CHAPTER 1
Embracing Your But

Something's on your mind. You've got things to do and problems to solve. We're not talking about the simple stuff like deciding to take a break from social media. We're talking about the complex, high-stakes stuff like starting a company when you're broke, studying for exams while working two jobs, or re-creating Grandma's famous holiday stuffing without the recipe. Whatever it is, you're stuck, and you're searching for a way to figure it out.

In that search, you're going to come up with a lot of dumb ideas. If you don't, you're not doing it right. That idea you had in the shower this morning? Yeah, not good. Don't feel bad. It's just not good yet.

You're not alone: YouTube started as a video dating site. PayPal started as a way to beam money between Palm Pilots. (Remember Palm Pilots?) Sparkling Champagne began as a fermentation accident that caused bottles to explode. And my first attempt at re-creating Grandma's stuffing involved dousing it in vodka. (After I worked my way through the liquor cabinet, bourbon was the answer.) These are just a few of the countless cases of getting smart by starting dumb.

Overcoming seemingly impossible problems and creating truly innovative things depends a lot on how much momentum you can muster when turning bad ideas into good ones.

But standing between you and the promised land of solved problems and glorious achievements are a bunch of meddlesome other people—and one particularly meddlesome person inside your own head—who are going to slow you down, trip you up, and send you crashing into a dead end. And they'll use one powerful, much maligned word to do it: but.

“But that won't work.” “But it's too expensive.” “But we have better things to do.” But, but, but.

You probably don't like the buts. But, you should. In fact, if you want to have the best chance of success in whatever you do, you need to embrace a lot of buts. And that's the funny thing about them: even though a single one will stop you in your tracks, buts can really generate momentum when they come in pairs.

Momentum Thinking That’s what the Two But Rule is about. It's about turning the world's biggest idea killer—and arguably the world's biggest relationship killer—into a powerful tool for getting unstuck, building velocity, staying nimble, and even repairing relationships. It's a tool that's always with you, though you rarely look at it, and you have to be mindful about how you display it in public. Yep…it's your but.

You might believe that you know your but, but you don't. There's a lot more there than you think. Throughout this book, we'll explore many useful kinds of buts, how to get them into shape, when to reveal them, and why it's essential that all buts come in pairs.

This is the basis of the Two But Rule: following “But that won't work” with “BUT it would if…” will lead reliably to more positive outcomes for you, your ideas, and the people in your life. Like a Shakespearean comedy, applying the Two But Rule starts out negative but turns positive in the end.

If you're a leader, a scientist, a general pain in the but, or just a regular person facing tough choices and hard problems, the Two But Rule is for you. If you're none of these, it should also be a mildly amusing digest of “but jokes” for adolescents of all ages.

There's a lot more to executing the Two But Rule than its simplicity suggests. Keep reading. You might discover some surprising things about buts and how to handle them.

Our Broken Buts

NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz never said, “Failure is not an option.” That was a line delivered by Ed Harris in the 1995 movie Apollo 13. In fact, during the tense days in April 1970—when an oxygen tank exploded in the service module taking astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise to the moon—failure wasn't just an option. It was a likelihood.

What Kranz did say was this: “Let's solve the problem, people. But let's not make it any worse by guessing.”

Solve the problem. Don't make it worse. It's a different way of looking at things than we've seen lately in technology, government, and society. Gig economy startups bulldoze whole service sectors while losing vast amounts of money simply papering over the same old problems with new buzzwords. Rash and reactionary government policies sacrifice human decency and common sense to satisfy the demands of an angry political base. Social networks and decentralized financial platforms claim to be about community and inclusion but instead deliver devastating blows to social norms and further concentrate wealth in the hands of elites.

These are the products of a no-buts-allowed culture, where the powerful, perhaps frustrated with the general pace of change and seemingly intractable problems, plow ahead with half-baked plans. They believe it's too hard and time-consuming to understand context, learn how the status quo came to be, or consider the consequences of their actions. All this underscores a deep misunderstanding we've developed about innovation and momentum.

“Move fast and break things,” Facebook's motto until 2014, set the tone for this approach to “disruptive innovation” that persists to this day. It suggests that deploying new ideas fast without taking constraints into account is better than sitting on your but pondering what to do. And at a high level, that sounds reasonable. But the things we're breaking these days are becoming hard to fix. We need a better way.

It's worth noting that the Apollo 13 team had no time to spare in saving the crew, and yet they didn't just move fast and break things. They moved even faster to identify problems, offer ideas, consider new problems presented by those ideas, and manage a complex array of constraints until they had plans that worked. They were engineers and scientists, with plenty of skeptics who didn't hesitate to point out the flaws in a plan. But they also had the mental fortitude and camaraderie as a team to say, over and over, “But that won't work, BUT it would if….” This is the Two But Rule.

For example, when the damaged Apollo 13 command module ran out of life support, the three crew members moved into the two-person lunar module, but the CO2 scrubbers were inadequate for the increased load. Left unfixed, the crew would have died of carbon dioxide poisoning. The command module's scrubbers could handle the job, but they needed to be fitted to the lunar module's round ports…and they were square. So the ground crew figured out how to fashion a makeshift connector from duct tape, plastic bags, and parts from a spacesuit.

They applied the same approach when they discovered a problem with navigation, a serious problem with the power supply, and issues with restarting the dead command module when it was time to re-enter Earth's atmosphere.

In more than one case, a contrarian viewpoint averted further disaster. An initial plan to use the main engine for a direct return to Earth was scrapped in case it had been damaged in the explosion. Later, when they ejected the service module and observed the actual damage, it was clear they had made the right choice.

In another case, flight controller John Aaron directed the team's attention from other problems to the spacecraft's dwindling power supply, convincing them to cut power in time to have enough battery reserves for re-entry. And later, he threw out the standard playbook and ordered an unorthodox power-up sequence. If he hadn't, the ship would have run out of its remaining battery power before reaching home.

Every time they found something in a procedure that wouldn't work, they found a way to make it work or to approach the problem in a new way. Fortunately for the crew, what they didn't do was ignore the skeptics—or let skepticism bring them to a halt. For every “But that won't work” (1But), they found a “BUT it would work if…” (2But) and then repeated the cycle, always matching a 1But with a 2But, a 3But with a 4But, and so on. Failure, it turns out, is only an option when you stop on an odd-numbered but.

Two But Basics

We've been moving fast and breaking things for a long time. And now, we're faced with problems so big, complex, and immediate—from climate change and social unrest to the rise of our AI overlords—that our only option is this: Solve problems. Don't make things worse. And somehow move faster than ever. This is what Momentum Thinking is all about. So let's get into some details.

Momentum Thinking starts when someone presents a problem to solve or offers an opportunity to capture. In either case, someone is forming an intention.

For Apollo 13, the intention was clear: bring the crew home safely. The priority was unambiguous: scrap the moon landing and bring the crew home safely. And the immediate nature of the emergency focused the minds of everyone involved: bring them home safely before they run out of life support.

These three factors made it more likely that the team could overcome the fact that they had no idea, at first, how to pull it off. It's not always that straightforward. Intentions,...