From 'Get Shit Done' to 'Just Handle It'

I used to wear “GSD” like a badge.

Get Shit Done. It was my answer to everything. Something breaks? I’ll handle it. Team’s stuck? I’ll unstick them. Project’s behind? I’ll push it through.

Now I’m not so sure that’s the flex I thought it was.

The realization didn’t come from work. It came from my personal life—from the third time in a week someone reached out expecting me to fix something they could have handled themselves. Not because they couldn’t. Because they’d learned I would.

That’s when it clicked.

I wasn’t being helpful. I was being a dependency.

The Thing About “GSD”

“Get Shit Done” sounds like strength. And for a while, it is.

You’re the person who breaks through walls. The one who doesn’t flinch when something hard lands on your desk. The firefighter who runs toward the smoke while everyone else backs away.

Here’s what it actually is:

Velocity without structure.

• Mentality: Tactical. Aggressive. Focused on activity.
• Connotation: Brute force. Break through the wall by running at it.
• Focus: The task.
• Weakness: It doesn’t scale. It creates hero dependencies. It prizes finishing over solving. It’s about output, not outcome.

“GSD” is noise masquerading as signal.

You finish fast. But did you solve the problem? Or did you just create a pattern where people expect you to solve it again next time?

What I Was Actually Building

I thought I was building a reputation for reliability.

What I was actually building was a system where people didn’t have to think—because I would.

The volleyball coach in me saw it first. If I’m always the one making the adjustment, the team never learns to read the game themselves. If I solve every rotation issue, they never develop court awareness.

The same pattern shows up everywhere:

• Personal life: People lean on me because I’ll “just take care of it.”
• Work: Teams wait for me to unblock them instead of finding the path themselves.
• Leadership: I’m the bottleneck because I conditioned everyone to route problems through me.

I used to think that made me indispensable.

Now I think it just made me tired.

The Shift: “Just Handle It”

“Just Handle It” sounds similar. But it’s a completely different framework.

Accountability over effort.

• Mentality: Strategic. Confident. Focused on resolution.
• Connotation: Calm, competent, assured. You don’t just fix the problem—you own the outcome and see it through to a resilient state.
• Focus: The system.
• Strength: Durable solutions. “Handling” something means you solved the foundational issue, not just the surface symptom.

This is pure signal.

You’re not rushing to finish. You’re ensuring it stays finished.

And here’s the key part: “Just Handle It” is something you can delegate. You can’t delegate “GSD”—that’s a trait, a posture, a way of being. But you can build a system where everyone is empowered to handle things.

That’s the evolution.

From Coder to Architect

“GSD” is what I did when I was at the keyboard. When I was the one executing.

“Just Handle It” is what I need now—as an architect, as a leader, as someone accountable for systems, not just tasks.

The difference:

• GSD describes effort. “I worked hard on this.”
• Just Handle It defines ownership. “The problem is gone.”

And ownership scales. Effort doesn’t.

When I operate as “the person who gets shit done,” I create a hero model. I’m the single point of failure. I become the thing I’m supposed to prevent.

When I operate as “the person who handles it,” I’m modeling a behavior. I’m showing the team what accountability looks like. I’m setting the standard.

I’m delegating the outcome, not the task.

The Tension I’m Still Sitting With

Here’s the part I’m still figuring out.

Letting go of “GSD” means letting go of an identity. For years, being the person who handled things was how I proved my value. It was my proof of worth.

What happens when I stop being that person?

What if people don’t see me as useful anymore?

At first, I wondered: Is this just me getting older? Slower? Less willing to grind?

But that’s not it. I’m not less capable. I’m just seeing the limitations of a model I used to think was bulletproof.

The problem isn’t that “GSD” stopped working. It’s that it never scaled. And I’m at a point where I need things to scale.

The Real Question

So here’s where I’m landing—for now.

“Just Handle It” is the right framework. But it brings up new questions I don’t have clean answers to yet:

Does this scale?

Can I actually build a culture where everyone “just handles it”? Or am I projecting my own standards onto people who don’t operate the way I do?

Does this raise the floor?

If I stop being the person who swoops in and fixes things, will the team rise to meet the standard? Or will things just… break more often?

How do I set this expectation without sounding like an asshole?

“Just handle it” can sound dismissive if you say it wrong. It can sound like “figure it out yourself” instead of “I trust you to own this.”

How do I communicate ownership without sounding like I’m abdicating support?

I don’t know yet.

What I do know is this: The shift from “GSD” to “Just Handle It” isn’t semantic. It’s strategic.

It’s the difference between being an operator and being an architect.

And if I’m going to lead—really lead—I need to trust the people around me to handle things the way I handle things for them.

Even if that means letting go of the identity that got me here.

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This is what I think today. Ask me again in six months.