GarthBox

Before an email leaves my outbox, it has to survive one question: could anyone put their signature at the bottom of this and the recipient wouldn’t know the difference? If the answer is yes, it doesn’t go. Not yet. An email anyone could have signed is a form letter wearing my name tag, and the person on the other end can smell the laminate.

We spend a lot of energy trying to be recognizable by our answers. Wrong end of the animal. Answers have gotten cheap. Any of us can summon a competent answer to nearly anything before the coffee finishes dripping.

What still can’t be borrowed is the question you refuse to stop asking. People recognize you by what you ask before you act. That’s the signature now.

I have three I’ll share now.

At work, every prompt I send to Claude carries a standing order: along with whatever I asked for, bring me one competing idea, still on strategy, that adds an element of surprise & delight. I built a rule that lets a machine outvote me, which sounds like surrender until you watch it work. Sometimes its idea wins outright. More often it arrives as a supplement, a strange little rib I can weave into my original skeleton, and the finished thing is better than either of us would have managed alone.

The second is the signature test above.

The third lives at home: before I do anything there, I ask whether it benefits someone else in my family. Not instead of me. Also.

I know these questions earn their keep because I know what it costs to skip them.

Skipping feels like efficiency in the moment. The bill arrives later.

There’s an email out there with my name on it that anyone could have signed. I was busy, the send button was close, and I wrote to a job title instead of a person. The reply was polite the way weather reports are polite. Regret is just a question you didn’t ask, showing up after the deadline.

You don’t have bandwidth to run every worthy question before every action. Nobody does. The checklist would outlive the task.

But there is always time for one. One question at the door costs seconds.

The real investment is the quieter audit underneath: are you running the right one? A question can go stale in your mouth without telling you. Worth checking its pulse now and then.

Companies have signature questions too, though most never wrote theirs down, which is why their emails read like everyone’s emails and their strategy decks could get shuffled together at a conference and returned to the wrong owners without incident.

Positioning, underneath all the frameworks, is a question a company refuses to stop asking before it acts. If your competitor could ask your question with a straight face, you haven’t found yours yet.

And here is what bothers me… I have a question for the machine, a question for the inbox, a question for the kitchen table. I don’t have one for the bar. The room most full of people I care about, and the doorway stands unguarded. I’ve started interviewing candidates. None have been hired.

This post took the test, by the way. The advice, anyone could sign. The vacancy is mine.

Stay Positive & What’s Yours?

Jeff is at dinner, a double date he didn’t want to be on, and somebody across the table is working through the shared plate at an alarming rate. Jeff watches the meat disappear. And instead of doing what the rest of us do, which is perform a small silent grief and fill up on bread, he says it. Out loud. This guy is eating all the meat and I haven’t gotten any.

The table freezes. The audience roars.

That laugh is worth studying. We built an entire genre of television around the pleasure of hearing somebody say the thing everyone at the table is already thinking. The laugh track is not decoration. It’s evidence. Millions of people tune in every week to feel, secondhand, the relief of a filter failing.

If nobody wanted candor, the joke wouldn’t land. The joke always lands.

Now … about a recent meeting.

A few days ago I sat in one about documentation. One small corner of the business runs its own platform and its own process. Everybody else runs a different one, and by most accounts a better one. Everyone in the room knew it. I had the sentence loaded: this is a strange way to do this, can we just handle it the way the rest of the business does?

I swallowed it. I’m new, still learning which walls are load-bearing, and new people who blurt tend to get remembered for the blurt instead of the point.

That silence wasn’t free, though. The clunky process is not the expensive part. The expensive part is a whole team privately narrating the same complaint, every week, each person separately concluding they don’t have the power to change it. That stops being a workflow problem and becomes an energy leak. And energy a team spends resenting a process is energy that never reaches a customer.

Point is…Every meeting has a laugh track. It’s just muted.

