GarthBox

Twenty-four beers, twenty-four days, and a bouncer at the door who never lets the same brewery in twice.

That’s the GBB advent calendar. This was its fifth year, and it sold out. We didn’t invent the idea, either. Beer advent calendars turn up everywhere once November hits, which is exactly why ours works. A countdown made of beer needs no tutorial. Somebody else paid to teach that lesson years ago, and a shelf full of other boxes keeps teaching it for free. So our one rule (no repeat breweries) does a lot of talking, but only to someone who has worked through a few of the others.

In an empty market you don’t have a position. You have an address.

Different is a comparison, and a comparison needs weight on the other side of the scale. A crowded market hands you that weight at no charge. It hands you the noise too, which is better than it sounds, because a full room is already arguing out loud about what it wishes somebody would do. (Best place in the world to eavesdrop, too. I do it in my own bar, no logo shirt, whenever I can.)

The trap is raising the bar the crowd is already staring at. Everyone in a busy category watches the same scoreboard, so one more tap or one more feature vanishes into the din. The crowd agrees on what counts. It also agrees, without ever saying so, on what doesn’t. That second list is where the bar is lying on the floor, waiting for somebody to pick it up and hang it higher.

In a beer town the obvious scoreboard is the tap list. The hands doing the pouring never make it onto the board, which is why every beertender behind our bar is Cicerone certified. A tap list can be copied by Friday. A team has to be built.

So when somebody calls a market too crowded, listen to what they actually said. The buyer is already educated. The bar is already posted where everyone can read it. And a dozen competitors have spent real money building the contrast you get to stand next to.

You can’t stand out in an empty room. You can only stand.

Stay Positive & Crowded Market? Great!

No house listing has ever included a photo of the neighbors. You get the kitchen, the backyard at golden hour, the bathroom from its one flattering angle. The people next door are the only feature nobody can stage.

In our last neighborhood, we used to daydream about the next one. A street where we’d connect with people over shared interests. Somebody two doors down who could turn a walk to the mailbox into forty minutes. We moved, and we were pretty sure that’s what we’d bought.

It flopped. (I have since learned you can’t return a street.)

That’s about the easiest complaint a person can make, and I know my own move by now. Catch it, kick it, swap in something grateful.

Read the complaint slowly first. We wanted to connect with our neighbors. We wanted shared interests. That’s the most specific thing we’ve ever said about where we want to live. The square footage never got a sentence that good. Of everything that came with the move, the complaint was the only part with a blueprint.

It also changed the verb. Before, we were shopping for a neighborhood. Now we have something to look forward to creating at the next place we move. Better job.

Which is a little embarrassing, because I run a bar whose entire job is turning strangers into regulars on purpose. Bottle shares, a run club, beertenders who remember what you told them last time. I would never expect a bar to do that by itself… and I expected a street to.

Teams hand their leaders this same sentence all the time. We don’t have the tools. Nobody told us what this is for. The reflex is to kick it for them, with a pep talk that shows up before the complaint finishes. Positive was never supposed to mean quiet. Kick a complaint and you keep the want and lose the blueprint, and the want goes somewhere you can’t hear it.

Read it back to them as a build. That complaint is their first draft of the thing they’d most like to make, and they wrote it for free.

The next street won’t come with it either. It’ll have a kitchen, a backyard, a bathroom with one good angle. This time we’re not shopping for the rest.

Stay Positive & We’re Packing The Complaint

The PA dies halfway through the second song. No crackle, no pop, just four people suddenly miming at a room that can’t hear them.

Some bands spend the next five minutes on their knees, chasing a cable across the stage with a phone flashlight clamped in the drummer’s teeth. Some already rehearsed the unplugged version. They step to the lip of the stage, somebody hushes the bar, and the room leans in closer than it has all night.

It took me a long time to swallow that some things only change after they break, and that you are not allowed to break them yourself (somebody would notice, and that somebody signs your checks). So you do the responsible thing. You tape the connection back together every night and play through the hum.

