Every Tool's a Hammer

Life Is What You Make It

Adam Savage

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781982113490
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

In this New York Times bestselling "imperative how-to for creativity" (Nick Offerman), Adam Savage— star of Discovery Channel's Mythbusters —shares his golden rules of creativity, from finding inspiration to following through and successfully making your idea a reality. Every Tool ' s a Hammer is a chronicle of my life as a maker. It's an exploration of making, but it's also a permission slip of sorts from me to you. Permission to grab hold of the things you're interested in, that fascinate you, and to dive deeper into them to see where they lead you.Through stories from forty-plus years of making and molding, building and break­ing, along with the lessons I learned along the way, this book is meant to be a toolbox of problem solving, complete with a shop's worth of notes on the tools, techniques, and materials that I use most often. Things like: In Every Tool There Is a Hammer —don't wait until everything is perfect to begin a project, and if you don't have the exact right tool for a task, just use whatever's handy; Increase Your Loose Tolerance —making is messy and filled with screwups, but that's okay, as creativity is a path with twists and turns and not a straight line to be found; Use More Cooling Fluid —it prolongs the life of blades and bits, and it prevents tool failure, but beyond that it's a reminder to slow down and reduce the fric­tion in your work and relationships; Screw Before You Glue —mechanical fasteners allow you to change and modify a project while glue is forever but sometimes you just need the right glue, so I dig into which ones will do the job with the least harm and best effects.This toolbox also includes lessons from many other incredible makers and creators, including: Jamie Hyneman, Nick Offerman, Pixar director Andrew Stanton, Oscar-winner Guillermo del Toro, artist Tom Sachs, and chef Traci Des Jardins. And if everything goes well, we will hopefully save you a few mistakes (and maybe fingers) as well as help you turn your curiosities into creations.I hope this book serves as "creative rocket fuel" (Ed Helms) to build, make, invent, explore, and—most of all—enjoy the thrills of being a creator.

1

DIG THROUGH THE BOTTOM OF THE RABBIT HOLE

“How do I get started?” Across four decades of making, I have been asked this one question more often than any other. It’s a simple question on its face, with not so simple answers underneath. At an individual project level, my answer is usually “Well, it depends,” in large part because creation and making have their own particular dynamics that involve unique concerns with the mental physics of inertia, momentum, structural cohesion, friction, and fracture. Thus, the rules of what you’re making often determine how you begin.

Most of the time, however, the question really being asked is, “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.

With my personal proclivity for speed and experimentation, I rarely have an issue getting moving, and rarely have difficulty coming up with ideas as a result. With eyes that have always been bigger than my stomach, my creative plate has been consistently full to overflowing with ideas. My battle is usually with time and resources more than worrying about what my next project will be.

I know this might make me unique in some maker circles, and probably infuriating to others, but I assure you that this has less to do with any special skill on my part and more to do with one specific trait: obsession. In my experience, bringing anything into the world requires at least a small helping of obsession. 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. As a maker, which result you experience depends largely on how you discover, engage with, and manage the sources of your obsessions.

I am a serially curious person. Countless things have captured my attention over the years: history, science fiction, film, the architecture of public spaces, mechanical computers, glue, LEGOs, curse words, magic, storytelling, Star Wars, physics, philosophy, armor and weaponry, magic and monsters, new tools, tiny cars, space suits and spaceflight, animal consciousness, eggs. I’ve not found an end to the list of things that have sent me deep down various rabbit holes for exploration. Thankfully, I had early support from parents who cosigned many of these flights of fancy and encouraged my natural interests. My dad was an artist and my mom was a psychotherapist. I lucked out there. If I was curious about something, they gave me permission to explore it. When I didn’t know how, they made the tools of exploration available to me. At one level, I think that what my parents were trying to do was to keep my curiosity aimed at something constructive, something other than mischief, though I was certainly able to engage in a fair amount of that in my time. In the house I grew up in, my folks put real value on following one’s passionate interests wherever they might lead. They knew that if I would let those feelings be my guide, I would be more likely to do something with the fruits of that exploration.