If I had said the sentence out loud, I don’t think the room would have gasped. I think it would have exhaled.

But this is where the sitcom and the strategy split. After the meeting I found a colleague and asked one question: who actually owns this decision? Then I brought the sentence to that person, on purpose, with the door closed.

Because Jeff says it to the table, and the table laughs, but the table cannot cook him more meat. The kitchen can. Saying the true thing to the room is relief. Saying the true thing to the person who can act on it is change. (The double date guest asks the waiter for more meat, btw.) The standard courage advice stops at the first half, be brave, speak up, and skips the part where the room is usually the wrong audience for the sentence.

There’s a marketing lesson hiding in that gap, too. The distance between what a room says out loud, which is nothing, and what it desperately wants, which is for someone to name the thing, is the same distance good positioning covers. The brand that names what the customer already privately believes gets the laugh. In a market, the laugh sounds like trust. Heaven knows we can use more of that amidst the sea of AI slop.

I don’t know yet whether the process will change. The sentence is out of my head and sitting with someone who can do something about it, which is more than it accomplished while the whole team took turns thinking it. That will have to be enough for now.

Stay Positive & Pass The Meat

Call summary. Sentiment: positive. Talk ratio: 46/54. Competitor mentioned once. Pricing discussed. Next steps: confirmed.

If you sell for a living, you’ve read a hundred of these. The machine listened to the whole call, and this is what it heard. The deal looks healthy. Everyone said the right things.

Then the call ends, and the actual work starts.

On one deal, the huddle after the call was where everything happened. A few of us, no agenda, just talking it through. Somebody remembered a name the champion had dropped in passing. Somebody else knew that name reported to a VP who’d been burned on a similar tool. Slowly we started mapping the connective tissue: who actually decides, who influences the decider, whose blessing our champion needed before she’d stick her neck out. None of it appeared in the transcript. The microphone was off for all of it.

That’s the trouble with call intelligence. It scores what’s said, and deals are rarely decided by what’s said. They’re decided by what people carry into the room and never mention. The reorg. The last vendor that overpromised. The career risk hiding inside a yes.

The software grades the performance. The pros investigate the play behind it.

And I’d go further. The tool doesn’t just miss the story behind the story. It quietly trains reps to stop looking for it. When the dashboard rewards talk ratio and keyword hits, you learn to have calls that grade well. Discovery becomes theater, and the deal gets won or lost in a hallway you’ll never hear.

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A couple came into the bar one Sunday afternoon. Traveling through, easy smiles, and only after me talking to them to get the story behind the story, I learned they hauled a cooler with them, packed with bottles they’d collected along the way. On paper, two customers who ordered a couple of pours. But that’s not what they came for. They wanted more than our tap list. More, even, than being treated as special. They wanted to share. They’d carried those bottles across state lines looking for a place that deserved to open them. They weren’t shopping for beer. They were auditioning establishments.

If I’d only listened to the order, I’d have missed the entire reason they walked in.

People rarely announce what they actually came for. They order something reasonable and wait to see what kind of place you are. The story behind the story isn’t extracted. It’s offered. And it’s only offered to people who’ve proven they’re worth telling.

Which is why no recording will ever catch it. The real story shows up in huddles, hallways, and Sunday afternoons, in rooms where people trust each other enough to open the cooler.

Stay Positive & Ask What They’re Carrying

Someone broke a glass in the hotel pool.

Not near the pool. In it. Most of the guests were annoyed about toweling off early. I was doing a different math. You cannot see glass in water, and you cannot vacuum what you cannot see, so depending on the hotel’s appetite for risk, that pool might get drained. Thousands of gallons and somebody’s whole night, because one person let their kiddos bring a glass toy into the pool.

I have never worked at a hotel pool. But I have stood over an ice bin.

