Guy Reams (00:00.588)
This is day 44. Focus, get over it, get back to work.
I learned this rhythm on the plains, not from a book or a seminar, but from watching people who did not have the luxury of delay. On a ranch or a farm in the Midwest, a broken line does not wait for a meeting, and the storm does not reschedule for your feelings. You walk the fence, you notice the break, you fix what must be fixed, and you keep on moving. There is no poetry in it, yet there is a kind of quiet wisdom. You focus, you get over it,
and you get back to work. That rhythm is the mentality I'm learning to apply in my company. We are building a product. The clock is always running. Every day reveals a new snag and integration hangs. A customer finds an edge case. A teammate gets pulled away. If we dwell, we stall. If we dramatize, we drift. The people I admired on those ranches would not do that. They would set their eyes on the one thing that was blocking the gate. They would remove the block.
and they would put their hands back to the task. Focus is not a mood. Focus is a decision. It starts with naming the real problem in plain words. What is the obstacle that stopping production right now? Not what could go wrong tomorrow. Not what should have gone better last week. What is the present kink in the line? When we name it clearly, we reduce it to something we can move. Vague problems make us feel important.
Specific problems make us useful. Getting over it is not resignation. It is movement. After we see the problem for what it is, we accept its existence without decoration. We do not blame. We do not ruminate. We do not craft a perfect narrative. We ask the simple questions. What is the smallest fix that restores forward motion? Who is the one person who can make that fix? How do we remove one step from the path?
Guy Reams (02:05.429)
Then we do that. We choose momentum over melodrama. Getting back to work is the part that keeps the whole engine running. Once the blockage is cleared, you do not float around in a victory lap. You return to the main effort as if nothing happened. This is the discipline that separates those who progress from those who spiral. I have watched teams solve the right issue, then spend the rest of the afternoon reliving the crisis, congratulating themselves, or draft in retrospective that reads like a short novel.
Meanwhile, the herd still needs water, the crop still needs to be moved, the customer still needs value in hand, the hay is about ready to get wet from the rain. In product work, this rhythm becomes a kind of heartbeat. A deployment fails. Focus? Why? Get over it. Roll back. Patch. Test. Get back to work. The pricing page confuses users. Focus. Which section? Get over it. Rewrite the headline. Run a quick test. Ship it. Get back to work.
A partnership goes sideways. Focus. What is the one term that is misaligned? Get over it. Clarify. Change the term or walk away. Get back to work. You repeat this until it becomes a muscle memory. It is not glamorous, but it is reliable. Progress is what happens when we practice it every day. There is a temptation to add grand philosophy here to build a pyramid of principles and frameworks. The field never needed that. The work itself teaches enough.
Tension is precious, emotional energy is finite. Time is not refundable. Every minute you spend on theater is a minute you do not spend on throughput. The job is to increase the flow of value, clear the obstruction, then return to the flow. If you want a practical way to adopt this ethic, try a simple loop during the day. Begin with a single line written on a card where you can see it. Focus, get over it, get back to work.
When something breaks, call a brief huddle with the one person who can help, or take the action yourself if you can. Speak the problem in a simple sentence. Commit the next small step that returns momentum in one sentence. Take that step, then end the huddle with the same words, back to work. The team will start to move in that cadence. The tone grows quieter, the noise dies down, the work simply advances. You may worry that this pace will ignore learning. It does not.
Guy Reams (04:32.656)
It just moves the learning to its rightful place. Reflection belongs in the margins where it does not interrupt the line. The ranchers taught me that too. You make notes after the herd is settled. You maintain the equipment when the gate is closed. You save your analysis for the cool of the evening or the winters. Then you return in the morning to repeat the three steps with little more wisdom than yesterday. You may also worry that this ethic will be hard on people. In my experience, it is the opposite.
Rumination consumes people. Delay exhausts people. Clear action relieves them. When we keep the questions simple and the steps small, we create a workplace where stress drops and trust rises. We are not asking anyone to be a hero. We are asking everyone to be present, to be honest, and just simply to keep on moving. Every product is a long walk across uneven ground. There will be washouts. There will be broken boards. There will be days when the sky opens and everything you
built feels fragile. On those days the three steps matter even more. Focus, get over it, get back to work. If you keep that rhythm, the distance will take care of itself. The gate will open, the valve will ship. The progress you seek will arrive in the only way progress ever arrives. One clear action at a time. Focus, get over it, get back to work. Say it until it becomes the way you move. Then watch what happens when an entire team adopts the same quiet ethic.
The noise fades, the throughput climbs, the work speaks for itself.