Just Get It Done
The most obvious career advice is often the least followed.
During Covid, I was having a Zoom beer with a senior colleage. You remember Zoom beers? Two laptops, two beers, two people pretending this counted as socialising.
Somewhere in that call, we both said almost exactly the same sentence at the same time.
I wish more people would learn how to get things f*cking done.
We laughed. Then we went quiet, because we both knew we meant it. And that was the moment I knew we were properly aligned as leaders. Not on the strategy. Not on the roadmap. On the thing underneath all of it.
I’ve been thinking about that sentence in my career ever since, because I’ve come to believe it’s the single best piece of advice you can give anyone.
Learn how to get things done.
I know. Painfully obvious. Borderline insulting. Perhaps you were expecting a framework, maybe a matrix, something with quadrants.
Alas, I am not a McKinsey consultant.
But stay with me, because the obviousness is exactly the trap. It sounds so simple that almost nobody bothers to actually learn it. And the gap between people who have and people who haven’t is the biggest gap in every company I’ve ever run, invested in, or advised.
Bigger than the talent gap. Bigger than the experience gap. It’s not even close.
The uncomfortable bit
Here’s the thing nobody puts on the careers advice posters.
You can be brilliant at programming. Brilliant at AI, financial planning, product, design, marketing, client services, whatever your thing is.
But if you cannot take a piece of work from started to finished, no Founder type or CEO will ever truly value you.
They’ll like you. They’ll respect the talent and the skill. They’ll say nice things about you in meetings. And they will quietly route every important piece of work around you, to someone who finishes things.
Because here’s what a leader actually needs:
It isn’t intelligence. Companies are drowning in intelligence. Even more so now than ever before.
It’s someone they can hand a problem to and then stop thinking about.
That’s it. That’s the whole job description underneath every job description. The people who become that person get pulled upwards through organisations like they’re on a rope. Everyone else gets managed.
And yet, paralysis over analysis is everywhere. Smart people circling a decision for weeks. One more data point. One more stakeholder chat. One more version of the plan, now with better formatting. It feels like rigour.
It’s fear with a calendar full of meetings.
Meanwhile someone three desks over shipped something imperfect on Tuesday, learned from it by Thursday, and shipped again the following week.
Ask me who’s ahead in six months.
What “get things done” actually means
Getting things done is not the same as doing things.
Lots of people do things. They’re extremely busy.
But activity is not the skill. Completion is the skill.
When you break completion down, it’s not one skill at all. It’s about ten of them, running in a loop. Here’s the actual anatomy of getting something done, start to finish.
Understand the problem. Properly. Not the problem as described in the ticket, the actual problem. Half of all wasted work comes from someone sprinting off to solve the wrong thing brilliantly. Ten minutes of ‘silly’ questions at the start saves ten weeks of clever work at the end. Ask the silly questions. Nobody remembers who asked them, everyone remembers who solved the wrong problem.
Figure out the solution. Note, a solution. Not the perfect solution, not the elegant one you’d present at a conference. The one that solves the problem you just understood, at a cost that makes sense, in a timeframe that matters. Good enough and shipped beats perfect and theoretical, every single time, and it isn’t a fair fight.
Make a plan. A real one. What happens first, what happens next, what done looks like, when. And crucially, a plan in service of motion, one that gets you moving this week. If your plan takes longer to write than the first milestone takes to hit, the plan has become the project, and you should be worried about you.
Bring the right people on the journey. Get the wrong ones off. This is the step everyone skips and it’s the one that kills most projects. Getting things done almost never means doing it alone. It means recruiting help before you need it, making it easy for the five people you depend on to say yes quickly, and, the bit nobody enjoys, moving the wrong people out of the way. Every stalled project has a passenger. Sometimes it’s a person who was never bought in. Sometimes it’s a person who joined out of politeness. Be honest early. A hard conversation in week one beats a dead project in month three.
