Adam Savage: Ground Rules for Success

[Music] I knew this was a Masonic Temple standing backstage just from the scrim mysteries of the world will be revealed to us later so I'm honored to be here I've been a fan of blowing blowing it's been one of my daily stops on the web for Christ 10 years now the first time I showed up in the Boyne going feet I couldn't believe what I was seeing as the cognitive distance was dissonance was intense and then I always get a little thrilled actually seeing everybody backstage mark and Mark and well Cory's the only one I haven't met in meatspace I'm hoping to remedy that today I wanted to talk a little bit about being a maker and I'm sort of working on a new a new way of talking about where where I've gotten to so far so I want to start by let's see is this gonna work oh there we go I'm a maker I've been a maker forever my father was a maker of things he was a painter a filmmaker an animator director and in his studio was always a bunch of tools and materials that I was allowed to go and utilize and when I was about well see I was four years old so it's 1971 that's me I during nap time or more that's the more mischievous me during nap time I snuck out of my room and out to my dad's studio with my teddy bear jingle so-called because in his left ear was a bell this is jingle in probably 1986 when his left eye had been burnt and small jingle is somewhere in one of my storage spaces I haven't found him in about eight years but I know he's there I'm a high-functioning hoarder there they're quite organized on a certain level I snuck out to my dad's studio with jingle because I wanted to make something I loved this teddy bear and I wanted to make something about how much I loved the teddy bear and actually how much I identified with it and I I was so intent on making something with jingle I violated the one rule by sneaking out about my dead studio is that you're not allowed to use the single edge razor blades now the story doesn't end with me getting scarred or anything it only ends with me finishing a drawing of jingle which is here wearing all the clothes that I wanted when I was four years old a vest a Superman shirt a belt with a gold buckle and apparently red pants this is me on the on the leg trying to spell jingle gele savage jingle savage so notice I think the I was already small cut to a few years later I'm more like eight or nine years old and you remember Mission Impossible when I was growing up this show was one of the greatest shows ever made because if you didn't watch the first five minutes you were screwed for figuring out what the hell was going on for the rest of the time you had no idea but the plots were really intricate the the the action was really fast and the the team was always super intelligent that was incredibly interesting to watch I identified with each of them at different points I loved watching the problem solving and I especially loved that they always had stuff like this they always had a box that would make something happen via remote control so when I was like eight or nine this is the the next thing I can remember having to have really needing was something like this this is Mission Impossible it's at one of their telephone briefcases so I took one of my dad's old briefcases and using some matte board and some acetate which we had in the in the studio I made a briefcase with a radar which was lit from the bottom of the huge six volt battery and a light bulb and some switches that literally said detonate I don't have a picture of it but I'm calling out the fact that somewhere at seven or eight years old I was making a detonation box to blow up and that continues when I was 18 I made my first Blade Runner gun out of model kits and toys bought on Canal Street when I was six I made my second blade burner gun pretty much hand sculpted from scratch only to discover that I'd made it 20% too small the story of my life and then a couple years ago after five years of gunsmithing I finished my most accurate Blade Runner gun made from all the real gun parts also I've spent a fair bit of time wearing cost making and wearing costumes I go to Dragon Con I go to Comic Con every year and each time I walked the floor that is a very important practice to me and it's the same import as it was when I was eight years old I want that transformation my first time I went to comic-con that's my Hellboy costume but not my real chest a couple of years ago I actually went as one of my all-time favorite characters no face from spirited away one of the all-time great movies if you haven't seen it dive into Miyazaki with both feet because he's one of the great living filmmakers and no face in the movie spirited away is one of the most sympathetic and amazing characters and an incredible oh sorry it's just an amazing film and wearing a seven and a half foot tall no face costume and seeing people's responses to it when they really knew the film was absolutely thrilling it felt like I was participating in an entirely new kind of theater so flash forward you know 15 years after making Blade Runner guns and movie props and then I make props for real movies and then I get Mythbusters and I've made making Mythbusters for 10 years and a couple of years ago I had a conversation with a person a really really renowned inventor I'm not going to name them because who they are isn't the point of the story but they were asking me for help in getting kids interested in science which is something I'm deeply deeply interested in how do you get kids interested and I started thinking back to the things that got me interested in making things so I pointed him after discussing what I'd been seeing out on the web I pointed him to a forum called the replica prop forum I've talked about it at length on my website and in interviews before it is a group of about 20,000 prop collectors prop makers and traitors and on there there's a program you can get now called Papakura which will take a 3d image and actually break it down into basically eight and a half by 11 sheets of paper so you can fold it so people who are inspired by Ironman I sent this to him to show him this is something that totally thrills me about finding a level where kids could get interested some kid likes Ironman he can print out all of these sheets of paper just like this assemble an Iron Man helmet and eventually finish it in fact we found kids the Stan Winston's the school here's a kid who made 16 year old kid who made an entire Ironman costume out of paper and bondo that thrills me so I sent it to this inventor and he's he looked at it he said boy that is a long way around and I agree this is this is the long way around this is not the way I would build something but it is a way for anybody to build something and that's why it's important to me and then the inventor said would it be nice if they build their own thing instead of the detritus that pop-culture feeds them and yeah I I felt like I'd gotten hit in the solar plexus I I can't it's just stressing much I admire this guy he's a freakin invention machine and really really keen and deep intellect much smarter than I am and I didn't know how to respond to this this thing because I had to stand up for the reason that I make that I am absolutely a a conduit for my culture of the things that I make and I started asking like what do I get what do I get out of this conversation that I have I mean look I'd love to be making all sorts of original stuff and I do make plenty of original things and original items but I also really deeply love that relationship I have with things that I see that I want objects that I can manifest and touch and the way that interaction feels to me I mean what do I get out of replicating every little item that's in Jason Bourne's red bag from the Bourne Identity this took 11 months of research with me and about 15 guys on the replica prop form what do I get out of dressing up as Chewbacca occasionally by the way dressing up as Chewbacca is the closest anyone can get to feeling like Bono because people just walk up and they just they've never seen a Wookiee and they hold on to you with such fierce that's affection that it's kind of