GarthBox

On Tuesday mornings, before the bar opens, my buddy spencer runs a cleaning solution through the draft lines. The chairs are still up. The room smells faintly like a swimming pool. It takes a while, nobody sees it, and nobody will ever mention it.

But every beer we pour that week passes through that decision.

Customers appreciate a lot of things out loud. The bar. The style. The tap list. The beertender who remembered their name. In fifteen years around bars I have never once heard a customer appreciate the lines. And yet if the lines are dirty, the best beer in Wisconsin tastes like a wet basement.

Nobody chooses a bar for clean lines. Plenty of people never come back because of dirty ones.

That gap is worth sitting with, because it’s not just a beer thing.

Gratitude, the way it usually gets practiced, collects the obvious.

Health, family, coffee, sunsets. Fine. But the exercise changes character when you point it at things you don’t normally appreciate.

The person who restocks. The friend who always texts first. (Even better, the friend who calls first. I’m looking at you, Nick.) The unglamorous fix that kept the whole system standing.

The moment you thank something invisible, you have to understand it first, and that’s the trick.

Appreciation of the unnoticed isn’t politeness. It’s a flashlight. It forces you to see how things actually work instead of how they present.

And once you see how things work, everything downstream gets better.

Empathy stops being a soft skill and becomes accurate. Curiosity gets specific instead of vague. You connect with people over the true thing they do, not the visible thing they’re credited for, and people can feel the difference immediately. Ask anyone whose work is invisible how often they get thanked for the real part.

There’s a marketing lesson buried in here too, and it’s the same lesson with a purple coat of paint. Customers can’t tell you what they appreciate until it’s missing. What people buy is the visible thing. What they leave over is the invisible one. If you want to know where your product actually lives or dies, make a list of everything your customer never notices, and appreciate each item until you understand it. That list is your quality. The tap list is just the menu.

It’s worth challenging yourself today to shift your appreciation somewhere it’s never been. Thank the lines. Whatever your lines are.

Stay Positive & You Might Be Surprised What Else You’ve Been Drinking Through

Nobody looks at a fella on a trike and thinks, there goes a car that failed inspection. Three wheels, moving, doing the entire job.

Product teams forget this. They hold the launch waiting for the fourth wheel, as if the vehicle doesn’t count until it matches the drawing. Meanwhile the trike would have told them everything. Where the road is bumpy. Whether anyone wants a ride. Whether they should have been building a boat.

And my favorite thing about wheels?… you can keep subtracting.

Two wheels is a bike, faster than the trike.

One wheel is a unicycle, absurd but moving…incredibly remarkable.

Zero wheels is you, walking, learning the route on foot. The spec was never wheels. The spec was motion.

Customers don’t buy your architecture diagram.

They buy the feeling of going somewhere.

Stay Positive & Add Wheels Only When The Road Demands Them

There’s a control rider who signed up for a leaning class on a Harley.

If you’ve never been to a track day, control riders are the people the track trusts to babysit everyone else. They ride sweep. They pull alongside the guy who’s about to do something expensive and shake their head slowly. Their whole job is to be better on a motorcycle than everyone they’re watching.

This one doesn’t own a Harley. Has no plans to buy one. He paid money to sit in a class full of people learning a bike he’ll never ride again, because the class taught leaning, and leaning was the skill he wanted more of in his hands. The Harley was just the container. He wasn’t there for the bike. He was there for the angle.

When we’re kids, everyone tells us to try all the things, and buried in that advice is a quiet promise: the trying will feed the one thing you eventually stick with. Soccer feeds footwork feeds balance feeds everything. Then we grow up and the promise gets revoked. Hours only count if they’re logged in your own lane, on your own equipment, with your own job title stamped on the receipt.

The ten thousand hours idea deserves some blame here. We treat it like an odometer. Log the miles, collect the mastery.

But the researcher whose work that number came from spent years annoyed about how it got quoted, because it was never about volume. It was about deliberate practice: reps at the edge of your ability, structured to make you a little worse before they make you better.

Hour 9,000 in your own saddle is warm and familiar. Warm and familiar is a lousy coach.

I learned more about audience empathy behind a bar than from anything with “marketing” in the title. At last call, somebody orders one more round and what they need is water and a ride home. The gap between what people say and what they actually need is the whole job, and I did my reps on it in a room that smelled like spilled lager, years before anyone paid me to think about positioning.

Try expensing the Harley class, though. Professional development budgets approve courses with your job title in the name and squint at everything else.

