GarthBox

A file sitting in a friend’s inbox, and the same file still open on my laptop.

I had given him Herough Herough to read start to finish, the whole thing, and then I did what writers do, which is keep editing a book that has already left the building.

He hadn’t told me anything. No notes, no page numbers, no polite sandwich of praise. The editing changed anyway, because I had stopped reading in my own voice and started reading in his.

Some of it got better fast. Lines I had been walking past for months, the way you walk past laundry you’ve stopped seeing, suddenly had a stranger standing over them, and they came out.

Then the other half, which I did not see coming. I got stubborn. Passages I would have traded away cheerfully the week before turned into things I wanted to protect. Nothing about them had changed. The only new fact in the world was that I knew a person was moving his eyes across them.

You cannot defend a book nobody is reading. There is nothing to defend it from. Before I handed it over, the novel had contents. After, it had positions.

A draft nobody has seen is a pile of options. Every sentence is equally negotiable, because none of them have been asked to do anything in front of anyone. Put it in one set of hands and the pile sorts itself into two stacks: the parts you would argue for out loud, and the parts that were only there because they were already typed. (The second stack is always bigger than you’d like…which is what makes editing so frustrating and time-consuming)

Same thing happens with messaging. I have shipped positioning I was sure I believed in, right up until somebody read it back to me in a room and I heard which sentences I would actually go to the mat for. Those were the strategy. The rest was wallpaper with verbs in it. No amount of solo review ever sorted them, because alone with a document, everything in it feels equally yours.

That is most of what a team is missing when the work never leaves the building. They produce, revise, polish, and never find out which parts they would stand next to with their name attached. Conviction isn’t something people carry in with their coffee. It shows up when somebody else is holding the thing.

So you get the reader long before you get the feedback. The feedback takes a week, if it comes at all. The reader arrives the second you hit send…

He has had the book a while now. He might have put it down after fifty pages. I have no idea. Little does he know that he has been editing it with me the entire time since I gave it to him.

Stay Positive & Who’s Reading Over Your Shoulder?

“In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for good work?”

That question travels with five siblings. Do I know what is expected of me at work? Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right? Do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day? Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person? Is there someone at work who encourages my development?

Gallup found those six, plain as saltines, predict whether people stay, produce, and keep the customers happy. I met them on page 234 of The Power of Moments, where the authors note the last three might as well have been written by a psychologist who studies close relationships. (Workplace survey, relationship researcher, same handwriting.)

Notice who holds the pen. Every question is answered by the person standing where the care is supposed to land. None of the six asks the boss whether they care, because the answer is always yes, always sincere, and sincerity isn’t data.

At home, my instruments all sit on the giving side. Every morning I write one line on a big wall calendar about something from the day before that I appreciated. It is the most adored piece of paper in Dane County, practically blushing on its nail… and by Gallup’s design, it’s filling out the wrong half of the survey. The calendar knows what I noticed. Whether anybody in those lines heard about it is another matter.

Two scraps of wording carry the whole list. The first is “seven days.” Love at home gets treated like a full keg in the walk-in, cold and heavy and assumed. Nobody checks the line until somebody pulls a glass of foam. Gallup only cares what got poured this week.

The second is “seem,” a four-letter word in a trench coat, the most honest thing ever smuggled into an HR document. Care that never shows up as evidence scores a zero.

Try question one at home. During a poetry week I sent my daughters on a scavenger hunt. They pounced on every item like it owed them money and never quite grasped that the loot was supposed to become a poem. Ask whether they knew what was expected of them and they’d have said yes, gloriously. They were right. It just wasn’t the job I had in my head.

Question two flips, too. When the girls storyboarded a short film, they ran the show and I was the materials and equipment, a dad-shaped tripod holding a phone.

Friendship never came with a job description, only a calendar, and the calendar belongs to somebody else. My notes from a year of weekly side projects say it flat: anything that needs another person’s calendar tends not to happen. Hold your friendships to the seven-day window and count how many have gone quarterly (generously). Every one of those friends would say you care. Seem is a different number.