It works, mostly… No one can point to the night it got bad. The crowd just thins a little each month, the best players quietly book other gigs, and the pain you were holding off arrives anyway, spread so thin across a year that nobody can see it well enough to fix it.

A blowup at least comes with a morning after, the one day a stuck company will say yes to almost anything. The hum never gives you that day.

That morning is short, and it goes to whoever walks in with something already built. Not a deck asking for time to think. The unplugged set, tuned and rehearsed, with the people who know the harmonies already standing there. That’s where the good energy belongs. Not in the tape.

The same clock runs outside the building. Two vendors once spent months courting a company I worked for. Then our CMO went on leave, the replies slowed down, and they read the quiet as a no. Their follow-ups had started to get on my nerves, which didn’t help. Both marked us closed-lost right before a new VP walked in with budget and an appetite. Neither came back.

The tape feels like loyalty. It even is loyalty, right up until the room goes quiet and you find out you only ever knew the song plugged in. I, for one, don’t want to be known for only that.

Stay Positive & Learn It Without The Speakers

The number that finally moved the room was a guess.

I heard about a conversation at a tech company that was about to make a change at roughly the worst moment its customers could have picked. The plan rolled forward the way a full keg keeps going once somebody lets go of it on a ramp. Then someone asked for a guess. How many customers might walk over this, and how much recurring revenue walks out the door with them.

That’s when the talk of doing it differently finally started.

Notice what the question added. Nothing.

The customers were always going to have a rough stretch. The question just put it in a different currency… a hypothetical with a dollar sign stapled to the front, and suddenly the pain registered on the scale that room actually reads.

That’s most of marketing, honestly. Positioning is translation. You take a true thing and price it in whatever the listener already counts. It’s also a little damning that a customer’s rough stretch needed a translator before anyone would sit with it.

A group I work in had a quieter problem. It sounded like a band where everybody knows the song and nobody agrees on the key. (We tried the grown-up fixes first. Different structures, templates, agendas. All very laminated.)

What worked was a temp check at the end of each week. Everyone rates how they feel about our progress toward the goal we share. No finger pointing. No labels. Just a number.

The energy people bring has shifted completely.

Same move as the churn question, pointed at a different seat.

The first room needed the customer’s pain converted into the company’s money before it counted. The second asked the team first, ahead of the customer and ahead of the money, and the team started showing up like the goal belonged to them.

Neither number would survive a statistics class. Both worked because each one handed somebody the consequence to hold. The difference is which room had to be scared into holding it.

Stay Positive & What Would You Rate This Week?

The dinner had reached the stage where people ask each other where they’re from for the second time. Forks were busy. The bread basket was getting more eye contact than anyone at the table. I had a few improv prompts in my pocket, and I could feel them in there like a second set of keys.

I pulled one out. Something like: play a passive-aggressive GPS. Recalculating, delivered like it’s keeping score. A couple of good sports played along. The rest of the table was doing quiet math on the other tables. It was not my finest card trick.

Then the bit ended, and dinner finally started. Everybody had a GPS story. The roundabout that wouldn’t let them go. The wrong turn, told with the pride of a survivor. The same table that had been rationing small talk was now interrupting itself.

The card worked because it flopped. The prompt asked people to perform, and nobody wants a stage between the hummus and the entrée. The conversation after asked them to remember, and everybody owns a wrong turn. The flop paid one more bill, too. Once you’ve watched grown adults play a sulking navigation system, nobody’s roundabout story can be the most embarrassing thing said at that table.

They’ll remember the ridiculous moment I pulled out a card. They’ll remember a great night. They won’t connect the two. Nobody on the ride home from a magic show thanks the person who sewed the false bottom into the hat. They just feel lighter and can’t say why.

Magic is an aftereffect. Aftereffects don’t cite their sources.

Marketing lives in that gap. Every attribution model is a polite attempt to trace the ride home back to the hat, and the best work still slips out the side door uncredited. Leadership lives there too. Somebody has to go first, a little badly, so the rest of the room gets to be interesting. It is almost never the person who gets thanked.

