Why Try To Get Out Of Your Box, When You Can Use What's In It?
Make it pop.
Make it fun.
Make it glow.
Make it sharable.
Make it valuable.
Make it snackable.
Make it mandatory.
Make it real.
None of these demands are wrong.
Until you know who you are making it for.
Stay Positive & It Starts And Ends With The Target
I keep a list of things I want to do before I’m done. Coach hockey. Earn the Advanced Cicerone. Learn German well enough that worauf and wovon stop ambushing me mid-sentence. Open a Christmas tree farm with a brewery and a beer hall attached, which may be the most Wisconsin sentence I will ever type.
I love that list. I’ve also noticed it has weight. It rides along in the passenger seat with its feet up on the dash, humming the same four bars, and every so often it leans over to ask whether we’re there yet. (We are not there yet.)
So I’ve been running a test on it. Picture yourself losing at the thing. Not failing to start. Losing, mid-game, scoreboard lit, people watching. Then watch what you reach for next. The honest answers are short.
You get fired up and try something new. You study the loss and come back better. You call friends and ask them to come lose alongside you until you stop losing. Or you back out.
If it’s that last one, cross it off. The list was never free to carry, and every item you’d quit on still gets a plate at dinner.
“Try something new” is the slippery one. It can mean a new way up the same hill or a different hill entirely. One is persistence. The other is quitting with excellent posture.
The bigger problem is where the test runs. It runs in my head, and in my head I lose beautifully.
When I looked hard at the list, every item had the same flaw, and it wasn’t money or nerve. None of them had a first physical action. Nothing I could do on a Saturday with my shoes on.
Which means I’d been running the losing test on a daydream…
So maybe the first physical action for anything on the list is the smallest real way to lose at it. Book the practice exam you expect to bomb. Ask to run one practice from behind somebody else’s bench. Then the answer comes from your body instead of your imagination, and bodies are terrible liars.
German already passed, as far as I can tell. I lose at it constantly, and my response has been to WeChat the exchange student our family hosted and make them wade through every worauf I put in the wrong place. That’s the third answer. I called somebody in.
Teams carry these lists too. Every roadmap has a someday column, and the items in it sit there like a keg nobody ever tapped, holding a spot in the cooler while everyone walks past on the way to something else.
Run the test there, out loud. Ask who would keep working on it if the first numbers came back ugly. Then ask who they’d recruit.
Saying you’d stick with it costs nothing in a planning meeting. Asking someone to come stand next to a losing project costs you something…so people only spend that on work they actually believe in.
If nobody would make the call, take it off the board in front of everybody. The team has been carrying it for you.
Losing once makes the list lighter no matter what you reach for next. The item either turns into a practice or it gets out at the next exit, and either one weighs less than a daydream.
Stay Positive & BRB, Going To Go Order A Pretzel In German
Two hundred dollars of sushi weighs more in one pair of chopsticks than it does split five ways.
I know because I’ve held it. Dinner for one, a check that landed right around two hundred, and service I couldn’t fault on paper. Polite. Brisk. Plates cleared, water topped off, the whole choreography performed on time. Nobody asked me a single thing.
A bigger group nearby got the other version. The lingering. The extra check-ins. The whole room tilted toward them like a pool table with one short leg.
I understand the math. A bigger table tips bigger, and by the restaurant’s arithmetic the staff called it correctly. The house just wasn’t the one eating.
What nobody knew, because nobody asked, is that Japan sat with me the whole meal. (Next fall it’s Tokyo first, then Kyushu, two days on a motorcycle and an itinerary built around shochu and miso. I would have talked until the rice went cold.) For the group it was a good night out. For me it was dinner with an entire trip folded up inside it.
The check tells you what somebody spent. It has no way of telling you what it cost them.
Value is priced in their currency, not yours, and there’s exactly one way to learn the exchange rate. You ask. Asking has been industrialized, of course. First time with us. Celebrating anything tonight. How did you hear about us. The reservation app has an occasion dropdown, and somewhere tonight a kitchen is sticking a candle in a brownie because a box got checked three weeks ago. I didn’t even get the laminated version.
The first question can be laminated. The second one can’t, because nobody knows what it is until the first answer shows up… One “what brings you in tonight” and I’d have said Japan, and a server who was actually listening would have flipped on like the neon in the front window at opening. Oh, you’re going to Japan next year? From there it barely matters what they do next. The meal already got bigger.
At Garth’s Brew Bar our beertenders have comped a pour based off something a guest told them, but more often what they hear turns into a surprise instead of a fix. I once handed a barrel-aged beer to a couple visiting from out of state. Nothing had gone wrong. That was the point. Most comps are apologies, handed over after something broke. The good ones show up when nothing did.
None of that happens if the person who heard the answer has to track down a manager before acting on it. The line every server gets trained to say, the one about whether there’s anything else they can do to make tonight special, is a promise wearing a question’s clothes. You can’t ask a team to ask better questions until they’re allowed to do something with the answers.
I’ve been the brisk one, too. I once ran a product release I didn’t think mattered much to the company yet, and I worked it in pure get-this-out-of-the-way mode. Every box got its visit. Nobody got a second question. (Guilty.) Software tiers its customers by what they pay. I tiered a launch by what I’d already decided it was worth, and whoever was waiting on the other end got polite, efficient, yes… and nothing more.
Back to the sushi… The group brought their celebration with them. I brought a reason.
Both got served on time, and both walked out knowing exactly what they were worth to the room.
Stay Positive & I Probably Won’t Be Back…
Write out a bunch of responses until one clicks.
