GarthBox

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

The fish pulls left, so I lean right. When it changes its mind, the bar on the screen goes red and I swing back the other way, finger still on the button, while something with fins and opinions tries to leave. Then it tires. I reel. It bolts again. This is fishing in RuneScape: Dragonwilds, and lately I have been doing a lot of it.

Most of it is waiting. The cast goes out, the line settles, and the water does absolutely nothing for a while. Plenty of casts come back with weeds. The game is very honest about junk: it still costs you a charge from the fishing spot, and it pays zero experience. (I respect this and resent it in about equal measure.)

The early rewards are almost funny. Hit level three and the game knocks one percent off how fast you burn stamina. One percent. That’s the whole parade. If you’re in a stretch right now where the prize for a month of effort feels like one percent, nothing is broken. You’re at level three.

In the original RuneScape, the one whose grind is famous enough to have its own folklore, level 92 is halfway to 99. Seven levels hold half the work. The curve doesn’t ramp up politely. It leans back on you harder the closer you get, and it was built to.

Dragonwilds made the same point with a patch. Most of its skills used to top out at 50. In March an update moved the ceiling to 99, and anybody who was done got to find out they were at fifty out of ninety-nine. Even the rods tell on the system. Ash, oak, willow, maple, yew. Each one is the right tool for a new region, which is a polite way of saying a new place to be bad at fishing.

The prize for mastering the pond is a harder pond.

Writing these posts works the same way, and yes, it’s a grind. One blog post every single day. I’ve signed off with the same two words and an ampersand for more than fifteen years, and whatever comes after them has to be new every time. Every post I publish becomes a move the next one can’t make. The fivethousandth (that’s just fun to type) is harder than the first because it has four-thousand-nine-hundred-and-ninenty-nine others it isn’t allowed to sound like…that’s my level 92.

Every brand that lasts runs into this. Year one, you’re inventing. Year five, you’re competing with your own back catalog, trying to say the same true thing without saying it the same way. Positioning gets heavier the longer you hold it. So plan for the back half to weigh more, and write that into the plan before you’re standing in it. When the heavy part shows up on schedule, it reads as progress instead of a verdict.

The game does hand out shortcuts, but only to people who already did the reps. The spell that yanks fish out of the water and drops them straight into your backpack doesn’t unlock until level 55. The cape waits at 99, and nobody wears that cape for warmth.

The shortcuts sold outside the game are traps, and they’re traps in a specific way. They don’t spare you the grind…they deliver you to the next, heavier one without the reps the lighter one was about to give you. A bought email list is ten thousand names and not one of them has ever heard you say anything. Now you get to grind for opens with inboxes that have already learned to ignore you.

The levels were never going to buy you fewer casts. They buy you less junk. That’s what the reps are for, and it’s the one thing a shortcut can’t hand you, because it skipped the part where you learned which casts were junk.

Then there’s the waiting, the stretch between the cast and the bite where nobody needs anything from you. An always-on brain won’t take a walk, because a walk looks like wasted time. It will happily take forty casts, because there’s a bar filling up. The grind is rest that showed up with a progress bar as its hall pass, and for some of us that’s the only way rest gets in the door. Appreciation sneaks in there. So do ideas. (If you manage anyone, this is the exact stretch we love to fill with a status meeting.)

Nothing is wrong with you at the pond. The weeds are on schedule, the one percent is on schedule, and the quiet between the cast and the bite might be the only stretch all week where the fish is the only thing pulling on you.

Stay Positive & Cast Again

Order the hottest wing on the menu and the burn is a trophy. You sweat, you grin, you hold the bone up like it owes you money. Bite the same wing thinking it was the mild one and that identical fire becomes a betrayal, and somebody in the kitchen is about to hear about labeling.

Same pepper. Different ticket.

There’s a standing instruction in my Claude settings. Before it hands me anything final, it has to question me, and it has orders to say so directly when an idea is too safe, too vague, or too close to what everybody else would say. It takes the job seriously. More than once it has told me an idea I was proud of was somebody else’s idea wearing my jacket.

It’s hard to get mad at a burn you ordered. The instruction was never really for the machine. Claude doesn’t flinch. I do. Writing it down was a calmer version of me filling out the ticket, so the version of me at the table couldn’t send the plate back.

I do it at work now, too. Before most meetings where I’m bringing an idea, I open the call with it or Slack a teammate ahead of time: can you please challenge my thinking on this one?

They probably would have pushed anyway. Now we both walk in ready. The objection arrives as something I ordered, and the person raising it gets to be helpful instead of difficult. (My favorite is the teammate who was planning to nod along. Now they’ve been handed a job, and the job is finding the crack and calling it out. They usually end up shining more than the idea!)

Everybody you work with is already running instructions. Nobody wrote them down and everybody knows them by heart: be agreeable, don’t embarrass whoever brought the idea, save the real opinion for the DM after the call. One sentence overwrites all of it. It might be the cheapest investment you can make in a team, because it tells them their disagreement is the work.

We’ve gotten good at telling machines how to treat us. People will take the same instruction, and plenty of them have been waiting years for somebody to give it. No need to wait around for someone to decide your idea deserves a fight.

Never did, really.