Gallup says these questions even predict customer satisfaction, forecast by asking the person serving the customer whether anybody noticed their work this week. Care runs downstream. Paint your values across the building in letters you can read from the parking lot, and the customer still only tastes whatever the last person behind the counter had left in the tank. What you meant is the giving side. What it seemed like this week is the only part anyone buys.

The people at home will never fill out a survey. They’re answering all six anyway, every week, over cereal and in the back seat, no link required. You get the results the way companies do… late, in the retention numbers, when someone you raised decides how often to call.

Stay Positive & Ask Them

It came easy to him.

It should come easy to me.

I failed here, so I’ll fail everywhere.

That’s just how business goes.

Nobody complained, so it’s working.

If it were a good idea, someone would’ve done it already.

A non-reply is a no.

Exhaustion = progress.

It’ll only get done right if I do it myself.

Good work speaks for itself.

Once this launch is out, things will calm down.

Stay Positive & Catch Your Mistakes

Where to play and how to win.

That is the whole of strategy in seven words, and I love it more than anyone should love a sentence out of a business book. The two men who wrote it down meant it the way a coach means it. A field, an opponent, a scoreboard. Fine. I keep snagging on the verb anyway…

They could have written where to dominate. Where to invest. Where to work, or where to deploy resources (a phrase that has never once gotten anybody out of bed on a Saturday). Any of those would describe the same market on the same map. They picked play, the only word on that list that expects you to lose now and then and keep going.

Lose where you meant to dominate and you failed. Lose where you meant to invest and you get a write-down, followed by a meeting about the write-down. Get tagged and you’re it, which is just a new job inside the same game. The loss is one of the moves.

Since the start of this year I’ve been running my year in themed weeks. Poetry, cooking, stand-up, woodworking, stocks, nature, video editing, gardening, meditation, improv, watercolor, motorcycle, candlemaking, manga. Every week gets the same seven slots, from reading something, to cold-emailing a local practitioner, to teaching my daughters, to a big closing number I named the Wow capstone. Seven days on one small field. Then the lines get painted somewhere new.

The scoreboard is honest, which means it’s ugly in spots. Woodworking was a wipeout, nothing built. But there was a broken bowl I hand-carved (and hand-broke?). History and geography got abandoned with the supplies ordered and never used. The gardening planter box got pushed a full year. Each of those cost me exactly the week I gave it and not an hour more.

Lined up side by side, the losses share a fingerprint. Anything that needed a new tool, shop space, or somebody else’s calendar tended not to happen. I didn’t find out I’m bad at wood. I found out where my field actually ends, which no amount of planning had told me.

Play is the only one of those verbs that pays out when you lose.

The winning half surprised me too. The Wow capstone was supposed to be the fireworks, and it was the slot I skipped most. The fake Netflix special never got filmed. The maker’s mark never got made. What I kept instead was smaller. Poems on index cards pinned to a tackboard. A binder of handwritten recipe cards. A frame of pressed leaves. A jar of improv prompts from a living-room showcase. I had defined winning as fireworks, and the game kept handing me ticket stubs.

The bar runs on the same logic. One location, on purpose, no second pot. Inside that one room, 90s Week, Plant Week, a tap list that refuses to sit still. The field stays fixed so the play can move. Plenty of companies run it the other way around, picking where to dominate, defining winning as the launch, and then wondering why nobody on the team will try anything that might not land.

If you lead anybody, hand them a field before you hand them a target. Edges they can see, small enough that a loss inside them costs a week instead of a reputation. Then watch who starts leaping.

My daughters had this figured out on poetry week. They loved tracking down every item on the scavenger hunt and never quite grasped the part where the items turn into a poem. The poem was my idea of how they’d win. They had already picked where to play.

