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

by Adam Savage

The story genius Andrew Stanton, who cowrote the Toy Story and Monsters, Inc. franchises and directed both Finding Nemo and Finding Dory for Pixar, talked to me about this first pass at listing out the component parts of a project. He was consulting with a group recently, and they were working on the early stages of a project and he said to them: “Can we just all agree right now, this is going to suck? Whatever we’re talking about now, no matter how much we’re getting excited, let’s just all understand it’s going to be a mess.” They were shocked, wondering if he was insulting the project itself. He explained that no, he was simply letting them know that in a project with any amount of complexity, the early stages won’t look at all like the later stages, and he wanted to take the pressure off any members of the group who may have thought that quality was the goal in the early stages.