GarthBox

There’s a wooden bowl on a shelf in my house that has no business still being there. It cracked years ago, a hairline split clean down one side, and by any sane audit of “do we need this,” it lost the vote. I kept it. Glued the seam, moved it up a shelf, out of reach of small hands and reasonable opinions.

I didn’t keep it because it still holds soup. I kept it because of what it taught me the day it broke, and pitching it would have pitched the lesson too. Somewhere along the way I stopped thinking of that as sentimentality and started thinking of it as a decision. Nobody made me keep the bowl. I decided the bowl should survive the thing that happened to it.

That’s the part we skip. We talk about tradeoffs like weather. The budget got cut. The feature got sunset. The person left. Things happened to us, we shrug, we move on. But a tradeoff has two halves and only one of them is grief. The other half is a choice nobody is forcing you to make, which is exactly why most people never make it: what gets to survive the thing that ended.

Companies are especially bad at this, and they’ve built a whole vocabulary to help them avoid it. “Sunsetting” a product sounds gentle, almost romantic, like the software is retiring to a beach house instead of getting axed in a roadmap review. What actually happens next is the docs get deleted, the URL redirects to a homepage that doesn’t mention it existed, and everyone hopes the silence reads as maturity instead of embarrassment. That’s not a goodbye. That’s a company acting like it was never there, which is its own kind of lie, and customers can smell a lie shaped like silence before they’ve even read the FAQ.

The teams who do this well decide, on purpose, what survives. Not everything. That’s the mistake on the other side, the org that can’t kill anything because killing feels like admitting the whole thing was a waste, so dead products get life support forever and dead ideas get recycled into new decks with new fonts. Selectivity is the whole skill. You don’t keep the bowl collection. You keep the one bowl that means something, and you let the rest go to the donation pile without a eulogy.

I made a move like that not long ago, walked away from an industry I’d given years of my life to. What I decided to carry out the door mattered a lot more than what fit in the box. That’s the version of this I actually trust, not because I got it right, but because I had to choose fast and under real weight, and the choosing itself is what let me move.

Watch what a company does when someone leaves the team. Not the exit interview. The week after. Look for whether anything of that person survives on purpose in how the team works: a phrase they used that stuck, a process they built that’s still the process, a story that gets retold behind the bar because it’s true and it’s good. Some companies erase the desk and act like the chair was always empty. Your team notices which one happens. They’re taking notes on what gets kept, because that’s the real answer to whether anything they build here outlasts them too.

The bowl still leaks a little, right along the crack. I don’t mind. It’s not for soup anymore. It’s proof that I get to decide what happened to me instead of just reporting it.

Stay Positive & What’s Broken On Your Shelf (And Does It Actually Serve You Sitting There?)

Ihave German flashcards open on my second monitor right now. Da-, wo-, davon, damit, worauf. Little grammatical trapdoors that swallow a whole sentence if you step on them wrong. I’ve opened that tab eleven times this month. Finished it zero. Not because German is hard. Motorcycle corners are hard. This is memorization, the laziest kind of hard there is. I have just never once, not for a single second, actually wanted to sit there and drill compound prepositions. I want to have drilled them. Present tense verb, past tense soul. Those are two different jobs, and only one of them was ever going to get done by nine on a Tuesday.

Willpower culture will sell you a hundred fixes for that gap. Habit stacks. Accountability apps. A guy on a stage telling you discipline equals freedom while wearing a shirt two sizes too small for the metaphor he’s making. None of it touches the actual problem, which is quieter and stranger than a lack of grit: wanting to do the hard thing does not come naturally to almost anybody. It has to be built. And the thing you can actually build isn’t the want. It’s the want to want.

That’s not a typo and it’s not a riddle. You can’t will yourself into desiring flashcards. But you can go looking for what’s sitting right next to the thing you think you should want, the piece of it that’s already alive in you, and build a door there instead of pounding on the one marked SHOULD.

Two columns, ten minutes, an actual pen. Left side: every hard thing you feel like you’re supposed to want. The should list. Get the whole parade out. The novel you keep meaning to finish. The workout routine. The language. The readout you keep pushing to next week. Right side, next to each one: what’s actually adjacent to it that you do want. Not the noble version. The real one, even the embarrassing one.

My left column says “learn German.” My right column doesn’t say “become fluent.” It says “text the exchange student who lived with us something she’d actually laugh at.” That’s the want. Fluency is a byproduct I’ll back into by accident, at two in the morning, hunting one specific word because I have a real person I want to talk to. My left column also has “stick to a fitness routine that improves my core,” which has been sitting there flatlined for years. My right column says “study the corner I keep getting stuck behind at the track.” Same body, same discipline, completely different animal. One’s a chore I inherited from a health article. The other’s something I’d drive two hours for.

