GarthBox

I won’t start work that shows up without somebody attached to it. An account, a role, a room I can picture with the lights on. No target, no draft. (I’m aware this makes me a delight at kickoff meetings.)

That rule should make me slower. It doesn’t.

Writing for a small room is light work, because the room has already told you most of what to say. You know what they call things. You know which problem lands on their desk the week before a big event. Half the draft is written before the doc is open.

That only holds if you’ve actually been in the room. Small batches written for strangers are just a broadcast, chopped up.

At a previous job I built outreach for a risk and incident product. Three kinds of buyers who don’t share a vocabulary: the event operations crew, the risk and security people, the compliance and legal folks. Then I cut it again by venue. Stadiums got their own version. Convention centers got theirs. Performing arts got theirs. The UK got a separate track written around a new venue safety law that only applied over there. Then voicemail scripts for all of it, because phones still exist.

Mapped out, it looked like a spreadsheet had sneezed. Running it felt like a Friday behind the bar… tabs stacking, somebody wants a taster of the sour, somebody wants to know what’s local, a keg kicks mid-pour. Ten small motions at once is tiring.

Tired is not the same as drained, though. A busy shift turns my feet into two sacks of gravel, and I still walk out humming, because every pour came back with a face attached. Somebody tasted it and told me something. The pay arrives all night long, in small bills.

Broad work makes the opposite trade. One message, sanded until it can’t offend anyone, sent to everybody with a pulse and a job title. Less effort per head, technically. Then you wait. What comes back is thin and late and averaged, a polite smattering from the cheap seats. That kind of work rarely tires you out. It drains you, slowly, like a tap left cracked open overnight.

Feeling seen is what makes a person talk back, and talking back is the fuel. A small room answers fast because the message already sounds like them. You hear about it while the work is still warm. You fix the second line. You ship the next one by Thursday. A big campaign takes a quarter to tell you what a small room tells you by lunch.

So the arithmetic runs backward from how it looks on a planning slide. Narrowing doesn’t shrink what you can do. It shrinks the lift per room, and a lighter lift means you can carry more rooms. Not more for the same people. More small rooms, each one getting the whole of you for an afternoon.

It’s also why I’d rather hand a team ten small rooms than one big one. The big one gets a long silence and a recap deck. The small ones send news back every day, and news is what keeps people leaning forward… a team that hears from a customer on Tuesday walks in different on Wednesday.

It does cost something. Let’s be real. Ten rooms means ten vocabularies to keep straight, and a low, permanent fear that the stadium version went to the ballet.

Nobody has ever been served by a bar. They were served by whoever looked up, caught their eye, and asked what they were in the mood for. The crowd was never the customer. It was a lot of people waiting for somebody to look up.

Stay Positive & Are You Waiting To Hear From Folks EOQ Or Tomorrow?

An assumption is not a forecast.

It’s a tool, and you pick it up for what it lets you do next, not for its odds of coming true. When I’m stuck because I’m not sure I have the right answer, I assume there are no right answers. When I’m stuck on what people will think, I assume nobody will read it. (Somebody is reading this. Hi.)

Neither of those is true, and neither one has to be. Each works by quietly walking somebody out of the room. The first dismisses the grader. The second sends the audience home. Stuck almost always has somebody standing over it, and a good assumption is just a polite way of asking them to leave.

A German philosopher named Hans Vaihinger built an entire philosophy on this move. He called it Die Philosophie des Als Ob, the philosophy of as if, and his argument was that a huge share of human thinking runs on ideas we know are false, kept around because acting as if they were true gets us somewhere. He worked out the core of it in 1877 and didn’t publish the book until 1911. (He needed a steady job first, which I find enormously comforting and why I didn’t open my bar until I was moving along in my marketing career.)

He drew a line I keep coming back to. A hypothesis says this might be true, go check and a fiction says treat it as true and see where it takes you.

One is waiting to be proven. The other is only waiting to be used.

Truth still gets a vote. It just votes last. You find out whether an assumption holds by moving on it, and by the time you know, you’ve usually traded it for a better one…

None of this makes the choosing easier. You can carry a whole drawer of good assumptions and the act is identical every time: look straight at the decision and make it. Staring is required. Staring is not the decision.

My daughter is almost six and learning to read, so I get to watch this in real time. She stares at a word as if it might volunteer itself… it never does. The word only shows up after she commits to a sound for the first letter, out loud, maybe wrong.

Even the rules kids get handed for this are fictions. When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking. Somebody counted, back in the sixties, and that rule holds less than half the time. Kids still get taught it, because it gets a five-year-old to open her mouth.

Nobody can correct a sound you haven’t made.

That sentence is most of leadership, isn’t it?

A team stuck on a decision is usually a room full of people staring at the same word, waiting for the person in charge to make the first sound.

