Adam Savage on One of His Biggest Failures

Just as Jamie gave a presentation at this year’s E.G. Conference, Adam attended two years ago to give a riveting speech about one of his past failures. The video of that talk is finally up on E.G.’s site now, embedded here. In the talk, Adam recounts a heartbreaking story he recently referenced in this year’s Maker Faire keynote, about the epic way in which he failed a close friend and how the subsequent coping with that mistake was one of the more formative experiences in his youth.

Comments (15)

15 thoughts on “Adam Savage on One of His Biggest Failures

  1. Hearing stories like this reminds me Adam is quite wise, thoughtful and self-deprecating. Not to be too philosophical but .. embrace failure, don’t run, learn.

  2. yes, that’s how this story strikes me as well.

    another important thing in this vein: realise what you can and can not do / who you can and can not be, acknowledge and stand up to it. it took me the longest time, bascially all of my youth, up into my early twenties, to understand that while i am good at some things, i am not good at others. one of my problems is that social contact wears me out immensely, and i need tons of alone time to recuperate. and yet i tried for the longest time to “play the game” like those to whom it comes effortlessly or natural. i got so physically sick from that that i was hospitalised for two weeks, needed a bit more than a year to heal, and medication from that time on, probably until the day i die.

    that gave me the initial spark of realising that i can not be that kind of person, that it is not a matter of how hard i try, and that it is fine, that i don’t need to be that kind of person. that nothing bad comes to me from admitting not being good at some things, and that it is freeing and empowering to be up front about it. it’s also fair to everyone around me, which is a nice bonus. 😉

    err, that went on a bit long. sorry. 🙂

  3. Great story. One of the MANY reasons I love visiting this site is because you never know what you’ll find. This is just such an instance.

  4. I still can’t find it…

    Wait, the thing on the play button? Can’t scrub it and I’m freaking out. I’ll watch the entire thing, that’s not the point, I need to know how long it is and how to use the player to relax!

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