Notes on: Every Tool's a Hammer - Life is What You Make It - Adam Savage

Making, as my friend Andrew Coy, the former White House Senior Advisor for Making under President Obama, says, is simply a new name for one of the oldest human endeavors: creation. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 1, loc. 15.

Blog Post: Every Tool's a Hammer - Life is What You Make It - Adam Savage

My story is more of a path with many forks. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 2, loc. 23.

This DIY maker movement that emerged empowered young people, underprivileged communities, and the simply curious to learn, and teach, and share how to make things again. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 3, loc. 38.

“CODING IS MAKING!” – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 4, loc. 55.

nothing we make ever turns out exactly as we imagined; that this is a feature not a bug; and that this is why we do any of it. The trip down any path of creation is not A to B. That would be so boring. Or even A to Z. That’s too predictable. It’s A to way beyond zebra. That’s where the interesting stuff happens. The stuff that confounds our expectations. The stuff that changes us. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 7, loc. 93.

When we say we need to teach kids how to “fail,” we aren’t really telling the full truth. What we mean when we say that is simply that creation is iteration and that we need to give ourselves the room to try things that might not work in the pursuit of something that will. 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. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 7, loc. 103.

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. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 9, loc. 128.

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. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 10, loc. 135.

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. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 12, loc. 167.

Each one of us ends up building different ways to interpret and recapitulate the world as we make our way through it. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 13, loc. 183.

And I’m okay with that, because for me making stuff has always felt different. Making stuff utilized my brain like no other skill I’d learned. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 14, loc. 187.

There was something special in the marriage between the structure of my brain and what I could do with my hands. When I made stuff, the world made sense to me. It felt like my superpower. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 14, loc. 188.

See, the thing about cosplay, or most any deep interest that produces these secret thrills, is that while it IS fun, it can also be complicated, because (and here might be a source for some of the secret shame around our enthusiasm) the things we love tend to make us quite vulnerable. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 14, loc. 195.

In the beginning of his incredible essay “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 20, loc. 261.

“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.” – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 20, loc. 262.

But what does that mean, to go deep? As a maker, it means interrogating your interest in something and deconstructing the thrill it gives you. It means understanding why this thing that has captured your attention has not let go, and what about it keeps bringing you back. It means giving yourself over to your obsession. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 29, loc. 372.

Dr. Strangelove – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 32, loc. 411.

I think Kubrick wants us to understand that the tragedy of war is that it’s often envisioned by idiots and executed by professionals. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 33, loc. 422.

But your ideas can come from anywhere. They are out there, floating everywhere. It will be your interest and obsession that create the gravity that draws them to you and then makes them yours. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 36, loc. 446.

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. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 36, loc. 451.

But here’s the thing: lists aren’t external to the creative process, they are intrinsic to it. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 37, loc. 463.

My preoccupation with completeness manifested itself constantly throughout my teenage years and has continued well into adulthood, again most often with film props. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 41, loc. 509.

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? – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 44, loc. 544.

Open Works, – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 45, loc. 550.

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. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 45, loc. 554.

List making has transformed many of them, right along with the lives of the people who interact with them.II – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 47, loc. 578.

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. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 54, loc. 636.

The same applies to any making project. 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.” – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 59, loc. 693.

the technique and the tool—are fundamental to making. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 69, loc. 867.

It means taking the time you need to do the job right the first time. Taking the time to organize your thoughts; to organize your work space; to organize your tools. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 76, loc. 949.

I am driven by the desire to FINISH. Damn the torpedoes and damn the consequences. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 77, loc. 952.

And they exist for a good reason: precise work requires precisely acting upon your work, and good role models to show you what a proper setup looks like. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 84, loc. 1039.

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. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 88, loc. 1078.

They kept asking me what they could do, but having never truly delegated before, I had no earthly idea. I spent the entirety of my time—a month—building this set thinking that I had everything under control and now that I didn’t, now that I clearly needed help, I had no idea how to utilize it. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 92, loc. 1142.

If you are conflict averse, like I am, this is the kind of note that burrows a hole in your gut and pumps blood through your heart with such force that you can feel it in your throat and hear it in your ears. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 93, loc. 1152.

He told me to log the experience and examine why it happened, so that I didn’t make those same mistakes again when another opportunity came around. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 94, loc. 1161.

