GarthBox

A shift schedule where one name never appears alone.

That was my schedule. I hired a beertender and then kept them paired up, week after week, never trusted with a solo shift. Nothing they did behind my bar earned that. The bars they came from did. I’d decided those places didn’t train anyone properly, so I also decided they hadn’t been trained, and then I made them re-earn a résumé they had already lived.

I did it again with a candidate I never hired. Two stops on her résumé, neither long enough (in my math) to have survived the grunt work. The keg that kicks mid-rush. The close that runs an hour long. The regular who needs managing more than serving. I did the math and skipped her. I’ll never know if the math was right.

What I was actually measuring was my own attendance.

I hadn’t watched them do the work, so the work didn’t count. Everyone you meet walks in carrying years of reps performed in rooms you weren’t standing in. Closes you didn’t close. Calls you didn’t sit on. A few rounds of interviews won’t cover that distance. An interview is a highlight reel the candidate edited and you watched with your arms folded … a show on both sides of the table.

So leaders wait. We call it ramp up, which is a very polite way of saying until I’ve watched enough. It feels like diligence. It wears a lanyard and carries a clipboard. Mostly it’s a toll the new person pays in weeks while the idea they walked in with goes stale in their pocket, and the customer pays it again later, when that idea finally gets heard.

The fix is small and a little uncomfortable. Ask to see more instead of waiting to see more. Ask the beertender how the close ran at the last place and what they’d change about yours. Ask which calls they’ve sat on and what they heard. Then put them in the room.

I’ve been on the good end of this. A sales team once pulled me into their calls and their strategy conversations without asking me to prove I’d done the sales grunt work somewhere else first. I had. They assumed it. That assumption bought all of us months.

The fear underneath the waiting is mostly fiction. Put someone in a little before you feel ready and one of two things happens faster: they succeed or they fail.

And in my career so far, there are very few rooms where an unprepared person stumbles and the damage ripples across your whole life. It feels that way the afternoon you hand over the keys, sure, but a rough solo shift is a bad night, not a permanently closed bar.

Buyers run the same schedule on products. Demo, second demo, the can-you-run-it-again-for-our-VP demo. All show, all waiting. The product has thousands of reps in rooms the buyer will never visit, so a fourth, shinier demo won’t close the gap. Hand them something to ask instead. The customer they should call. What broke in month one. Give them a way to stop waiting.

Stay Positive & Who’s Still On Your Ramp?

“You’re so smart.”

That’s what came out when my daughter grabbed the oven mitts to get something hot out of the microwave. I heard it leave my mouth, caught it, and changed lanes as casually as a man can in his own kitchen. “Oh, looks like you grabbed oven mitts so you wouldn’t burn yourself!”

Smart is a trophy. It goes on a shelf and does nothing. The oven mitt sentence is a recipe, and the next time the microwave beeps she already knows what to reach for. (For the record, I still said smart first. Old habits get to the microwave before you do…)

A label is a grade, and a grade needs a judge. Every “great job” quietly climbs onto the bench and bangs the gavel. “I knew you could do it” is worse, because now the judge is also collecting credit for calling it.

Going downhill, that mostly works. Parents grade kids. Managers grade reports. Grades roll downhill like everything else does.

Try sending one uphill…

Tell a boss “great presentation” and you’ve appointed yourself her grader. That’s presumptuous, so you add a little sugar to cover the presumption, and the sugar is what the whole room can smell. Brown-nosing is a grade from below, frosted.

A description doesn’t need a bench. Anyone can be a witness.

I tried it once. A boss had said something vulnerable in a meeting, the kind of thing leaders usually leave in the car, and later I told her I’d noticed she was willing to say it out loud in that room. No adjective. You could still watch it land on her face as praise. Then she told me what saying it had actually done, which meant she was praising herself, with better evidence than I had.

I’ve been on the receiving end, too. At a sales kickoff at one company, an account manager took the mic in front of everybody. She said I was responsive, which was nice. Then she got specific. I’d built the enablement materials her team had been desperately asking for, tracked whether they actually used them, and kept refining them off my own research instead of waiting around for feedback. I can still tell you what she said. That’s the tell. (She could have easily said, Garth is awesome!)

