Today, I'm thinking a lot about horse butts

The chariot dates back at least to the Indo-Iranian peoples four or five thousand years ago.

Yeah, I've just jumped right into a little story.

Bear with me, friend. This email takes about 7 minutes to read — and it’s worth the journey.

The chariot was a cart with two wheels, pulled by two horses.

Three horses made the cart too wide, unwieldy, and unstable. One horse was just too small.

So we built every cart with wheels exactly two horses apart.

More precisely, 4’ 8.5” apart.

The war machine spread throughout the Middle Eastern world, then into Western Europe and into the Far East, with the design staying largely the same.

The wheels were 4’ 8.5” apart. Everywhere.

Over time, the chariot morphed into four-wheeled wagons and other transports, and soon became the primary means of land-based cargo transport across the world. But the fundamental design didn't change: pulled by two horses, the wheels still had to be two horses or 4’ 8.5” apart.

This vehicle reigned throughout antiquity, through the middle ages and the Renaissance, and well into the industrial revolution.

It was just how we moved stuff. 🤷

When the industrial revolution saw the development of the English railroad, interoperability was key. Whatever went on rail cars needed to also fit on wagons — the railroad didn’t go everywhere.

So how wide did we build the wheels of a rail car? Yep, 4’ 8.5” apart.

And that became...just how we moved stuff. For a long time.

Enter the Saturn V rocket.

It is the most powerful rocket ever made.

I didn't say "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.

It literally propelled us to the moon.

So how does this fit into our story?

Well... while we launched the thing from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, it's not like we were manufacturing everything from the launchpad, right?

A series of American companies built components throughout the United States, which they shipped to Florida for final assembly.

How? Via the railroad, of course.

It was the only transportation system that stretched across the country, from here to there and everywhere.

And, because it had to travel by train, it had to fit on a train. Therefore, no component of the rocket could be wider than a train car, which could be no wider than its wheel-span. Everything had to be smaller than 4’ 8.5” in width.

Thus, a design constraint of the Saturn V rocket was that it could have no component wider than two horse butts.

See? The subject line wasn’t clickbait.

But JDM...why are you telling me telling you this?

Ok, yes, It’s a common story with a common punchline, but it can teach 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 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.

Or, as Eugene O'Neill put it:

There is no present or future — only the past, happening over and over again — now.

Doing something innovative requires us to take a different path — to think outside the box.

So, how to we break the cycle?

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.

I promise one tip or trick in each of these emails to help you launch sooner or scale faster, so let’s get to it.

How do we successfully innovate while dragging the weight of history around our ankle?

It's three steps:

1/ Uncover the constraints under which you're operating.

There are a lot more than meet the eye. Really juice the situation to get all of it out in the open. Make a big mess on the table.

2/ Understand the constraints.

Which of those constraints are within your control, and which are a function of society, culture, and industry? You can’t re-invent the rail system just to make your good, but you can invent new ways to assemble the components.

3/ Discard those you can.

Finally, free yourself from the constraints you control (they’re self-imposed anyway), and embrace those you cannot.

There are real societal, technological, environmental, economical, and political constraints, but they almost never kill innovations.

The false constraints that we never say out loud yet act as if are true are what kill innovations. They reflect internal biases — sometimes even taboos.

Discard them. They’re not helpful.

Whatever problem you're facing now — it has a solution, too. You just have to find it.

Remember the lesson of Saturn V — even with bronze age constraints, human ingenuity still sent a man to the moon.

Practically on horseback.

When you're ready, there are 3 ways I can help you.

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