"Failure is always an option"
About this Quote
“Failure is always an option” lands like a dare because it reverses the motivational poster logic we’ve been fed: succeed, or you’re doing life wrong. Adam Savage, speaking as an entertainer-engineer hybrid from MythBusters-era maker culture, isn’t romanticizing failure. He’s normalizing it as a built-in feature of doing anything real with your hands and brain.
The intent is practical: if you’re testing, prototyping, experimenting, you are courting the possibility that the thing won’t work. Calling failure an “option” is a sly rhetorical move. Options are empowering; they imply agency and choice, not shame. Savage smuggles emotional permission into a sentence that sounds almost logistical. You don’t have to pretend you’re certain. You don’t have to contort yourself into someone who “never misses.” You can try, miss, learn, iterate - publicly.
The subtext pushes back against a culture that treats competence as a performance rather than a process. In a social-media world of polished outcomes and invisible drafts, “failure” is what gets edited out. Savage drags it back onstage and reframes it as data. The phrase also undercuts perfectionism, that self-protective habit where people avoid starting because not starting can’t be judged.
Context matters: MythBusters was basically televised trial-and-error, with explosions as punctuation. The audience watched smart people be wrong repeatedly, then adjust. Savage’s line works because it’s honest about the cost of discovery and optimistic about what survives that cost. Failure isn’t the opposite of success here; it’s the admission fee.
The intent is practical: if you’re testing, prototyping, experimenting, you are courting the possibility that the thing won’t work. Calling failure an “option” is a sly rhetorical move. Options are empowering; they imply agency and choice, not shame. Savage smuggles emotional permission into a sentence that sounds almost logistical. You don’t have to pretend you’re certain. You don’t have to contort yourself into someone who “never misses.” You can try, miss, learn, iterate - publicly.
The subtext pushes back against a culture that treats competence as a performance rather than a process. In a social-media world of polished outcomes and invisible drafts, “failure” is what gets edited out. Savage drags it back onstage and reframes it as data. The phrase also undercuts perfectionism, that self-protective habit where people avoid starting because not starting can’t be judged.
Context matters: MythBusters was basically televised trial-and-error, with explosions as punctuation. The audience watched smart people be wrong repeatedly, then adjust. Savage’s line works because it’s honest about the cost of discovery and optimistic about what survives that cost. Failure isn’t the opposite of success here; it’s the admission fee.
Quote Details
| Topic | Failure |
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