You can’t describe what you didn’t watch. A description is a receipt for attention, and attention is the one thing flattery can’t counterfeit for very long.

Sucking up is praise that skipped the watching.

For what it’s worth… I’m not shitting on labels. Labels still have a job. They’re the bow. Once the box has something in it, “I’m so proud of you, I’m so happy you made that kind of impact on people” ties it off beautifully. That isn’t a grade anyway. It’s a report on your own feelings, and you’re the only one qualified to give it.

Product pages could stand to learn this. A page that calls itself powerful is grading its own homework, and buyers can smell the sugar from the search results. Describe what changed at one customer’s desk on one ordinary Tuesday… and leave the adjective blank. People defend the adjectives they write themselves.

My daughter will reach for the oven mitts again. The word smart won’t be what sends her there. What she did will, because a thing you did is a thing you can do twice. And ain’t that the whole game of growth?

Stay Positive & I Noticed You Invested The Time To Read This Blog Post…

One faucet on our draft system pulls sideways.

Most bars have the standard handle you rock forward until beer arrives. Ours is a side-pull, a European thing with a little restrictor plate in the nose, and it takes a new beertender about three weeks to stop fighting it. It pours slower. It cost more. It made our training longer on purpose.

I did not buy it because it makes better beer, although many-a-beertender argues it does. I bought it because it gave every person behind that bar something to say that belongs to them. A guest asks why the pour looks different and the answer is not printed on a card by the register. It comes out of whoever is standing there, in their words, with their hands showing the angle.

That is the whole trick, and I keep watching it fail everywhere else.

At work the number one priority changes constantly. Not yearly. Not quarterly. Barely monthly, if I’m honest… Something gets funded on a Tuesday and by the following Monday there is a newer fire with a better story, and the thing you have been carrying slides down a row on somebody’s board while you were in a different meeting.

The instinct is to defend the slot. Better deck, louder business case, more urgency in the update.

Notice who actually wins those fights. It is almost never the person with the strongest argument. It is the person whose idea already lives in three other people’s vocabulary, so when they are not in the room, the idea still walks in, spoken by somebody with more credibility on that particular subject than they will ever have.

You cannot hold the slot. You can make the thing unownable by you alone.

Marketers need to stop evangelizing and start teaching. Build the skill into somebody else. Give the sales lead the two questions that make a discovery call bend your direction. Give the support manager the frame that explains the roadmap in support language instead of yours. Then let them say it however they say things.

I have watched quiet people get very good at this. Folks who would rather do inventory alone at midnight than present to a room, who figured out that if you hand a colleague something that makes that colleague look sharp in their own meeting, the idea travels farther than any presentation they would have given. They never had to become extroverts. They just stopped being the only distribution channel.

Which is a positioning problem in work clothes. Messaging that only works in your mouth is not messaging, it is a performance. The test is not whether the sentence is right. The test is whether somebody else can say it badly and it still lands.

(This is also why I quit correcting my team on the faucet story. Half of them tell it poorly. Myself included. Guests love it anyway.)

The kicker of a pill we need to swallow: Priorities are supposed to move.

Build in public. Ship in intervals. Find the loud beta customer who says it better than your deck. But mostly, give your best idea away to three people who have no reason to protect it, and then watch how hard it becomes to kill.

Stay Positive & You’re A Teacher Whether You Wanted To Be One When You Grew Up Or Not

At some point you stop having first times. Nobody sends a letter about it. You just notice that most of what you do now arrives pre-chewed, already sampled by some version of you sitting in a chair with eyes half closed, running the whole thing at double speed.

I am thinking about taking the family camping. So far I have made dinner, gotten the girls to sleep, played a hand of Uno to kill the hour before the fire got good, and burned two marshmallows. All of it in my head. On a Tuesday. In a kitchen.

It was a beautiful trip. The good chairs were in it. The bug spray was already sitting in the bin by the door, the cooler had ice that never turned to water, and the fire caught on the first strike, which is the detail that gives the whole thing away.

Running that simulation costs something, and what it costs is the first time. When we actually get out there and the fire finally catches and starts throwing that smell onto everybody’s jacket, I will not be having an experience. I will be running a comparison. The real campfire has to audition against the one I already built… and the real one has bugs (literally and figuratively).