intense and I started really examining the this relationship between what I get out of my culture and what I put into it and the reason that I make these things and I realized that what I get out of it is literally everything and by that I mean that desire that I had at eight years old at four years old to make my my teddy bear the desire I had at eight years old to make a Mission Impossible box with a button I would carry this briefcase around and when no one was looking I'd open it up and I'd be like and I blow it up you know and I'd have this structured play that's not very different than what I'm doing when I'm walking the floor at comic-con has no face and responding to people in character that desire is literally the engine of everything that I have it's the engine of everything that I've achieved in my life thus far and I have to pay respect to that and I have to understand you know I I and I do I have been making things for 30 years 30 years 20 or 25 years as a living and it's clear that I've become inordinately successful at that but I'm not sure what lesson is there I've also been a storyteller the whole time because when you make objects the object that you're making is also telling the story if you're making a prop for a movie that prop has to have a certain amount of age and whether to weathered quality to it that weathering is a story when you're making a spaceship there's not a model maker in the world when he's gluing something on to a spaceship if they're good that they don't know why that object is there or they don't know they you know they know why it was built this way they think of these as cooling fans and therefore they're going to run some ducting to it all of that is storytelling we are a storytelling species we like stories we like stories with happy endings we like stories with a clear arc and so a lot of times and this has happened in the past you know I stand up in front of a crowd and say no so I've got this story to tell the story is that you know I followed my dreams and I got what I wanted out of life but I've grown to think that this is a really shitty message and this is the second part of what I wanted to talk about because here's my example for why this story totally doesn't quite work everybody here in this room has been in a relationship or is in a relationship with a person now when you first meet somebody that you want to be in a relationship with whether it's a friendship or a romantic entanglement it doesn't matter a new friendship is intoxicating and you find someone that you want to spend time with you find someone that you connect with and connect with and this is a deeply human need to fulfill this but let me ask you after five years do you feel like you got everything out of this relationship that you want simply because you love the person do you think that you get everything you want all the time simply because you love the other person and the answer is of course not no the relationship is built on work on hard work on absolutely difficult work and it's work about looking inside yourself it's work about getting past your own you're getting past yourself in order to be able to find the compassion for another person and I think that when you tell people to follow their dreams it leads them to believe that they're entitled to something without realizing what it's going to take for them to get there and that's not a good message to give to kids and I'll tell you I've had some of these kids come through my shop or come through Mythbusters and they have a sense of entitlement about this this snowflake culture and don't get me wrong I think having a solid self-esteem is totally vital I give my kids all the self esteem that I can pump into them but I also tell them a few things about the way the real world works because I want them to be served but the fact was was I thought the beginning when I was 19 that I would follow my dreams and I would get what I wanted and that was pretty clever at things I thinks came pretty easily to me and boy was I wrong I wasted a lot of time and if I have one regret it's that I didn't really know how to work hard until I was about 25 years old so I came up with a set of ten ground rules and this is what I want to finish with these are things that I actually regularly tell my kids and things that I would say are fantastic ground rules for any young maker wanting to proceed in the world wanting to talk to their culture through their hands through their work through their creativity number one get good at something get really good get is get good at as many things as you can being good at one thing makes you better at getting good at other things it is a absolutely exponential process to getting good at stuff takes practice it takes a lot of practice in my case practice equals projects I think of things that I want I think of a skill that I want to learn I join those two things together and now I have invested reason to learn that new skill get obsessed everybody at the top of their field is obsessed with what they're doing this is something that a girlfriend told me when I was making sculpture I was 22 years old and I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with it and I said she worked in a big gallery in New York and I said well what can you tell me about working with artists who actually make their living at art I knew this was a vanishingly small population and she said that every one of them is totally different but if there's one thing it unifies all of them it is that they are all completely obsessed with what's going on they pay attention to whatever is going around they know at what everybody else is doing and they really really examine their own work with a finally critical eye for doing something well and thoroughly is totally its own reward anybody who's ever spent time making something even if it took five times as long as it should that the finished product was glorious doesn't matter if anyone is standing around to see it the word you get from that the reward you get from that prat sorry the reward that I get from that practice is deeply meditative five show-and-tell if you do something well and you're happy with it for Flying Spaghetti Monster sake tell everybody tell everybody if you're at work if you're at a job as a young maker and you do something that you like or you're happy with go tell somebody I often as an employer as a boss I need to know what people are doing that they're happy with because if I see that they're doing it well I'm going to want them to do more of it and as a corollary if you want something ask for it if something piques your interest tell somebody if you want to learn somebody something asks somebody like your boss as an employer when people when people who work for me want to learn new things I noticed that that's a good skill to have and I want to keep those people employed seven goals make up goal set goals regularly assess where you look I misspelled it so I type this on the plane on the way here assess where you are and where you want to be in terms of them this is a kind of prayer actually and by prayer I mean just a regular daily focus allow for the fact that things will never go how you plan that you might end up miles from where you started but knowing what you want and being able to know that you're comparing what you're doing to move towards it eight be nice to everyone life is way too freakin short to be an if you're an please apologize I I say this fully realizing that I have been an in my life and I try to apologize every time that it happens 9 fail you will fail it is one of your jobs in life you will keep failing and when you fail admit it when you don't don't get cocky because you're just about to fail again 10 work your ass off this is the thing this is the thing that my kids need to hear it is more important to be a hard worker than it is to be smart the world is full of geniuses who didn't do anything who didn't achieve anything with their work the world is packed with idiots who have millions of dollars in the bank because they work really hard work your ass off work like your life depends on it because it does thank you you [Applause]