Do it. Yes, this gets its own step, because you’d be amazed. The number of projects with a beautiful problem statement, a lovely solution, a gorgeous plan, and no actual work done is funny until it’s your company. At some point somebody has to sit down and do the thing. Be that somebody.
Communicate progress. Before anyone asks. This is the cheapest trick in the entire book and almost nobody uses it. A short update, sent regularly, unprompted, does two magical things. It makes people trust you with bigger things, and it surfaces blockers while they’re still small. Most stalled projects aren’t stalled on the work. They’re stalled on a conversation someone has been avoiding for a fortnight.
Review progress critically. Your own progress, before someone else does. Is this actually working, or does it just feel busy? Are we hitting the milestones or quietly redefining them? The people who get things done are their own harshest reviewers, which is precisely why nobody else ever needs to be.
Adapt as you need. The plan will be wrong. Not might be, will be. Reality doesn’t read your plan. Adapting isn’t failure, it’s the whole point of moving, because you only find out where the plan is wrong by executing it. The doers find out in weeks. The planners protect the plan from contact with reality, call it diligence, and stay wrong in comfort for months.
Complete the project. Actually complete it. Not ninety percent. Not “basically done.” Done done. Shipped, live, handed over, in use. The last ten percent is boring, fiddly and thankless, which is exactly why it’s where most people quietly leave. It’s also where one hundred percent of the value lives. Nobody’s career was ever built on a pile of nearly.
Retro it. What worked, what didn’t, what you’d do differently. Ten minutes, honestly done. This is the compounding step, the difference between doing ten projects and doing one project ten times. Skip it and you stay the same speed forever. Do it and every project makes the next one easier.
Look at that list again. Understanding, judgement, planning, influence, delivery, communication, self-awareness, adaptability, follow-through, reflection. That’s not a task. That’s a decathlon. Running daily, on work that’s usually ambiguous and half-blocked, with people who have their own priorities.
This is why “get things done” is such deceptive advice. It sounds like the minimum.
It’s actually the whole game. Simple is not the same as easy, and this is one of the hardest skill stacks there is, which is exactly why it’s so rare, and exactly why it’s so valuable.
Why you should care
Learn this and two things happen.
First, you’ll succeed at more or less whatever you point yourself at. Completion compounds. Every finished project buys you three things, a reputation, a lesson, and a lottery ticket. Most tickets don’t win. But the person finishing fifty things a decade holds a lot more tickets than the person polishing five, and then everyone calls them lucky.
Second, you’ll stand out far more than you realise. This is the strange part. You’d think a skill this valuable would be crowded. It’s empty. You’re competing in the one category with almost no competition. Every CEO I know is starving for these people. I’ve hired hundreds and backed over sixty companies, and if you made me pick one trait to bet on, ahead of raw talent, ahead of credentials, ahead of charm, it’s this one. It isn’t close.
And here’s the timing argument. It’s 2026. AI can write the code, draft the deck, build the model, produce the analysis. The clever bits that used to take a long time are getting cheaper and faster by the week.
What isn’t getting cheaper is a human who can understand a messy problem, rally other humans around it, and drive the whole thing to actually finished. The ultimate skill in 2026 isn’t on any course.
Simply learn how to get things done.
One last thing
I’m not writing this from the summit. I still catch myself circling decisions. I still have a project or two “basically done.”
The skill never fully arrives, for anyone. You just get faster at noticing the gap and closing it.
But if you’re early in your career and wondering what to work on, work on this.
Not instead of your craft, but parallel to it.
Be the person a founder can hand a problem to and stop thinking about.
And you will win.
This is great. One of the things that I used to do in meetings was fix something that someone brought up before the meeting was even done. Someone says "X has responded or told me what they need. I emailed them a week ago." If I wasn't running the meeting a quick Teams chat, or stepping out to make a quick phone call could solve most of those issues.
Communicate progress before anyone asks! This is something everyone should be more focused on. If your leader needs to 'check in' with you, you are already behind - anticipate the needs, including the need for upward communication.