Behind a bar there is a ranking of where glass can break, and every bartender knows it by heart. The floor is nothing: broom, thirty seconds, a joke about tipping the bar gods. The glasswasher is worse: shards hiding in hot soapy water, every glass in the rack washed again, your hands moving slow and suspicious for the rest of the shift. But the ice bin is the one that hollows you out. You cannot pick glass out of ice. You cannot even be sure how far it traveled. So you burn the whole bin. Melt it, dump it, all of it down the drain, then start over while the tickets stack up.

The pool crew and I have never done each other’s jobs. I still knew exactly what their night had just become, because my own small disasters had taught me the shape of theirs.

That is the thing about empathy I think we get backwards. We treat it like it runs on experience, like you can only truly feel for someone if you have lived their exact version. But nobody gets enough lifetimes for that. You get one bar, one career, one family, one body. Everything else you will ever understand about people, you will have to get by watching.

And watching is a skill you can aim. We already observe constantly. We just aim it at the wrong things: outfits, cars, typos, who got the promotion.

Aim it at hardship instead.

The barista counting her drawer twice. The contractor redoing drywall on his own dime. The manager apologizing for a decision made two levels above her. Two things happen when you do. Your own hard days stop feeling like solitary confinement, because you have seen the same weather over everyone else’s house. And grace gets easier, because you have watched what people are actually carrying.

This is also the quiet trick of anyone good at marketing, or at leading. You will never be your customer. You will never live your employee’s Tuesday. The people who seem psychic about what an audience needs were almost never members of the audience. They are watchers. They know where the glass tends to break in other people’s lives, and they build for it.

I grew up on “give them the benefit of the doubt.” It is a decent motto, but it is a courtroom motto. It withholds a verdict. It hands nobody anything.

New motto: give them all the empathy. Not a measured amount. Not what their behavior earned. All of it. The crew fishing a pool for glass that night did not need my reserved judgment. They needed one person on that wet deck who looked at them like someone staring into an ice bin.

Stay Positive & Watch For The Glass

I looked at my to-do list this week and realized I had built myself a very nice place to hide.

Everything on it was real work. Follow-ups, edits, scheduling, a handful of small fixes. All of it legitimate. All of it checkable. None of it the thing.

That’s the trouble with tasks. A task can be finished. A mission? Not so much. Checking a box pays you immediately, a little hit of progress right there in the moment. A mission pays in months, maybe, and only if you were right. So given the choice, and we are given the choice every single morning, we reach for the boxes. Not because we’re lazy. Because we’re hiding, and a full list is excellent camouflage.

The costume works in the other direction too. Stack enough tasks on top of each other, give the pile a project name, and it starts to look like a mission.

I know because I’ve sewn that costume myself before.

At a previous gig I ran a go-to-market motion I was proud of at the time. It had everything a launch is supposed to have. Sequenced emails. A one-pager. Enablement. A checklist that got checked all the way down. It felt like momentum, and momentum is a very convincing feeling.

What that motion never had was the question underneath it: is this even the feature worth this much of us?

In hindsight, the answer was no. The time belonged to a different feature entirely, and to a much more drastic prioritization of the actual initiatives instead of the tasks orbiting the first one. We executed beautifully on the wrong bet. Nobody noticed, because every box was checked, and checked boxes are what reviews are made of. (Thankfully it was one of our most successful releases, but I knew I could point the success to only a couple checked boxes; not all of them.)

Stay Positive & Tasks Are Receipts; Missions Are Bets

For a stretch, I spent my off hours driving to local game shops. Board game shops, card shops, anywhere with dice behind the counter. Not to buy anything. To pitch. I wanted them to partner with us on events like a Dungeons and Dragons night at the bar.

A beer bar. A place whose entire identity was the tap list. We had spent years going deep on exactly one thing, and there I was asking a guy restocking miniatures if he wanted to help me host a campaign between the taps.

The standard advice says I should have stayed home. Focus on the core. Protect the thing you’re known for. It’s the most repeated strategy note in business, and it’s incomplete in a way that doesn’t show up on any invoice until later.

