GarthBox

I watched two strangers become riding buddies at a motorcycle tech inspection over zip ties. One guy’s kickstand needed securing, and before he could finish describing the problem, the rider next to him was already digging through his kit, coming up with a fistful of zip ties like a magician who only does useful tricks. Ten minutes later they were trading routes and phone numbers. The zip ties cost a nickel. The friendship is still running.

We keep a version of that kit at the bar. There’s a section in our backroom, cans and bottles with no tap line attached and no order waiting, standing at parade rest until a stranger shows up. Their whole job is to be grabbed. Anyone on the team can walk back, pull one, and pour a sample for a guest. No permission needed. It’s stronger than permission, actually. They’re expected to.

One of those samples turned into a Google review. A guest got handed a taste they didn’t ask for and didn’t pay for, and it landed hard enough that they went home and wrote about it. Reviews are how strangers decide whether to trust a bar they’ve never walked into. So a can from the shelf that earns nothing became five stars, and five stars became new faces at the door. The shelf that doesn’t sell may outsell the ones that do.

The mechanism matters. A spare works because it existed before the need did. You stocked it for someone you hadn’t met yet. Generosity improvised in the moment smells like a transaction. Generosity provisioned in advance smells like character, because that’s what it is. You can’t backdate a spare.

Which is why so few businesses have any… Walk through the average company and try to find something that isn’t tagged to a budget line and wired to a conversion goal. A sample that has to convert isn’t a spare. It’s a pitch with the receipt still showing, and customers can smell the receipt.

The other half is the keys. If your team has to ask before being generous, you don’t have spares. You have inventory with extra steps.

Stock the shelf, then hand your people both the access and the expectation. You invest in them, they invest it in the guest, the guest walks home and invests it back in you. Somebody has to fund the first move in that cycle, and it’s you.

In all the years that shelf has existed, nobody has abused it. Not once. The only time it has ever hurt was when it ran empty. The right person on the right stool, a perfect moment to be generous, and nothing to reach for. Running out is the only way a spare fails you.

Our dog figured all this out before I did. He picked his favorite neighbor by one criterion: the man carries spare treats. You can picture it what happened when Ella (our Bernese mountain dog) ran to him and he was out of spare treats. Oof.

Stay Positive & Restock The Shelf

Garth’s Brew Bar is one location, and I intend to keep it that way. No second spot, no franchise dreams, no empire. Which means I own exactly one pot, and the physics of one pot are unforgiving. If you don’t stir it, everything settles. The good stuff sinks, sticks to the bottom, and quietly scorches while the surface still looks fine.

So we stir. New taps (and tap handle styles… side-pull, anyone?!), new events, small experiments the regulars didn’t ask for. Not because the bar is broken, but because nothing standing still ever made a spark, and a team ladling the same soup every week goes to the bottom of the pot right along with it. Stirring is how one room stays new. It’s also how the people in it stay awake.

A note on technique, because stirring the pot has a bad rap. The rap comes from people who stir just to see what splashes. That’s not stirring, that’s flailing. A pot stirrer worth the name has a strategy and a target, and knows exactly what the dish is for and who’s going to eat it. Last month I stirred the pot on the messaging for a product video. The splash landed as a blog post and a LinkedIn post. Stir on purpose and even the mess feeds somebody.

The standard cure for a stale business is a bigger business. Another location, another line, another pot. That’s one way to stay new. It’s the expensive way, and it won’t fix a bottom that’s already burning.

Stay Positive & Stir

We were two minutes inside the trading card show when a stranger waved us over. He was holding six Eevee cards, fanned out like a tiny royal flush of joy, and he said, “I’ve been looking for someone special to give these to. I’m going to guess your daughter likes Eevee?”

She was wearing an Eevee hat. She sure does.

I’ve been chewing on that scene all day, because it wasn’t random kindness. Random would have been handing the cards to whoever walked in first. This man had been carrying a gift around like a loaded question, scanning the room for its answer. Generosity, it turns out, is a search problem.

