In the Comma Club, we talk a lot about our words, deeds, and thoughts, and how our habits and relationships shape us. Sometimes it’s enlightening to break out a scratch pad and put some numbers to these things.
Say what you will about the world in 2025, but it’s fun to have AI around to explore all the curiosities that come up. I worked with a LLM and did the math to estimate how many times I have heard the phrase “I love you” in the last 40 years—factoring in my wife, my kids, all of my family, and all my close relationships where that phrase is appropriate.
My favorite part of the calculation was the assumptions the model made about how often kids say they love you at different ages. It guessed that you’d hear it daily from a 2–8-year-old, 0.5 times a day (whatever that means!) from a 9–12-year-old, and then rapidly going from weekly to monthly to quarterly as kids become teenagers, young adults, and mature adults, respectively.
Now, I’ve been blessed to have a lot more time with my kids than that, and a lot more affection, but I was interested in the process of the estimation as much as the actual estimate.
With all of this in mind, it turns out I’ve heard that phrase at least 70,000 times in the last 40 years. And I’ve said it at least that many times. I chose 40 years because there was another phrase I wanted to clock.
A foundational lesson on influencing, responsibility, and how they connect
As I think about my legacy, one thing I’m interested in is sharing what I’ve learned with the next generation. And the insights I’m sharing here are fundamental ones.
As you read, I doubt you’ll feel the lesson applies to you. But I know that it will help you express your similar insights to those you want to inspire to be the best they can be as entrepreneurs, leaders, and employees.
In fact, the second half is all about employees, and it resembles the comments and conversations I’ve had coaching teams to be better at influencing. The lesson here is exactly the kind that will save time and suffering if it’s learned early. I’d love to hear your version of these insights and who you share them with and how.
The song of a frustrated entrepreneur?
Over the last 40 years, I’ve probably heard the phrase “They just don’t get it,” and all its variations, 2,000 times. That’s about once a week. Someone will be telling a story about a pet opinion someone didn’t agree with, a great idea they have that they can’t get going, or something they’re always trying to get their team to understand—and they’ll end it with: “They just don’t get it.”
And that made sense to me. We all know how easy it is to spot an opportunity from our perch as entrepreneurs. To us, it’s not more complicated than fund it and put a team around it. I came to think of it as the song of the frustrated visionary.
That’s how I heard it at first. My life had been blessed to that point and I was always pursuing ideas that I could get across to people and teams who understood. How could the problem be anything besides the other person?
Or is it something else?
But after maybe the 1,001st time, I started to hear a different ring to it. I realized I wasn’t hearing it from everyone. I didn’t hear it as often from corporate leaders. I didn’t ever hear it from VCs or investors. I didn’t hear it from entrepreneurs whose businesses were growing.
And, regardless of anything else, I didn’t hear it from people who were emotionally grounded and secure in themselves. So there was something else going on.
Over time I realized that it wasn’t the words themselves but the resentment and defeat they were delivered with. “They just don’t get it” was the phrase people were using to excuse giving up. And crucially, it excused giving up without changing your mind.
It didn’t suggest any learning from the process of discussing the idea with others, it didn’t express any insight into why the approach taken or the idea itself didn’t land, and it didn’t admit that the idea wasn’t as profitable in practice as it was exciting in theory.
Once I thought all this through, I never heard the phrase the same way. I no longer heard the song of an unjustly opposed visionary. I heard something that sounded a lot like wounded ego lashing out with blame.
The buy-in you earn and the buy-in you buy
As entrepreneurs, we aren’t experts at everything. That’s why we build strong teams of experts around us. We’re often the chief visionary, focused on upside, potential, possibility, new ground. Our experts usually focus on realizing—on grounding and producing and operationalizing, analyzing for risk and feasibility, protecting investment, and ensuring profit. That’s why we work with them.
So there are two scenarios when our experts don’t “get” our idea. Sometimes, they're right. In this case, “not getting it” protects us from mistakes. In the other case, they’re wrong. Maybe because they’re stuck in established thinking, maybe because you weren’t able to express the crux of the idea in a way that made sense. And this can happen. We have all heard about visionary inventors, execs, and others who heroically had to build support from investors, partners, or others to make their big idea happen.
