GarthBox

“You know you don’t have to do that.”

Somebody said that to me once while I was right-clicking my way through a paste-special the way you read a menu in a language you almost know. Then they handed me three keys. Alt, E, S, V. Four seconds a shot, and I have used it more times than I can count since.

The advice that usually gets pulled out of a moment like that is old and has a beard on it. Let people watch you work. Shadow somebody. Ask for feedback. True enough, and nobody needs another paragraph about it. But let’s look at how the hard work shows itself.

Almost every improvement system we build points at an artifact. The doc, the deck, the campaign, the number at the end of the quarter. Feedback is an opinion about a thing after the thing exists. It shows up too late to touch how the thing got built, so it fixes the thing and leaves the habit exactly where it was.

Witness is a different animal. Witness is somebody watching the motion. It catches the twelve minutes spent formatting a table no one asked for, the four tabs you keep re-finding, the file you rebuild every Monday that could have been a template back in March.

Feedback tells you the thing you made was fine. A witness tells you the way you made it was ridiculous.

Marketing already knows this, which makes it worse. The entire research discipline is built on the gap between what people say and what people do. You don’t ask a customer how they would use the product, you sit behind them and watch them use it, because the survey answer is a performance and the click is the truth. We pay real money for that. We build labs for it. We have never once pointed the instrument at our own workday.

One move this week. Take twenty minutes of real work, not a demo, and share your screen with somebody who has no stake in the outcome and no business being there. Someone from another team. Your partner. The newest hire (…especially the newest hire.) Do not present. Do not narrate. Work badly and honestly in front of them, and let them interrupt whenever they want to ask why you just did that.

You will hate the first four minutes. They might, too. Then somebody will say you know you don’t have to do that, and you will get those four seconds back for the rest of your life.

Ten smart people are not there to judge the work. Judgment is cheap and available everywhere and it always arrives after the thing is already built. What has gotten scarce is a witness.

Your work is more recorded than it has ever been and less watched than it has ever been. Those are not the same thing, and only one of them makes you better.

Stay Positive & Share Your Screen With Someone Who Has No Reason To Be Looking

Rest used to come included in the price of making things.

Nobody designed it that way. Production was just expensive. You could not shoot the video, write the whitepaper, build the microsite, and rewrite the deck in the same week, so the week had a shape whether you asked for one or not. The gaps were structural. The quiet between the swings was paid for by how hard the swinging was.

That subsidy is gone, and nothing replaced it.

I built a machine whose entire job is to tell me my writing is not good enough yet. There is a gate my drafts have to clear before I ever read them, with a list of phrases that get killed on sight and a test that fails anything a stranger could have written. I wrote that gate. I also sat and answered something like a hundred questions about how I think, and had the drawers in my house photographed, specifically so that nothing I do gets to hide behind a vague question anymore.

It works. The writing got better in a way I can point at.

And some mornings I open the laptop and see the column of chats and tasks and projects standing there with their arms crossed, every one of them ready to push back, and I want to close it before I’ve typed a word…

The usual prescription for that feeling is a treat. Build in a delight moment. A little reward every fifth prompt. Something cute waiting at the bottom of the list. That is a vending machine bolted to the wall of a factory, and it fixes nothing, because tiredness is not the malfunction. Tiredness is the readout. The malfunction is that the work has no shape.

We were good at this once. Before the cost of production collapsed, marketers were coordinators before they were makers. You sequenced. You knew a campaign had a build, a peak, and a long exhale, because you only had so many arrows and you had to decide when to spend them. The exhale was not mercy. It was composition. Then the arrows became free, and we stopped composing without ever deciding to. Now we just fire.

Pacing used to be a side effect. Now it is a line item, and almost nobody is budgeting for it.

Your audience is living the same week you are. They open their feed and find every company they’ve ever given an email address to, all producing at full tilt, all day, forever. Volume is the floor now. Everyone can flood. What almost nobody does on purpose is build a rhythm with real silence in it, which means silence has quietly become one of the few positions still available. A brand that goes quiet and comes back with one heavy thing gets read. A brand that never stops gets scrolled, and eventually gets muted by someone who does not dislike it at all.