You decide to give before you know who’s receiving, and then you go looking for the person who has already told you what they love.

And people are always telling you.

My daughter announced her whole heart with one piece of embroidered headwear. Adults do it too, just with worse hats. The concert shirt. The laptop stickers. The way somebody’s voice picks up speed when a certain topic enters the room. Everyone walks around broadcasting exactly what would delight them, on a frequency almost nobody bothers to tune.

There are two lessons in those Eevee cards, wearing one trench coat. The first is surprise and delight, which every brand claims to practice and almost none does, because they run it through accounting first. Back when I was bartending we had the buyback, the round that simply appears, no punch card, no points, no explanation beyond a nod. Its entire power lived in the fact that nothing was owed in either direction. Print the same free drink on a loyalty card and it becomes an invoice with good manners. The Eevee man kept no receipt. He didn’t ask us to follow him anywhere. He gave, he glowed, and he wandered back into the aisles of cardboard.

The second lesson is that he read the hat. He didn’t give her what he wished she wanted, or whatever he happened to have too much of. He matched the gift to the signal. A lot of marketing runs this in reverse: decide what needs unloading, then hunt for someone to aim it at. The order is everything. Delight starts with the hat, not the inventory.

If you want to train for this, try one week of a small, unglamorous practice: at the end of each day, write down the one thing you gave away. It doesn’t have to be an object. Credit in a meeting counts. Twenty unhurried minutes counts. The point isn’t bookkeeping. The point is what it does to your eyes. By Thursday you’ll be scanning every room you enter for hats.

This afternoon I’m driving around town slipping copies of my novel into free little libraries. Small wooden boxes on posts, doors squeaking, waiting. Somewhere out there is a stranger wearing the right kind of curiosity, and I will never see their face when they find it. That’s not the missing part of the story. That’s the engine.

Stay Positive & What Did You Give Away Today?

There’s a beer we bring back to the bar over and over called Teal Label, from Modist Brewing. Depending on who’s sitting in front of me, it becomes two different beers.

To one guest, it’s a sweeter hoppy beer. Four words.

She nods, she orders, she’s happy, and anything more from me would have been noise.

To another guest an hour later, it opens up: a west coast IPA built on a sweet malt base that never goes thick on you, the hops doing their piney strut on top of something almost candied, one of the few beers that our guests and our own team love so much we keep bringing it back like a band that fills the room every time it plays.

Same liquid. Same tap. Two different verbal pours, because the person changed.

I do this behind the bar without thinking. Reading the guest and picking the words is the job. Nobody trained me on it. It would be absurd not to.

Then I go do marketing and see people forgetting the whole thing. (Myself included!)

Because at work I have a house pour, and it’s revenue. Ask me why a project matters and I’ll tell you what it does to revenue. Ask me what’s broken and I’ll show you where the revenue is leaking. It’s a sturdy format. Numbers hold weight, executives trust them, and I’m good at it.

But… that’s not why I reach for it. I reach for it the way I reach for a pint glass, by muscle memory. Revenue is what I pour, whether the person in front of me drinks it or not. Stepping outside of it is hard for me in a way that switching descriptions of a beer has never been.

Recently I watched someone land a difficult point, the kind that usually dies in a follow-up meeting, and they never touched a number. They traced the frustration instead. This process makes that person redo her work. It leaves this team waiting days for an answer they should have in an hour. It turns a simple request into four apologetic emails. They colored in the annoyance person by person until the whole room could feel the ache of it, the way you feel a pebble in someone else’s shoe once it’s been described well enough. Nobody argued. Things moved.

The revenue version of that argument existed. I could have built it in my sleep… could have said it in that call! It would have earned polite nods and a slide in somebody’s deck.

The complicated point wasn’t the hard part. The point was the beer. The hard part was the pour, and they chose it for the room instead of for themselves.

That’s the thing about a default format. It feels like a strength because you’re fluent in it, but fluency is a comfort you give yourself, not a service you give the listener.

