🧠 Deep dive — learning to love constraints
Innovation requires first understanding the rules of the game: constraints. Then, discarding the constraints you can, and embracing the ones you can’t. The hard part is knowing the difference.
Hey friend 👋
Last week, I talked about how to crush constraints using “we can if” thinking.
Today, I want to share a process for embracing the constraints we can’t control — and, more importantly, how to tell the difference between the two.
But first, we’re going to take a step back.
Just here me out!
The chariot dates back at least to the Indo-Iranian peoples four or five thousand years ago.
It’s a simple innovation, really: a cart with two wheels, pulled by two horses.
Why two?
Because three horses made the cart too wide, unwieldy, and unstable. But one horse made the cart too small to be really useful.
So every cart had two wheels exactly two horses apart, which averages to 4 feet 8.5 inches.
Used predominantly as a war machine, the chariot spread throughout the Middle Eastern world, then into Western Europe, and into the Far East.
The design stayed largely the same.
Chariots everywhere, with two wheels 4’ 8.5” apart.
Over time, the chariot morphed from a weapon into four-wheeled wagons and other transports, and soon became the primary means of moving cargo across land.
But the fundamental design didn’t change: carts got longer, but not wider. They were still wheeled carts pulled by rows of two horses, and the wheels still had to be two horses apart.
This vehicle reigned throughout antiquity, through the middle ages and the Renaissance, and toward the modern era.
Wagons were… just how we moved stuff. 🤷
Then the industrial revolution entered the chat.
When English developed the steam locomotive in 1814 and spurred the creation of a global network of railroads, interoperability was key.
Railroads weren’t everywhere, and never would be. Whatever went on rail cars needed to also fit on wagons. So crates on wagons needed to fit on rail cars, and so rail cars were designed the same way as wagons:
Two wheels, 4’ 8.5” apart.
And then the railroad became… just how we moved stuff.
For a long time.
Fast forward a century and a half to 1962, when NASA designed the Saturn V rocket, the most powerful rocket ever made.
Not “was”.
To this date, the Saturn V rocket is still the most powerful extraterrestrial vehicle ever. It is the only rocket that has ever propelled a human beyond low-Earth orbit, and it literally propelled us to the moon!
Build a rocket was also quite a logistical feat, involving some 20,000 companies across the United States.
So while we may have launched the thing from Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida, it’s not like we were manufacturing everything from the launchpad.
These 20k American companies built components throughout the United States, which they shipped to Florida to be cobbled together in the Vehicle Assembly Building at KSC.
Shipped via the railroad, of course.
Because the railroad was the only transportation system that stretched across the country, from here to there and everywhere.
And, to get super obvious… because the components had to travel by train, they had to fit on a train. Therefore, no component of the rocket could be wider than a train car, and no train car could be wider than its wheel-span.
Everything had to be smaller than 4’ 8.5” in width.
Thus, a literal design constraint of the Saturn V rocket was that it could have no component wider than two horse butts.
It’s a common story with a common punchline, but it teaches us something important about innovation:
Though we created one of the most awe-inspiring technologies around — though we were trying to achieve one of the most impressive feats of engineering ever — we were saddled with technical debt that was literally thousands of years old!
Nothing is developed in a vacuum.
Technically, we call this path dependency. When doing anything, we feel the weight of every decision we’ve ever made pulling us down the same path we’ve always taken. It’s hard, and sometimes impossible, to take a different path.
Or, as Eugene O’Neill put it:
There is no present or future — only the past, happening over and over again — now.
And this cuts in both directions.
With the Artemis Program, NASA is taking humans back to the moon (as a hopeful springboard to Mars), so they need to make some spacesuits. The problem is we haven’t been to the moon since 1972, and the entire supply chain that supported the creation of those spacesuits is just…gone.
It doesn’t matter that we have schematics and specs, because no one makes the constituent parts anymore!
That momentum is just… gone.
This is unfortunate, because we have to invent literally everything from scratch, but also amazing, because we are no longer bound by the constraints of the 1960s.
That’s the tradeoff of constraints.
