You Can Just Do Things: An Honest History of the Phrase

The phrase “you can just do things” is not a meme. It is a thesis about the nature of the world — one that has been independently rediscovered by builders across every generation and every geography. The load-bearing claim is simple and verifiable: the structures around you were assembled by ordinary people, which means ordinary people can reassemble them. The corruption of that claim — the slide from the world is malleable to rules do not apply to me — is equally well-documented. Understanding both is the work of this article.

Why this phrase has a history worth tracing

Most motivational slogans arrive fully formed, peak on social media, and vanish. “You can just do things” is different because it keeps being reinvented — by people who had not read each other, working in different decades, from different starting points, arriving at the same structural observation about human agency. That convergence is evidence of something real. It also means the phrase carries accumulated baggage: each reinvention absorbed the blind spots of its moment, and by the time it became a viral Silicon Valley mantra in 2024, it had picked up enough ideological freight to make thoughtful people uncomfortable. Separating the signal from that freight is the point of this piece — and it is the founding intellectual commitment of FounderWise.

Movement I: The 1994 interview and the original claim

In 1994, Steve Jobs sat for a private interview with the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association. He was still at NeXT; Apple had not yet taken him back; the conventional wisdom of the moment held that he had failed. In that interview, Jobs talked about his values, advice to entrepreneurs, and his thoughts on how best to live life. What he said has since been clipped, remixed, and quoted so many times that the original context is almost invisible — which is precisely why it matters.

Jobs argued: “When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. But that’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is, everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.”

Read carefully, this is not a claim about genius. It is a claim about permission. Jobs was not saying that building things is easy, or that constraints do not exist, or that everyone who tries will succeed. He was saying that the mental model most people carry — the world as a fixed given, life as navigation within it — is empirically wrong. The world was built. It can be rebuilt. The task, as he framed it, is to “shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it” — because “it’s kind of messed up, in a lot of ways.”

That last clause is the one that gets dropped in the motivational-poster version. Jobs was not describing a frictionless world. He was describing a broken one that needed people willing to engage with it. The permission he was granting was not exemption from difficulty; it was exemption from the false belief that difficulty means impossibility.

The context matters: Jobs said this in 1994, when the conventional wisdom was that both he and Apple had failed. Toy Story would not be released until the following year. The iPhone was thirteen years away. NeXT was failing. He was not speaking from a position of validated triumph. He was speaking from a position of someone who had built things, lost them, and was still building — which gives the claim a different weight than it carries when repeated by someone who has never yet risked anything.

Movement II: Aaron Swartz and the activist inflection

Aaron Swartz arrived at the same insight from a different direction. An American computer programmer, writer, political organiser, and internet activist, Swartz was involved in the development of RSS, the website framework web.py, and the social news site Reddit. He also focused on sociology, civic awareness, and social activism. What distinguished Swartz from most technologists of his generation was that he treated the malleability of the world not as a personal opportunity but as a moral obligation.

His writing returns repeatedly to the same theme Jobs had articulated: that most people accept the world’s current configuration as natural, and that this acceptance is a choice — one with consequences. In one interview, Swartz said: “I feel very strongly that it is not enough to just live in the world as it is and just take what you are given, to follow the things that adults told you to do.” The phrasing is almost identical to Jobs’s, but the moral register is different. For Jobs, the insight was liberating — it opened a door. For Swartz, it was demanding — it created a responsibility.

Swartz’s counsel was: “Think deeply about things. Don’t just go along because that’s the way things are or that’s what your friends say. Consider the effects, consider the alternatives, but most importantly, just think.” This is agency with a conscience attached. The world is malleable — but the question of toward what end is not optional. Swartz’s version of the ethos included the obligation to ask whether the thing you are building actually improves the world for people beyond yourself.

This is the inflection that the 2024 meme version largely discarded. Swartz understood that high agency without ethical direction is not founder energy — it is just power. He was never interested in making money; he was interested in something much more important, something larger, something he could not just walk away from. That distinction — between agency as a tool for personal advancement and agency as a tool for structural change — is the fault line along which the phrase eventually split.

