well hello it's adam savage and i am in my cave i'm answering questions about shop
practice and teaching uh from tested patrons and today's question comes from john england
that really is your name john england john england says as a dad of two daughters who
love to build and create mazeltov uh and also as someone who oversees engineering tasks at work
i often find it hard to balance when to knowingly allow someone to learn from their mistakes rather
than provide a possible answer aside from will they shoot their eye out have you discovered any
tricks to weighing the benefit of when and when not to step in and when to steer the situation
more toward a path of discovery um well i mean on one hand there's just i'm sorry it's a little
cold here in the shop so i'm just warming my hands um on one hand there's the fact that as adults we
all kind of have to go through our own journey and it's not necessarily your responsibility
to help someone with the mistake they might be making unless they ask and obviously unless it's
a genuine safety issue i have found that people don't always appreciate when you're
trying to fix their mistakes if they don't know they're making a mistake you might find in your
life that precious few people ever ask you for genuine insight into their process or their thing
and that might just mean that you'd be quiet about it that's that's what being a person
is right we got to let each everyone's got to go through their own kind of thing that's one thing
but you ask about kids and about employees so um engineering tax tasks at work i think
that the the dictates of like being on a team together means that whatever information you have
should be passed around like i i fully believe in that um i i mean look if i see someone drilling a
hole wrong i'm not necessarily going to stop them i'm going to wait till they finish and
then i'm going to say here's an idea about what just happened and maybe how it could go better um
but really the meat of your question i think is about your kids
and it's like let how do you let your kids make mistakes
because kids bore so easily man and frankly if they ask you to make something and
you're always trying to turn it into a lesson that can get really really really exhausting
seriously um because the
your daughters love to build and create if they love to build and create like
let them build and create if they make mistakes
talk to them after they've made the mistake that that's genuinely like a mistake has to
happen for you to talk about it if in the abstract it's not a mistake it's just a potential mistake
um and we all learn through negative and positive reinforcement it's best to get
negative negative reinforcement from the world and positive reinforcement from people you love
it's not always the case but i think that's the most ideal way that it works isn't it
i will tell you a story about making something with one of my kids uh that might be instructive
uh one of my skills that i got from mythbusters was knowing was being able to smell a project that
i knew i could complete without knowing how i was going to complete it so the goal on the show was
for the builds to be as honest as they could be so i would often remain ignorant of certain aspects
of the technical challenge in front of me so that i could deal with that technical challenge
live and on camera which is awesome and really fun but it's hard sometimes to know
what to where where that line is uh and thus uh i got a skill that
i really understand where that line is and i kind of know how to set up a task that i
can do within a certain period of time um when when tested went to the smithsonian institution
and did a live build on stage at the smithsonian of the command module hatch from apollo 11
that's exactly what that was that was a project that i knew once we had all the pieces and parts
assembled from makers all around the world i knew we could assemble it in a day with the team we had
that's the precursor to the my son asking me to make something thing one came to me
at one point i think it was about 4 15 14 and he said i have to build a trebuchet
for school and i'd like your help and the funny thing about me at that moment in time was i had
never built a trebuchet i know in all of the years we didn't build a trebuchet until the last season
of mythbusters and that was the duct tape trebuchet that we made for some reason it just
never came up and the funny thing about trebuchets was i understood them i understood the pendulum
uh i understood that part but i had never intersected with how the sling of a of
a of a trebuchet actually releases i had never looked into how that actually works
and so i decided not to i decided let's go into the cave i know how to build this part
of the trebuchet let's figure out together how to do the other part of the trebuchet
and i didn't know how this was going to go but we come in here and we start assembling a trebuchet
out of some mdf that i have we make the weight out of a bunch of one inch ball bearings actually one
inch ball bearings left over from the steam machine gun episode of mythbusters we had
thousands and thousands of those things i still have hundreds floating around in this shop
at any rate we made a nice big counterweight out of one inch ball bearings duct taped together we
put that at the end of a stick we made a pivot we made the release we put the thing up there
and made the sling and we put a a package in the sling and we set up right here right next to where
i'm sitting here facing the the the front door of my shop and we we knew that the sling was mounted
to the throwing arm on one end right so a sling is like a piece of cord with a leather
flat piece of leather in the middle and another piece of cord and what you do is
you hang a rock in that piece of leather at the end of the two pieces of court and you swing it
when you want to throw it at something you release one of those strings when you are at the correct
moment of swing to apply the most amount of force this is how david killed goliath allegedly um
so a trebuchet is a sling throwing a device and it has to let go of that other half of
the sling but how does it do that i didn't know so once we built it my son and i sat there and
we were like i was like so i've no i told him i've never looked this up i don't know how this
works and he's like all right and i said what do you think and he said i think it's a little hook
i think it's a loop that goes over a hook and i said i thought the same thing okay so we took a
nail we bent it and we put it in and we made a little hook and we put the loop around it and
we put it down and anyone who's done this knows that what happened was we released the trebuchet
and went whack and just like smacked into the ground right at our feet making us both jump
so clearly little hook is wrong so then we're like let's open that hook up a little bit
so we opened it up the first hook was genuinely at a 90 degree second hook 45. set it up set it
up get here release the thing and it goes whack but like four feet in front of its predecessor
so clearly we're on to something and we're both sitting there in the immediate aftermath of the
second failed test and it's one of my favorite moments in parenting because we both realized
the solution at the exact same instant and we both went oh it's a straight pin
and that's totally what it is it's a straight pin we made the pin straight we set it up again
we we actually hit the front door of my shop from here and it's about 50
40 40 feet away it's 40 feet away yes it was like whoa yeah it was real
i wasn't trying to impart a specific lesson to my kid i was actually trying to impart a
much more general one which is that i'm willing to figure something out adults
don't know all the answers those are the most important things to teach your kids
nobody knows what's going on okay here is my rough i don't know if i've ever said this out loud or
actually publicly but like my rough idea of parenting is that our job as parents in
western culture are perceived job as parents let me give those qualifiers
our perceived jobs as parents is to give our kids the illusion of consistency to the world
until they build enough fortitude to be able to recognize that the world has no consistency and
that they don't matter that's i'm not saying it's an ideal situation but yeah my job as a parent is
to create a lovely consistent universe for my kids while they were growing up and forming themselves
uh and giving them the mental and emotional fortitude to be able to parse the world and
deal with people in it until such time as they realize that they're crushingly alone and that
the universe doesn't care about them and that they're only here for a short period of time yeah
that's that's what we're doing i know that sounds really bleak but and i know that there are plenty
of other ways to raise children and there are tons of other cultures with many different approaches
full stop um but to me it was really important to
i mean i i want to say it's important it was important to me to let my kids know that i didn't
have all the answers saying that you know i i also had difficulty not always having all the answers
you know you you want to be the one who knows as a parent but that lesson of us figuring
that out together and both of us enjoying the pleasure of that moment
that's what comes out just from the natural process of making stuff together
so my answer is i don't think you need a framework with your kids to decide whether or not
to help or not i think as long as you are making stuff with your kids you're teaching them
the best kinds of lessons which is our lessons about collaboration and cooperation and also about
the ways in which we do and don't take ourselves seriously yeah and those are the things that the
kids are really picking up whether or not you are trying to teach that to them john england that
is a great question thank you so much for it i've had a lot of fun answering it and i hope i've i've
been able to say some stuff that's useful to you all right thank you guys so much tested patrons
keep submitting your questions and i will continue to answer them here see you guys next time