GarthBox

Growth has a curriculum, and the whole thing costs about four dollars at the local store.

First you underfill. The balloon comes off the faucet looking like a sad grape, and you learn that timid doesn’t splash. Nobody ever got soaked by caution.

Then you overcorrect. You hold it on the faucet one proud second too long and it bursts all over your shoes, and you learn that more is not a strategy. More is just more, delivered faster, to your socks. Ask me sometime about the year I tried to launch coffee inside a beer bar.

Then comes the right amount, and you know it by feel before you know it by logic. A well-filled balloon has a wobble to it, a kind of confidence. Heavy enough to matter, loose enough to survive the trip across the yard. The bar taught me this one. One location, filled properly, beats three filled to bursting, which is why I’ve never bought a second faucet.

Then multiple at once. This is the stage where you find out the amounts don’t transfer. Right now I’m filling a bar, a marketing job, a blog, a novel, and a daughter’s construction projects, and every one of them takes a different pressure. Calibration isn’t a skill you earn once. It’s a skill you earn per balloon.

And then the last stage, the one nobody grades you on: you learn to have fun with it. Which turns out to be the entire point, because nobody in the history of summer has ever filled a water balloon to keep it. A balloon filled right is meant to leave your hand.

Stay Positive & Here, Catch

The week before Great Taste of the Midwest, Madison fills up with people who plan their vacations around beer. Every taproom in town does something with that week. You barely have to decide to. The week has its own gravity, and a party will assemble itself out of it the way iron filings snap into place around a magnet, whether or not anyone is steering.

I was planning ours. Somewhere between the taplist and the logistics, I asked myself a question I try to keep loaded: what’s the intent?

The first answer was thin. Because it’s that week. Because everybody does something. Because a party shaped hole opens in the calendar and a bar is biologically incapable of leaving a hole unfilled.

That’s the moment the question earns its keep. Not when it confirms you’re on track. When it catches you rolling and asks who put the car in neutral.

Intent evaporates quietly. That’s the trouble with it. Activity keeps its shape long after the aim has left it, the way a garden hose holds its coil for years after it comes off the reel. The newsletter goes out weekly because it went out weekly. The party gets thrown because the week demands one. Nothing looks wrong. Everything hums. And none of it is pointed at anything.

Which is why the question can’t be a gate you pass through once at kickoff while everyone nods into their coffee. It’s maintenance. You ask it the way you check the oil, on a schedule, and especially on the machines that seem to be running fine. The machines that seem fine are exactly the ones that drift.

When I made myself answer it for the party, I didn’t feel caught. I felt lit. Deciding who a night is for, what it should do for them, what we want to be true on Sunday that wasn’t true on Friday, that isn’t homework. That’s the fun part. The obligation stayed the same size. The work got bigger on the inside.

Four words, and they run three audits at once. Whether the thing is being done with care or just being done. Whether it will actually land on anyone. Whether you’d choose it again next year, on purpose, in writing. A lot of what a business does was never asked any of the three.

The only time the question stings is when it catches you without an answer and you have to make one on the spot. But that isn’t the question being cruel. That’s it doing the one job you keep it around for. A smoke detector isn’t annoying because it’s loud. It’s annoying because something’s burning.

The party almost threw itself. It would have been fine. Fine is what happens when nobody asks.

Stay Positive & Ask It Again Tomorrow

Some of your work gets assigned to you. Some of it nobody asked for. You need both to grow, and you mostly need them at the exact moments they frustrate you.

I learned this at Blackhawk Farms, where a few times a summer I pay good money to ride my motorcycle in circles and, occasionally (okay…frequently…), to be annoyed.

Last time out I spent a string of laps behind a rider who kept botching Turn 5. He turned in too early, every lap, pinching himself tight against the inside of the corner like a man hugging a doorframe during an earthquake. My pace dropped to his pace. My first reaction was combustion.

But a track day is not a race, and you can’t pass everywhere, so I did the only useful thing available. I studied him. If early and tight was wrong, then late and wide might be right. Next lap I pushed my entry out, stayed patient, went wide, and held the throttle harder and longer than I ever had through that corner. It opened up like a door I’d been shouldering for a year.

Then the traffic cleared. With nobody’s taillight in front of me, I could run Turn 5 at the edge of what I’d just learned, lap after lap, pushing the line and my throttle a little further each time.