In extreme cases, they spend their own money to make it happen—they bought the buy-in needed. That’s not always possible, and it’s not always the best approach. What people choose to invest in and work on isn’t the same as what people do on a mercenary basis. Hundreds of people will tell you they invented the same thing as Facebook, Dropbox, Starbucks, any number of major products, but they couldn’t get it off the ground or adopted at the same scale.
Assuming those would-be products were identical, the difference is in having earned the buy-in of others versus being impatient and trying to buy the buy-in.
It’s usually (but not always) the case that what you can’t explain to investors you can’t explain to the public. Crowdfunding is a great counterpoint to this, as it’s people who want to support the creation of something they want. Like everything else, the rules around all this are changing.
But if you can’t get it across to the teams that are going to build it, there’s no hope. If you want to be successful at a large scale, some “they” will have to “get it.” And that is ultimately the job of you, the visionary.
Whatever the case, one thing is for sure: whether they privately cursed how dense everyone seemed or had the patience of a saint, a visionary who made a fortune from their vision stayed in the saddle until the people who needed to get it, got it.
The hidden cost of “they don’t get it”
Sometimes “They don’t get it”just means, “I had a good idea, people didn’t like it, but hey, I’m still smart. Right?” Fair enough. Tending a bruised ego is necessary. Venting with people you trust is fine. And there’s nothing wrong with feeling disappointed when people you respect or admire don’t see what you see.
But buy-in from others, with all their different frames of reference, is an essential part of the recipe. Seasoned entrepreneurs know that earning that buy-in—the work of influencing—is table stakes for getting anything done at scale.
And like most things, it gets easier with practice. Over time, people grow out of the “They don’t get it” phase as they move through multiple ventures or lead larger teams. And now, when I hear it from someone earlier in their journey, I take it as a cue to coach them on the relationship between ego, influencing, and blame.
Blaming comes from feeling powerless
And here we get into what I think is the deeper reason people do or don’t give up and lash out when their ideas aren’t understood.
Listening more closely, I began connecting the “don’t get it”refrain to something else: blame language. On its surface, blaming isn’t anything special. But there’s a reason we associate blame with youth, pettiness, and panic—it comes from a place of feeling profound weakness and disempowerment.
Nonviolent Communication tells us that every time someone blames, they’re asking for help. It’s life-changing to hear blaming language as someone expressing a need for help.
They’re asking for help—demanding it, actually. They’re doing something tricky and counterintuitive: asking for help without being vulnerable. No one does this consciously. It’s reactive. It’s a wounded ego asking for first aid.
We need to know what happened and why. We need to understand who did what. This is rational analysis. Blaming is another thing altogether. If you search your feelings, you’ll be very clear on the distinction.
Blaming is what we do when we don’t know how to make something happen but don’t want to admit it.
It’s a human reflex that works less and less—and stands out as inappropriate more and more—as we gain responsibility. You can blame your little brother for breaking a vase when you’re nine. But at 30, you can’t blame your parents for not encouraging you to be what you now know you should be. At 49, you can’t really blame your spouse for a relationship rut.
If you’re the boss and you blame your team, even if they’re intimidated, it’s clear you’re not in control. In all these cases, there is nowhere to pass the buck to. It’s your problem, the rewards of solving it go to you, and you are the person all the appeals go to anyway.
Responsibility in relationships and leadership
So much of maturing has to do with setting aside patterns from earlier life. Blame is a pattern that doesn’t work for adults. Whoever got you in whatever mess you may be in, you’re always the person responsible. There’s no one else to blame. There’s immense freedom in this.
There’s cause and effect, understanding, and then there’s responsibility. In any situation or relationship you want to continue, you have to take responsibility for what happens. That doesn’t mean pretending everything is your fault—it means caring about results, not dumping blame.
Even if you had a company of one, working with AI, you’d have to make sure the AI “gets it.”
The one thing you trade for being a leader—of a business and of your life—is the luxury of ever passing the buck.
Helping others get it—and get you—never ends. At work, at home, and even in your understanding of yourself.
In life, it’s your obligation to sell, not their obligation to buy. Don’t take it personally.
Part II
Complexity, blame and influencing in organizations
The ultimate blame game at work: good complexity vs. bad complexity
There’s a concept I think about often: good complexity vs. bad complexity. Companies create both. In a lot of ways, companies are machines that produce bad complexity as they pursue good complexity—and they simplify complexity as they go on.
Good complexity is growth—more geographies, products, clients, employees. Bad complexity is the paperwork, processes, and bureaucracy that’s required to be orderly and track investment and return.