The girls will just be at a fire.

Both ways teach you something, which is what makes this hard to settle. Pre-living everything trains your gut. You stack up outcomes until you can make a call in four seconds that used to take four days, and that is real, and it is most of what people are actually buying when they hire experience.

Going in cold trains a different animal. No map, no rehearsal, learning to stay comfortable while uncomfortable, which might be the more expensive skill because you cannot get it from a chair. Only one of those two muscles keeps getting used. The simulator gets faster every year. The tolerance gets slower.

A launch works the same way. By the time the thing goes live you have read the headline four hundred times. You have run the demo in your sleep. You have pre-experienced the reaction so thoroughly that you have no access left to the reaction itself. You spent every first impression you had on rehearsals, and the only one that mattered was the one you cannot get back.

The newest person in the building still has theirs. They ask the question that makes everybody shift in their seat, the one that sounds naive, and it is not naive. It is the last unspent first impression on the team. Standard practice is to train it out of them inside ninety days and put it on a slide called onboarding.

If you believe the team feeds the customer and the customer feeds the company, that is the asset you are supposed to be guarding. Not their eventual competence. Their current inability to see it your way.

I am still going to plan the camping trip (I know myself). But the fire starter stays home, dinner is undecided, and if they want to swim at the exact moment I have scheduled s’mores, we are swimming.

In a few years the girls will remember a trip. I will remember two stories stacked on top of each other, and I will not be able to tell you which one had the better marshmallows.

Stay Positive & What Muscle Are You Working This Week?

You always know when you splurge.

It arrives with its own weather. Ecstasy and regret holding hands, a little fear underneath, that specific nausea of having done something you cannot fully defend. And it never shows up on a calendar. It shows up at 9:40 on a Thursday with the card already out of the wallet.

I paid a professional editor to read Herough Herough. Real money, my money, for a novel that owes me nothing. I did not budget for it. (I budgeted for a few Upwork-priced editors…) I decided in an afternoon to drop the $3k and felt sick and elated in the same breath, which is how I knew it counted.

So the tidy conclusion is that we should plan our splurges. Plan one into the launch. Into the new hire’s first week. Into the customer visit.

Except… Except a splurge you planned is just a purchase with better lighting. The charge comes from the fact that nobody approved it.

Only half of it can be planned. The money can be decided cold, months out, in a quiet room where nothing is happening and nobody is excited. The moment cannot. The moment belongs to whoever is standing there when it arrives, and that person is almost never the person holding the card.

I sat in an offsite once where a team was working out what to build next with AI. Somebody said the big thing out loud. The room did not argue with it. The room sized it. Three months, current resourcing, and the idea went quiet on its own. Nobody killed it. It just got measured while it was still warm.

Another time I tried to thank a few customers who had joined us on a conference panel. Everyone loved the idea. Then it was the cost. Then it was the execution. Then it turned out the gifting platform was mid-renewal. (If you want to watch a good impulse die, lock it in a room with a contract that is up for renewal…) The whole thing came apart in my hands.

The generosity was never what failed. The timing of the ask was. Ecstasy does not survive a quote request. By the time three people have weighed in on the vendor, the thing you felt on Tuesday has grown a Wednesday five o’clock shadow and a routing number.

If you are the one who has to ask… stop asking in the moment. You will lose in the moment, every time, to people who are not wrong.

Ask in January for a night in April you cannot describe yet. Ask for a number instead of a plan. “I want four hundred dollars a quarter and I am not going to tell you what for until afterward” is a deeply strange sentence to say to your boss… it is also the only shape of the ask with a pulse, because in January the money is still abstract and nobody is defending anything.

(I remember reading a story of a company that gave it’s employees no-questions-asked-$200-coupon. And they penalized them for NOT using them. That‘s how you plan for the splurge!)

A budget is the most honest document a company publishes. It says, in numbers, which outcomes it actually expects. Fund the crisis and not the celebration and you have told your whole team what you think is coming.

The only part of that customer thank-you that ever reached anybody was a letter. I wrote it and put it in a hand. It cost postage, took an hour, and passed across no one’s desk on the way. No one knew I did it. Which is either a very nice thing about letters or a very unkind thing about everything else in the building…

Stay Positive & When Did You Splurge Last?

