You hear these mottos all the time, right? Especially at work. They put ’em on posters. “Innovate!” “Synergize!” Stuff like that. Mostly, it’s just noise, if I’m being honest. But sometimes, one of them actually sticks with you, or rather, life kinda forces it on you. We had this one, our own little “spurs motto” as we used to call it around the office, though the official HR name was probably something far more boring. It boiled down to this: “Just Get It Done.” Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Yeah, tell me another one.
How “Just Get It Done” Really Hit Home
I properly understood what that phrase meant, I mean really understood it, a couple of years back. We were knee-deep in this massive project, a real beast. The deadline was, as always, breathing down our necks, and the pressure was on. Then, wouldn’t you know it, the main guy who understood our creaky old reporting system, the only one who could make sense of its spaghetti logic, decided to take a sudden two-week vacation. Vanished. No handover, nothing. Lovely.
So, picture this: a critical report fails. Clients are screaming. My manager, bless his cotton socks, just turns to me, gives me that look, and says, “Well, you know the team’s ‘spurs motto’. Just get it done.” Gee, thanks. Super helpful advice right there.
So, I got to work. What else could I do?
- My first move: I tried all the standard procedures. Pulled up the documentation – which, surprise surprise, was about as useful as a chocolate teapot. Full of out-of-date screenshots and wishful thinking.
- Plan B: I then wasted a good day, maybe more, just poking around the system, trying to reverse-engineer what our vanished colleague had built. It was like trying to read ancient hieroglyphics. I was getting absolutely nowhere, just more and more frustrated.
- The ‘what the heck’ moment: I was seriously considering just throwing my hands up, telling them it was impossible without Mr. Vacation. But then, I vaguely remembered him mentioning some obscure command-line tool he sometimes used for troubleshooting this very system. He’d said it was tricky, not for the faint-hearted.
At that point, I was out of options. So, I dug through old emails and shared drives until I found the name of this tool. Downloaded it. Fired it up. The interface looked like something from the 90s, all text-based and cryptic. I spent pretty much all night, chugging lukewarm coffee, just trying to understand the basic commands from some equally ancient online forum posts.
It wasn’t a smooth ride. I’m pretty sure I nearly brought down the test server a couple of times with some badly formed queries. My apologies to the server gods. But, slowly, painstakingly, I started to get a feel for how the data flowed, or rather, where it was getting stuck. It turned out to be a ridiculously tiny error in a configuration file, something so small you’d miss it a hundred times. Something our expert would have probably spotted in minutes. It took me nearly two full days of slogging.
When I finally got the report to run correctly, there wasn’t a parade. Just a quick “good job” from the manager. But for me, that whole “Just Get It Done” thing, our little ‘spurs motto’, it wasn’t just some empty corporate slogan anymore. It was the taste of bad coffee, the ache in my back from hunching over the keyboard, and the stubborn refusal to be beaten by a stupid machine.
So, what did I learn from all that?
Mottos are cheap. You can stick them on a wall, put them in an email signature. But actually living them, that’s where the rubber meets the road. It’s not usually about some heroic, glorious moment. It’s about those quiet, frustrating, thankless tasks when you’re completely stuck, and you just have to dig in and, well, get it done. You try things, you mess up, you learn a bit, you try something else. That’s the real motto in practice, if you ask me. It’s not about being brilliant; it’s mostly about being too pig-headed to quit. And sometimes, that’s all you need.
