You’d be forgiven if you thought the title of this post was a typo. Or some weird, butchered Russian word. Or, as a friend of mine, who recently introduced me to the term, said: “I always thought it was some kind of Yiddish thing…”

YCDBSOYA is an acronym. You can get it on tie pins from the 1950s. It stands for “You Can’t Do Business Sitting On Your A$$”.

Before we had productivity apps, life hacks, and 12-step frameworks for success, we had this. A simple, powerful, and slightly abrasive kick in the pants. A reminder that creation, innovation, and success are not passive activities. They are contact sports.

The world is drowning in ideas. We have notebooks full of them, whiteboards covered in them, and Notion docs packed with “the next big thing.” But ideas are cheap. They are potential energy. The magic, the money, and the momentum are all locked in the second half of the equation: Action.

YCDBSOYA is the antidote to the modern epidemic of “analysis paralysis.” It’s the cure for the endless cycle of research, planning, and strategizing that feels like work but produces nothing. It’s the voice in your head that screams, “Enough talk. It’s time to build. It’s time to ship. It’s time to sell.” You don’t learn how to swim from reading a book; you learn by jumping in the damn pool. You don’t build a business by perfecting a slide deck; you build it by making the call, writing the code, and putting your offer in front of a customer.

Action is the ultimate clarifier. It’s only when you’re moving, doing, and engaging with the world that you get real feedback. You can’t steer a parked car. You have to be in motion.

Those old-timers who wore YCDBSOYA on their tie pins understood a fundamental law of the universe: The world doesn’t pay you for what you know; it pays you for what you do with what you know. Thinking is essential, but it must be a prelude to action, not a substitute for it. Planning is crucial, but it must serve the doing, not delay it.

Now, get up. Go. And build something that matters.

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And we are back… I mentioned this a few weeks ago – time to unveil the new, updated, better, bigger, bolder GYSHIDO manifesto! And I need your help (read to the end…)

As a quick reminder: GYSHIDO (which, of course, stands for “Getting Your Shit Done”), a term originally coined by Will Butler and introduced to me by Daniel Epstein from the amazing Unreasonable Group, started out as a single webpage with seven little principles a dozen years ago. Since then, it has grown into a global movement – the original manifesto was translated into seventeen languages by our community, people have made videos enacting the principles, a university in Germany has created a course teaching the principles to …

Walt Disney went bankrupt. At just 20 years old, Walt’s first company, Laugh-O-Gram Studio, brought together some of the most talented animators in the world, laid the groundwork for the creation of Mickey Mouse – and was a financial disaster. Before the company went out of business just two short years later, cash was so tight that Walt lived in his office and survived on cold beans from a can and bathed at Union Station because he couldn’t afford hot water. He even resorted to catching mice in his office – one of which inspired Mickey Mouse.

Have you ever noticed how some songs sound loud but strangely lifeless? That’s not just your imagination – it’s the result of over-compression, a trick sound engineers use to make music louder, but at a cost to both quality and, surprisingly, your ears. Compression “squishes” music: loud parts become quieter, quiet parts louder, making everything sound equally loud. This boosts punchiness on small speakers, but strips away nuance and, as new research suggests, may even harm your hearing.

It’s been a hot minute since we last spoke. I didn’t disappear; I just got busy… Busy with radical✦, my advisory firm, busy with building out our bi-weekly Briefing (which you absolutely should subscribe to – two times a week you will get our latest research and insights on the future of technology and business), our free resources (check it out – we make a bunch of our best tools available for free for you), and busy with working on GYSHIDO. Yes, GYSHIDO – the brutally honest, no-BS productivity movement we launched some dozen years ago.

On a sunny, cloudless day in the summer of 2012, I found myself sitting in one of the classically uncomfortable seats at Denver International Airport, waiting for my connecting flight to depart. At 6 feet 4 inches (or 1.96 meters), I am, by most measures, tall. I am also fairly skinny – back in 2012, while training for a series of ultramarathon races, my body fat was down to around 5%, and I weighed around 165 lbs / 75 kilograms. This means that when I encounter people who are as tall as I am, they tend to be heavier – think basketball players, rather than super tall, skinny runners.

There once was a startup. The founders, plagued by a problem they encountered in their own lives, went out into the world to seek a solution. They spoke to countless others who shared their plight, listening intently to their woes and wishes.

With determination in their hearts and fire in their eyes, they returned to their humble garage and began to craft a magical device. Day and night they toiled, fueled by the stories of those they’d met. Their creation grew more wondrous with each passing moon, for it was born from the very essence of the people’s needs.

Dee Hock, the founder of VISA (the world’s largest credit card payment system), was one of the eminent thinkers in management and organizational theory. As a lifelong student of Hock, his work and insights, I came across the following — which I thought about summarizing in my own words but realized that it’s too good to be butchered by me.

On Leadership:

“I used to have sessions with my employees once a week. Anyone could come, and we’d talk about anything on their minds. They always wanted to talk about management. ‘How do you do it?’ ‘What’s the best way?’ So I would ask them, ‘What is the single most fundamental responsibility of a manager?’

There is a fantastic story told by bodybuilding legend Arnold Schwarzenegger:

I’ll always remember the first time someone asked me questions in the gym. It was about their legs. They said they couldn’t grow, and they wanted to know which exercises to add to their routine to hit the thighs. First, I said, “Let’s see your squat.” And they said, “My squats are fantastic. I can squat 405.” They got the weight on their back and lowered it approximately 2 inches, and came back up. That’s when I learned that people have a habit of looking for the next big thing when they haven’t spent any time mastering the simple thing in front of them.

First things first—it has been a while. As you have undoubtedly realized, my Heretic posting schedule has slowed to a crawl. Which doesn’t mean I don’t post—I just happen to post (twice a week) on the radical Briefing. Check it out; you might like it! With this out of the way, let’s talk about GyShiDo.

GyShiDo?

Yes, GyShiDo. The Art of Getting Your Shit Done. 😁

More than a decade ago, Daniel Epstein, Will Butler, and I created—somewhat as a practical joke, but also dead serious—the GyShiDo Manifesto, after realizing that our individual superpowers were simply that we do get things done. I wrote down some principles, registered the domain, launched a website (all in a mad 48-hour GyShiDo …

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