GarthBox

The drag car at Madison’s raceway wore a full rack of antlers on the hood and a double tail piece off the back, like a whitetail that had renegotiated its contract with nature and come out with horsepower. It staged. It launched. The tree went green and the antlers went with it, doing whatever the opposite of aerodynamics is, and the crowd loved that car more than anything else that touched the strip. (It won the heat, too.)

That was one of three exaggerations I witnessed in about a month. Before the raceway there was an outdoor theater in Door County, where a musical took the New Jersey stereotype and instead of winking at it, floored it. And before that, a high school dance performance, where one dancer wasn’t just moving her arms and legs. Her face was doing choreography too. Eyebrows, jaw, the whole front of her head committed to the routine.

I clapped hardest for all three. So did everyone around me. Which is worth sitting with, because every piece of respectable creative advice runs the other direction. Dial it back. Be subtle. Show restraint. And the trouble with restraint is that from ten rows away it looks identical to indifference. Nobody in the cheap seats can tell your tasteful minimalism from your not trying. Care is invisible at normal volume. You have to overshoot for it to register.

Exaggeration registers because it costs something. It risks dignity, and it cannot be done halfway. One antler on a hood is an accident, something you hit on the drive in. Two antlers and a double tail piece is a decision a person made in a garage, sober (maybe…), probably with zip ties, knowing full well the other racers would have opinions. That’s what the crowd was cheering. Not the spectacle. The decision. Proof that somebody committed all the way, in public, at the personal expense of looking ridiculous.

And here’s what the dancer taught me: the faces didn’t just make her more watchable. They made her better. Once your face commits, the rest of you has to follow or admit the whole thing is a bluff. Exaggeration works on the exaggerator. It burns the boats behind your own effort.

At the bar, our version of antlers is the beertender recommendation card. The job could be done by a Post-it. A name, a beer, done. Instead we designed an actual card, and each one carries an AI art portrait of the beertender’s face, because a recommendation should come from a person, not a wall. A reasonable person would look at those cards and say it’s a bit much. Correct. That’s the entire mechanism. And notice what the card overdoes. Not the beer. The beertender. It announces that the person pouring your beer has an opinion worth framing, and customers pick up the card and then go looking for the face behind the bar. Overdo it on behalf of your people and your customers will find their way to them.

One more thing exaggeration does, and this is the part that takes nerve: it sorts. Somebody at that raceway rolled their eyes at the antlers, guaranteed. They weren’t the audience. The antlers weren’t for everyone, which is exactly how you know they were for someone. Half-exaggeration is the only truly bad setting on the dial, because half is where the flinch lives, and an audience can smell flinch through concrete.

A month later I couldn’t tell you a single time slip from that night at the raceway. But of everything that launched down that strip, the thing that followed me home had antlers.

Stay Positive & Overdo Something Small This Week

“This is why we don’t eat snacks in the car.”

That was the sermon in the brewery parking lot, delivered by a father into the open sliding door of a minivan, to children who had apparently turned a bag of something crunchy into weather. My wife and I were walking in without our kids for once. We never saw the spill. We didn’t need to. We know that spill personally.

Now compare that to the last brewery trip with the full herd. My wife was closing the tab, the kids needed somewhere to orbit, so I washed up against the merch rack. And there, between the hoodies, the brewery had swag for infants. Tiny onesies. Within seconds I was thinking of a friend who’s expecting and loves that brewery, and just like that I was a gift shopper. I’ve been drinking beer in rooms like that for a couple decades and I could not tell you what most of those merch racks ever held before. The rack didn’t change. I got handed different eyes.

Kidless, the merch went invisible again and the room turned its volume up. Couples deciding things in that low negotiating voice. Families comparing Door County notes. The small audible machinery of other people’s lives, running on the same fuel as mine.

I didn’t choose to notice any of it. That’s the part worth keeping. Attention isn’t a virtue. It’s a side effect of constraint. You can’t will yourself into fresh eyes. You have to borrow a constraint that forces them: a kid on your hip, an empty passenger seat, a stroller where your pint hand used to be.

