hey everybody adam savage here in my cave with a little q a i am taking questions submitted by
testing patrons and answering them here in this forum and today's question comes from jason's
uh jason wants to know do you ever lament that you're a generalist when it comes to maker skills
instead of devoting all your mind and resources to becoming a master at one particular thing
he says i know i do jason that's a really interesting question
sure yes sort of
it's a great question um because absolutely there's no one who would like to be able to
like pick up a guitar or play the piano more than i would love to be able to do that but i
also know how many years of training it would take to get there not necessarily years of
training i could certainly take up piano as an adult and i strum the guitar a little bit but
you're asking about do i feel like i should have spent my time devoted to one thing see because
i want to separate this out i love gathering skills
and i don't just love gathering skills so one reason i love gathering skills is because every
skill is as i'd like to describe it an arrow in my quiver with which i can use to solve
a different kind of problem and the more versions of solutions i have
the farther and wider i can look for the correct solution for the problem i'm solving right now
and i love having that taxonomy of solutions in my head
but i also love gathering skills for another reason because i find all skill gathering
to be pleasurable and not just pleasurable because i'm achieving some new thing with that skill but
because as i take a skill and um and imbue myself with it because that's really what happens with
a skill uh i shot a thing last year with zoe bell the stun woman actress director i think in reverse
order director actress stuntwoman extraordinaire and a really good friend of mine and zoe is just
a powerhouse and one of the things i loved about what she talked about stunt work was
we were teaching her how to drift in a car and she was like she had to learn she had to learn
the skill both in her mind and in her body and those were two separate operations she
had to physicalize it and i feel the same way but even more than that there's a way in which
when you first look look at a skill and let's take chess for example chess is a set of pieces
to understand it is a set of moves to learn and you can play chess just by understanding
which the pieces are and what moves they do you could play a game of chess just by knowing that
and then you can play more chess and you can get better and you can start to learn some of
the philosophy of chess then once you understand the philosophy of chess you can start to learn the
the the how those philosophies apply and you play a few hundred games or a few thousand games
you start to learn how to play an opponent which is different than playing in a vacuum
you start to learn strategy and not just strategy of the moves but strategy against the person
and i'm saying this i didn't go through all this with chess i'm saying i understand that
this is what happens with a chess player and there comes a point where the board
ceases to become a set of pieces with possible moves in front of them and it becomes a mood
it becomes a gesture it becomes something more abstract to the professional chess player and that
moment where all of these separate pieces coalesce piano players have told me at a certain point
playing the piano stops being 88 keys and starts being just movements that happen from your body
and while i haven't experienced that sensation with chess or with piano playing or with any
specific skill that i currently have i still get that feeling because for me
my skill is that i'm a generalist now i i don't mean i'm not being facetious here i'm actually
being 100 correct sorry i'm being 100 precise with my language my skill is that i'm a generalist
and it has taken me a long time actually to come to terms with the fact that i i believe i'm a
master of that craft in my life at this stage of my life me right now it's not a it's not an
appellation i'm looking to the outside to bestow upon me but i understand when it comes to setting
and achieving goals for the complexities of the things that i like to make in here
i have over the past year seen a progression that makes it clear to me that i have elevated
my generalism to a to a level that i can achieve objects i can make things that have never before
occurred to me and that that that were not in my grasp as a young maker or yeah they
weren't until they were so i've started out this i started out answering your question
um by saying you know of course i am not a master at anything but i think that's wrong
i think my quiver is full of a lot of amazing arrows and as long as my
brain is still functioning dutch wood that goes on for another 30 or 40 years
all that information is here as a as a giant an amazing pool of knowledge to draw from and i'm
so grateful for that knowledge i'm grateful for all the circumstances and jobs and long days and
all-nighters and friends and colleagues and directors and producers and situations that have
put me into places where i learned and i learned about my
materials and i learned about deadlines and i learned about delegation and i learned
about people but most of all through all of that i learned about myself
and still continue to so no i don't have any regrets about
not having taken one of my skills all the way
the phrase master of sorry jack of all trades master of none that's half the phrase the
other half of the phrase those of you who know me know is jack of all trades master of none though
often better than a master of one and we found this on mythbusters we found our most reliable
uh and informed experts were the ones who understood cross-disciplinary aspects of
their discipline they understood how it plugged into all these other disciplines and i'm not
denigrating specialization because we all have to choose our path and
some of us want to specialize that's completely reasonable and realistic and understandable
i'm not saying my way is the better way by any stretch of the imagination it is the
way that i have chosen and it's the way that i have developed um i used to have i wrote this
monologue for one of my stage shows where i made a joke that i'm the patron saint of mediocrity
which is i'm making a kind of a cellular joke there uh but you know uh
that introspection that comes from the widening of one's perspective because you're gonna face down
a lot of things when you are trying to get great at something but the biggest thing you're gonna
be facing off against is yourself it's your own bias your own proclivities your own laziness and
finality and jealousy and all those things that keep you from fully realizing yourself as a person
that got a lot bigger than i expected it would but i really appreciate the question look
you can't affect the past you can only affect the present based on what
future you of what you can envision for future you
and there are a lot of people who did amazing things way late in life if
i could go back and tell my young self one one thing it's not use more cooling
fluid although i love that joke it's you have more time than you think uh
you definitely have more time than you think raymond chandler didn't write his first book
until his 40s gabriel byrne was in his 30s and when he made his first movie which was excalibur
oh my goodness there are so many wonderful late bloomer stories um i'm forgetting many of them
right now off the top of my head because i haven't prepared for this but you know you have more time
than you think and if becoming a a an expert at one of the things that you do is important to
you you can structure your life around getting to that goal that's totally an a an achievable goal
okay i can go on for hours on this subject but thank you so much for
that excellent questions patrons keep submitting your questions and
i will continue to answer them in this form thank you guys see you next time