A story, a number, a question, a sketch, a demonstration, a map of who’s quietly suffering: they’re all the same active ingredient in different dosage forms, and the dose gets chosen for the patient, not the pharmacist.

Behind the bar I’ve always known this, although things are a bit more simple when it comes to guests who come in versus an organization of 400 people… but that’s what makes it even more important, doesn’t it?

Stay Positive & Know Your Audience

Sound familiar?

I keep attending the same meeting. The company changes, the room changes, the brand of sparkling water changes. The meeting stays.

Somebody names a gap everyone already knows about. Heads nod. Somebody proposes a fix. More nods. The agreement in the room is warm and thick as August. Then the meeting ends, and the gap just sits there in the parking lot, waiting patiently for next quarter’s version of the same conversation.

For a long time I thought the problem was commitment. It wasn’t. Everyone in that room was supportive. Nobody was lying.

The problem was that the solution had been positioned for no one.

It floated above the table in company-speak, relevant to everybody in general and nobody in particular. And priorities don’t get set in general. They get set by each person deciding, privately, that this thing matters to them. (I’d go so far as to say, it’s not even decided via some digital tracker. It’s their spirit. You know… the thing we get hired to actually bring to the table of the work. The thing AI doesn’t have yet.)

Marketers already know how this works. We would never send a prospect an unaimed message. We segment, we study the buyer, we adjust the words until they land on the exact nerve. Then we walk into an internal meeting, present the initiative in our own dialect, and wonder why it dies of politeness.

I learned this the slow way. If you want sales to care about a gap, attach revenue potential to it. Not a vision. Not a principle. A number with a dollar sign that could plausibly show up in someone’s pipeline.

If you want product to care, bring a prospect’s actual words, verbatim, ugly grammar and all. Product people can resist a strategy document forever, but a customer’s own sentence gets under the skin and stays there.

Think of it as columns. Every function has one, the place their eye goes first. Revenue for sales. The customer’s voice for product. Risk for finance. Hours for ops.

Your job, before the meeting, is to fill in the column for every person who will be sitting there. Same gap, same fix, translated into every currency in the room. (I hinted the work of cross-department alignment was possible. Not that it was easy!)

Then you need one shared scale so the whole group can rank the pile together, and it should be embarrassingly simple. Effort, time, impact.

Something anyone can read in ten seconds. The translations get each department to lean in. The shared scale keeps them from tearing each other’s lists apart.

None of this is extra work. (And damn, I’d say it even buys you back time in meetings that never happen and words that never get echoed in them from the previous status meeting…)

It’s the same audience research we already do for strangers, finally aimed at the people we eat lunch with.

And there’s something almost tender about it done right. It says I know what your week looks like, I know what you’re measured on, I did the work to make this land in your world. That’s not politics. That’s respect wearing a spreadsheet, which makes the whole thing work even harder!

The gap doesn’t care that the room agreed. The gap moves when each person in it can see their own reason to move it.

Stay Positive & Ask Them What It’s Worth To Them (Might Mean A 1-1…But Ask It)

Before an email leaves my outbox, it has to survive one question: could anyone put their signature at the bottom of this and the recipient wouldn’t know the difference? If the answer is yes, it doesn’t go. Not yet. An email anyone could have signed is a form letter wearing my name tag, and the person on the other end can smell the laminate.

We spend a lot of energy trying to be recognizable by our answers. Wrong end of the animal. Answers have gotten cheap. Any of us can summon a competent answer to nearly anything before the coffee finishes dripping.

What still can’t be borrowed is the question you refuse to stop asking. People recognize you by what you ask before you act. That’s the signature now.

I have three I’ll share now.

At work, every prompt I send to Claude carries a standing order: along with whatever I asked for, bring me one competing idea, still on strategy, that adds an element of surprise & delight. I built a rule that lets a machine outvote me, which sounds like surrender until you watch it work. Sometimes its idea wins outright. More often it arrives as a supplement, a strange little rib I can weave into my original skeleton, and the finished thing is better than either of us would have managed alone.