Which is exactly backwards, because everyone in your category is taking the courses with your job title in the name. Same books, same certifications, same conference tracks. Same inputs, same instincts, same output.

The stuff that makes you distinct almost never announces itself as relevant. If it did, your competitors would already be enrolled.

The control rider went back to his own bike. The Harley stayed behind, like a ladder you climb and leave. Nobody at the track knows where his lean came from, and it doesn’t matter. The skill transferred. The container never had to.

Sign up for the thing you’ll never use. It’s how you get better at the thing you’ll never stop doing.

Stay Positive & Ride The Bike You’ll Never Buy

In-N-Out sells four things. A burger, a cheeseburger, fries, a shake. That is the whole board, lit up in red, and it has barely moved in seventy years. Then you lean in and order a Double Double, Animal Style, and the kid at the register nods like you just gave the password to a club he wasn’t sure you knew about.

You didn’t get more burger than the menu admitted exists. The receipt looks the same. But something happened anyway. You feel like you got away with something, and that feeling never shows up in the price, and it is doing more work than the burger.

That is a knob. Not the kind in a settings panel, the kind that lets a person reach past the default and feel rich for having reached. The secret menu isn’t sloppy menu design. It’s the most generous thing on the wall, precisely because it isn’t on the wall.

Now go the other direction.

Elden Ring ships with one difficulty. No easy mode, no slider, no story mode for people who just want to see the castles. Players have begged for years. The studio keeps saying no, and they are not being stubborn for sport. The brutal default is the product. The whole thing they are selling is the moment a wall you could not pass for a week finally falls, and a knob that let you turn the wall down would quietly delete the thing you came for. Here the value lives in the default, and a setting would water it down.

Then there’s the quiet middle. A Nest thermostat decides the temperature for you. It learns your week and runs it without asking. You can still spin the ring on the wall, and you almost never do, and that is the point. The knob there is not surplus and it is not strategy. It is reassurance. It exists so you feel like you could grab the wheel, even while the car drives itself just fine.

Three products, three different answers to the same question: where does the value actually live?

Here’s a rule I carry… A good default should make you feel safe. A good knob should make you feel rich.

Anything that does neither is clutter wearing a costume… and most software is wearing a lot of costumes.

This is where product leaders get lost, usually in one of two directions.

One ships fourteen toggles and calls it flexibility. It isn’t flexibility. It’s indecision with a lanyard. Every setting is a small confession that the team could not agree on what the thing should be, so they shipped the argument and made you referee it. Notion does this with a straight face. It hands you a blank page and a thousand options and calls the blank page freedom, and a stunning number of people open it, feel the weight of having to design their own product before they can use it, and quietly close the tab. Freedom that heavy is just homework.

The other leader ships zero knobs and calls it focus. Sometimes that is Elden Ring and it is glorious. More often it just caps how much delight a curious person is allowed to find, then calls the ceiling a philosophy. I think of a Prius here. Or there’s Linear, which sits in the honest middle. It decided what your workflow should be, shipped that opinion as the default, and rationed its settings like they cost money. You feel held by it instead of handed a kit.

And then there is the person whose whole job is to explain the thing, standing on a stage saying the core value is speed, or the core value is collaboration, treating the secret menu as a footnote. They are describing the engine and skipping the part that actually thrilled anyone. The customer did not fall in love with the core value. They fell in love with the Tuesday they found the shortcut nobody told them about and felt, for one minute, like the smartest person in the building.

Deciding for people is not a power grab. It is a kindness.

When you pick a brave default, you carry the weight of a decision so the other person doesn’t have to. You looked at the wall of choices, you ate the risk, you said this one, trust me. And then, if you are good, you leave a secret menu behind. A little room to reach past you and feel like the clever one.

That is the whole move. Decide so they feel safe. Then hide something so they feel rich. The cowardly product does neither, and you can feel it the second you open it, all those settings and not one of them a gift.

(To this day, I think “sport mode” in vehicles is one of the most genius product additions. What could be more attractive (and oxymoronic) than a knob that moderates your inherent desire for “more”? The not so secret dial that can even make a Prius feel more than a Prius.)

Stay Positive & Build It Animal Style

Between two songs at the show last night, the singer leaned into the mic and started telling us about a different night, at a different brewery.

“We had a few people up saying the verses with us, and we got to the point of really challenging them, over at Lone Girl.”

