I got it! I got it! I got it! (I don’t got it.)

Goonies, the group of young misfits who discover the ancient map of a legendary pirate, taught me numerous life lessons as a child:

• How to outsmart clumsy mobsters
• How to take advantage of opportunities
• How to form trusted friendships with unlikely characters
• How to come prepared with contraptions like slick shoes and homemade fireworks.

There’s one scene in particular that always made me smile. Not the famous Truffle Shuffle, sorry to day, but this little moment:

Chunk was drinking from a water cooler while the other kids were racking their creative brains to figure out how to bust through the floor. He then accidentally knocks into the appliance, and trying to save it from falling he yells:

“I got it, I got it, I got it!”

“I don’t got it.”

“You klutz.”

That scene not only makes me laugh, it makes me think. Especially in our empowerment obsessed, hyper individualistic, afraid to ask for help society, where the universal tagline seems to be, I got this.

Have you noticed in the past decade or so how often that phrase is uttered? In commercials, movies, or just passing by people on the street. Anytime someone is a hundred percent sure of their ability to make something their bitch, they say, I got this.

Or, if they are encouraging someone else, they say, you got this. It means to encourage and emphasis ambitious success.

You believe in yourself to keep a chaotic situation under control to the point that you feel you own it. Often the statement will be followed by a flexed muscle emoji.

Now, the motivational speaker inside me appreciates this sentiment. Life is hard, and we all say what we have to say to ourselves to stay motivated.

But at the same time, it’s easy to overestimate our own abilities. No matter how many times we announce to ourselves that we’ve got this, sometimes, we don’t got this.

I remember about five years ago, an airline partner at our travel startup decided to stop using our algorithm to run the backend of their flight booking website. They told us they could easily build the system in house, and no longer had any use for our product.

Fair enough. Wasn’t much we could do to stop them from churning, so we thanked the client for their years of business, and wished them well on their new project.

Three months later they came crawling back only to admit:

Wow, this algorithm is actually way harder than we thought. Our version didn’t run as well as yours, and in fact, part of our website has been down for the past few weeks because we screwed up the code and don’t know how to fix it. Can we rehire you?

No problem, we said. But now our price is triple.

Kidding, we didn’t charge them more.

But maybe we should have. Because they were effectively admitting, we don’t got it.

Have you ever trapped yourself in this moment before? When you already convinced yourself that you had something covered, but then you realized, oh shit, I was wrong?

Good. That’s a powerful lesson in humility, and frankly, everyone should go through it. Sometimes we don’t got it, and that’s okay. Others can help.

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Additionally, one last point around this distinction between, I got this, and, I don’t got this, is around intellectual property.

Every day, we seem to read yet another heartbreaking story about plagiarism, interpolation and copyright infringement. Companies and brands are suing each other for millions of dollars for supposedly stealing their technology.

My whole philosophy is, go right ahead and steal it. Seriously. Be my guest.

When it comes to a specific process, or some technology built around that process, I can easily tell people what to do, but if they don’t do it right, they’re screwed. And most people who steal things probably won’t have the skillset to do it right anyway.

Because if they did, then they wouldn’t need to steal it, because they would have built it themselves.

In short, they assume they got it, but in reality, they don’t got it.

What a klutz.

Chunk would have been proud.

What have you convinced yourself you’ve got in the bag, but you actually need more help with than you suspected?