this could be a nice model . . .”

It was like hearing a Zen koan from the Caddyshack version of the Dalai Lama.

This is exactly the trap you don’t want to fall into when it comes to deadlines: you don’t want to cast them as the villain. What you want to do is embrace them, because at a certain point more time does not equal better output.

(which is insane, if you were wondering),

He didn’t show any emotion, neither perturbation nor anger, not even nonchalance. He just calmly looked at the producer and said: “To get this done by the end of the day I figure we have three options . . .”

encomium,

Whether from impatience or arrogance, inexperience or insecurity, lack of knowledge or lack of interest, you are going to tear seams, break bits, snap joints, misdrill, overcut, under-measure, miss deadlines, injure yourself, and generally just make a mess of things.

About this prediction, I have three words for you: WELCOME TO MAKING!

True failure is dark, it hurts, it affects others, and it’s something to be recovered from. Failure is getting drunk and not showing up to your kid’s birthday party.

In all this talk of failure, what we are really talking about is iteration, experimentation. What we are talking about is the freedom and willingness to try a bunch of new things in the pursuit of new ideas until we find the thing that works. 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.

Vibration is an energy vampire, stealing energy, and thus performance, away from the intended movement of the mechanism to which the pin is a part. Making the fit between pin and hole tighter allows for a more efficient transfer of energy.

“mistake tolerance”—a term I’m inventing here and now.

There was no tolerance for waste—of time, money, talent, other people’s patience. Except this is precisely where you figure out what something is supposed to be and how best to make it. If you don’t give yourself enough room to maneuver and to mess up, neither may happen.

ferroequinologists

I’m not saying that empirical knowledge and intuition replace reading, I’m saying they augment it. They fulfill an area of knowledge that reading can’t reach. Doing puts the kind of knowledge in your body that can only be gained through an iterative process.

It’s a buffer for (inevitable) mistakes. It’s my relief valve. My plan always is: I don’t know how circumstances will change, only that they WILL change, so I’d better be ready.

The knowledge was inside me, I just didn’t know it was there until I applied it.

Now, with the experience of many, many wrong turns righted and mistakes corrected, going slowly is my main method for doing something that I don’t know how to do, in a situation where I don’t have a lot to work with—tools, supplies, margin for error, whatever. I simply go slowly. Very slowly. Even slower than you’re thinking right now.

we can often substitute that knowledge with time. This is the great secret sauce for tackling the unfamiliar.

painter Francis Bacon said about painting, “One has an intention, but what really happens comes about in working.”

A painter as amazing as Bacon is saying clearly that his painting is a hunt in which he’s never sure what he might catch. As a maker of any kind, with any project, you

Prussian commander, Helmuth von Moltke, when he said, “No plan survives first contact with implementation.”

Jamie has always thought that making things involves taking large chunks of stuff and making them smaller in precise ways.

I tend to use styrene and acrylic mostly in my shop, so my glue of choice is Weld-on 3.

The fact is when you interview for a job you rarely get to showcase all your skills. That’s true regardless of the job you seek or the field you work in. Sharing what you’ve 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.

Being a better listener rather than a “wait-to-talker”

one of Buddha’s five reminders, paraphrased by Thich Nhat Hanh that speaks to the heart of what motivates me in our collaborations: “My actions are my only true belongings: I cannot escape their consequences. My actions are the ground on which I stand.”