That’s the whole system. The rider in front of you teaches you the corner. The empty track is where you find out whether you learned it. Remove either one and the learning stops. All traffic and you never test your limit. All open track and you’re just repeating your own habits at higher speed.

The bar taught me this before the track did. When I jump behind the bar with my teammates at Garth’s Brew Bar, I’m in traffic, and it’s wonderful. Feedback comes at me from every direction, how they pour, what they say, what they notice that I miss. But when I get the bar to myself, I push. I try to surprise a guest past what they walked in expecting. I ask them, right there while the foam is still settling, what would have made the visit better. In the moment, as often as I can. That’s my open track.

Same at work. Assigned marketing tasks are traffic. The deliverables, the foundational voice of customer grind, the things you just need to do and ship. So be it. That work runs slower than your ego wants, and it teaches you the corners of the company. My unasked work right now is a readout nobody requested: what’s working, what needs improvement, and how we might prioritize efforts that span departments. It only exists because of what I noticed while grinding through the assigned laps. Traffic wrote the notes. The open track is where I get to ride them.

So here’s an audit, one friend to another: find the tension in your week.

If you’re stuck behind something slow and it’s making you a little crazy, good. Study the line while you’re back there. If you’re building something nobody asked for and your throttle hand is a little nervous, also good. That’s the stretch. But if nothing frustrated you and nothing scared you even slightly, you’re not in traffic and you’re not on the open track. You’re in the paddock. And the paddock teaches you nothing except how to stand around.

Stay Positive & It’s Not Just The Blend That’s Important; It’s The Tension Of Both

“Really like where this is headed. Can we make it feel a little more polished? A little more positive?”

If you make things for a living, you’ve gotten this note. It shows up friendly, wearing a lanyard, asking for ten minutes. And by the third or fourth time you’ve run the translation, you know exactly what it means. Take out the parts where I can hear you breathing or where the tension lives.

I want to say something about that note, friend to friend, because I’ve watched what it does to people I care about, and I’ve felt what it does to me.

The note is rarely about your work. Somewhere above the person giving it sits another person, and above them another, and every one of them reads your draft the same way. Not “will this move the room.” More like “what does this make me look like.” A director imagines the VP’s face. The VP imagines the CMO’s. The CMO imagines the board. By then your document isn’t a message to the market anymore. It’s a mirror in a hallway of mirrors, and everyone stops to check their own reflection in it.

Optimizing for that has a name in the art world. It’s the brief for hotel art. Pleasant. Coordinated with the carpet. Selected by someone whose only instruction was that no guest, from any country, in any mood, at any hour, could possibly object to it. And it works. Nobody objects. Nobody looks at it either. In the entire history of hospitality, no one has loved a mauve abstract enough to smuggle it out in a duffel bag.

That’s what a hallway of mirrors does to work. Edit by edit, your carnival poster becomes hotel art. It hangs everywhere. It lives nowhere.

Years ago I did marketing for a company that helped parents manage their kids’ screen time. For the press push we mailed journalists a kit with an egg of Silly Putty inside and a note that said, roughly, this is what it feels like when you put the iPad down. Squishy, tactile, a little ridiculous. If that idea had crawled through four layers of review, someone would have asked whether putty was on brand. Someone would have suggested we lead with the data. And we would have shipped a very professional one-pager on the benefits of reduced screen time, a genre of document no journalist has ever covered. The putty was the whole argument. The putty is what they remembered.

Alas… the advice.

Sort the notes. There are notes that make the work clearer and notes that make a reviewer safer, and they are not the same species. A clarity note points at the reader. I got lost here. This runs long. I don’t believe this claim. Take those greedily, and say thank you like you mean it, because your personality was never living in the typos. A comfort note points up the chain. Is this too casual. Will this land okay with leadership. That note isn’t editing the work. It’s editing the reflection.

Be honest about which parts of you are voice and which are tics. Not every quirk deserves a hill. Some of what feels like personality is habit wearing a costume. The stuff worth defending is the stuff doing work. The line that makes a reader feel seen. The image that makes the idea stick. Defend that. Let the rest go without a funeral.

Trade generously and defend narrowly. Hand over the structure edits like party favors. Then pick the one line that carries your fingerprint and say, out loud, this one stays, because it’s the reason anyone will remember the rest. People argue less with someone calmly defending one thing than with someone bitterly defending everything.

