GarthBox

My daughters have been drawing us a lot of bookmarks lately. They’re great bookmarks. I’d put them up against anything hanging by a checkout lane.

Now picture a grocery store that takes them as payment. You slide one across the counter, the cashier tucks it into the drawer between the twenties like it has always lived there, and you walk out with eggs and a baguette.

I’d never shop there again. Not because of the art… the art is excellent. Because I’d start wondering what else that register is willing to accept. The bookmark doesn’t lose an ounce of value at that counter. The store does.

Every option you put in front of a customer is evidence about your judgment. Teams spend months making the new thing good. The customer spends a few seconds deciding what it says about you, and the quality of the thing barely gets a vote.

Even people who already own crypto, the ones who need the least convincing, say they’d rather spend it through a company they already trust. A currency invented to make the middleman unnecessary, and its biggest fans keep asking for one. Trust doesn’t transfer to a new thing. It gets lent to it, by whoever’s name is over the door.

Nobody has tried to pay in crypto at Garth’s Brew Bar yet. If I could flip it on tomorrow, I would, and we’d make a real fuss over the first person to use it. (The beertenders would get a story out of it. They’d earn it.) That first round won’t run on the coin. It’ll run on whoever is pouring, explaining something strange with a straight face.

Whatever trust a new option spends, it spends theirs first.

Stay Positive & I’m Still Not Taking Bookmarks As Payment, But We Will Give Them Out To Those We See Reading A Book At The Bar

A thirty-minute conversation on Thursday’s calendar has already eaten Monday. It’s chewing through Tuesday now with its mouth open, one eye on Wednesday.

And you’re tired. Shoulders-up-around-your-ears tired, from work that hasn’t happened yet.

From an effort standpoint, a tough conversation is one of the easiest things you’ll do all week. You sit down. You say the sentence. The whole thing fits inside a cup of coffee… and somehow the weight of it has been riding shotgun since Sunday.

The tired is honest, though. You have been working. You’ve had that conversation nine or ten times already, in the shower, at red lights, at the kitchen table after the kids are down. Every run is against a stand-in who is meaner than the real person, remembers every mistake you’ve made, and never once lets you finish a sentence. Each rerun costs a full emotional rep. You’re worn out from a job you keep doing in the wrong room.

Dread doesn’t scale with the size of the work. It scales with the size of the gap.

So when you catch it, skip the pep talk and shrink the gap. Pull the conversation closer, same day if the other person can take it, because the stand-in bills by the hour. If you lead anybody, watch your openers. “Can we talk Friday?” sent on a Monday hands someone four days of reruns with no script. Put the actual subject in the first message. Hard news with a label on it weighs less than a blank.

The other move is to hand someone half of it before you walk in. Before some meetings I’ll Slack a teammate one line: can you please challenge my thinking on this call? The pushback was probably coming anyway. Now it’s invited, we both show up ready, and it’s hard to take personally something you asked for in writing. The stand-in only has one move, the ambush. Ask for the ambush and he’s out of material.

Buyers carry the same weight. Plenty of deals die in the gap between “this is better” and the switching conversation with the CFO, rehearsed in a parked car for a quarter until the renewal date decides for them. Write the first two lines of that conversation for them.

The real person is usually kinder than the one you’ve been arguing with since Sunday. That one was you, doing an impression.

Stay Positive & This Applies To Any Meaningful Work, Not Just Conversations

Spent or invested.

I or we.

Have to or get to.

Morning or good morning.

She did X or we’re working on X.

We may not always notice the choice of words in the moment, but receivers feel it. And feelings compound.

From my experience to date, it takes about 10-15 word choices… that is, improved language around the poor word choices we use the most… to notice a meaningful shift in our world.

It’s easier than ever to record yourself and give it to AI and ask where you can lean more into positive word choices that resonate.

Stay Positive & Crutch Words Have Nothing On These Crippling Ones

We rearranged the girls’ playroom and they walked back into it like tourists. Same toys. Same walls. Nothing new came through the front door (I would like it on the record that I bought nothing). We just moved things around, and the whole mood of the room tipped, and toys that had been sitting there like furniture were suddenly the most important objects in the house.

Kids don’t play with the best toy. They play with the one in front of them.

The toy at the back of the shelf was never boring. It was behind something.

That is the entire job of positioning, and the job is sitting right there in the word. Where a thing sits decides whether anyone picks it up. When a campaign goes stale, the reflex is to buy more inventory: a new channel, a new offer with a new font. Usually the inventory is fine. The arrangement fell asleep.

At a marketing offsite, we ran a worst idea ever challenge. A whole group pitching the most terrible things they could think of, on purpose, out loud. It is very easy to look at that and see a room full of salaried adults manufacturing garbage, since every idea in it was designed to die there.

Except a truly terrible idea is hard to write without knowing exactly what the customer can’t stand. A great bad idea is a precise map of somebody’s fear, drawn upside down. In a normal brainstorm everybody is guarding their name, so the ugly true thing about the customer stays politely in their pocket. Ask for the worst and people hand it over gladly…

Then we flipped them. Same knowledge, turned over. One of them is on its way to becoming a real campaign.