And the first step in doing anything innovative is understanding them.
To work with constraints, or to break free of them. That is the question.
You might ask: how to we break the cycle of path dependency? And the honest answer is… sometimes, we can’t.
Decisions we make today are shackled by decisions we made months ago, years ago, decades ago — even millennia ago.
Some of those decisions serve to create entire supply chains, and we can’t just change those to suit us. We’re never painting from a blank canvas.
So how do we successfully innovate while dragging the weight of history around our ankle?
Here’s how to work with constraints in 3 steps:
If you want to do anything innovative, you need to understand the rules of the game. Fortunately, it’s not as complicated as it sounds.
Here we go 👇
1. Surface your constraints.
The first step is divergent thinking: what are all the possible constraints to consider and discuss. We have to create choices before we can make choices.
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of constraints:
Activatable resources — the people, money, time, and other resources you have at your disposal (or which are within your resources to acquire). These are clear constraints.
STEEP constraints — the societal, technological, environmental, economical, and political conditions also puts constraints on your ability to innovate, and we take most of these for granted.
Go through the list and document every single conceivable constraint you can think of. Don’t worry if the list is good or accurate yet. Quantity over quality.
Two quick examples:
The boundary of your people constraint is the sum of who you have on the team, and who is in your extended network that you can activate.
But working on a tool in an industry where AI is deeply distrusted? That’s a societal constraint.
There are a lot more than meet the eye, so really juice the situation to get all of it out in the open.
Make a big mess on the table. And then:
2. Understand those constraints.
You can’t re-invent the rail system just to make your product, but you can invent new ways to assemble the components. You may not have sufficient capital to fund a product build, but you can find alternative pathways to the necessary market validation.
You can’t create a plan for constraints until you understand what they are.
Which constraints are within your control, and which are a function of society, culture, and industry?
Money is a great example of a common constraint. As a good friend of mine likes to say, there are only seven ways to get money. You can:
Already have it
Earn it
Borrow it
Trade equity for it
Steal it
Commit fraud
Print it
That’s literally it. You can go through that list to understand where the constraint of money is putting pressure on your ability to innovate.
Therefore:
3. Discard the constraints you can; embrace the ones you can’t.
Continuing with the money constraint…
If you don’t have it, but are currently fundable, you can raise equity investment from angels and VCs, potentially discarding that constraint.
But if none of the seven ways to get money are currently available to you, then you cannot discard the money constraint. It’s real, and you have to embrace it.
Whatever you wanted to spend money on, you can’t. You don’t have it, and don’t have access to it. That’s freeing because you know the answer isn’t in that direction. Reject that path, and find one that your constraints support.
Maybe you can’t hire a rockstar CTO and an engineering team to build an MVP, but:
Can you use a rapid prototype to answer critical questions so that you don’t have to build a larger MVP?
Can you double-down on validation to create a path to fundability?
Can you focus on strategic early adopters from whom you can collect pre-sales?
What all of these represent are alternative paths, which we are free to explore because we accepted that the money door was closed.
And that’s the point:
Our goal is always to free ourselves from the constraints we can control (because they’re self-imposed anyway), and to embrace those we cannot.
For example, there are real societal, technological, environmental, economical, and political constraints, but they almost never kill innovations. They just reshape them.
That’s when constraints become our best friend: they give us focus. Constraints draw a box around the playground and give us the necessary space to be creative.
Despite popular belief, creativity and innovation aren’t about thinking outside the box, but about finding the right box in which to think.
And that box is drawn by an accurate understanding of your constraints.
Real constraints seldom kill innovations.
But the false constraints that we never say out loud yet act as if they are true are what kill innovations.
False, self-imposed constraints reflect our internal biases — and often our taboos.
Discard them. They’re not helpful.
Whatever problem you’re facing now — it likely has a solution, too. You just have to find it, and move from ”we can’t” to “we can if”.
And heed the lesson of the Saturn V — even with literally bronze age constraints, human ingenuity still sent a man to the moon.
Practically on horseback.
Peace ✌️
—jdm
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