Movement III: John Collison and the tenacity addendum

In May 2022, John Collison — co-founder of Stripe, one of the most consequential fintech companies of the past two decades — posted a tweet that became one of the most widely circulated observations in the startup world. He wrote: “As you become an adult, you realize that things around you weren’t just always there; people made them happen. But only recently have I started to internalize how much tenacity everything requires. That hotel, that park, that railway. The world is a museum of passion projects.”

The phrase “museum of passion projects” is doing significant intellectual work. A museum is not a place of easy creation — it is a place of preserved effort, of things that survived long enough to become permanent. Our lives are full of things that other people have created from their heart and soul and out of pure passion for their work: computers, books, and museums themselves. Collison’s framing adds something that Jobs’s version implied but did not foreground: the sheer quantity of sustained effort required. Not just the permission to build, but the reckoning with what building actually costs.

Stripe became as successful as it is today from the passion to build tools that help other people start businesses online. But it started because John and his co-founder Patrick found something they were good at — writing software — and directed that talent to a big problem: paying for things on the internet. Things often happen simply because somebody finds a match between something they are good at and something the world needs.

Collison’s version of the ethos is the most structurally honest of the three. It does not promise that the world is easy to change. It observes that the world has already been changed — repeatedly, by people who were not obviously exceptional — and that the mechanism was sustained effort directed at a real problem. The museum metaphor also implies curation: not every passion project survives. The ones that do are the ones that found a genuine fit between the builder’s capability and the world’s need. This is a far more rigorous claim than “you can just do things.”

Movement IV: The 2024 meme and the curdling

By 2024, “you can just do things” had become a Silicon Valley mantra — a phrase deployed in tweets, podcasts, and Substack posts as a kind of incantation against hesitation. Over the preceding months, it had become a popular mantra and meme around Silicon Valley — described by some as “just do it” for nerds. At its best, this popularisation did genuine good: it gave permission to people who had been told their whole lives that certain paths were closed to them. Many people had been told what they could not do — that you cannot get a job without a college degree, that you cannot get paid for being funny, that you cannot build software without knowing how to code. It turned out they were wrong. You can get jobs without degrees and start businesses without business school.

That is the phrase working as intended. But something else was also happening. The same slogan was being used to dismiss structural friction that is not imaginary — regulatory complexity, access to capital, network effects that compound advantage for incumbents, and the simple fact that the cost of a failed experiment is not the same for everyone. At the core of a certain tech-culture persona lies a deep-seated sense of entitlement and privilege. Many come from affluent backgrounds, having attended prestigious universities and enjoyed access to resources and opportunities that others can only dream of. This privilege often translates into a dismissive attitude towards those perceived as less accomplished or knowledgeable — overlooking the contributions of colleagues from diverse backgrounds and assuming superiority without recognising the systemic advantages they have been afforded.

The phrase did not cause this problem. But it became a vehicle for it. When “you can just do things” is said by someone with a Stanford network, a family safety net, and a warm introduction to a tier-one venture fund, it carries a different epistemic weight than when it is said by a first-generation founder in São Paulo, Lahore, or Lagos who is navigating the same ambition with a fraction of the structural support. The insight is still true in both cases. But the implied ease is not.

This is the distinction the honest version of the ethos must hold: the world is malleable — and malleability is not uniformly distributed. The friction is real. The question is whether the friction is decisive. In most cases, for most people, it is not. But pretending it does not exist is not high agency. It is a failure of situational awareness.

Movement V: What the research actually says about agency

The good news — and it is genuinely good news — is that the core claim of the ethos is empirically supported. Agency is not a fixed trait. It is a learnable orientation.

The psychological construct most directly relevant here is locus of control, first theorised by Julian Rotter in the 1950s and extensively studied in entrepreneurship research since. Locus of control is a powerful motivational variable that has the potential to be an important driver of individual entrepreneurial behaviour. It is different from other personality variables in that it relates to the perception of behavioural consequences and therefore has a proximal impact on opportunity recognition.

Research indicates that an internal locus of control is positively associated with entrepreneurial intentions, whereas an external locus of control is negatively related. Self-efficacy shows a significant positive correlation with entrepreneurial intention, and structural equation modelling reveals that self-efficacy partially mediates the relationship between locus of control and entrepreneurial intention. In plain language: people who believe their actions shape outcomes are more likely to start companies, and more likely to persist when those companies encounter difficulty.