The worst ideas came out of the same heads as the polite ones. Nothing new came into that room either. Everything the campaign needed was already at the table.

It was just facing the wall.

Stay Positive & Disruption Can Be A Positive Occurrence

Twenty-four beers, twenty-four days, and a bouncer at the door who never lets the same brewery in twice.

That’s the GBB advent calendar. This was its fifth year, and it sold out. We didn’t invent the idea, either. Beer advent calendars turn up everywhere once November hits, which is exactly why ours works. A countdown made of beer needs no tutorial. Somebody else paid to teach that lesson years ago, and a shelf full of other boxes keeps teaching it for free. So our one rule (no repeat breweries) does a lot of talking, but only to someone who has worked through a few of the others.

In an empty market you don’t have a position. You have an address.

Different is a comparison, and a comparison needs weight on the other side of the scale. A crowded market hands you that weight at no charge. It hands you the noise too, which is better than it sounds, because a full room is already arguing out loud about what it wishes somebody would do. (Best place in the world to eavesdrop, too. I do it in my own bar, no logo shirt, whenever I can.)

The trap is raising the bar the crowd is already staring at. Everyone in a busy category watches the same scoreboard, so one more tap or one more feature vanishes into the din. The crowd agrees on what counts. It also agrees, without ever saying so, on what doesn’t. That second list is where the bar is lying on the floor, waiting for somebody to pick it up and hang it higher.

In a beer town the obvious scoreboard is the tap list. The hands doing the pouring never make it onto the board, which is why every beertender behind our bar is Cicerone certified. A tap list can be copied by Friday. A team has to be built.

So when somebody calls a market too crowded, listen to what they actually said. The buyer is already educated. The bar is already posted where everyone can read it. And a dozen competitors have spent real money building the contrast you get to stand next to.

You can’t stand out in an empty room. You can only stand.

Stay Positive & Crowded Market? Great!

No house listing has ever included a photo of the neighbors. You get the kitchen, the backyard at golden hour, the bathroom from its one flattering angle. The people next door are the only feature nobody can stage.

In our last neighborhood, we used to daydream about the next one. A street where we’d connect with people over shared interests. Somebody two doors down who could turn a walk to the mailbox into forty minutes. We moved, and we were pretty sure that’s what we’d bought.

It flopped. (I have since learned you can’t return a street.)

That’s about the easiest complaint a person can make, and I know my own move by now. Catch it, kick it, swap in something grateful.

Read the complaint slowly first. We wanted to connect with our neighbors. We wanted shared interests. That’s the most specific thing we’ve ever said about where we want to live. The square footage never got a sentence that good. Of everything that came with the move, the complaint was the only part with a blueprint.

It also changed the verb. Before, we were shopping for a neighborhood. Now we have something to look forward to creating at the next place we move. Better job.

Which is a little embarrassing, because I run a bar whose entire job is turning strangers into regulars on purpose. Bottle shares, a run club, beertenders who remember what you told them last time. I would never expect a bar to do that by itself… and I expected a street to.

Teams hand their leaders this same sentence all the time. We don’t have the tools. Nobody told us what this is for. The reflex is to kick it for them, with a pep talk that shows up before the complaint finishes. Positive was never supposed to mean quiet. Kick a complaint and you keep the want and lose the blueprint, and the want goes somewhere you can’t hear it.

Read it back to them as a build. That complaint is their first draft of the thing they’d most like to make, and they wrote it for free.

The next street won’t come with it either. It’ll have a kitchen, a backyard, a bathroom with one good angle. This time we’re not shopping for the rest.

Stay Positive & We’re Packing The Complaint

The PA dies halfway through the second song. No crackle, no pop, just four people suddenly miming at a room that can’t hear them.

Some bands spend the next five minutes on their knees, chasing a cable across the stage with a phone flashlight clamped in the drummer’s teeth. Some already rehearsed the unplugged version. They step to the lip of the stage, somebody hushes the bar, and the room leans in closer than it has all night.

It took me a long time to swallow that some things only change after they break, and that you are not allowed to break them yourself (somebody would notice, and that somebody signs your checks). So you do the responsible thing. You tape the connection back together every night and play through the hum.

It works, mostly… No one can point to the night it got bad. The crowd just thins a little each month, the best players quietly book other gigs, and the pain you were holding off arrives anyway, spread so thin across a year that nobody can see it well enough to fix it.

A blowup at least comes with a morning after, the one day a stuck company will say yes to almost anything. The hum never gives you that day.

That morning is short, and it goes to whoever walks in with something already built. Not a deck asking for time to think. The unplugged set, tuned and rehearsed, with the people who know the harmonies already standing there. That’s where the good energy belongs. Not in the tape.

The same clock runs outside the building. Two vendors once spent months courting a company I worked for. Then our CMO went on leave, the replies slowed down, and they read the quiet as a no. Their follow-ups had started to get on my nerves, which didn’t help. Both marked us closed-lost right before a new VP walked in with budget and an appetite. Neither came back.

The tape feels like loyalty. It even is loyalty, right up until the room goes quiet and you find out you only ever knew the song plugged in. I, for one, don’t want to be known for only that.

Stay Positive & Learn It Without The Speakers