There’s a moment that happens in every conference room, every strategy meeting, every product review. Someone asks a question. A hard one. About the market, the customer, the problem you’re actually solving. And everyone in the room does the same thing: They perform expertise.
“Well, based on our research…”“The data suggests…”“Industry best practices indicate…”
They build elaborate structures on foundations of air. They protect their credibility. They sound smart. And the question never gets answered.
I watched this happen last month. Startup, Series A, building something in climate tech. Investor asks: “Do your customers actually want this feature, or is this what you think they should want?” The founder launched into a five-minute explanation about market trends, competitor analysis, user personas. Beautiful presentation.
Total bullshit. Because the actual answer was four words: ”I do not know.”
Here’s what most people miss: Those four words aren’t the end of the conversation. They’re the beginning. The founder could have said: “I don’t know. Let’s discover. We’ll call five customers this week, ask them directly, and report back what changed about our understanding.”
Same four words. But they create a different outcome entirely.
1 – “I don’t know” (admission)
This is the hardest part. Not because you don’t know – you already don’t know. You’re just really good at hiding it behind frameworks and jargon and “strategic thinking.”
The hard part is saying it out loud.
Admitting uncertainty feels like professional suicide. Like you’re disqualifying yourself from the room. But here’s the thing: everyone already knows you don’t know. They can smell the performance.
Saying “I don’t know” doesn’t make you look stupid. It makes you look honest.
And honesty creates space. Space to actually figure it out instead of defending a position you’re making up in real-time.
2 – “Let’s discover” (action)
This is where the magic happens. This is what separates genuine intellectual humility from imposter syndrome dressed up as wisdom. You don’t just admit uncertainty and shrug. You admit it and move.
Call the customer. Run the experiment. Build the small version. Test the assumption. Do the thing that will replace “I don’t know” with “Now I know.”
Most people skip this. They stay stuck in the admission phase, treating uncertainty like quicksand instead of a starting line. Or worse, they theorize. They workshop. They build decks about what they might discover if they ever actually went looking.
”Let’s discover” requires action, not analysis.
3 – “What changed?” (learning)
You made the calls. You ran the test. You shipped the thing. Now comes the part everyone forgets: closing the loop.
What did you learn? What changed about your understanding? What do you now know that you didn’t know before?
It isn’t about being right. It’s about updating your map of reality with new information. Most people are so busy performing growth that they never actually grow.
The four-word sequence only works if you complete it. Admission without action is paralysis. Action without learning is thrashing.
But all four together? That’s how you stop pretending and start building.
The next time you’re in a room and someone asks a hard question, about your customer, your strategy, your actual value proposition, try something radical: Tell the truth. Say “I don’t know.”
Legendary climber Reinhold Messner lost his toes on Nanga Parbat in 1970.
Not all of them – just enough. Enough that technical rock climbing, the discipline he’d mastered, became impossible. His brother Günther died on that mountain. Messner barely made it down alive, frostbitten and broken.
Most people would have called it quits. Hung up the boots. Found a “real job.”
Messner did the opposite.
Unable to rock climb, he pivoted to alpine climbing – big mountains, high altitude, pure suffering. And then he did something nobody thought possible: He climbed all fourteen 8,000-meter peaks on Earth. Without supplemental oxygen. The first person ever to do it.
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.
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?’