Stay Positive & Go Lose A Week (You’ll Gain Much More)

A cursor blinking in an empty folder where a whole weekend used to be.

That picture makes my stomach drop. I gave a weekend to a report for work, and if it vanished tomorrow I would be devastated. Not annoyed. Devastated, the full-body kind, where you check the trash folder six times.

Now the other file. I post here most days, and I’ve signed off the same way for more than fifteen years. If every post on this blog disappeared tonight, I’d be… fine. (Sad for an afternoon, maybe. Then I’d go write something.)

Put those two on a grid. Effort runs left to right. Up the side goes how long you’d grieve if the thing were gone by morning. The report sits in the top right corner, sweating through its shirt. The blog sits in the bottom right with its shoes off. Same effort. Opposite grief. The left side fills itself in: the lucky photo you’d mourn forever up top, most of your inbox down below.

Grief isn’t measuring how much the work matters. It’s measuring how much of the payment hasn’t landed yet.

I work in payments, so I think about this gap more than is healthy. A card gets approved in about two seconds. The money takes a day or two to actually settle. For that stretch the sale is a promise wearing the costume of a sale, and promises fall through.

The report lives in that stretch. Every hour I put into it is approved and pending. It pays when somebody reads it, nods, and decides something. Until then my weekend is sitting in a file, and files die. The blog cleared at the keyboard. Each post paid me the moment I found a sentence I didn’t know I had. The archive is a drawer full of receipts, and nobody grieves a receipt.

I learned this standing next to a fire full of homework. At the end of a school year we burned a year of notes and worksheets, and it didn’t feel like loss. It felt cathartic. The learning had already moved into us. The paper was just proof we’d shown up, and proof burns fast.

Impact is a different question, and the report probably wins it. Reports like that get decisions made off them. Nobody has ever changed a plan because of a post about a broken bowl (that I know of). But impact that only pays when someone else signs for it can also disappear in one bad click.

So the fix isn’t caring less about the report. It’s getting paid on the way. One page, just for you, written before the thing ships: what you learned, what surprised you, the one sentence you’d still defend if every chart vanished. If the laptop eats the file, the weekend survives in you. Grief becomes annoyance, which is a much better price. Annoyance drives action and prevents people (and ideas) from dying standing still.

If you lead anybody, look at where their grief lives. If your team would be wrecked by losing any single thing they’ve made, you’ve built a place where work only pays out when you receive it. They spend their weekends in the pending column, waiting on your nod. Give them some work that clears the moment they make it. They’ll show up Monday already paid.

The report will land or it won’t, and somebody else decides which next week. This one cleared while I was writing it, though. I even enjoyed thinking about it while I was on vacation the other week. Delete it tomorrow and I still walk away holding a few sentences I didn’t have this morning.

Stay Positive & Back It Up, Map It Out

“We just don’t have the budget for it.”

It is the most comfortable sentence in business. Nobody has to be wrong. Nobody has to say the idea was confusing, or aimed at nobody, or a little bit about the person pitching it.

But there’s one belief I’ve got…There is always budget for a good idea.

Money turns up mid-quarter like a twenty in last year’s jacket the second the right person gets excited. Budget is a crowd, and a crowd drifts toward whatever someone can describe to it on the way out of a meeting.

What there’s never budget for is a good idea with no audience attached. Or a good idea nobody else can carry.

I just got back from Portugal where my job was to stretch myself in ways the daily life doesn’t. Back home the meetings kept happening (meetings are the one part of a company that never takes PTO), and every idea I’d left on the table had to stand up without me. I don’t know yet which ones did since I’m logging back on after I write this post… which is sort of the point. A vacation is the cheapest stress test an idea will ever get.

