Book Review: Every Tool’s a Hammer by Adam Savage

I’m diverging this month from my normal sewing blogs to talk about a book that I found very inspiring for those who are Makers. If you every watched the hit show MythBusters then you are familiar with Adam Savage. Most Makers would refer to him as one of the well-known makers in the Maker community. His eccentric personality and outlandish creativity made every episode of MythBusters an exciting adventure. Adam has written a book that is a mixture of biography and a self-help book. In this book Adam talks about what got him interested in the Maker community, how he stays inspired, and lessons he learned along the way. He also talks about his amazing career at Industrial Light and Magic. In all he has had forty-plus years of making and molding, building, break­ing, and a lot of laughs along the way. You might be asking where does he get the title of his book from? In his words “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.”

Taking time to read this book really inspired my own creative process. I think he hit the nail on the head, excuse the pun, when he says, “don’t wait until everything is perfect to begin a project.” I am guilty of procrastinating on projects just because I didn’t have exactly what I wanted, or my idea wasn’t fully flushed out. Who knows how many projects I could have finished or how many creative ideas I passed up on because it just wasn’t the right time, or I didn’t have just what I needed? Being a part of the Maker community a lot of the time it’s not about the end product, it is about the journey as well as the failures. A lot of times the mistakes make the successes even sweeter. Hearing Adams journey helped me to realize that we all go through a different, yet very similar creative process that leads us to success in the end. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like success, but sometimes we can’t see the forest for the trees. Adam even tackles being overwhelmed in this book by talking about his process for list making which I found helpful.

So if you are looking for a new read that will get you inspired and ready to dig into your next project I highly recommend giving this book a read. Even if you don’t consider yourself a Maker this book reminds you that you are. As Adam put it, “It doesn’t matter if you’re a model maker, a potter, a dancer, a programmer, a writer, a political activist, a teacher, a musician, a milliner, whatever. It’s all the same. Making is making, and none of it is failure.”

Review by Ian Garland