And keep a cut file. Nothing sanded off you actually dies unless you let it. Every line an approval chain has shaved off me in fifteen years has landed somewhere I own, including right here, which is one long act of putting the fingerprints back on.

If you’re the one holding the red pen, one thought before you go…

Every time you edit someone’s work to protect your own reflection, you teach them to pre-sand the next draft before you ever see it. Do that for a year and you’ll manage a team of beige. You didn’t hire beige. You hired people, and the market can smell the difference, because the market has never once objected to inoffensive work, and has never once remembered it either.

Invest in a person’s bravery and it comes back to you through every customer who reads their work and feels something. That’s the direction the current is supposed to run.

The goal was never winning every edit. The goal is staying recognizable. Somewhere down the line, somebody reads a thing before the name loads and thinks, I know whose this is. That’s positioning. For a company, sure. But first, for a person.

Stay Positive & I’d Like To Recognize Your Work Anywhere… Even At A Hotel

“Do you mind if I reach out somewhere down the road with a question or two?”

I say that at the end of every meeting I have with a CMO or a VP of product marketing. Every single one. I don’t know if I’ll actually reach out. I don’t know what the questions would be. Sometimes there never are any, and the ask just sits there like a spare key under a flowerpot that neither of us thinks about again.

I ask anyway. The asking is free. The not-asking gets expensive later.

Here’s the story that taught me why. A vendor came through the bar a while back selling landjaeger, the dried sausage. He wasn’t just selling it. He was writing a book about it, too, which tells you something, because a man who loves a sausage enough to write a book about it is a man worth knowing. Before he left, he asked: when the book comes out, months from now, could we host a pop-up at the bar for the release?

Sure, I said. Easiest yes of my week. It cost me nothing that day.

Then months passed. Seasons changed. Kegs came and went. And when he finally emailed to coordinate, the strangest thing happened, which is that nothing hard happened at all. The yes was already sitting there, warmed up, like a car someone started for you on a cold morning. He didn’t arrive as a stranger with an ask. He arrived as a plan we’d already agreed to, finally showing up.

People will tell you goodwill fades, and they’re right. Gratitude has a half-life. Do someone a favor in March and by October it has quietly composted into “oh right, that guy.” But he never asked me for a favor. He asked for permission, and permission keeps differently.

A favor is fresh bread. Permission is landjaeger, a food that was invented specifically to survive: hunters’ pockets, long winters, forgetful months. Cure it right and it outlasts the season it was made in.

He was selling shelf-stable meat and accidentally teaching shelf-stable asking.

Marketers already run this play, though most of them have forgotten what it is.

An email signup box is just “do you mind if I reach out?” wearing a sweater. Every opt-in is a pre-ask, a tiny down payment of consent made when the stakes are low. The brand that collects permission early gets to show up months later as a follow-through. The brand that shows up cold has to build the bridge and cross it in the same breath, and bridges built at full sprint tend to wobble. Cold outreach pays retail. Permission pays wholesale.

(I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to calm down a room that freaks out when someone admits that people who signed up for a newsletter haven’t gotten anything yet and we should send something ASAP. Wrong. Send something when you have something meaningful to share. That’s what they actually opted-in to, anyway.)

The same math runs through hiring, partnerships, fundraising, and every hallway of a career. The person who laid a thread six months ago pulls gently on it. The person who didn’t starts from zero, in front of someone whose inbox is a landfill of zeros.

The tactical takeaway is small and repeatable: end things with the door ajar.

Ask before you need. Remind lightly, so the cure takes.

But under the tactic there’s something softer, and I’d rather say it than let it go unsaid.

When I ask a CMO if I can reach out someday, what I’m really saying is that I’d like this to not be the last time we talk. That’s all. Professional doors mostly close quietly and forever, and it costs one sentence to prop one open. Some of those doors never get walked through. A few do. And the book, I’m told, is coming along.

Stay Positive & This Is One Of Those Cases That Permission Is Better Than Forgiveness

An application came in for a beertender opening recently, and the name rang a bell. Over a year ago we connected with a couple who host Star Trek trivia and brought them in to run some nights at the bar. It would have been easy to pass on that. A themed trivia night is coordination, promotion, and a bet on a Wednesday that’s typically slow to begin with. We made the bet, the nights have came and went with varying degrees of “success.”