It may not be reality (yet), but every brain will start with the feature comparison.
Once that’s out of the way, you get to the real emotion and story to it.
Stay Positive & You’ll Know It When You See It
Hazy IPA.
The beer that looks like a porch light seen through a shower curtain is the style Madison drank more than any other this year, according to the 350-some people who answered the Madison Beer Census. It’s also the style the most people called overdone.
That’s a first slide. It’s tidy, a little scandalous, and it has the personality of a commemorative plaque. It tells you the room is worth walking into and then just stands there. (I’m proud of the 350. Pride is not a conversation, though.)
So I cut it. Pull apart the people who drink hazy from the people who are tired of it and they barely overlap. Across every other style on the list, the split is almost total. Eighty people named West Coast IPA among what they drank most this year, and one of them called it overdone. Fifty-nine leaned on barrel-aged stout. Zero. Kettle sours, two. “Overdone” turns out to be mostly what we call beer that belongs to somebody else.
Then there’s hazy.
Twenty-one of the 121 people who listed hazy among their go-to styles also said Madison makes too much of it. Twenty-one is not a market. It’s two tables on a busy Thursday. But it’s the only style on the board where the regulars showed up to complain about their own beer, and that’s where my eyebrows went up.
Now the guessing starts, and I can’t make it stop. Maybe they drink hazy because it’s the best thing on a tap list made of hazy. Maybe it’s become the house red of craft beer, ordered out of trust and a little fatigue. Maybe they love the style and are worn out on the sameness, every brewery’s version tasting like the one across the street…which would make it a positioning problem wearing a style’s clothes.
Each theory hands a brewery a different job. Brew a lager. Brew a weirder hazy. Fix the board. The topline couldn’t have started that argument. The cut did, and it didn’t settle a thing. It handed the room a suspect.
I’m at TechCrunch Disrupt this week, surrounded by more charts than anyone should see before lunch, and it’s the same on every stage. The first slide is the big number, and the room accepts it like a receipt. The second slide is the breakdown, and that’s the one that gets the eyebrows. People lean toward each other. Somebody’s theory of why shows up before the speaker finishes the sentence.
Which is why the best question in any survey is one you can’t write yet. In June I had no reason to ask it. Now I’d ask every one of those twenty-one: the last time you ordered a hazy, was it the beer you wanted, or the best thing on the board? That question only exists because the first round came back strange…the first survey is how you earn the second.
A brewery doesn’t even need a second survey for it. Its bartenders already stand exactly where that follow-up gets asked, one pour at a time. Hand them the second slide before anyone sees the first. (You know, in marketing we just call that voice of the customer…)
Twenty-one people are drinking something they think there’s too much of. I’d pour every one of them a pint to find out why.
Stay Positive & Skip To Slide Two
I’ve been hearing house lights all week.
I’m at a startup conference, sitting in the dimmed room with a lanyard around my neck, and nearly every speaker so far has reached for the same switch. They get three minutes into an answer that finally has some teeth, and then: “at the end of the day.”
Up come the lights. The room blinks. Whatever was about to get said goes and finds its coat. (I run a bar. I know exactly what that switch does to a room. It’s the one we hit when we want everybody to go home.)
I thought about keeping a list of what each speaker said mattered at the end of the day. I’m glad I didn’t. It would be unbearable, and not because it would be long. Every one of those sentences landed on a different thing. It’s about the people. It’s about the customer. Each one delivered as the final answer, each one quietly cancelling the speaker before it. Stack enough bottom lines on top of each other and you don’t have a bottom line anymore… you have a buffet of big ideas that make you need to loosen your belt.
What’s more after they say it..it is almost never something anyone in the room would fight about. Nobody stands up in the dark and says, actually, I don’t think it’s about the people. That’s the job the phrase is doing. It walks a speaker right up to the edge of a claim somebody could check, then sets them down somewhere carpeted and safe. It sounds like a conclusion. It works like an exit.
I’ve heard it at work, recently, too. Tell a team that at the end of the day we have to hit the number, and you’ve told them exactly whose clock counts. It isn’t theirs. They’ll set their watches to it anyway… right up until they don’t or can’t or worse, they head to another meeting where they hear someone else say “At the end of the day…”
Stay Positive & Maybe Better For Us To Pivot To “At the start of the day…”
Call it as you see it.
Every word in it is holding up a different wall.
Call it. A call is half of a thing. The singer at the front of a blues room throws a line out over the tables and leaves a gap the exact size of an answer, and if nobody fills it, that wasn’t a call. That was a guy yelling. Calling it means putting your read on the table so other people can push on it, poke holes in it, hand you the part you missed. It’s the first word, offered early so the second and third show up sooner.
As you. The current you, holding whatever you happen to be holding right now, and not the version who will have slept on it. A referee who blows the whistle on Tuesday is just a man with opinions about Sunday. The call is worth something because it lands while the turf is still torn up.
See it. The phrase points at the thing and leaves you out of it. “Here’s what I see” puts the problem out where everyone can see it and puts you beside them, squinting at the same mess. A witness can be wrong about the color of the getaway car and still be a perfectly good person.
Notice the sentence is an instruction. It’s aimed at somebody else.
Flip it to first person (“I call ’em like I see ’em”) and it tends to show up right before somebody gets rude, with all the weight slid onto the I.
Said about yourself, it’s a résumé.
Said to the person across the table, it’s a permission slip, and it hands over all three at once: say it before you’re sure, say it before you’re done thinking, say it knowing the work is on trial and you aren’t.
Stay Positive & How Many Times Did You Call It Today?