Channel: Boing Boing Video

Views: 54,312

Rating: 4.9735489 out of 5

Keywords: Boing Boing (Blog), Adam Savage (TV Producer), MythBusters (TV Program), makers

Id: o5LgwwiesQ0

Length: 18min 27sec (1107 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 18 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/la_mecanique]

The first 14 minutes are a set up for the background before introducing his rules:

Get good at Something.

Really good. Get good at as many things as you can. Being good at one thing makes it easier to get good at other things.

Getting good takes practice.

Lots and lots of practice.

Get obsessed.

Everyone at the top of their field is obsessed with what they're doing.

Doing something well and thoroughly is its own reward.

Show and Tell.

If you do something well and you are happy with it, tell everybody.

If you want something ask for it.

If something piques your interest, tell someone. If you want to learn something, tell someong, like your boss.

Have goals.

Make up goals. Set goals. Regularly assess where you are and where you want to be. Allow for the fact that things will never turn out how you think they will, and be prepared to end up miles from where you intended.

Be nice.

To everyone. Life is way too short to be an asshole. If you are an asshole, apologize.

Fail.

You will fail. It is one of your jobs in life. When you fail, admit it. When you don't, don't get cocky. Because you are just about to fail again.

Work your ass off.

Work like your life depends on it.

It is more important to be a hard worker than it is to be smart. The world is full of geniuses who didn't achieve anything. The world is packed with idiots with millions of dollars in the bank, because they worked hard.