My strategy back then might sound familiar: I’d accept a new challenge, then go off alone, put my head down, work hard, work fast, try stuff, and see what happened. It was my impatience rearing its head again. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 95, loc. 1175.

But I’ve had to learn (the hard way, in some instances) to be really honest about what I do and don’t know. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 95, loc. 1180.

The most surprising aspect of learning that lesson, as it burrowed itself into my brain very much against my will, was that when trying to make something work, it was always the smartest people I knew who were the quickest to ask what the hell you were talking about; to ask you to explain; to ask you to help them understand. In this sense, help is more than just an extra pair of hands or an extra set of eyes. Help is expertise. It’s wisdom. It’s learning enough to understand and admit to what you don’t know. It’s how you learn to do new things and how you deepen your skill set. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 95, loc. 1184.

My problem wasn’t really those gruff effects houses, after all, it was that I didn’t actually know what I wanted to do. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 96, loc. 1196.

The list of skills I learned by asking for help is long and I loved every minute of it. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 97, loc. 1207.

My big problem is that I want to do too many things, and if I load them all up on my plate because I know, individually, I can complete each task more quickly than anyone else, the end result is that nothing gets done and, thanks to my chronic impatience, I haven’t helped my younger collaborators learn new skills to make them better. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 99, loc. 1236.

This means I HAVE to ask for help from my team. I have to delegate. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 99, loc. 1240.

Jen Schachter – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 99, loc. 1242.

“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,” – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 100, loc. 1244.

“I am so particular about the way that I do things,” she told me, commiserating on the phone over this issue, “that I almost feel like, ‘Well, no one else will do it the way that I’m going to do it.’ ” – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 100, loc. 1250.

“There’s a level of transcendence that you can get to when you’re working by yourself on a project and everything’s sort of vibrating and you’re just in the zone. But, it’s a whole other level when you’re doing that with other people,” – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 101, loc. 1260.

“There’s something really gratifying about building something that you couldn’t possibly have made on your own because of the sheer scope of the work, but more so because you don’t have all the knowledge to do it. My biggest satisfaction comes out of projects that have required lots of people’s expertise and hands and labor to make happen. Then we can look at the finished product and say that we did this together, that this is not just something that I made.” – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 101, loc. 1267.

acknowledgment and appreciation, that is, acknowledging the help that has been given to you—by people you work with or work for—whether you asked for it or not. This is especially true when you are the boss. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 102, loc. 1272.

Invariably, I could trace the source of my bad days back to how I managed (or didn’t manage) the work going on around me. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 102, loc. 1278.

It was more about communication. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 102, loc. 1280.

Production would bog down. I wouldn’t know why and then I’d get frustrated, but because I am so nonconfrontational, it would take forever to get to the heart of issues that should have been molehills but that I had allowed to grow into mountains. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 102, loc. 1281.

Personally, I believe there are levels to this kind of feedback. It is a hierarchy of acknowledgment that moves from positive to negative, and gets harder and more important, the deeper you get. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 103, loc. 1287.

At the top level is simple gratitude: saying “Good job! Well done!” when the situation warrants it; saying “Thank you” when someone offers a hand. It’s not something that requires public pronouncement, it’s just basic common courtesy. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 103, loc. 1288.

Below that is encouragement: letting the people who have helped you know why their work was good. “Hey Tory Fink!” I might say to MythBusters lead builder, “I can tell you had fun building that prop, and it not only shows, it made the whole episode better,… – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 103, loc. 1290.

Then there’s motivation: giving someone the context for why they in particular are perfect for the role they’re performing; explaining how they contribute invaluably to the whole picture; and reminding them that you couldn’t do it without them. Beyond encouragement, which is recognition that all this hard work is… – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 103, loc. 1294.

Constructive criticism usually seems simple—it’s just giving guidance when something isn’t working or a project needs a small change of direction that a specific person is responsible for implementing. But it’s often tricky because to you it’s rarely that big of a deal, but to the recipient it can be this short little burst of negativity. Nobody likes hearing that they didn’t do a complete job, but being able to give honest feedback is critical to working with others. I don’t like telling people things they don’t want to hear, but I remind myself that by providing negative feedback, I’m investing in the people I’m talking to. If I didn’t… – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 104, loc. 1298.