Start on the right side. Every time. The should list isn’t wrong, exactly. It’s just aimed at a version of you that doesn’t exist yet and may never show up to do the work. The want list is aimed at the person sitting in the chair right now, and that’s the only one who can pick up the pen.

This is a marketing problem wearing a self-help costume, too.

Every brand that leads with the should (the category benefit, the ROI slide, the here’s-why-you-need-this) is standing at the front gate wondering why the line isn’t moving.

Meanwhile the side door, built out of what the customer already wants right now, embarrassingly, specifically, is sitting open six feet away, and nobody’s pointed anyone toward it. Good positioning doesn’t convince someone to want something new. It finds the want that’s already awake in them and builds the shortest hallway from there to the harder thing you actually sell. Nobody buys a CRM because they want a CRM. They buy it because they want to stop looking like an idiot in front of their VP on Monday, and fluency shows up somewhere down that hallway as a byproduct, same as mine will.

I haven’t finished the flashcards today either. But I texted the exchange student. Badly. Half in English, half in words I had to look up twice. She’ll get the parts that matter out of it. I got the only kind of practice that was ever going to stick.

Stay Positive & Lean

I left beverage alcohol for a job that came with its own list of things nobody mentioned in the interview. That’s not a complaint. It’s just true of every job, every house, every city, every partner you picked over the one you didn’t. We are extremely good at cataloguing what’s wrong with where we’re standing. We are almost never good at pricing out where we’re not.

People like to say the grass is greener on the other side. It isn’t. You just can’t see the dead patch by the fence from where you’re standing. Distance doesn’t make things better. It just makes them blurry enough to skip the parts that would talk you out of it.

I’ve bought two houses now. Every listing photo gets taken from the one angle in the room where the water stain doesn’t show. You move in, and a year later you know exactly which corner of the basement eats the wifi signal, which pipe knocks at 2 a.m., which neighbor gets strange about the fence line. None of that was hidden from you on purpose. It just doesn’t photograph. You only learn a dead spot by living inside its range.

Jobs work the same way. I knew the title, the comp, the mission statement, before I signed anywhere. I did not know that half the building was still quietly arguing over whether the flagship product and the new product were one story or two, and that the argument was setting the temperature of nearly every other disagreement in the place. You cannot see that from the listing photo. You find it standing in the corner of the basement holding your phone up like an idiot, looking for a bar or two of signal.

People ask me pretty often when Garth’s Brew Bar is opening a second location. The answer is never. Not because a second bar wouldn’t look good in the brochure. Because I already know exactly where its dead spot is: the day I’m not standing behind either bar, and both of them can tell.

Apply it to whatever you’re building or selling. A competitor’s category looks easier when you’re only looking at the parts that made it onto the site. Enterprise looks easier from SMB. SMB looks easier from enterprise. The agency side looks freer from the brand side, and the brand side looks steadier from the agency side. Every position has a dead spot. The job was never to find the one without one, that job doesn’t exist, and anyone selling it to you is selling you a listing photo. The job is figuring out which dead spot you can actually live with, on purpose, with your eyes open.

The people I trust most in this business aren’t the ones who tell me they made the right call. They’re the ones who can point to the exact spot in their own basement where the signal drops, and still tell you they’d sign the lease again.

Stay Positive & Check The Corners Before You Sign

Every movie has a scene where the whole audience is thinking the same four words at once. Just tell her. Take the job. Walk out the door. Say the thing. Nobody in row twelve is confused about the next move. The character on screen is the only person in the building who can’t see it.

Here’s the exercise. Don’t answer it to me. Answer it to yourself, out loud if you have to.

If your life was a movie right now, this month, not the highlight reel version, what would the people watching be yelling at the screen? Not “be better” in general. The specific thing. The one the whole audience already knows and you’re the last to admit.

Now do it again with your work. If your career was a movie, what’s the note the whole theater is screaming, the thing your smartest coworker already said to someone else about you at happy hour?

And then, carefully, your relationship. Some scenes aren’t for the audience. Fair enough. But you already know if there’s a line in this one too, even if you never write it down for anybody but yourself.

I run this question on myself more than I’d like to admit (but still probably not as often as I should), usually somewhere loud, behind the bar or on my motorcycle where I can’t check my phone and hide from the answer. It’s never once returned something I didn’t already know. That’s the part that gets me. The obvious move was never hidden. I was just the only one in the room not allowed to see the whole screen.

