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

by Adam Savage

Making is more than the physical act of building. It’s dancing, it’s sewing. It’s cooking. It’s writing songs. It’s silk-screening. It’s breaking new trails both literally and figuratively. Making, as my friend Andrew Coy, the former White House Senior Advisor for MakingI under President Obama, says, is simply a new name for one of the oldest human endeavors: creation.

Life stories always look like straight lines from the vantage point of looking back, but precious few really are. My story certainly isn’t.

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.

“How do I get started when I have no idea what to make?” That’s when the question moves from the physical world of making to the internal, mental space of ideation and inspiration. I have come to believe that the answer to this question resides within one of the grander, fundamental principles of physics, the first law of thermodynamics: an object at rest tends to stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. Which is to say, to get started you need to become the outside force that starts the (mental and physical) ball rolling, which overcomes the inertia of inaction and indecision, and begins the development of real creative momentum.

Obsession is the gravity of making. It moves things, it binds them together, and gives them structure. 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.

There is a belief among many of these types, that to jump with both feet into something like that is to play hooky from the tangible, important details of life. But I would argue—and have—that these pursuits are the important parts of life. They are so much more than hobbies. They are passions. They have purpose. And I have learned to pay genuine respect to putting our energy in places like that, places that can serve us, and give us joy.

With so many of those early fascinations, I never knew how to push past that point of proficiency, and I didn’t care enough to find out. I was the Patron Saint of Mediocrity+1.

Screenwriters are basically human 3-D printers for story.

I was having a conversation between two versions of myself: I was giving a shout-out to high school me, telling him, “It’s okay to let your freak flag fly”; and I was reminding grown-up me to keep moving toward this thing that I know is a little bit weird, and that I love for reasons I don’t fully understand, because moving toward these things has been the engine of everything I’ve achieved in my life.

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.”

Every single one of us is trying to make sense of the world—our place in it, and how everything fits together. We learn as much about ourselves and our surroundings from the stories we choose to tell, as from the stories others choose to tell us.

Here’s the thing about stuffed animal talismans that became obvious once I finally had kids of my own: they are objects that are separate from you, but they also are you. They are both sponge and mirror. They are a projection. The adventures you take them on narratively are your adventures. Onto them you project all the things you want for yourself, that you like about yourself, and what you don’t like about yourself. They are your world.

Completism and list making create a feedback loop: completism demands list making in order to be successful; list making begets completism, because why would you make a list if it didn’t contain everything you needed? This feedback loop can flip negative if it becomes the sum and substance of all your creative effort. Just think of all the perfectionists you know who can’t get started unless they have everything exactly right, in exactly the right order, down to the most granular level.

Completism can certainly tip toward perfectionism and into a negative feedback loop, but there is also great utility in it—a positive feedback loop—when it comes to list making as a planning tool. It ensures that you capture the totality of your project: the materials you will need; the quantities required; the collaborators you might need to coordinate with; the steps it will take to put those materials together. It’s all there in front of you on the page, in one place. Far from inhibiting creativity or obstructing the making process, lists like these actually unlock your creative potential because they free up all that brainpower you would have otherwise been using to remember all this information.

Mark Frauenfelder, the founding editor in chief of Make: magazine, insists that “you’ve got to do at least six iterations, minimum, of any project before it starts getting good enough to share it with other people.” That very first iteration, what I call the brain dump, Mark calls “the quick and dirty stuff.”

PERFECT IS THE ENEMY OF DONE

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. It can be a mobile app or a five-thousand-word article about why Whole Foods is full of angry people, or the mechanical assembly for a robot tree. It doesn’t matter.

You don’t need to be perfectly polished. Start a blog or an Instagram account. 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).

There’s a Buddhist sentiment, 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.”

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.

“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.