It’s why my favorite seat at Garth’s Brew Bar isn’t behind the bar. It’s a stool in the middle of the room, no GBB shirt, no tell, listening to strangers talk about the place while the owner sits two feet away eating their reviews like peanuts. Those are my most gratifying moments at my own bar, better than pouring. Behind the bar I only ever see what an owner sees. The apron is a constraint too. It just keeps showing me the same movie.

Whoever walks into your business tonight is carrying something you can’t see from your side of the counter. A due date. A car full of crumbs. A friend they’re already shopping for. The room won’t tell you what they see. The only way in is to borrow what they’re carrying.

Stay Positive & Leave The Logo Shirt At Home

When I launched coffee at Garth’s Brew Bar, I onboarded the new hire the way a man assembles a grill the night before a cookout: fast, sweating, certain the instructions were written for somebody less capable. Here’s the grinder. Here’s the POS. Here’s where the oat milk lives. Go. Then I gave him the story.

A few weeks in, he handed me something I hadn’t ordered. He said the onboarding went straight to process and served the story second…and that hurt. It was painful for him to care about any of the details when there was nothing about why the bar exists, what it believes, who it’s trying to be a living room for. Just buttons and workflows.

It stung. It was also the cheapest consulting I have ever received.

We are lousy at holding mirrors up to ourselves. And on the rare occasions we manage it, we angle them. Everyone has a bathroom tilt, that one degree of rotation where the jawline forgives you. Businesses have it too. We ask questions built to come back kind. We survey the customers we already know are happy. We run the retro where every “what went wrong” lands on a mattress somebody dragged in beforehand.

The fix is a readout. Someone digests across your business and tells you what they saw. Not edits. Not a strategy deck. Observations of friction and flow. Where things snag, where things glide, the walk-in door everyone has learned to hip-check without noticing they learned it.

And the polite version of this idea hides something: even pure observation stings. “The door sticks and everyone hip-checks it” carries a silent “and nobody has fixed it in three years.” The sting is not a malfunction. The sting is the thermometer working.

Consultants sell readouts, and good ones earn their fee. But you already hired one. Every new hire walks in with an unbent view of your business, and the meter is running. Thirty days, maybe forty-five, and their eyes adjust to the dark like everyone else’s. The sticky door becomes a hip-check. The jargon becomes air. You get one mirror per hire, and it starts melting the moment they sign.

I’m the melting mirror right now. New job, readout due in a week. One thing going in it: we talk about our core product and our new product like two arms that happen to share a torso. Separate stories, separate pride. Some people want one platform narrative. Some don’t. And when you double-click on most of the frustration floating around the building, that disagreement is sitting at the bottom of it, holding its breath.

It’s the same flaw the new hire caught at my bar. Process before story. Product before narrative. Different building, same missing sentence.

But the readout itself is not the valuable part. The document gets read once, nodded at, argued with, filed. What lasts is what it took to write it: weeks of sitting with people, listening past their titles, asking questions with no agenda except understanding the place. By the time you deliver a readout, people trust you, and not because your observations were sharp. Because you were the one who asked.

Attention is the rarest currency in any building, and they watched you spend yours on them.

That said… that structure is not reserved for consultants and new hires.

Listening, observing, asking real questions on a schedule benefits anyone in any role. Most job descriptions just forget to mention it. And if you’re past your own thirty days, your eyes have adjusted along with everybody else’s, which makes it more urgent, not less, to find a fresh pair and hand them permission to tell you what they see. Regularly. On purpose. Before the door becomes a hip-check.

Mine is due in a week. The sentence about the two arms is loaded. I don’t know yet whether the room will hear an observation or an accusation. That’s the deal with a mirror you didn’t angle.

Stay Positive & Hip-Check Be Damned

I watched two strangers become riding buddies at a motorcycle tech inspection over zip ties. One guy’s kickstand needed securing, and before he could finish describing the problem, the rider next to him was already digging through his kit, coming up with a fistful of zip ties like a magician who only does useful tricks. Ten minutes later they were trading routes and phone numbers. The zip ties cost a nickel. The friendship is still running.