Most self-improvement asks you to imagine some better future version of yourself. This is a cheaper trick and a meaner one. It doesn’t ask what you should become. It asks what you already know and won’t say. The theater doesn’t need a new you. It just needs you to stop pretending you can’t hear them yelling.

Stay Positive & Go Sit In Row Twelve For Once

For the first while, my bar didn’t have a phone number. That was a decision, not an oversight. I work a day job, I have a family, and I knew exactly what that phone would ring with. Hours we already post. Lost sunglasses. Whether the seltzer is gluten free. I also knew what the silence could cost. A missed call might be a missed $25 tab, and the person behind that tab might have become a regular who tells ten friends, so on the wrong night my no was worth $1,500. I read the price tag and bought it anyway.

The bar has a number now, and a robot answers it. It knows the hours and the taps. It writes down anything that truly needs a human and holds it for the end of my day, when I trade one job for the other. And once you’re taken care of, it offers you a fun beer fact, because a phone call to a beer bar should leave you slightly more dangerous at beer trivia than it found you.

I build a lot of these systems now, for work and for play, and the uncomfortable truth of the whole field is that everyone has the same robot. Same engines, same tools, prompts traded around like casserole recipes at a potluck. Ask the same model for the same outcome and the outputs rhyme. The thing everybody obsesses over, the output, is the least defensible part of anything you build.

What differentiates a system is its constraints. The non-negotiables you decide on before you ask for a single deliverable. What it is never allowed to do. What it must always check. Who it answers to. Everyone designs the wish. Very few design the refusals.

Mine, for the record: digital research is unverified until a human verifies it. Copy can propose, only a person can approve. And nothing I build ships without one agent whose entire job is to argue with me, because agreement is the cheapest thing a machine knows how to make.

Now a confession…

I once built an AI sales agent to cold call around 400 bars across Wisconsin and ask one question: what does a Spotted Cow cost? There was no client and no strategy. I had surplus credits and curiosity, and I don’t even sell Spotted Cow. The first run went out on a Thursday afternoon, when every bar and supper club in the state is dark, and nearly nobody picked up. I had the agent introduce itself honestly as an AI doing survey research, and people hung up on its little silicon heart. So I dropped the manners and led with the question (and adjusted the timing… duh!). The data came back five to eight bucks, no anomalies, no story. So I swapped the question itself, to what do you recommend when you don’t have Spotted Cow, which is how I learned that at one supper club the house answer is a Miller High Life. (I imagine your reaction was similar to my “wut?”) The credits ran out somewhere in the supper clubs, and the Spotted Cow Index sits in my garage now, up on blocks.

It took me a while to see why the phone robot lives and the Index doesn’t. The Index had no non-negotiables. Every part of it was up for grabs: the calling window, the manners, even the question. When everything is negotiable, a project doesn’t end. It dissolves. A system with no refusals isn’t a system. It’s a mood with a dashboard.

Brands run on the same physics. In a category where everyone can afford to say yes to everything, the no is the only sentence a customer can verify. Anyone can claim great service, obsessive quality, unmatched care. Claims are free. Refusals show up on the receipt. The bar with no phone number told you something true about us before you ever walked in: we would rather be all the way present with the people in the room than half available to everyone outside it. People found us anyway. Some of them, I suspect, because of it.

The Index might come back someday. If it does, it gets its refusals written first. The hours it may call. The one question it is allowed to love. The moment it has to say thank you and hang up. Refusals are how you tell a project you intend to keep it. A no, priced and chosen on purpose, is the closest thing strategy has to a promise.

Stay Positive & Tell Whoever Answered At That Supper Club I Owe Them A High Life

I needed an OBD sensor for my motorcycle. A small plug that listens to the bike’s vitals and tattles to my phone. I knew nothing about the category, and I did not try to learn. I skipped the brand story. I ignored the spec sheet. The price barely registered. I scrolled straight past everything the companies wanted to tell me and went looking for the strangers.

What did others say?

That was the entire purchase. People I will never meet, whose bikes I will never see, holding my decision in their thumbs.

Every decision walks past that question on the way to yes.

It doesn’t always get asked out loud. Sometimes it never leaves the buyer’s skull. But it’s in there, patient as gravity. A hiring manager asks it of a back channel. A customer asks it of a search bar at eleven at night. The question is constant, quiet, and almost never addressed to you.