We took the family apple picking and I ate a Brooklyn Gala standing in the row. It’s a variety I’d never heard of, grown around here and not much of anywhere else. It tastes like a Gala that spent some time outdoors. Earthier. Like it knows what dirt is.

The bag I carried out was full of the reliable stuff. The apple I still remember is the one I ate before I paid for anything.

My daughters worked this out faster than I did. They didn’t want an apple. They wanted permission to take one bite and throw the rest into the grass, which they did, a few times, with the glee of tiny vandals.

The orchard knew that was coming. Tasting isn’t a leak in that business, it’s a line item. The price on the sign by the shed already covers the two apples I ate in the row and the four my kids pitched into the weeds. Nobody follows you down the rows. Nobody counts.

They priced the joy in before we got out of the car.

Most operations run the other way. Someone notices that people take a little of the work for themselves and files it under problem. So you get approval steps, and trackers, and a review cycle with three sets of initials on it, all built to protect something that was never actually going missing.

The policing costs more than the apples ever did.

I do positioning work for a living, and a while back I was deep in a project when a thought came loose that had nothing to do with the deliverable. It was about how people actually decide things. Good enough to use. Not close enough to the assignment to survive a review.

So I published it myself. (Not stolen, exactly… it grew in the row next to the work, which is where most of the good ones grow. Like the Brooklyn Gala)

The deliverable shipped on time. The odd thought got eaten standing up, in the field, by me.

That’s a manager’s move more than a worker’s…. A good one says out loud that you’re allowed to keep something from the work you do. Take the strange one. Try the variety you’d never buy a whole bag of. Nobody is going to weigh it on the way out.

Plenty of people never hear that from a manager, so you end up having to say it to yourself, which is harder, because it feels like something you were supposed to have outgrown.

The reason it matters isn’t morale… it’s supply.

Pickers who taste come back next fall, and they bring people with them. An orchard that puts cameras in the rows gets one clean season and then a very quiet parking lot.

My daughters ate maybe six bites of apple all afternoon and abandoned four whole ones in the grass. It was the happiest either of them had been all morning. The orchard planned on that, priced it, and made money anyway.

Stay Positive & Eat The Weird One

I read a post a while back about software companies putting payments inside their products.

It was competent. Organized, accurate, market math all in the right places. And there was not one human being in it. Not a single line from a company that had actually gone through the transition. Nothing about what it cost them, what broke, who on the team quit over it, what they would tell somebody standing at the front of that decision right now.

So I supplied them. I sat there filling in the missing people from my own memory, from conversations I have had and a few I watched go sideways. By the time I got anything useful out of that post, I had done most of the work.

That is not a reading experience. That is a bill.

We have all had “know your audience” drilled into our brains since our first marketing job, so set that aside. This is narrower and more mechanical. Every piece of content either does the translation or hands it to the reader, and there is no third option. The reader pays in attention they never agreed to spend, which is why so much technically correct content leaves people tired instead of convinced.

I have sent that bill.

When I was job hunting I wrote a run of posts about a category of business I wanted to work inside. Confident stuff. What the space needed to understand about itself. Every one of them was the same posture underneath: pay attention, here’s what I want you to know. Look how smart I am!

I was not contributing. I was auditioning. Describing a room I had not been let into yet, in the vocabulary of that room, hoping somebody inside would hear the accent and open the door. Asking for attention on credit is a very particular kind of expensive… the reader feels the ask even when they cannot name it.

There are really only two things a piece of writing says underneath the words.

1. Pay attention, here’s what I want you to know. Or…
2. I have been paying attention, here’s what I can contribute.

You know which one you are holding by the second sentence. Not the headline. The headline is a costume. The second sentence is where the writer either stays with you or turns to face the crowd, and by then you already know whether you are being paid attention to or being called to pay attention.

The ones that land almost never open with knowledge. They open in tension, or in something the author got wrong, or in a thing that still is not resolved. That reads as vulnerability and gets filed under tone, but it is not tone..per se… It is evidence.

Tension is proof somebody stood where you are standing before they started talking. Stats can be gathered from a chair. Tension has to be survived.

Stay Positive & Read Your Own Second Sentence