We keep a version of that kit at the bar. There’s a section in our backroom, cans and bottles with no tap line attached and no order waiting, standing at parade rest until a stranger shows up. Their whole job is to be grabbed. Anyone on the team can walk back, pull one, and pour a sample for a guest. No permission needed. It’s stronger than permission, actually. They’re expected to.

One of those samples turned into a Google review. A guest got handed a taste they didn’t ask for and didn’t pay for, and it landed hard enough that they went home and wrote about it. Reviews are how strangers decide whether to trust a bar they’ve never walked into. So a can from the shelf that earns nothing became five stars, and five stars became new faces at the door. The shelf that doesn’t sell may outsell the ones that do.

The mechanism matters. A spare works because it existed before the need did. You stocked it for someone you hadn’t met yet. Generosity improvised in the moment smells like a transaction. Generosity provisioned in advance smells like character, because that’s what it is. You can’t backdate a spare.

Which is why so few businesses have any… Walk through the average company and try to find something that isn’t tagged to a budget line and wired to a conversion goal. A sample that has to convert isn’t a spare. It’s a pitch with the receipt still showing, and customers can smell the receipt.

The other half is the keys. If your team has to ask before being generous, you don’t have spares. You have inventory with extra steps.

Stock the shelf, then hand your people both the access and the expectation. You invest in them, they invest it in the guest, the guest walks home and invests it back in you. Somebody has to fund the first move in that cycle, and it’s you.

In all the years that shelf has existed, nobody has abused it. Not once. The only time it has ever hurt was when it ran empty. The right person on the right stool, a perfect moment to be generous, and nothing to reach for. Running out is the only way a spare fails you.

Our dog figured all this out before I did. He picked his favorite neighbor by one criterion: the man carries spare treats. You can picture it what happened when Ella (our Bernese mountain dog) ran to him and he was out of spare treats. Oof.

Stay Positive & Restock The Shelf

Garth’s Brew Bar is one location, and I intend to keep it that way. No second spot, no franchise dreams, no empire. Which means I own exactly one pot, and the physics of one pot are unforgiving. If you don’t stir it, everything settles. The good stuff sinks, sticks to the bottom, and quietly scorches while the surface still looks fine.

So we stir. New taps (and tap handle styles… side-pull, anyone?!), new events, small experiments the regulars didn’t ask for. Not because the bar is broken, but because nothing standing still ever made a spark, and a team ladling the same soup every week goes to the bottom of the pot right along with it. Stirring is how one room stays new. It’s also how the people in it stay awake.

A note on technique, because stirring the pot has a bad rap. The rap comes from people who stir just to see what splashes. That’s not stirring, that’s flailing. A pot stirrer worth the name has a strategy and a target, and knows exactly what the dish is for and who’s going to eat it. Last month I stirred the pot on the messaging for a product video. The splash landed as a blog post and a LinkedIn post. Stir on purpose and even the mess feeds somebody.

The standard cure for a stale business is a bigger business. Another location, another line, another pot. That’s one way to stay new. It’s the expensive way, and it won’t fix a bottom that’s already burning.

Stay Positive & Stir

We were two minutes inside the trading card show when a stranger waved us over. He was holding six Eevee cards, fanned out like a tiny royal flush of joy, and he said, “I’ve been looking for someone special to give these to. I’m going to guess your daughter likes Eevee?”

She was wearing an Eevee hat. She sure does.

I’ve been chewing on that scene all day, because it wasn’t random kindness. Random would have been handing the cards to whoever walked in first. This man had been carrying a gift around like a loaded question, scanning the room for its answer. Generosity, it turns out, is a search problem.

You decide to give before you know who’s receiving, and then you go looking for the person who has already told you what they love.

And people are always telling you.

My daughter announced her whole heart with one piece of embroidered headwear. Adults do it too, just with worse hats. The concert shirt. The laptop stickers. The way somebody’s voice picks up speed when a certain topic enters the room. Everyone walks around broadcasting exactly what would delight them, on a frequency almost nobody bothers to tune.