A CEO once asked me how I use AI. A tools question, on the surface. Which models, which workflows, how much time saved. But that wasn’t the real question. The real question was: did the people around you feel it? Did your team benefit, or did you just get faster at generating homework for everyone else? It was a reference check wearing a curiosity costume.

I didn’t answer with a philosophy. I pointed at the work. Then I pointed at a specific person and shared what they’d said about how it changed things for them. I could reach for that quote because I had captured it along the way. Asked for it, wrote it down, kept it where I could find it.

Products get review sections. Little yellow constellations of stars under every listing.

You have one too.

Yours is written in rooms you’re not in, by the people who’ve worked beside you, and the person deciding whether to trust you reads it the same way I read sensor reviews: skipping your brochure entirely.

So the smartest thing anyone with a reputation can do, and everyone with a reputation is in this business, is make sure that when the question gets asked, it comes back with an answer. Better still, a few.

This is not a launch-day scramble. It’s ongoing work, a quiet habit inside every project, whether the project belongs to a client, a company, or your own name. Beta customers should hand you testimonials before launch, while the delight is still fizzing. Ask your team what it was like working with you on this one, then write down what they say. Stamp it. A name, a date, their words, not your summary of their words. Praise has a shelf life. Fresh, it sounds like “this changed how I run my week.” Let it sit a season and it collapses into “yeah, he’s good,” which convinces nobody of anything.

And notice who holds the pen. Your reviews are written by the people closest to the work. Not the audience. The team. One more reason the investment starts there. Take care of the people beside you and the answer to the silent question starts writing itself.

The quote I handed that CEO existed because months earlier I asked for it, at the exact moment it felt awkward to ask. That’s the whole trick. The question is coming whether you prepare or not. The only thing you control is whether it comes back empty.

Stay Positive & Stamp It

I paid a police motorcycle veteran to yell at me in a parking lot the other day.

The class is called lock and lean. He built it over twenty-plus years of coaching motor officers, then sanded it down for civilians like me who will never chase anyone through an alley. You ride a big, heavy bike at walking speed through cone patterns tight enough to make you sweat, bars cranked to full lock, clutch slipping, engine chugging under you like an impatient percolator. Everything my track bike ever taught me is a lie down here. On my R7 at Blackhawk, I hang off the side and let speed hold the whole arrangement together. On this bike you do the opposite. You push the machine down and keep your body tall, like dipping a dance partner you just met and very much do not want to drop.

In his opening speech he told the group, “Direct communication is absolutely critical for advancement.” I nodded the way you nod at a safety briefing.

Then it was my turn in the cones, and the man lived his slogan.

I was riding tight. Shoulders up around my ears, arms welded straight, eyes bolted to each cone like it owed me money. He watched two passes and delivered the whole diagnosis in one breath: “Stop looking at the fucking cones. Relax. You’re not taking this bike onto the track.”

Riders call it target fixation. The bike goes where your eyes go, which is a lovely piece of engineering when you’re looking through the corner and a cruel one when you’re staring at the exact thing you’re afraid of hitting.

Next run, my shoulders dropped. My arms found room to move. I looked up at where the pattern was going instead of down at what could go wrong, and the bike simply went where I was looking, obedient as a compass needle. One sentence. That’s what it cost to fix me.

The polite version of that sentence exists. (And no, it’s not just dropping the profanity…) It sounds like “I’d encourage you to broaden your visual focus and release a little tension.” It would have fixed nothing. I would have nodded, tightened up, and hit another cone while composing a thank you. The blunt version worked because it was blunt. It cost him a little social smoothness and it bought me the rest of the day.

His world builds communicators like that because vague coaching on a motorcycle has a feedback loop of about two seconds and ends with 900 pounds of Harley on the asphalt. Offices don’t crash that fast. Vague survives in conference rooms because nothing falls over the same afternoon. We sand feedback down until it’s decorative, then wonder why nobody’s riding improves.

And companies target-fixate just like riders do. Stare hard enough at the competitor and you steer straight into becoming their tribute act. Stare at the scary number all quarter and the whole team organizes itself around the obstacle instead of the destination. Positioning is deciding where to look. The bike follows the eyes. So does the roadmap.

What I keep coming back to is that his directness was a gift with my name on it. He absorbed the awkwardness of saying it so I didn’t have to keep paying for it in dropped runs. That’s the team-first math I believe in, done at parking lot speed.

The one thing I’m carrying out of that class… besides sore forearms, is a resolution to collect more people like him. People who will tell me the true thing in one sentence, while there’s still time to drop my shoulders.

Stay Positive & And In Case You Needed To Hear It Stop Looking At The Fucking [Insert Your Version Of Cones Here]