Adam Whitney Savage is an American special effects designer and fabricator, actor, educator, and television personality and producer, known as the former co-host of the Discovery Channel television series MythBusters and Unchained Reaction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Savage ## Notes - [[A good leader is...]] - [[Bailing on boring projects - Ask Adam Savage]] - [[Finding organizational inspiration and discarding things you need later - Ask Adam Savage]] - [[Getting over the hesitation to learn a new skill]] - [[How to avoid the death spiral of perfectionism]] - [[If I could rebuild my shop from scratch - Ask Adam Savage]] - [[Makers in the film industry - Adam Savage]] - [[Reading critical viewer comments - Ask Adam Savage]] - [[The best way to store materials - Ask Adam Savage]] - [[The one-day build concept - Adam Savage]] - [[The tool that does not only one thing, but does it well - Ask Adam Savage]] - [[Tips for organizing reference materials - Ask Adam Savage]] - [[When to discard scrap materials - Ask Adam Savage]] - [[When to make vs. buy something - Ask Adam Savage]] - [[When to store a project - Ask Adam Savage]] ## Quotes - [[A good shop involves a lot of cannibalism]] - [[A great working relationship is rare. When you find it, you should feed it.]] - [[A lot of times, it's about working with an imperfect situation until I'm angry enough about it to actually fix it and solve the problem]] - [[A shop is a possibility engine]] - [[Be game to play]] - [[Being in love with someone (something) is not about fate - it's about work]] - [[Be merciless with your scraps]] - [[Building something always makes me feel in love with it]] - [[Calm people live. Tense people die.]] - [[De-organizing stuff is like walking downhill to school knowing you're gonna have to walk uphill to get home]] - [[Every build has a moment in it where I have no idea what's going on]] - [[Every build is going to have tedium and consternation... and it's part of the process]] - [[Every shop is an externalization of a philosophy of how to work]] - [[Feedback early; often; always; ongoing.]] - [[Follow the process not the plan]] - [[For me, what's fun is to buy those pieces, and then weather them and bring them in]] - [[From the vantage point of the present, every life story looks linear.]] - [[Getting good at creating shapes with corrugated cardboard will be knowledge you put into your body that will be applicable to all sorts of other materials]] - [[Having all that stuff visually accessible as well as organizationally accessible is really for the problem solving that needs to happen for that shop]] - [[Human beings... we are explorers, we are problem solvers, and we are storytellers.]] - [[If I could buy exactly precisely what I was going to make... I'll probably buy it.]] - [[If I didn't have it right now, where would I look for it?]] - [[If I needed something more than three times a year, I would buy my own version of it]] - [[If it's neat to look at, I'll use it more.]] - [[I'm going to be less inclined to pull something out of an ugly box than a beautiful box]] - [[It gave me respect for people who are just spontaneously funny with each other. Like the anchors for every morning news show]] - [[I think it's great to watch people screw up! I think it's delightful to watch people solve problems.]] - [[I think it's great to watch people screw up! I think it's delightful to watch people solve problems.]] - [[It is not a problem to solve. It is a process to manage.]] - [[It's not the greatest piece of furniture that's ever built, if no one ever gets around to building it, is it?]] - [[It's so easy when you have a ton of stuff to lose track of where it is. Once you lost track of where it is... You've lost it.]] - [[I've also had teachers who spend so much time explaining stuff - I didn't learn a damn thing]] - [[Knowing more means knowing more about what you still don't know]] - [[Lists are intrinsic to creation]] - [[Lists give rhyme or reason to any project - big or small]] - [[Low-frequency tools. Having them is not enough. You have to be able to find them when you need them. And low-frequency tools can suffer from cleverness, at least in my shop.]] - [[Making - Anytime you use your point of view to make something that didn't exist]] - [[One of the best lenses for speeding up my process is to say, 'What would happen if I had to deliver this by the end of today? What would be the way in which I would do that?']] - [[Only those people understand what I went through. Only those people witnessed what I witnessed. That yields an intimacy that is really special.]] - [[Ownership over what you're doing, but bounded]] - [[Philosophy of work]] - [[Real greatness is making everything before you came obsolete and everything after you arrived change]] - [[Sharing stories is one of my favourite ways to widen the world]] - [[So much of the process of learning is failure and iteration]] - [[The answer to all of these questions is - it's always it's a process]] - [[The best book ever written on pool and billiards was 'The inner game of tennis' by Tim Gallwey]] - [[The closer you look, the blurrier things get]] - [[The fail is the meat in the sandwich!]] - [[The first order of retrievability]] - [[The goal is if I died, there's information about everything!]] - [[The setup of my mill is like a fighter pilot's cockpit. Everything I need, the first order of retrievability, is within quick grasp.]] - [[This tool feels cheap but it does not behave cheap]] - [[To be on television, I had to push me +20%]] - [[Tools want to be used. They are fulfilling their purpose when they are used.]] - [[What if I was on the clock?]] - [[When we hear each other's stories, we open up to each other's experiences and we open up to our own.]] - [[When you want everyone pulling on the same rope, they all need the same mental image of what's going on.]] - [[We don't know what it will be because it hasn't told us yet. Eventually, it will tell us what it wants to be, and our job is to execute that.]] - [[Within the philosophy of storage, there's always more room on the z-axis]] - [[You don't have a team. It's just you and a glue gun, and there's a whole crew waiting and that crew costs $10,000 a minute.]] - [[You have to give everyone total autonomy within a tiny bandwidth]] - [[You've got to point to stuff you're interested in]] ## See also - [[Tom Sachs]] - [[Laura Kampf]] - [[Van Neistat]] - [[Evan Monsma]]