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

by Adam Savage

Wrong turns are part of every journey. They are, as Kurt Vonnegut was fond of saying, “dancing lessons from God,” and the last thing we want to do is give our kids two left feet.

Each one of us ends up building different ways to interpret and recapitulate the world as we make our way through it. Each of us has a unique way we share our stories, which means that each of us comes to our ideas differently, and we each express them differently. This is the magic that makes culture. How does your brain work? What is your secret thrill? How do you process your world?

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.”

The deepest truths about your experience are universal truths that connect each of us to each other, and to the world around us. I have found this truth to be the key that unlocks those shackles of shame and self-doubt. It gives you the elbow room to fly your freak flag, the mental space to pay attention to the things that you’re interested in. For the creator within all of us, this is the pathway to ideas and creation.

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.