Then, more than a year later, one of the hosts decided she wanted to pour beer with us.

Here’s an older one. Four years ago I put together a pop-up for a guy who was just getting his insurance and financial advisory practice off the ground. It took real work to coordinate and the turnout was a disappointment. If I were keeping strict books, that event goes in the loss column. Except we still talk. And I carry a quiet certainty that our worlds will collide again somewhere down the road, in a way neither of us could put on a calendar.

I’ve come to believe people and work come back around more than they don’t. It just never feels that way, and I think I know why.

Waste keeps receipts.

The moment something flops, you get an itemized bill: the hours, the emails, the folding tables, the Wednesday you’ll never get back. It’s vivid, it’s immediate, and it files itself.

Returns don’t do that.

Returns saunter in years later, out of uniform. A job application. A referral you can’t trace. A warm reply from someone you’d half forgotten. Nothing about the return says which seed it grew from, so your brain never credits the original line item.

The loss gets booked instantly and the gain arrives anonymous, which means your internal ledger reads “waste” even in a life where things come back around constantly.

Marketing runs on the same crooked accounting.

The customer conversations that don’t turn into anything. The positioning work that gets politely shelved. It all feels like a time suck right up until someone walks in two years later already trusting you, and the dashboard hands the credit to whatever they clicked last. Last click gets the receipt. The trivia night never does.

The discipline isn’t optimism, exactly… It’s refusing to let the itemized losses vote against the anonymous gains.

Best to say yes to the odd connection. Do the pop-up. Have the conversation that goes nowhere. Your books will tell you you’re wasting your time. But we both know your books are missing half the entries.

Stay Positive & Call Them “Future Investments” If You Need The Reminder

I have started grading protein bars the way some people grade wine. This week’s winner is a Built bar, and it won for a reason that has nothing to do with protein: the cookie dough sits on top in rounded little lumps, laid there like a mason laid them.

Any food scientist will tell you it would be cheaper to mix that flavor straight into the bar. Same ingredients, same macros, one less step on the line. Somebody at Built chose the extra step anyway, and I noticed. That’s the whole story of marketing in nine words.

Somebody chose the extra step, and somebody else noticed.

We made the same choice at Garth’s Brew Bar when we installed the side-pull faucet. If you haven’t seen one, it’s a Czech-style tap with a long lever you swing sideways, and the beer comes through a fine screen so the foam builds wet and dense, like cream settling into a decision. It is objectively the harder option. It costs more. It takes longer to train a new beertender on that one faucet than on every other tap combined, and for the first week they approach it the way you’d approach a horse you’ve been told to parallel park.

But guests see it. They watch the lever swing and the foam stack, and they ask about it, and now we’re talking about Czech beer culture and the three classic pours and why foam is not the enemy, and a beer has become a story they’ll retell at somebody else’s table. The faucet earns its keep because it performs in public.

Now walk a few steps to our reach-in cooler. Everyone sees the cooler. Nobody sees what it cost to make the cooler quiet. There are cheaper commercial units that come self-contained and hum politely. Ours needed its condensers exiled to the backroom, where they rattle away like a garage band nobody booked. No guest has ever complimented the condensers. No guest ever will.

I keep mentally sipping on that pairing, because the lesson is not “make every effort visible.” Some effort belongs backstage. That’s why backstage exists.

The real work is editorial. You are always deciding which of your effort performs and which of it hums in the dark, and your customer only reads the visible ledger. They will pay you for the cookie dough on top. They cannot pay you for the mixing they never saw.

Which is also the trap. If Built quietly folds the dough in next month, I will notice before the wrapper hits my cart. It would probably taste identical. It wouldn’t matter. The bar would suddenly read as processed, as a company cheaping out, the way you feel it when a friend starts signing texts with just their initial.

Visible effort is easy to add and nearly impossible to withdraw. The moment you put the deviation where people can see it, it stops being a flourish and becomes a promise.

So the standing audit for anything you make… what’s on top, what’s mixed in, what’s in the backroom?

Put your best deviation where it can be seen. Hide the machinery that’s only noise. And once you’ve shown someone the extra step, keep taking it.

Stay Positive & What’s Humming In Your Backroom?