He smiled at the memory. You could tell it had been a good night. People singing the verses back, the band pushing them to go further, that rare electricity where a room stops being an audience and becomes part of the act.

And the room he was standing in did nothing. Not because we were rude. Because we weren’t there. He was describing the most participatory moment a crowd can have, and he was describing it to a crowd that could only watch him remember it. The story was about being inside the thing. The telling left us outside it.

His intentions were good. That’s what stuck with me. He wasn’t bragging. He was reaching back for something real and trying to share it. But reaching back is the problem. He pointed at a door he’d already walked through and shut, and asked us to admire it from the hallway.

A friend of mine runs a consulting practice and writes about how he got started. I wasn’t there for any of it. I have no idea what his first month felt like. And yet every time I read him, I’m in it. He doesn’t tell me what it was like for him. He puts me in the chair. He writes the fear I’d be feeling, the math I’d be doing at 2 a.m., the moment I’d want to quit. Same raw material as the band guy. Opposite move. One reflects. One invites.

I know the difference because I’ve been the band.

For years I told the story of getting the liquor license for the bar like this: it took eight months, a binder thick enough to stop a door, three trips to a county office where nobody made eye contact, and at least one night I was ready to walk away from the whole thing because the neighborhood eats businesses up that they think will result with people puking in their front yards. That’s a true story. It’s also a story about me, performed for people who weren’t in the binder with me. They nodded. They were polite. They weren’t there. I’ve since changed the tune.

Here’s where it stops being about songs and bars.

Walk through the founding-story page on almost any company website. The origin video. The wall of awards in the lobby. The “our journey” timeline with the little dots. It’s the band guy, professionally lit.

A business standing on stage, reaching back for its proudest night, describing a moment of connection to a customer who wasn’t there and isn’t being invited in. We started in a garage. We won the thing. We grew. The customer reads it the way we watched that singer. Nice for you. I wasn’t there. And you’re not actually talking to me.

The fix isn’t humility, exactly. The band guy was humble. The fix is a change of address. Stop narrating the memory. Build the doorway. Take whatever was true about your proudest night and rebuild it so the other person is standing inside it, feeling what you felt, facing what you faced, before you ever tell them how it turned out. Hand them the key in the hallway instead of the photo album of a vacation they didn’t take.

Most of the people who get this wrong are not careless. They’re the opposite. They care so much about the moment that they hold it instead of handing it over.

They had something true and they kept it warm in their own hands while the room went cold.

We weren’t there. We’re never there. That’s not the obstacle. That’s the whole job.

Stay Positive & What’s The Next Verse?

Every few weeks I run a quiet count. Six columns, the 6Fs: family, fun, finance, fitness, faith, and the one I always forget to list, which tells you most of what you’d need to know about how I’m doing in it. I total them up like a guy counting kegs in the cooler on a Sunday night. Nobody is watching. There’s no applause for the count. There’s me, a number, and the slow honesty of looking.

Usually I’m counting to find the empty one. Fitness has slid to zero because finance got loud. Fun got crowded out by a season of saying yes to the wrong things. I find the gap, I patch the gap, I feel briefly like a functional adult.

Hirohiko Araki wrote a book about making manga, and the part that stuck to me had nothing to do with drawing. He breaks every story into four elements: character, story, setting, theme. Then he says the real work, the work behind the work, is relentless analysis. Read everything. Take it apart. Figure out why the thing that moved you moved you. He treats it as the foundation and he means that literally. You cannot build on ground you have never surveyed.

That is inventory. It’s the least romantic word in any craft and it’s the whole game. Every artist I’ve studied does the same unglamorous thing. They take stock. They count what’s already on the shelf before they decide what to make next. I just took inventory of our beer cooler at the bar, too. Fun isn’t how I would describe the time. Alas.

…Here’s a count worth running on your own life. Not what you do, but how you came to do it. Some things you got thrown into. Some you signed up for. Some you still get coached on as a grown adult, thank God. Some you do for nothing in return. Some you do entirely for the return.

A full life has all of them on the board. A stuck life is usually missing two and has no idea.

The part I get wrong, every single time, is that I only hunt for the zero. The empty column is honest. It announces itself. You feel the absence of fun or faith the way you feel a missing tooth.

The dangerous column is the full one. The thing you do entirely for the return, quietly running at a hundred, eating the hours that used to belong to the things you did for love. It doesn’t read as a problem. It reads as discipline. It reads as winning. Nobody audits a winning streak, and that is exactly why it gets to keep growing in the dark.