“No budget” is a translation. Unfold it and the original usually says one of these:

• Nobody could say who it was for without using the word “everyone.”
• It only made sense with you standing next to it, waving your hands.
• The person who loved it would have to pitch it to the person who signs, and they heard it once, walking to the parking lot.
• Its goal was “awareness,” which nobody has ever been fired for missing.
• Nobody’s name was attached to the result.
• It needed a slide to explain the slide.
• It solves a problem the room doesn’t feel yet.
• It sounded vague, and vague always rounds up.
• Saying yes meant someone else’s project had to lose, and nobody told that person.
• Its best argument was your enthusiasm, and enthusiasm does not survive being forwarded.
• Nobody could explain it in the time it takes to pour a pint.
• The finance person couldn’t tell their boss what changes if it works.
• It arrived finished, with no handles for anyone else to grab and call partly theirs.
• “No budget” is easier to say than “I don’t get it,” and much easier than “I don’t want to be the one who carries this.”

Every one of those is a portability problem. Not a budget constraint. The idea couldn’t travel.

That’s the whole game in B2B, and it is humbling, isn’t it?

Your product gets bought in a meeting you’re not invited to, described by someone who heard your pitch once and liked it more than they understood it. The pitch that counts is the one they give. So the work is shrinking the idea until it fits in someone else’s mouth: one audience, one goal, one sentence that survives being repeated by a tired person at 4:45 on a Thursday while you’re climbing stairs of a castle and laughing when your tour guide Bruno forgets to turn the mic off when he blows his nose.

My out of office told everyone exactly when I’d be back. The ideas worth funding never needed to read it.

Stay Positive & Can Your Idea Survive The OoO Test?

There is always a slowest tap.

Pull it, and the title just moves one handle over. The beer that was second slowest yesterday wakes up this morning as the problem, and nothing about it changed. Same keg, same pour, same handle, now wearing a dunce cap it never tried on.

Every revenue report eventually makes you the same offer. A fifth of the names are paying for most of the lights. Keep those, let the rest drift, and enjoy how much lighter the boat feels. (Spreadsheets always sound so calm. That’s how they get you.)

The trouble is that the shape lives in the list, and the list comes with you. Cut the bottom 80 percent and the survivors are an 80/20 of their own the moment the cut is made, a fifth of them paying for most of what’s left and the rest suddenly looking a lot like drag. Cut again and you’re down to four percent of where you started, still lopsided, the curve growing back like a hedge that takes every haircut as a suggestion.

Follow the plan all the way down and you end up with one customer.

That isn’t a business. It’s a job with a worse boss. One logo sets your prices, bends your roadmap, and knows to the dollar how much you need it.

I’ve been on the wrong end of the trim. At a company I worked for, two vendors courted us for months. Then the executive who owned the budget went on leave, the conversations went quiet, and somewhere a rep read the quiet as a no. Both marked us closed lost, right before a new VP walked in with budget and appetite. Neither came back. On their list we were the 80… we were about to be somebody’s 20.

The bottom of a list is a seat. Somebody is always sitting in it. Some are on the way up, some are on the way out, and the ranking can’t tell you which, because a ranking only knows where everyone stood on the day you printed it.

So cut for behavior, never for rank. The customer who treats your team like a vending machine has earned the door at any size, and showing that one out actually changes the room. Show the small one out and you’ve only handed the small title to whoever’s next in line.

Then give the bottom of the list a job. Part of it is your future 20, still growing into its budget. Part of it tells you what the market is doing, since your biggest accounts mostly tell you about themselves. Part of it is ballast, and a lighter boat is also an easier one to tip. If the 80 feels like drag, it’s usually being served on a model built for the 20: the same meetings, the same handholding, the same price of attention. That’s a packaging problem wearing a customer’s face.

The same math runs through a team, where it gets expensive. Rank a great crew and somebody is still last. Cut them, and the new last one spends every shift waiting to be next, and the guests can feel it from across the bar.

80/20 is always 80/20. You never get to delete the shape, only furnish it. There will always be a slowest tap, a smallest account, somebody at the end of the bench… and everyone else is watching how you treat whoever’s sitting there.

Stay Positive & Pour One Out For The Slow One