Leaders stall by asking for more information, because waiting feels neutral. It isn’t. Waiting is an assumption too. It assumes the answer is on its way. Sometimes the most useful thing a leader can say is that this is all of it, and this is our guess. We’ll assume the best possible answer will never arrive.

Say the guess out loud, labeled as a guess. “We’re acting as if this is true, and we’ll know by the end of the month.” Now the team has two permissions at once: to move, and to tell you you’re wrong. Dress the same guess up as a fact and they’ll defend it for you. Keep it in your head and they’ll wait.

And here’s the truth for anyone with a bit of career experience…They already know you’re guessing.

The only choice you get is whether you guess where they can help.

Emree, my daughter, will never get the word by staring harder. She gets it the way everybody does, by making a sound she isn’t sure of and letting the page tell her how wrong she was.

Stay Positive & Say The First Sound

At work, a goal had two roads to it. Both reasonable. Written out, the challenges on each road came out even, which felt like information and was closer to a coin landing on its edge.

The tie was hiding an arrow. Beat the challenges on one road and a good share of the other road’s challenges shrink on their own, because they were never separate problems to begin with. Run it the other direction and…not much moves.

An even score is also what talks you into splitting the day between both roads. It sounds fair. There are only so many hours, though, and a band can’t play two songs at the same time and call it a medley.

So before picking a road, draw the arrows…

Next to every challenge, write what gets easier once it’s gone. Count arrows instead of lines. The challenge with the most arrows leaving it is the actual work, and whichever road it sits on is the road to trek down. That won’t always be the easier one. Achievable and easy are different words.

If you lead anybody, the arrows are yours to draw. Hand a team an even list and they’ll split themselves down the middle to keep both roads happy, and roads don’t have feelings. People who beat one real set of problems get faster at the next set. People who half-fight two sets just get tired, and tired doesn’t compound.

Customers never see the list at all. They see what got finished, and they decide what you’re for from that. (Worth iterating differently: Customers don’t see your progress across items. They see what got finished.)

Stay Positive & Where Do The Arrows Go?

Put a car on an alignment rack and the car never moves. The frame is the reference point, the fixed truth, the one thing in the bay nobody questions. A tech with a wrench and a screen full of red numbers spends the next hour talking to each wheel, one at a time, into agreeing with it.

Two of the companies I’ve worked for hung some version of that on the wall as a core value. Come together. Get aligned. Move forward as one. It reads beautifully on a slide, especially the one with the rowing team on it.

Each time, it felt like a cop-out to meaningful work. I guess because alignment has a direction built into it… and it’s no mystery which way it points. When a rested executive and a manager on their ninth meeting of the day “align,” everybody in the room knows who moved.

Nobody has ever aligned downward.

So the value quietly hands a vote to two things that should never get one: exhaustion and rank. If you’re tired, align. If someone outranks you, align. I’ve swallowed a fully loaded sentence in a meeting purely because I was the newest person at the table. It went down like a dry cracker. The value takes “I have nothing left for this one” and issues it a lanyard, and from across the room it looks exactly like teamwork.

Then I read about a company that sets a different expectation for its people: disagree and commit. Argue it out in the room, then carry the decision like it was yours. I’d edit one word. Challenge and commit. (Yes, I’m redlining another company’s values in my spare time. Marketers can’t help it.)

Disagree points at a person. It seats two people on opposite sides of the table and waits to see who loses. Challenge points at the idea. It puts everyone on the same side, leaning on the thing together to find out whether it holds. Which means you can challenge an idea you already believe in…and those deserve it most. The people pushing hardest on a plan are usually the ones who need the pushing for it to survive.

A collaboration nobody pushed on is just a meeting with good attendance. Or, what we too easily label as allignment.

Word choice only gets you partway, though. Listen for who says “let’s disagree and commit” in a meeting… when it comes from the most senior person at the table, it’s the alignment value in a nicer jacket. Challenge only gets safe when the person with the most rank goes first, out loud, against their own idea. The tech checks the frame before anyone touches a wheel.

Your customer never outranks anyone in your building. Their objections come in through the least senior people you employ: the rep on the call, whoever’s working the support queue, the new hire who sat in on the demo and winced. Alignment runs uphill, so the customer’s voice is the first thing aligned out of the plan. Every launch that confused the people it was built for came out of a room that agreed with itself.

If you lead anybody, your team’s permission to challenge you is the only pipe that objection can travel through. Close it and your roadmap belongs to whoever has the most rank and the most sleep.

Commit is the half that makes the challenge affordable. Once you’ve leaned on the frame and it held (or got fixed), you drive. You stop reaching over from the passenger seat to yank the wheel. Committing doesn’t mean you changed your mind. It means you stopped billing the team for it.

You can align every wheel on a bent frame, by the way. The car rolls out of the bay and pulls left anyway, so everybody grips the wheel a little harder, every mile, every day. It’s exhausting. And exhausted people are the ones who truly align.

Stay Positive & Check The Frame, Align With Real Impact

A file sitting in a friend’s inbox, and the same file still open on my laptop.