The same math sits on your team. The person three seats over is running the identical wall you are, with less control over the settings than you have. Nothing on the calendar is going to produce their exhale for them. Someone has to put it in there deliberately, and that someone has a title and a salary and probably a direct report.

The tension itself is not the villain. I want the argument. I want the tool that tells me the draft is a lie, because it usually is. But adversarial-at-all-times is a setting, not weather, and it only feels like weather because we forgot we typed it in.

You wrote the instructions. You chose the cadence. You decided what is standing there waiting for you at nine in the morning with its arms crossed.

Or you didn’t decide, and it got decided for you, which is still a design.

It’s just somebody else’s.

Stay Positive & Go Read Your Own Instructions.. Then Edit Accordingly

Somewhere along the way we started writing better documentation for software than for people. We’ll revise a prompt eleven times to strip out ambiguity, then hand a new teammate a login and tell them they’ll pick it up. The customer gets the polished narrative. The team gets a shrug and a net.

Flip that.

The team is the one that needs the manual, because they’re the ones who end up writing the customer’s. And, really, when has “use common sense” actually worked out as a reliable bet?

Stay Positive & Say The Obvious Thing Out Loud

Horrible Therapist runs on one rule. Each round, one person is the judge. Everybody else plays a card meant to land with that judge, the judge picks a winner, and then the job moves one seat over.

Two plays are available every round, and they are not the same play.

You can play to the judge. You know this person. You know the joke they’ll pretend not to laugh at and then laugh at anyway. That’s a read, and it’s a good one, and it wins rounds.

Or you can play to the table. The card that makes six people at once go oh, that’s the one before the judge has finished reading it. Different instinct entirely. You’re not solving for one taste, you’re solving for the sound a room makes.

The second play looks softer and is actually the colder calculation, for two reasons. Judging is temporary. Everyone at that table is going to hold it, and people remember who made them laugh in the rounds they weren’t in charge of. And judges feel the room. When a card lands out loud, the judge’s job quietly stops being taste and starts being confirmation. Very few people pick against a room they can hear.

It costs you though. Playing to the table loses rounds you could have won by reading one person correctly, and you will sit there watching someone take it with a lazy card because they know exactly what the judge’s ex-boyfriend was like. That’s real and it will annoy you.

Worth separating two things that look alike: playing to the table is not the same as pleasing it. The card that makes a room go quiet counts too. Pandering is a table-read with the spine removed.

My first sales kickoff at a company, an account manager took the mic during some open-floor stretch and told nearly a hundred people she was glad I’d joined. Then she said why. She named the intel and the backup I’d given her on accounts she was fighting for, in specifics, on a microphone, to everyone.

What my manager thought of me that quarter, I could not reconstruct for you now. Those thirty seconds I could recite.

It wasn’t only that it felt good, though it did. It kept working after she sat down. A room’s opinion has legs. It walks into other rooms, shows up in meetings I wasn’t invited to, sits in somebody’s answer when my name comes up in a hallway. A judge’s opinion ends when the round ends. The table’s opinion goes home with everybody.

Which is the whole reason to point your work at the people beside you instead of the person above you. Your team carries your work into rooms you’ll never see the inside of.

Same game on a grocery shelf. The pull-instead-of-push idea has a beard on it by now, and every marketer nods along and then goes right back to building a deck for the buyer.

The category buyer at Woodman’s is the judge. The obvious move is the pitch: margins, velocity, planogram fit, a sell sheet with your best photograph on it. Fine. Fine wins rounds sometimes.

The other move is to make the aisle loud before you ever walk in the building. Get enough people asking for it, requesting it, mentioning it to the guy stocking shelves. Then the buyer’s decision changes shape. They are not evaluating you anymore. They are being handed cover.

That’s the part worth sitting with. Buyers are rarely trying to be convinced.

They’re trying not to be the only person holding the bag if it doesn’t sell.

A room full of demand is an insurance policy with your logo on it, and no pitch is required, because the pitch already happened in seven hundred small conversations you weren’t in.

Careers built entirely on judge-reading have one specific failure mode. The judge leaves. Reorg, new boss, acquisition, she takes a job in Denver. And then you find out whether anyone at the table would have picked you.