This is also, for whatever it’s worth, the whole secret of positioning, and most people building brands have it pointed the wrong way. They think positioning is an act of invention. A new story, a clever line, a fresh coat of paint. It almost never is.

Positioning is an act of inventory.

You take honest stock of what you already are, you find the column sitting at zero in the customer’s mind, and you find the one running so hot it’s crowding out everything else you could be to them. Most brands don’t need a new story. They need to count the one they’ve already got, and notice which shelf is bare and which one is about to tip over.

The count never gets easier. That’s the thing I keep waiting on and it keeps not coming. You’d think after enough Sunday nights with the cooler you’d run out of surprises. You don’t. Last time I ran mine I found that the column I’d been bragging about was the one bleeding all the others dry. Not the empty one. The full one. The one I was proud of.

Survey the ground. Even the part you’re sure you know.

Stay Positive & Especially That Part

There’s a river near my house called Sugar River. It is not made of sugar and it is not sweet. Somebody, a long time ago, tasted the water or the maples on its banks or just liked the sound, and the name stuck the way names do, which is to say arbitrarily and forever.

I walk along it almost every weekend. For years I would have told you, if you asked, that Sugar River is a thing. A noun. A blue line on a county map. Something you point at the way you point at a parked car. It’s (and I do mean it’s) a river I drink by often and might just kayak down this summer.

Then I learned that in Potawatomi, one of the languages that named this land long before anyone thought to call the water sugar, a bay is not a noun. The word lands closer to “to be a bay.” The water is not sitting in a category. It is doing something. Being a bay is an act the water performs, the way you perform being awake, or being in love.

About seventy percent of Potawatomi words are verbs. In English the number is closer to thirty percent. We took a living, moving, weather-having world and filed most of it under nouns. Rocks, rivers, hills, Saturdays. We turned the world into inventory and then acted surprised when we started treating it like inventory.

Here is what the grammar does to you, quietly, before you notice. And having two daughters, I’m highly sensitive to it now.

When Sugar River is a noun, I am the subject of the sentence and the river is the object. I am the one holding the verb. I walk, I look, I own the riparian rights, I decide. The river just sits there being itself, waiting for me to do something to it or about it. The grammar puts me in charge. It hands me the clipboard.

When Sugar River is a verb, the whole arrangement comes apart. The river is doing something. It was doing it before I got here, in the dark, with no audience, carving the same bank it has been carving since the glaciers left and the meltwater had to go somewhere. It will keep doing it after I am gone and after the county map is a museum object. I am not the subject of that sentence. I am a guy who showed up partway through, stood on the bank for a few hundred afternoons drinking beers, and called it sugar.

That is the part I keep circling. Not that the river deserves my respect, though it might. The smaller, stranger thing: the river does not need me to finish its sentence. I have spent my life inside a grammar that told me I was the one with the verb, the protagonist of the watershed, the one things happen to and through.

And the river, doing its slow patient work in the cold, was never asking. I am the guest. The word “it” was how a temporary visitor talked himself into feeling like the landlord.

I will not pretend this is only a nature thought, because it followed me back to work, amidst my 15 claude projects and flooding LinkedIn feed.

We do the same thing to companies. We make them nouns. We are the leader. We are the platform. We are the category. Every one of those sentences plants a flag and stops moving, and a flag is a thing, and things sit on shelves, and shelves get reorganized.

The brands that harden into nouns are the ones that get carried off by the current while still insisting they are the river. Kodak was a noun. Photography was a verb, and it walked away without them, the way Sugar River would keep flowing if every map in the county burned and the brewery beside it shut down.

The humbling version, the one I actually believe, is that no company is the river. The market was here before you and it is doing something whether or not you show up to narrate it. You are a guest who arrived partway through and got to stand on the bank for a while and call it yours.

That is not a small thing. It is just not the large thing we keep pretending it is.

I still call it Sugar River. The name is wrong and I love it anyway. But lately, when I’m looking out over the bridge, admiring wildlife with my daughters, I try to hold the other grammar in my head at the same time. Not the river. Rivering. Something the water is doing, has been doing, will keep doing, with or without a name, and with or without me there to watch it go by.

Maybe just maybe my daughters use the name as a verb. I promise not to correct them.

Maybe just maybe we did marketing justice by calling it marketing. It sounds right to everyone I say it to, but internally I really am referring to the market as a verb and not the work of a noun.

Stay Positive & Worth Looking Up At The Skying Today