I had given him Herough Herough to read start to finish, the whole thing, and then I did what writers do, which is keep editing a book that has already left the building.

He hadn’t told me anything. No notes, no page numbers, no polite sandwich of praise. The editing changed anyway, because I had stopped reading in my own voice and started reading in his.

Some of it got better fast. Lines I had been walking past for months, the way you walk past laundry you’ve stopped seeing, suddenly had a stranger standing over them, and they came out.

Then the other half, which I did not see coming. I got stubborn. Passages I would have traded away cheerfully the week before turned into things I wanted to protect. Nothing about them had changed. The only new fact in the world was that I knew a person was moving his eyes across them.

You cannot defend a book nobody is reading. There is nothing to defend it from. Before I handed it over, the novel had contents. After, it had positions.

A draft nobody has seen is a pile of options. Every sentence is equally negotiable, because none of them have been asked to do anything in front of anyone. Put it in one set of hands and the pile sorts itself into two stacks: the parts you would argue for out loud, and the parts that were only there because they were already typed. (The second stack is always bigger than you’d like…which is what makes editing so frustrating and time-consuming)

Same thing happens with messaging. I have shipped positioning I was sure I believed in, right up until somebody read it back to me in a room and I heard which sentences I would actually go to the mat for. Those were the strategy. The rest was wallpaper with verbs in it. No amount of solo review ever sorted them, because alone with a document, everything in it feels equally yours.

That is most of what a team is missing when the work never leaves the building. They produce, revise, polish, and never find out which parts they would stand next to with their name attached. Conviction isn’t something people carry in with their coffee. It shows up when somebody else is holding the thing.

So you get the reader long before you get the feedback. The feedback takes a week, if it comes at all. The reader arrives the second you hit send…

He has had the book a while now. He might have put it down after fifty pages. I have no idea. Little does he know that he has been editing it with me the entire time since I gave it to him.

Stay Positive & Who’s Reading Over Your Shoulder?

“In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for good work?”

That question travels with five siblings. Do I know what is expected of me at work? Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right? Do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day? Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person? Is there someone at work who encourages my development?

Gallup found those six, plain as saltines, predict whether people stay, produce, and keep the customers happy. I met them on page 234 of The Power of Moments, where the authors note the last three might as well have been written by a psychologist who studies close relationships. (Workplace survey, relationship researcher, same handwriting.)

Notice who holds the pen. Every question is answered by the person standing where the care is supposed to land. None of the six asks the boss whether they care, because the answer is always yes, always sincere, and sincerity isn’t data.

At home, my instruments all sit on the giving side. Every morning I write one line on a big wall calendar about something from the day before that I appreciated. It is the most adored piece of paper in Dane County, practically blushing on its nail… and by Gallup’s design, it’s filling out the wrong half of the survey. The calendar knows what I noticed. Whether anybody in those lines heard about it is another matter.

Two scraps of wording carry the whole list. The first is “seven days.” Love at home gets treated like a full keg in the walk-in, cold and heavy and assumed. Nobody checks the line until somebody pulls a glass of foam. Gallup only cares what got poured this week.

The second is “seem,” a four-letter word in a trench coat, the most honest thing ever smuggled into an HR document. Care that never shows up as evidence scores a zero.

Try question one at home. During a poetry week I sent my daughters on a scavenger hunt. They pounced on every item like it owed them money and never quite grasped that the loot was supposed to become a poem. Ask whether they knew what was expected of them and they’d have said yes, gloriously. They were right. It just wasn’t the job I had in my head.

Question two flips, too. When the girls storyboarded a short film, they ran the show and I was the materials and equipment, a dad-shaped tripod holding a phone.

Friendship never came with a job description, only a calendar, and the calendar belongs to somebody else. My notes from a year of weekly side projects say it flat: anything that needs another person’s calendar tends not to happen. Hold your friendships to the seven-day window and count how many have gone quarterly (generously). Every one of those friends would say you care. Seem is a different number.

Gallup says these questions even predict customer satisfaction, forecast by asking the person serving the customer whether anybody noticed their work this week. Care runs downstream. Paint your values across the building in letters you can read from the parking lot, and the customer still only tastes whatever the last person behind the counter had left in the tank. What you meant is the giving side. What it seemed like this week is the only part anyone buys.

The people at home will never fill out a survey. They’re answering all six anyway, every week, over cereal and in the back seat, no link required. You get the results the way companies do… late, in the retention numbers, when someone you raised decides how often to call.

Stay Positive & Ask Them

It came easy to him.

It should come easy to me.

I failed here, so I’ll fail everywhere.

That’s just how business goes.

Nobody complained, so it’s working.

If it were a good idea, someone would’ve done it already.

A non-reply is a no.

Exhaustion = progress.

It’ll only get done right if I do it myself.

Good work speaks for itself.

Once this launch is out, things will calm down.

Stay Positive & Catch Your Mistakes