“Fast, Cheap, Good: Pick Two”

“Fast, Cheap, Good: Pick Two” is a rule of thumb about the competing demands of building: speed, low cost, and quality cannot all be secured at once. David Walker applies it to the construction of Twenty Mile House and the neighboring White Castle, turning a practical maxim into a compact contrast between two projects and their radically different tempos.

The Maxim and Its Context

Walker recalls a story that, during the filming of Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola had a sign on his trailer reading “Fast, Cheap, Good: Pick Two.” The phrase presents construction as a choice among three desirable qualities: a builder may prioritize two, but must accept the compromise imposed on the third. In Walker’s account, the saying is less an abstract slogan than a measure of the work unfolding around him.

Two Projects, Two Choices

Walker says that he and Bernadette Fox chose “cheap” and “good,” and were slow as a result. Their Twenty Mile House was still unfinished when the White Castle was ready for its occupants: the White Castle had reached that point before Walker and Fox had even closed the walls of their house. The difference in pace makes the maxim tangible, setting careful, prolonged work against a neighboring project completed at extraordinary speed.

The White Castle’s Irony

The White Castle crew’s choice, in Walker’s wry formulation, was “fast” and “fast.” Hundreds of workers descended on the site, working around the clock in three successive eight-hour shifts. The repeated word turns the maxim into a joke about a project whose speed appears to overwhelm the ordinary trade-off; its rapid progress is the point of comparison, not evidence that the other constraints have disappeared. The phrase thus gives Walker a vivid shorthand for the contrast between the two building efforts and the pace at which each took shape.