Emotional self-awareness is a tall task for a kid. Hell, it’s tough when you’re an adult. It’s hard to put words to emotions. It’s even more difficult when verbalizing them in public might subject you to scorn. That was certainly the case for me. The pubescent teen me had no earthly idea how to describe what Star Wars or science fiction or the Apollo astronauts made me feel. At least not in a way that I wasn’t sure would get me stuffed into a locker. So I kept my enthusiasms and feelings to myself. This is a strategy that is not unique to young, enthusiastic, creative types. Where I differed was that in keeping my feelings secret, I did not also bottle them up and extinguish them, as so often can be the case when you don’t have a supportive environment at home. Instead, I simply let them multiply inside me until they were all that I could think about.

In this sense, what my parents had really done by nurturing my curiosity was to give the original green light to my creative obsessions, and I will be eternally grateful to them for that. Their encouragement demonstrated to me that my budding obsession was a thing of value, not a trifling thing to be dismissed; my fascinations were worth something; my curiosity was currency to be spent in the service of deep exploration, both of the external world and also of myself. They gave me license to pursue what I have called my “secret thrills.”

FOLLOW YOUR SECRET THRILLS

Secret thrills can come from anywhere and anything at any time. If you happen to be a cinephile or an architecture fan like me, it might be the MacGuffin that pushes your favorite movie’s plot forward, or it could be the verdigris patina of some weathered architectural detail on a building you pass every day on your way to work or to school. If you’re paying attention, those types of things will catch your eye, and if you let them, they’ll start to engage your mind. Once in a while they will even thrill you enough within the privacy of your own imagination to feed a desire to go deeper into that thing, to know more about it, possibly even to possess and do something with it. Budding (and matured) obsessions like these are where ideas come from.

In my experience, when you follow that secret thrill, ideas pop out from the woodwork and shake out of the trees as the gravity of your interest pulls you farther down the rabbit hole. And yet, so few of us give that thrill much purchase. We may even dismiss it as an indulgence or a distraction. There is almost a quiet shame in it, which is a big part of the reason why that secret thrill always seems to remain secret for so many. Over the years, I have lost count of the times people have come up to me and begun a conversation by quietly, almost reluctantly, admitting to their own curiosity about something I’ve done or a hobby I pursue. 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.

I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve been able to follow my secret thrills into adulthood and then into professional success. But even if I hadn’t been able to do that for a living, if I could only chase those thrills in my free time, I would still be constantly making stuff.

This stands in stark contrast to other fleeting interests and random skills that I used to pursue, like juggling or dramatic performance, which I gave up on once I got a notch better than mediocre. 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.

When I realized in my early twenties that I could pursue, and maybe catch, real excellence at a high level of making, that is when I dove in headfirst. And that pursuit has radically improved my ability to incorporate the skills I already had with new skills I hoped to acquire. It’s also made me more comfortable with acknowledging the limits, which are substantial, of what I can do. For instance, I would love to be a writer of screenplays. A screenwriter’s way of seeing is a special thing. They have a unique type of brain, one that filters the world it experiences entirely through narrative and has, over time, become a highly tuned machine in the service of character construction, world building, and plot layering. Screenwriters are basically human 3-D printers for story.

But I’ve learned that is not how my brain works. I don’t think in arcing, twisting plots. It’s not that I wish it were different. I’m actually okay with how my brain works. I don’t view it as a deficiency. I don’t need to write screenplays. 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? Screenwriting is simply one route to creating stories. The specific skill set my brain has equipped me with is one solidly within the realm of making physical things. It has served me very well, even if it doesn’t end up yielding a screenplay. 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. 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.

Foremost among my passions for making stuff has been cosplay. Cosplay is at its most basic the practice of dressing up as favorite characters from movies, fiction, and especially anime, but it’s about so much more than just putting on a character’s costume. Cosplay encompasses stepping into the character him- or her- or itself. I’ve come to understand it as more of a participatory community theater than a solo practice. I have a deep abiding passion for cosplay. It has been a constant source of thrills, and an endless fount of ideas for stuff to make as a result. Many of my favorite projects are a product of this interest. I am unabashed and unequivocal in my love for it. Now, at least. But it has not always been so simple. 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.