Stay Positive & Go Find Whoever Grabbed The Mic For You

I put a courtroom into Herough Herough.

Not a scene about a courtroom. A transcript. Speaker labels, the clipped call and response of testimony, the format doing the work description usually does. Nothing in the book asked for it. I wanted to see if I could hold that structure, and I thought a witness under oath would hand over backstory in a way a paragraph never could. People answer questions differently when they can’t leave.

Right now I’m in the middle of a Murakami novel where a chapter stops being prose and lays itself out in newspaper columns. After a couple hundred pages of one rhythm, the page changes shape in your hands. The reading muscle you’d been using gets to set its instrument down. Best twenty minutes of the book so far. Fifteen minutes between sets, and the second set hits different because of it.

Half the people who hit a chapter like that shut the book. They didn’t sign up for columns. They wanted the thing they were already enjoying, more of it, uninterrupted, and the author got cute. The other half sit up straighter, because somebody is clearly driving.

It’s a smoked beer. Rauchbier splits a room inside one sip. Campfire, ham, a bonfire in a glass, and you either want the whole pint or you want it moved to the far end of the bar. Nobody is neutral. Nobody forgets it either. (As craft beer geek of a person I am, get that smoked beer away from me…)

The easy lesson here is be polarizing. That lesson is thirty years old and has been laundered through so many decks that it’s now the safest thing a marketer can say out loud.

The move only works under two conditions, and both of them are boring.

First, you need a rhythm worth breaking. The newspaper chapter is a thrill because two hundred pages taught your hands what the book feels like. Same reason smoke is interesting in a glass: you’ve had enough regular beer for your mouth to have an opinion. Swerve on page one and you haven’t swerved, you’ve just started weird. You don’t get to be strange until you’ve been legible. Most brands reaching for divisive skipped the years where anyone learned their shape.

Second, the reason can’t be the reaction. I didn’t write the courtroom to split readers. I wrote it because I wanted the challenge, and because it lit the backstory from an angle prose couldn’t reach. When the only argument for a strange move is that it’s strange, people taste it. There is a difference between a beer that’s smoked and a beer that’s smoked for the ad.

Which makes the swerve less a marketing decision than a permission structure. Somebody on staff has to be allowed to put the rauchbier on tap and be wrong about it. (Take it from me, just get it in cans. It really ruined one of our beer lines and I had to replace the whole thing…)

If your team can only make choices that poll well, your brand can’t make a decision. It can only make an average.

…And an average is safe the way a hallway is safe.

The people who love the courtroom chapter aren’t loving the courtroom. They’re loving the evidence that a person was at the wheel and could have crashed. That’s the entire transaction. Nobody has ever felt chosen by something that was never at risk of refusing them.

Stay Positive & What Have You Been Talked Out Of?

“Put your shoes on.”

“If you want to pick the music in the car, put your shoes on.”

Same shoes, same car, roughly the same four seconds of breath. The difference is that the second sentence had to be true before it left the house.

Lead with the why and everybody assumes you’re doing it for the other person. Buy-in. Motivation. Getting a five-year-old moving without a hostage negotiation. That part works, and it’s the least interesting thing happening.

The interesting thing happens in your mouth, about a half second before the words get out. You have to name the outcome. Naming it means checking it. Is that outcome worth this ask. Is that actually the impact I want. Is there an outcome at all, or was I just moving a person around because I could. (If you want your sister to look up to you, show her how you put your shoes on would have been better, perhaps)

A reason kept in your head stays soft. It bends to fit whatever you already decided, and you can think it so fast you never really hear it. Out loud it stiffens. It becomes a claim with an edge on it, and somebody else is holding the other end.

Which is why we skip it. Not because we’re busy. Because a stated why hands the other person a legitimate door. “If you want the deck to land Thursday, get me the numbers by noon” invites the honest reply: I don’t actually care if it lands Thursday.

That’s information, and it’s expensive, and most of us would rather not have it in the room.

“Because I said so” was never about efficiency. It was about keeping the door shut.

We put a side-pull faucet at the bar. Beautiful, fussy, slower to learn than the standard thing every bartender has already used a thousand times. The ask by itself is just extra work: learn a harder pour.

