> Do you think if I could just go through the usual channels, I wouldn't? > > That is not how this debt works. > > It demands a result, not an appeasement. > > There is a hook in me. > > One that you cannot see. > > But it is there. Related: > Too often I see someone who is responsible for accomplishing an important goal doing the best they can in the face of immense odds. It may sound counterintuitive, but the mandate of such a job is not to “do the best you can.” It is to get it done. > > https://boz.com/articles/get-it-done Related: > There are certainly big chunks of the world where the way to win is to hack the test. This phenomenon isn't limited to schools. And some people, either due to ideology or ignorance, claim that this is true of startups too. But it isn't. In fact, one of the most striking things about startups is the degree to which you win by simply doing good work. There are edge cases, as there are in anything, but in general you win by getting users, and what users care about is whether the product does what they want. > > http://www.paulgraham.com/lesson.html > > (My note: Appeasements work for hackable tests. They don't work for tests that aren't hackable - for example, whether users keep coming back to your product week after week and spending money on it, despite all the other alternatives trying to compete for their money.) If you're working for a company "get it done" usually means something like "make a product that users keep coming back to and prefer over the alternatives that they're currently using, even after accounting for the psychological 'cost' (effort, time, trusting) of switching to something new" (or get customers for an existing product), and if you're founding a company it usually means "stack cash and/or discounted future cashflows". It also means being able to recommend alternative approaches to what you've been asked, if it's needed to reach what you know is the underlying objective. And it means knowing what you’re good at and where you can make something great. If you can’t make something great for X, suggest the alternative to X that still meets the underlying objective but that you can make great.