Entrepreneurial self-efficacy and internal locus of control measure the perceived learning from failure and recovery ability that can support continued entrepreneur engagement and new opportunity recognition after a failure. The analysis shows that these psychological characteristics can influence the willingness of entrepreneurs to learn from failure and increase their ability to recover — which can increase the willingness to continue in entrepreneurship and help them to recognise new opportunities.

The critical implication is this: if internal locus of control predicts entrepreneurial success, and if locus of control is a cognitive orientation rather than a fixed personality trait, then the work of building founder agency is not motivational — it is educational. Bandura’s work on self-efficacy is closely related to the idea of locus of control. It provides a deeper understanding of how belief in one’s own abilities can influence behaviour and success. You do not need to convince people they are special. You need to give them accurate information about how the world works, evidence that people like them have changed it before, and the practical skills to act on that information. That is a programme. That is what FounderWise is built to deliver.

These findings underscore the importance of strengthening people’s sense of personal control and self-efficacy to enhance their motivation and capacity to pursue entrepreneurship. The phrase “you can just do things” is, at its best, a compressed version of that finding. At its worst, it is a way of avoiding the harder work of actually building the conditions under which more people can act.

The honest version of the ethos

Strip away the meme, the entitlement, and the motivational-poster aesthetics, and what remains is a claim that can be stated with precision: the world is a human construction, human constructions can be changed, and the belief that you are capable of changing them is both learnable and consequential.

That claim has three load-bearing components, each of which needs to be held simultaneously.

First: the world is genuinely malleable. This is not optimism. It is history. Every institution, every market structure, every piece of infrastructure you interact with today was built by someone who did not know in advance that it would work. The hotel, the railway, the payment network — every invention and tradition is, in essence, a passion project that has survived long enough to become an ordinary ordeal. The ordinary-ness is the point. These things feel inevitable in retrospect. They were not inevitable in prospect.

Second: malleability is not uniformly accessible. The friction between intention and outcome varies enormously by geography, capital access, network, regulatory environment, and the specific problem being attacked. Acknowledging this is not defeatism. It is the precondition for building systems that actually compound — because systems that ignore real constraints fail at the first encounter with them. The founder who maps the terrain accurately, including its obstacles, is more likely to navigate it than the one who was told the terrain is flat.

Third: agency is a practice, not a personality. The most important implication of the research on locus of control and self-efficacy is that these orientations are not distributed at birth. They are built through exposure to models, through small acts of agency that succeed, through communities that treat action as normal rather than exceptional. This is why the phrase matters as a cultural artefact — not because saying it changes anything, but because the communities that take it seriously tend to produce more people who act. And action, compounded, is how the world changes.

The honest version of “you can just do things” is not a permission slip. It is a description of reality — one that most people have been systematically undertaught, and that capable operators use as a foundation for everything else they build.

What this means

A forward-looking close

The phrase will keep being reinvented. Someone reading this in a decade will encounter it again, in a new form, attributed to someone they admire, and it will feel fresh because the underlying insight is perennially true. The world is still being built. The people building it are still, on average, no smarter than the people who are not — they are simply operating with a different model of what is possible.

What changes across each reinvention is the context: the tools available, the markets open, the problems most urgently requiring attention. The Jobs version was about the personal computer era and the permission to build hardware and software. The Swartz version was about information freedom and the obligation to build in the public interest. The Collison version was about the hidden tenacity behind every ordinary thing. The 2024 meme version was about the democratisation of the internet economy — and also, at its worst, about a particular demographic’s comfort with its own privilege.

The next version — the one worth building toward — is about something more demanding: not just the permission to act, but the infrastructure to make that permission real for a much larger share of the world’s founders. That means open knowledge, honest accounts of how things actually work, and communities that treat agency as a learnable skill rather than a birthright. It means, in short, doing the work rather than just saying the phrase.

That is what this publication is for. If you are building something — anywhere, at any stage — the six gaps that stop most founders from compounding are worth understanding before you encounter them. And if you are thinking about how trust and credibility are built in practice, the history of credibility is the structural companion to this piece.