Said the whole way, it holds together. Watch.

If you want the guest to walk out with a beer and a story attached to it, we learn about the side-pull faucet.

That sentence had to survive me saying it to people who had every right to ask why we couldn’t just do the normal thing. If the real reason had been that it photographs well, it would have collapsed somewhere between my teeth and the bar floor.

Some asks should collapse. That’s the feature, not the bug.

This is most of what’s wrong with marketing asks, too… Download the report. Book a demo.

Every one of those has a why, and almost every one of those whys belongs to the person doing the asking. Pipeline. Attribution. A number somebody promised in January. Try saying it in the customer’s direction as a full sentence: if you want your board to stop asking about churn every month, read this. Now it’s checkable. Either it’s true and cringeworthy, or you just heard yourself lie to a stranger in your own voice.

Positioning is the same move at company scale. It’s a why said in public, in a form the market is allowed to turn down. That permission is the whole value. A position nobody can decline isn’t a position, it’s a mission statement, and mission statements are what you get when a company writes a reason it never had to say out loud to a person who could walk away.

The sentence is the easy part. The hard part is being willing to hear your own reason at full volume, in a room where someone can say no to it, and letting the weak ones die on the way to the door.

You’ll lose about half. The half that survives will move people without you having to push.

Stay Positive & So That…

Picture the newest people in a building that isn’t quite theirs yet. They didn’t apply for this job. They didn’t sweat over a cover letter or angle for the offer. Their whole team got folded into a new one through an acquisition, boxes and all, and one Monday they simply belonged somewhere else.

They’re still doing the job they came in doing. That much hasn’t changed. But a few weeks in, you’ll catch them sitting quietly in meetings that don’t need them yet, learning a tool nobody assigned them yet, shadowing a process three departments over that has nothing to do with their title…yet. Nobody is making them do this. They’re understudies who never auditioned for the part, and everyone in the room, without saying it out loud, has already agreed on the one true thing: it isn’t a question of if they eventually get moved into something else. It’s when.

That’s a strange thing to sit calmly inside of. Tell most people “you will definitely be asked to do a different job than the one you have, we just can’t tell you which one or when” and watch them get uneasy. But inside an acquisition, everybody nods along like it’s a weather forecast. Of course.

Obviously. That’s just how this works.

That exact certainty is true almost everywhere the acquisition isn’t. Your marriage will eventually ask you to be the strong one on a week you didn’t train for. Your body will eventually ask for a level of care you didn’t train for either. We only treat the shift as a sure thing when it’s wearing a lanyard and sitting in a boardroom. Anywhere else, we call it bad luck instead of the forecast it always was.

Businesses will write an entire slide deck called Succession Planning with a straight face, then act genuinely wounded when their own knees give out on a hike they never trained for.

I run a bar. Every new hire behind that rail learns something outside their own station in the first month, whether they ask to or not. Not because a manual tells them to. Because I’ve watched what a bad Friday does to a room that only trained people for their own job, and the nights that don’t fall apart are the ones where somebody spent a slow Tuesday back in week two learning a job they didn’t have yet, for no reason they could have named at the time.

Learning a skill you don’t need yet has a particular itch to it. It’s like practicing a chord that doesn’t belong to any song you’re currently playing. That itch isn’t proof you’re wasting the afternoon. It’s usually the tell that you’re doing the one thing that actually protects the people who’ll be counting on you later, on a night neither of you can see yet.

This is what investing in your team actually looks like on an ordinary Tuesday, not a benefits page bullet point.

It’s letting someone learn the part they’re not playing yet, while nothing is on fire, so that on the night something is, the room already knows what to do without a meeting about it. Teams that get handed that kind of investment take better care of the customer standing in front of them. Customers who get taken care of come back and invest in you. Most companies build the whole thing backwards, waiting for the crisis to teach, for free, what the slow Tuesday was already offering to teach for nothing.

I don’t know exactly what I’m currently under-preparing for. Nobody does. That’s the whole trick of the thing hiding inside the certainty. But given the choice, I’d rather spend a slow Tuesday finding out on purpose than wait for the Friday that makes me.

Stay Positive & Time To Prep