Below that is a larger course correction: a project is going way off course and we really need to marshall our forces to get it back on track. Usually there’s a point person who is principally responsible for the part of the project that’s gone off the rails, but a full course correction is never just about one person. Just as it only takes one person to derail a train, but an army to get it back on… – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 104, loc. 1304.

Lastly and most importantly of all, is confronting someone about a personality trait that is inhibiting things from moving forward smoothly for everyone else. This is truly difficult for me. As I’ve said, I don’t like telling people things they don’t want to hear, but I love working with my team and I don’t want to let anything or anyone ruin that collaborative environment for them. See! I am so nonconfrontational I’m… – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 104, loc. 1308.

When you’re the boss, when the buck stops with you, then you need to be able to deliver the right… – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 106, loc. 1313.

the terror that comes with newness can’t be your excuse for falling back into old habits or retreating to the comfort of… – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 106, loc. 1315.

That is the cruel joke of making, or any creative discipline for that matter: no matter how much you progress in your career, the duality of thrill and terror that exists with all new things will never leave you. In fact, the better you get and the more experience you acquire, the better you are at understanding objectively where your work and your wisdom fall short. Self-doubt never leaves the attentive craftsperson, so you best make friends with it.… – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 106, loc. 1316.

they internalize the consequences. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 115, loc. 1417.

A deadline shouldn’t feel like a vise slowly crushing your head, it should feel like a sieve through which only the essential elements get pushed by the pressure of time, leaving the unnecessary bits behind. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 115, loc. 1429.

That is what deadlines can do for your creative thinking. They help you cut through the clutter. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 119, loc. 1472.

With the help of a deadline, however, those goals start to change size and shape in proportion to one another and to the project as a whole. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 119, loc. 1476.

As a maker, you need to think about employing deadlines on your projects this way, whether you’re making something for yourself or a client, and particularly if you are a compulsive perfectionist and prone to going deep down dark rabbit holes. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 120, loc. 1482.

Ridley Scott’s Alien – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 121, loc. 1494.

The deadline has to be relevant to you or to the project, or both. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 125, loc. 1531.

When your project is starting to lag, figure out a date that is as important to you as the project, then work backwards from there. Trust me, you’ll get it done. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 125, loc. 1534.

“You know it’s around this time of night that I get real philosophical about this kind of crap. I mean, at the end of the day it’s just another damned commercial, and we’ll either get our part of the job done or we won’t. It’s not like the world’s going to end . . .” – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 126, loc. 1551.

We completed our work on time, I believe precisely because it wasn’t the end of the world if we hadn’t. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 127, loc. 1557.

You don’t have to be a great illustrator to derive the benefits of using drawing as a way to flesh out your idea. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 135, loc. 1634.

Gever Tulley. Gever is the author of 50 Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do) – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 138, loc. 1684.

“I’ve been trying for eight years at Brightworks School to introduce visual communication on equal footing with written and spoken communication,” he told me as we discussed the threshold to entry for making, and the problems people have getting started and collaborating effectively. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 139, loc. 1686.

Making things has always been a central pleasure to my life. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 140, loc. 1711.

I have a prediction: you are going to mess up a lot. I mean A LOT. 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. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 147, loc. 1760.

About this prediction, I have three words for you: WELCOME TO MAKING! – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 147, loc. 1763.

If you desire to pick up a new skill or learn a process, or even an entire discipline, there’s almost surely someone online who’s helpfully filmed a video about it. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 147, loc. 1764.

Making is messy. It’s full of fits and starts, wrong turns, and good ideas gone bad. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 148, loc. 1770.

“Fail” is one hell of a four-letter f-word. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 148, loc. 1778.

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. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 149, loc. 1784.

Creation is iteration. Your job as a creator is to take as many of the wrong turns as necessary, without giving up hope, until you find the path that leads to your destination. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 150, loc. 1799.

Making is making, and none of it is failure. It is an iterative process. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 150, loc. 1801.

To be a successful maker you need to have significant patience and endurance, but you also need to open your mechanical tolerance. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 150, loc. 1803.

For it is essential that you build a loose tolerance into your process, to give yourself room to mess up. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 152, loc. 1827.

Eventually, and I don’t know if I was always like this or if it developed with time, I came to realize this was the ONLY way I could successfully learn a skill—by doing something with it, by applying it in my real world. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 153, loc. 1838.

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. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 156, loc. 1879.

Gever Tulley told me an amazing story from the early days of Brightworks, the maker-based charter school he founded in an old mayonnaise factory in the Mission District. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 160, loc. 1913.