There are two lessons in those Eevee cards, wearing one trench coat. The first is surprise and delight, which every brand claims to practice and almost none does, because they run it through accounting first. Back when I was bartending we had the buyback, the round that simply appears, no punch card, no points, no explanation beyond a nod. Its entire power lived in the fact that nothing was owed in either direction. Print the same free drink on a loyalty card and it becomes an invoice with good manners. The Eevee man kept no receipt. He didn’t ask us to follow him anywhere. He gave, he glowed, and he wandered back into the aisles of cardboard.

The second lesson is that he read the hat. He didn’t give her what he wished she wanted, or whatever he happened to have too much of. He matched the gift to the signal. A lot of marketing runs this in reverse: decide what needs unloading, then hunt for someone to aim it at. The order is everything. Delight starts with the hat, not the inventory.

If you want to train for this, try one week of a small, unglamorous practice: at the end of each day, write down the one thing you gave away. It doesn’t have to be an object. Credit in a meeting counts. Twenty unhurried minutes counts. The point isn’t bookkeeping. The point is what it does to your eyes. By Thursday you’ll be scanning every room you enter for hats.

This afternoon I’m driving around town slipping copies of my novel into free little libraries. Small wooden boxes on posts, doors squeaking, waiting. Somewhere out there is a stranger wearing the right kind of curiosity, and I will never see their face when they find it. That’s not the missing part of the story. That’s the engine.

Stay Positive & What Did You Give Away Today?

There’s a beer we bring back to the bar over and over called Teal Label, from Modist Brewing. Depending on who’s sitting in front of me, it becomes two different beers.

To one guest, it’s a sweeter hoppy beer. Four words.

She nods, she orders, she’s happy, and anything more from me would have been noise.

To another guest an hour later, it opens up: a west coast IPA built on a sweet malt base that never goes thick on you, the hops doing their piney strut on top of something almost candied, one of the few beers that our guests and our own team love so much we keep bringing it back like a band that fills the room every time it plays.

Same liquid. Same tap. Two different verbal pours, because the person changed.

I do this behind the bar without thinking. Reading the guest and picking the words is the job. Nobody trained me on it. It would be absurd not to.

Then I go do marketing and see people forgetting the whole thing. (Myself included!)

Because at work I have a house pour, and it’s revenue. Ask me why a project matters and I’ll tell you what it does to revenue. Ask me what’s broken and I’ll show you where the revenue is leaking. It’s a sturdy format. Numbers hold weight, executives trust them, and I’m good at it.

But… that’s not why I reach for it. I reach for it the way I reach for a pint glass, by muscle memory. Revenue is what I pour, whether the person in front of me drinks it or not. Stepping outside of it is hard for me in a way that switching descriptions of a beer has never been.

Recently I watched someone land a difficult point, the kind that usually dies in a follow-up meeting, and they never touched a number. They traced the frustration instead. This process makes that person redo her work. It leaves this team waiting days for an answer they should have in an hour. It turns a simple request into four apologetic emails. They colored in the annoyance person by person until the whole room could feel the ache of it, the way you feel a pebble in someone else’s shoe once it’s been described well enough. Nobody argued. Things moved.

The revenue version of that argument existed. I could have built it in my sleep… could have said it in that call! It would have earned polite nods and a slide in somebody’s deck.

The complicated point wasn’t the hard part. The point was the beer. The hard part was the pour, and they chose it for the room instead of for themselves.

That’s the thing about a default format. It feels like a strength because you’re fluent in it, but fluency is a comfort you give yourself, not a service you give the listener.

A story, a number, a question, a sketch, a demonstration, a map of who’s quietly suffering: they’re all the same active ingredient in different dosage forms, and the dose gets chosen for the patient, not the pharmacist.

Behind the bar I’ve always known this, although things are a bit more simple when it comes to guests who come in versus an organization of 400 people… but that’s what makes it even more important, doesn’t it?

Stay Positive & Know Your Audience