The second is the signature test above.

The third lives at home: before I do anything there, I ask whether it benefits someone else in my family. Not instead of me. Also.

I know these questions earn their keep because I know what it costs to skip them.

Skipping feels like efficiency in the moment. The bill arrives later.

There’s an email out there with my name on it that anyone could have signed. I was busy, the send button was close, and I wrote to a job title instead of a person. The reply was polite the way weather reports are polite. Regret is just a question you didn’t ask, showing up after the deadline.

You don’t have bandwidth to run every worthy question before every action. Nobody does. The checklist would outlive the task.

But there is always time for one. One question at the door costs seconds.

The real investment is the quieter audit underneath: are you running the right one? A question can go stale in your mouth without telling you. Worth checking its pulse now and then.

Companies have signature questions too, though most never wrote theirs down, which is why their emails read like everyone’s emails and their strategy decks could get shuffled together at a conference and returned to the wrong owners without incident.

Positioning, underneath all the frameworks, is a question a company refuses to stop asking before it acts. If your competitor could ask your question with a straight face, you haven’t found yours yet.

And here is what bothers me… I have a question for the machine, a question for the inbox, a question for the kitchen table. I don’t have one for the bar. The room most full of people I care about, and the doorway stands unguarded. I’ve started interviewing candidates. None have been hired.

This post took the test, by the way. The advice, anyone could sign. The vacancy is mine.

Stay Positive & What’s Yours?

Jeff is at dinner, a double date he didn’t want to be on, and somebody across the table is working through the shared plate at an alarming rate. Jeff watches the meat disappear. And instead of doing what the rest of us do, which is perform a small silent grief and fill up on bread, he says it. Out loud. This guy is eating all the meat and I haven’t gotten any.

The table freezes. The audience roars.

That laugh is worth studying. We built an entire genre of television around the pleasure of hearing somebody say the thing everyone at the table is already thinking. The laugh track is not decoration. It’s evidence. Millions of people tune in every week to feel, secondhand, the relief of a filter failing.

If nobody wanted candor, the joke wouldn’t land. The joke always lands.

Now … about a recent meeting.

A few days ago I sat in one about documentation. One small corner of the business runs its own platform and its own process. Everybody else runs a different one, and by most accounts a better one. Everyone in the room knew it. I had the sentence loaded: this is a strange way to do this, can we just handle it the way the rest of the business does?

I swallowed it. I’m new, still learning which walls are load-bearing, and new people who blurt tend to get remembered for the blurt instead of the point.

That silence wasn’t free, though. The clunky process is not the expensive part. The expensive part is a whole team privately narrating the same complaint, every week, each person separately concluding they don’t have the power to change it. That stops being a workflow problem and becomes an energy leak. And energy a team spends resenting a process is energy that never reaches a customer.

Point is…Every meeting has a laugh track. It’s just muted.

If I had said the sentence out loud, I don’t think the room would have gasped. I think it would have exhaled.

But this is where the sitcom and the strategy split. After the meeting I found a colleague and asked one question: who actually owns this decision? Then I brought the sentence to that person, on purpose, with the door closed.

Because Jeff says it to the table, and the table laughs, but the table cannot cook him more meat. The kitchen can. Saying the true thing to the room is relief. Saying the true thing to the person who can act on it is change. (The double date guest asks the waiter for more meat, btw.) The standard courage advice stops at the first half, be brave, speak up, and skips the part where the room is usually the wrong audience for the sentence.

There’s a marketing lesson hiding in that gap, too. The distance between what a room says out loud, which is nothing, and what it desperately wants, which is for someone to name the thing, is the same distance good positioning covers. The brand that names what the customer already privately believes gets the laugh. In a market, the laugh sounds like trust. Heaven knows we can use more of that amidst the sea of AI slop.

I don’t know yet whether the process will change. The sentence is out of my head and sitting with someone who can do something about it, which is more than it accomplished while the whole team took turns thinking it. That will have to be enough for now.

Stay Positive & Pass The Meat