Mistake tolerance is particularly valuable in this aspect of the creative process. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 163, loc. 1959.

Kurt Vonnegut was fond of saying, “Travel plans gone astray are dancing lessons from God.” – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 174, loc. 2084.

The Fifth Element, – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 177, loc. 2116.

To my mind, there are three cornerstones to the philosophy of glue: 1) glue is about joining things together; 2) glue is most often wet coming out of the package, and can’t do its work until it’s dry; and 3) not all glues are created equal. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 179, loc. 2147.

Little known fact: baking soda is also an excellent accelerator for CA glues. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 188, loc. 2261.

However, I’ve run into many people who don’t believe in sharing their work, or more specifically, that sharing their work, their methodologies, their custom processes, even their enthusiasm, incurs a direct cost to them. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 193, loc. 2311.

In my experience, the more you give away, the richer you will be (to paraphrase Paul McCartney). – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 194, loc. 2316.

And then I added to my Star Wars play the other gateway drug for making (besides cardboard): LEGOs, – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 195, loc. 2332.

When you’re a kid, learning this kind of information produces a perception-altering, paradigm-shifting epiphany. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 195, loc. 2341.

The truly great service that magazines like Fangoria and Cinefantastique provided was to offer their writers and readers a platform for learning about and sharing their passions. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 196, loc. 2348.

That process of opening yourself up and sharing the cultural commonalities you care about can be a pathway to learning more than you could ever imagine. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 197, loc. 2359.

he registered my curiosity and let me use his shop to learn about pretty much anything I was interested in. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 198, loc. 2371.

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. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 198, loc. 2376.

As an employer myself now, 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. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 200, loc. 2386.

In the maker world, word of mouth is everything. EVERYTHING. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 200, loc. 2390.

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. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 202, loc. 2421.

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). – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 203, loc. 2430.

Isaac Newton once said, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 207, loc. 2484.

If you ever want to create something great, you will have to collaborate with other makers. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 211, loc. 2522.

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. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 212, loc. 2539.

As a maker, it’s up to you to decide what you’re going to do with all the knowledge you accumulate. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 214, loc. 2546.

A shop is a meta-level tool for telling our stories. It is an autobiography of our whole experience as makers. It’s where the problems we choose to solve have stakes big enough to challenge us. It’s where our successes and failures play out in microcosm. It’s where we encounter the world, and confront our own minds. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 215, loc. 2557.

“Farmers have to be incredible mechanics and biologists and animal husbandry experts and carpenters,” Nick recalled when we talked late one summer morning about his shop. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 216, loc. 2567.

visual cacophony. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 225, loc. 2649.

This is also why I have a love-hate relationship with drawers. Let me tell you my philosophy about drawers: F*CK DRAWERS! Drawers are where stuff goes to die. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 226, loc. 2662.

“The layout and flow of a shop always has to do with the specificity of what that shop fabricates,” – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 234, loc. 2715.

But how something looks is not the same as how something works, and for me, Jamie’s layout didn’t work because I was wasting time. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 235, loc. 2739.

It wasn’t that he might not “want” extra hammers in his shop, he simply didn’t think he needed them. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 236, loc. 2752.

When I was done with my cardboard man, I remember distinctly going into the kitchen and telling my mom: “Mom, I wanted to let you know that on this day, in September 1981, I am truly happy.” – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 251, loc. 2888.

As makers, we become adept at holding complex concepts and ideas in our heads that we have our own mental shorthand for. This isn’t a problem when we are working for ourselves on projects of our own. But when we’re working for someone or with someone, quite often this tendency toward internal cataloging can lead to many of the fundamentals to a project going unspoken because they’ve become baked into our assumptions about what everyone should already know. But it’s important to remember that this kind of knowledge is not so easy for civilians to engage with and process. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 252, loc. 2903.

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. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 253, loc. 2909.

Cardboard is a low-threshold material that can make discussion of ideas at the preliminary stage so much easier and more complete. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 253, loc. 2914.

Humans are toolmakers. We are explorers, innovators, inventors, and what facilitates all of that is our use of tools. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 265, loc. 3027.

Mark Buck, whom I worked with at ILM. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 266, loc. 3045.

“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. – Adam Savage, Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It [Kindle Edition]. pg. 267, loc. 3048.