Stay Positive & Order It Hot

A beer faucet is supposed to hover. Close to the glass, never in it, the way a good server hovers near a table without leaning on it. When the chrome nose dips down into the beer, I flinch. When it dips into a glass somebody just carried back up to the bar, the last pour still clinging to the walls like a bathtub ring, I flinch harder. That faucet now has a stranger’s afternoon on it, and it’s about to go visiting.

I’m not looking for it. My eyes just go there, the way a tongue keeps finding a chipped tooth.

The other one lives in sentences. I worked with a copy editor for nine years, and somewhere in there “So,” at the front of a sentence stopped being a word and turned into a tell. It’s the sound of somebody revving the engine before they’ve picked a direction. Lazy. I can’t read past it without hearing it. (You won’t find one anywhere in this post. Nine years will do that to a person.)

Neither of these feels like something I learned. They feel like eyesight.

I can name the copy editor. What I can’t do is remember the version of me who read a sentence opening on “So,” and felt nothing at all. He left without a forwarding address. When the change happens inside the instrument you notice things with, the instrument has no way to report it… a ruler can’t tell you it shrank.

If I’m that blind to my own, I’m hopeless with everybody else’s. And everybody is carrying them. Every guest, every hire, every buyer walks in with a few, installed by their own copy editor over their own nine years. The brewer at the end of the bar is watching the faucet. The buyer who got burned by a vendor once is listening for the exact promise that burned them, and the moment you make it you’re finished… they just won’t be able to tell you why.

That’s what “it just felt off” means. It’s one of the most honest sentences a customer ever says, and the first one we throw away, because there’s nothing in it to fix. Nobody is withholding the reason. They don’t have a reason. They have eyesight.

Surveys miss it for the same reason. Ask people to list what matters and you get the brochure. The eyes never make the list.

Ask sideways instead. What can’t you unsee? In your job, in your category, in the last product that let you down. It’s an easy question to answer because it sounds like a confession about the person answering, not a complaint about you, and it hands over the one thing a buyer can’t otherwise give: the rule they don’t know they’re grading you by.

The copy editor fixed plenty of my copy, and that part got archived with the files. What lasted was a reader who can’t stop seeing one more thing. This is the real return on investing in a team, and it never shows up in a quarterly report: the things they’ll keep noticing on behalf of every customer they serve after you, in rooms you’ll never walk into.

I know exactly who ruined “So” for me. I have no idea who’s out there carrying something I taught them, wincing at it, crediting nobody. The copy editor is in every sentence I write and has never once made the byline.

Stay Positive & … So, Thank You, Sandy (Sorry, Couldn’t Help It)

I got to the end of a workday once and realized I hadn’t laughed in a single meeting.

So I went back through them looking for a smile… nothing there either. My face had spent the whole calendar in the expression you make watching a progress bar think it over. Polite, unblinking, slightly betrayed.

The first thing my brain produced was a complaint. Why aren’t any of these meetings fun? Notice the shape of that sentence. It treats fun like dinner somebody else is cooking, and I’d been checking the oven window all day.

“Didn’t laugh once” is an audit result. Waiting does that to you. You stop experiencing the room and start inspecting it for whatever’s missing, and you get very good at finding it missing. (I should mention I attended every one of those meetings, and I wasn’t funny in any of them either.)

Some waiting is honest. The first time I made a dutch oven meal, it was six hours of “cooking” that was mostly me standing around. The lid stays on. Lifting it to check is how you ruin dinner. That kind of waiting works because something in there is actually cooking.

Nobody had put anything in the oven for those meetings. It was a room full of people staring through the window of an oven nobody turned on, each of us assuming it was somebody else’s night to cook.

That’s the discomfort that doesn’t grow you. Waiting on an empty oven is a chair you’ve sat in too long. Nothing is getting stronger. Something is just going numb. (My bum and my energy…)

Real talk, though… doing something about it might not make the fun arrive any sooner.

If speed were the point, the move would be to lean on whoever’s supposed to be cooking. Suggest an icebreaker. Ask the organizer, kindly, whether we could all bring a little more energy. That’s the annoying version, and it’s annoying because it’s aimed at the schedule.

The other version is aimed at the thing. You make a small, homemade piece of it yourself, right where you sit. You say the funny thing you noticed instead of saving it for later. It might not land. One person in the room still smiled, even if it was only you, which already beats the day’s count.

Launch week has its own oven window. The release goes out and the team spends days refreshing the adoption dashboard like it owes them money. Meanwhile anyone on that team could call one customer and walk them through the feature on their own screen, with their own data. One person won’t bend the chart. It’s still the only part of the launch that’s alive while everybody else stares at a line.

If it’s your meeting, the waiting gets stranger. Rooms copy the face of whoever booked them. Sit at the head of the table waiting for the team to bring the energy and you’ve taught everyone that energy is catered.

The question that shows up around bedtime never asks what arrived. It asks whether I did everything I could today for the things I said I wanted. Waiting guarantees the bad answer, even on a good day, because the honest version is that I watched.

The meetings might stay exactly this beige. That was never the bet. The bet is whether I spend another day as the most patient person in the room, which turns out to be a lousy thing to be the best at.

Stay Positive & I’m Smiling As I Type This BTW