Adam Savage on the Internet: “The internet is far from fulfilling its promise to be the compendium of all human knowledge, it’s more like the outline or the index. But where it shines is in giving people all over the planet the ability to find a peer group of enthusiasts with which to share their creativity, and thus themselves. That’s a net good.”
Adam Savage on “paying your dues”: “In my mind I understood that paying my dues was an exchange for learning new things. However, what I got instead was a crash course in all the ways someone can tell you to stay in your lane and mind your own damned business. No one in those shops seemed interested in sharing ANYTHING about what they did or what they one day hoped to do, probably because the hope had been drubbed out of them by the people who came before them–people just like them.”
Adam Savage on the Discipline of Addressing Your Work: “If impatience is my biggest sin as a maker, its primary manifestation has been in my continual struggle with addressing my work. In this context, addressing your work means orienting yourself, physically and mentally, in the optimal position to execute the task, despite the fact that it might take a little longer. It means taking the time you need to do the job right the first time.”
Adam Savage on Answering the Question “How Do I Get Started?”: “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 concern 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.”
(NotebookLM suggested the heading ‘The Mental Physics of Beginning’ for this quote. This isn’t to be confused with the “science” of Mentalphysics, “an experiential method of self-realization that teaches the oneness of life embodied in all substance, energy and thought.” But they are, funny enough, related.)
Adam Savage on Being Both a Maker and Storyteller: “As a maker and storyteller, I see myself as part of a continuum, going back to the beginning of humans using tools and telling stories, and continuing forward into infinite possible futures. Sharing information is the fuel for the engine of progress.”
Adam Savage on Being a Serial Skill Collector: “The skills I have, all of them, are simply arrows in my mental quiver, tools in my problem-solving tool chest, to achieve that thing. They are each of them only a means to an end.”
Adam Savage on Commercial Kitchens: “Kitchens are pressure cookers in which wasted movement and hasty technique can ruin a dish, slice an artery, burn a hand, land you in the weeds, and ultimately kill a restaurant.”
Adam Savage on Completism and List Making: “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.”