I still have a few cards in my pocket. I cringe every time I think about pulling one out… then I remember the card was never the trick. The trick happens after, and it rides home in somebody else’s car. (Last night it was in a Waymo’s. Everyone’s first time in one. I really believe we only agreed to it as a group because we ran that ridiculous GPS improv prompt.)

Stay Positive & Recalculating…

There’s a lean people do in a doorway. One shoulder on the frame, one foot still out in the hallway, two fingers up like they’re ordering a pair of lagers. The body has planned its exit before the mouth says a word.

Then the mouth catches up.

“Real quick.”

“Got two minutes?”

“This’ll just be a sec.”

Every one of those opens with the price. You don’t know what’s for sale yet, but you already know what it costs, and the cost has been rounded down to the point of fiction (nothing that needed a doorway lean has ever fit inside two minutes… we all know that).

Now the other person is holding a stopwatch. You handed it to them. Half their attention is on you and half is on the clock you just set on the table, and whatever you actually came for has to elbow past the timer to get heard.

Nobody in hospitality drops the check before the menu.

We do it to each other all day.

Open with the job instead.

“I need some reassurance.”

“Can you help me with an idea.”

“I’m carrying something and could use a second shoulder.”

None of those mention minutes. They tell the other person which version of themselves to bring to the door… the cheerleader, the skeptic, the one who just listens.

I do a version of this before meetings. I’ll Slack a teammate ahead of time, or say it as the call opens: can you please challenge my thinking on this one? They probably would have pushed back anyway. Asking means we both walk in ready, and it’s hard to get bruised by a challenge you ordered. (And it always beats the 1-1 huddle call after for “2 seconds” when you know they’d rather be getting a snack between meetings than tackling our problem)

Sales outreach makes the same mistake.

“A quick fifteen minutes.”

“Just a short call.”

“Circling back just to see if…”

The subject line leads with the bill, so the buyer measures the email the way you taught them to, in minutes they don’t have. Whatever you lead with becomes the ruler.

The people you interrupt most are your own team. Teach them to time you and they’ll get very good at it.

Stay Positive & Take All The Time You Need

p.s. Pro tip… bake it into your AI coach to evaluate your transcripts and messages for these phrases.

I send a brief back if it doesn’t say who it’s for. Doesn’t matter how good the idea is or how nice the person asking. It goes back across the desk with one question stapled to the front. Who is this for?

Then I lay in bed at night and tell myself to be better. No brief. No audience. No name anywhere on it.

Better for who? (Whom. The J-school kid in me will not let that one slide.) Present me. Future me. My wife, the girls, the neighbors, the regulars… every one of them pictures a different better.

Better for present me is twenty more minutes under the blanket. Better for future me is the alarm. Better for the neighbors is a lawn that looks like somebody over here is paying attention. Better for my oldest, who is learning to read, is me sitting on my hands while she wrestles a word like dragon to the ground one letter at a time. Better for my evening is me just reading it to her.

All of those are better. None of them are better for the same person, and they all want the same few hours.

That’s the friction. It was never doubt about whether better is worth chasing. It’s five briefs on one desk with no names on them, and the one that wins is whoever’s standing closest. Usually present me, which doesn’t feel like a fulfilling way to live.

Naming the who doesn’t make the friction go away. It tells you who waits. When I opened the bar, a few of the gauges I watch in my own life ran low, and I let them. I knew who the bar was for and who was going to wait on it. Choosing who goes second feels nothing like finding out later who you skipped.

Every homepage you’ve ever bounced off says better somewhere near the top. It’s the emptiest word in marketing until a name gets attached, and the moment one does, so does a list of everyone it isn’t for. That list is what makes the claim believable.

Teams work the same way. Tell a team to do better and they will, for whoever was loudest in the last meeting.

Better is a comparative. It was always half a sentence. Somebody has been finishing it for you.

Stay Positive & We’d All Be Better If We Worked More On Whom For