Great leaders cyclically cut the knot of bad complexity once the good complexity has paid off, usually as their teams let them know it’s necessary before taking on any more good complexity.
From the ground, this can look chaotic and avoidable, the result of poor management. And from the top looking down, this can look like it shouldn’t be a problem.
But the reality is, it’s basically a natural cycle. Not understanding this natural cycle is a root cause of cynicism—and the unreflective, naive heart of every Dilbertcartoon. And it’s the generator of the baseline lack of accountability in companies: It’s not the fault of my leadership, it’s these dumb people to blame. It’s not my fault I can’t handle all these processes and meetings, it’s these dumb leaders to blame.
Neither party can fix this without the other. And in a company, it takes influencing to connect the two sides and facilitate a conversation.
It may not surprise you to learn that employees can’t effectively influence if they do their version of “they just don’t get it” directed at their leaders.
Employees have their own version
For employees, their “song of frustration” is different. It sounds like the private satisfaction of feeling smarter than your boss, or thinking you know how to fix everything if only someone would listen. It’s the cold comfort of feeling like you’re right in exchange for making peace with not being effective.
Taking responsibility for change
This is too bad, because sometimes it’s true: employees really could fix things if they could get someone to listen. It’s in everyone’s interest to encourage them to—and help them understand how to do it.
The employees who actually drive change—the ones who get ideas implemented and rise through organizations—don’t stop at being right.
They take responsibility for the entire journey from insight to implementation. They learn influencing—the micro and macro, the tactical and the strategic, the political and the practical. Not because it’s in their job description, but because they understand that in the real world, being right is maybe 10% of the equation, and that getting things done is the only thing that gets you ahead.
Companies that reward this and facilitate this have an unstoppable evergreen competitive advantage.
Recalibrate what success looks like
In a company, (and even in some families), being right is 10% of what counts. The other 90% is the work nobody teaches you in school or in “persuasion" workshops.
It’s realizing your brilliant idea must survive within budgets, timelines, competing priorities, and politics. Your manager who “doesn’t get it” might be juggling seventeen other initiatives—three of which directly conflict with yours.
That might mean your idea can’t happen now, that might mean you need to focus on another solution, or address a fraction of the problem.
And here we see one of the underlying difficulties that demotivates employees to bother to influence change: success at work isn’t like success at home.
One of many adjustments human beings have to make to serve as a part of an organization is understanding fractional progress. In life, you may not feel satisfied by small improvements—probably because you can’t measure them in the first place—but as an employee, you can measure things.
Lean into it. After all, fractional improvements are literally what resume or CV bullets are made of.
Fractional because it’s shared
And it only makes sense that some progress or success will be fractional. Because change in organizations requires many perspectives and many stakeholders, and it’s only natural that a good idea will have many chunks taken out of it and additional pieces tacked on by the time it becomes real. It’s what happens in lawmaking, too. And just like in lawmaking, the ones who make change happen in companies create consensus and build coalitions. They translate insight into language the organization understands, grounding it in metrics and priorities that already matter, framing it according to what their audience cares about.
They don’t want anyone not to get it just because their natural inclination is to frame their point from their own perspective. Overall, they take responsibility for making their idea understood and actionable to everyone who needs to understand.
The alternative—sitting back and feeling smarter than everyone—feels good for a moment but changes nothing. Just like saying “they just don’t get it” covers your ego for a moment but doesn’t change anything at all.
Your obligation to yourself and your success
Just as it’s an entrepreneur’s obligation to sell, and not their investors’ or prospects’ obligation to buy, your company doesn’t owe you understanding—even though they would benefit from it. Cardiologists know that just because their advice is good for people doesn’t mean people will take it.
A secret in life is that if you see something others don’t, that’s not the end of your responsibility—it’s the beginning. You have to make it visible, make it make sense in their world, make it feel possible within their constraints.
You have to help them get it.
And even if the answer is no, you’ll walk away with stronger relationships, better insight, and a reputation for clarity.
Because influence isn’t about being right—it’s about taking responsibility for making the right things happen.
I hope you enjoyed this as an exercise in articulating a lesson many of us learned the hard way. I’d love to hear your personal stories and insights on the topic, and I’d love to know if you find a way to share these insights to empower and enable influencing in your companies.
Cheers,
Dave