The seeds for my cosplay obsession germinated in high school—well before the word was even invented—when I started to fall in love with film as a form. The multisensory storytelling and layered world building blew my mind. This was the early ’80s, an incredible time for a teenager interested in sci-fi adventures, space operas, and fantasy epics. They inspired me to create my own versions of costumes to bring their dream worlds closer to reality, to put myself into those narratives—in the privacy of my own home, of course. I would only let that secret joy out for public consumption on Halloween, when I had a built-in excuse for my creative inspiration. I suspect this is how it starts for a lot of people.

At sixteen, my dad and I built a full suit of armor inspired by John Boorman’s film, Excalibur, and I wore it to school the day of Halloween. We spent weeks researching it and fabricating it from aluminum roof sheeting and what felt like a million pop rivets. I worked on it ceaselessly until it fit like a glove and I felt properly awesome in it. The only structural problem I encountered: I couldn’t sit down. If I wanted to stay in costume AND see what the teacher was writing on the blackboard at the front of the classroom, I had to stand against the wall at the back of the room. It was a trade-off I was more than willing to make, and one that I was getting the better end of as far as I was concerned, right up until about halfway through third period, when I started to overheat, develop tunnel vision, and then slowly slide down the wall with a loud, deliberate scrape, until I passed out in a heap in the middle of a math lecture. It’s more than a little embarrassing to wake up in the nurse’s office covered in sweat, stripped to your underwear, wondering where your homemade armor went.

The following year I went a little lighter on the metal and made a piece of forearm armor as part of a costume inspired by Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. I fashioned a vambrace from aluminum and added some cool labels and futuristic graffiti. Then I got it to look suitably, post-apocalyptically weathered by scraping it repeatedly on a dirty stone wall in my basement. On Halloween, I wore the whole rig to school with a beat-up leather motorcycle jacket and some heavy-duty Mad Max–like boots. It was what I’d later learn was called an “in-universe” costume—not canon, but within the canon—that felt as badass to wear as it looked. In fact, more so even than the full suit of armor, if that was possible.

My classmate Aaron begged to differ. He ribbed me about my costume, not ruthlessly, but enough to get my hackles up. Ordinarily when something like this would happen, my tendency toward conflict aversion would send me retreating into myself, into the space where my obsessions lived, but not this time. Wearing the costume made me feel powerful (as I would later discover cosplay often does), and imbued with the spirit of a character from a post-apocalyptic universe who had managed to survive through the end-times, I reared up and talked back. In my head—or should I say, in the head of the character I was inhabiting—that should have been the end of it. I had parried Aaron’s thrust, then countered successfully with a thrust of my own. Aaron was vanquished.

Aaron disagreed. “Oh, check out Adam being all powerful with some metal on his arm!” he yelled derisively, much to the delight of our classmates.

With a single sentence, Aaron had pierced my armor. He saw through me so clearly, and he used it against me, exposing the part of me that I had mostly kept private. In that moment, I realized that this thing that had produced such a transformational feeling of empowerment could, if I let it, also be turned against me to make me feel just as vulnerable as it had made me feel strong. It was a lesson that I would relearn many times as I got older.

In 2009, for example, MythBusters set out to tackle a classic movie myth. Throughout film history, heroes and villains alike have made their escapes by leaping from the roofs and windows of tall buildings into the safety of dumpsters in alleys below them, then casually climbing out and running away. But how hard or soft are the contents of the average real-world dumpster? What is the ideal material to encounter when you make the actual jump? And if that ideal material is, in fact, in the dumpster, will it save your life? These were all questions we planned on answering.

When we plotted out the story, it became obvious that Jamie Hyneman and I would need to do the jumping ourselves. This led to one segment of the episode that involved training and a second that would include the actual experimentation. From a visual storytelling perspective, I wanted our outfits for each segment to be different. For the training sequence, the wardrobe team made us tracksuits with the words STUNT TRAINEE pasted on their backs with iron-on transfers. For the experimentation sequence, since I would be our official jumper, I thought a lot about what kind of wardrobe would look good on screen, but in a manner befitting the theme of the episode.

Sitting atop one of the structures at the Treasure Island Fire Training Facility in the middle of San Francisco Bay, where we were filming the episode, I stared out toward the East Bay and my gaze landed upon the now-defunct Alameda Naval Air Station. Alameda NAS was the shooting location for some of our biggest car-related mythbusting as well as a number of sequences in one of my favorite sci-fi franchises of all time: The Matrix with Keanu Reeves as ...