Depth creates an obligation, though.

When customers go deep with you, they do not want deeper and then deeper again. Nobody buys single depth. They show up to have their expectations met, then exceeded, and exceeded eventually means surprised. The deeper your core gets, the wider your customers expect you to reach.

You don’t get to opt out of that expectation. You only get to decide whether you’ll meet it on purpose or disappoint it by accident.

Here’s the mechanism…. The core’s actual job is to de-risk the weird stuff.

The aquarium in Denver will let you climb into a cage while sharks glide past your face. That’s an unhinged product, and it sells, because the rest of the building is the safest place in the city. Avanti works the same way: enough variety to pique you, something new and something safe under the same roof. The safe thing is not the opposite of the new thing. The safe thing is what makes the new thing purchasable.

D&D night worked at the bar for the same reason. If the dice bored you, the beer didn’t. Nobody was betting their whole evening on a twenty-sided die. The tap list was the net under the trapeze. And the game shops got the mirror image: their regulars walked into a bar that had already been vouched for by the hobby they trusted.

The trap, and the reason I say obligation instead of opportunity… the safety you build is exactly the thing that obligates you.

Once people trust the roof, they start expecting you to put new things under it….That’s the bill for loyalty. Depth is a debt, and your customers collect it in surprise.

Which also explains why some experiments make everyone wince. When a company known for one thing ships a basketball, a speaker that follows you around the room, and a meme generator, the reflex is to call it unfocused. (I’m talking about Open.AI if you couldn’t guess.) I don’t think that’s the diagnosis. It’s unearned width. The core hadn’t gone deep enough to make those bets feel safe, so instead of surprise, customers felt confusion.

Same move, different balance sheet.

The question was never whether to stay focused…The question is whether you’ve gone deep enough that your customers are quietly waiting for you to do something strange.

Stay Positive & If Nobody’s Waiting, The Weird Thing Isn’t Your Problem…The Core Is

There’s a brewery called Mountain Sun and I can tell you its name because a waiter there decided, without asking my permission, that I would remember it for the rest of my life.

He talked about the beer the way some people talk about a first car or a last dance. Not a script. Not the upsell voice. He knew which tank it came out of and he had opinions about it, actual opinions, the kind you can only form by caring past the point where your paycheck stops requiring it. I don’t remember what I ordered after the saison. I remember him. The brewery gets to live in my head rent-free, forever, because one human being on its payroll meant it.

That same trip, I bought a coffee somewhere.

I know this only by residue, the way you know you had a dream. I cannot tell you the shop’s name. I cannot tell you the street, the cup, or whether the person behind the counter was one human or a rotation of three. I remember a pink banner. That’s all. The coffee was fine. Fine is the sound memory makes while it’s deleting something.

So here’s what I’ve come to believe. Every customer walks through your door wearing a give-a-damn meter. Standard equipment, factory installed, mounted somewhere between the sternum and the gut, no off switch, no snooze. It does not measure quality. Quality gets you to fine, and you now know what fine is worth. The meter measures one thing: whether a human on the other end meant it.

And the readout isn’t stars or reviews or net promoter anything.

The readout is memory.

You exist in a customer’s life exactly as long as the needle moved, and not one minute longer.

You can’t bribe the instrument. Fonts don’t move it. Mission statements painted on reclaimed wood don’t move it. It is the most honest gauge in all of commerce, and it responds only to meant things.

Which is why you should strap one on yourself, facing backward, pointed at your own work. Before anything ships, check it: did my needle move while I made this? Because care survives translation into the finished thing, and so does boredom. If you were checked out while making it, the checked-out is in there, load-bearing.

One more thing about that waiter. People who give a damn at work are, almost always, people somebody gave a damn about first. Needles are contagious. They catch from the inside of a company outward, never the reverse.

Stay Positive & Order Whatever Makes The Waiter’s Eyes Light Up