The Value of Saying I Don't Get It, But I Get It

A title that makes you go “what is this guy talking about?” but it’s a genuinely important thing.

The phrase came up the other day in conversation with a friend.

It’s easy to picture if you imagine a founder who started a company alone: sometimes a person is terribly alone.

An experienced executive, or someone trying to build the present on top of lessons drawn from past failures, is, in that context, truly alone.

Few people in the world try again after a fairly large failure. So naturally, among the successful, there tend to be a lot of “people who have only ever known success.”

They don’t understand the entrance to a painful failure.

They don’t understand that conflict, or the feeling that makes you want to sob.

The members working hard at the same company, in the same office, eating from the same pot. Where they are now is the same, but where they came from is different.

So, inevitably, it’s lonely.

I too have, in my own way, made failures that people who know me well would call “you really messed that up.” More than once.

This “failure” might just be wordplay, but it’s a little different from what’s called a “mistake.” It isn’t something done carelessly, and it isn’t an oversight born of inexperience. It’s a failure that comes from encountering something you can’t choose against even after foreseeing the consequences, and following your own heart or convictions anyway.

You’ve probably lost track of what I’m even talking about, haven’t you?

But for a very small number of people, what I’m talking about should be “completely understood.” So, again, it’s lonely.

To that person I can say, “I don’t get it, but I get it.”

Fundamentally, one person’s inner conflict cannot be understood by others.

Some people understand it technically, but the kind of consultation where someone struggles technically is really just a worry of the “I just want to talk to someone to organize my thoughts” variety. That kind of thing doesn’t make you pass blood in your urine.

“Well, I can at least listen” is another one of those warm, familiar lines. But feeling better from being listened to lasts only for that moment, and it doesn’t settle any resolve.

When you deliver the line “I don’t get it, but I get it,” in reality you understand the content almost completely. But presenting that understanding is a different matter. His conflict belongs to him alone, and it’s on the foundation of its conclusions and results that he moves forward.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2022/08/1285/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.