GarthBox

Picture the newest people in a building that isn’t quite theirs yet. They didn’t apply for this job. They didn’t sweat over a cover letter or angle for the offer. Their whole team got folded into a new one through an acquisition, boxes and all, and one Monday they simply belonged somewhere else.

They’re still doing the job they came in doing. That much hasn’t changed. But a few weeks in, you’ll catch them sitting quietly in meetings that don’t need them yet, learning a tool nobody assigned them yet, shadowing a process three departments over that has nothing to do with their title…yet. Nobody is making them do this. They’re understudies who never auditioned for the part, and everyone in the room, without saying it out loud, has already agreed on the one true thing: it isn’t a question of if they eventually get moved into something else. It’s when.

That’s a strange thing to sit calmly inside of. Tell most people “you will definitely be asked to do a different job than the one you have, we just can’t tell you which one or when” and watch them get uneasy. But inside an acquisition, everybody nods along like it’s a weather forecast. Of course.

Obviously. That’s just how this works.

That exact certainty is true almost everywhere the acquisition isn’t. Your marriage will eventually ask you to be the strong one on a week you didn’t train for. Your body will eventually ask for a level of care you didn’t train for either. We only treat the shift as a sure thing when it’s wearing a lanyard and sitting in a boardroom. Anywhere else, we call it bad luck instead of the forecast it always was.

Businesses will write an entire slide deck called Succession Planning with a straight face, then act genuinely wounded when their own knees give out on a hike they never trained for.

I run a bar. Every new hire behind that rail learns something outside their own station in the first month, whether they ask to or not. Not because a manual tells them to. Because I’ve watched what a bad Friday does to a room that only trained people for their own job, and the nights that don’t fall apart are the ones where somebody spent a slow Tuesday back in week two learning a job they didn’t have yet, for no reason they could have named at the time.

Learning a skill you don’t need yet has a particular itch to it. It’s like practicing a chord that doesn’t belong to any song you’re currently playing. That itch isn’t proof you’re wasting the afternoon. It’s usually the tell that you’re doing the one thing that actually protects the people who’ll be counting on you later, on a night neither of you can see yet.

This is what investing in your team actually looks like on an ordinary Tuesday, not a benefits page bullet point.

It’s letting someone learn the part they’re not playing yet, while nothing is on fire, so that on the night something is, the room already knows what to do without a meeting about it. Teams that get handed that kind of investment take better care of the customer standing in front of them. Customers who get taken care of come back and invest in you. Most companies build the whole thing backwards, waiting for the crisis to teach, for free, what the slow Tuesday was already offering to teach for nothing.

I don’t know exactly what I’m currently under-preparing for. Nobody does. That’s the whole trick of the thing hiding inside the certainty. But given the choice, I’d rather spend a slow Tuesday finding out on purpose than wait for the Friday that makes me.

Stay Positive & Time To Prep

Every meeting worth having generates weather. You can feel it building somewhere around minute ten: shoulders lean in, opinions start showing up uninvited, someone doodles harder than the moment requires. It isn’t caffeine and it isn’t manners. It’s closer to the air going thick and metallic right before a storm actually breaks.

Then the meeting ends. Whatever that charge was either grounds itself into somebody’s actual task list, or it drifts up into the recessed lighting and disappears, the way morning fog quietly declines to become rain. Nobody gets zapped. Nobody gets anything, either.

I heard someone describe an entirely different problem once, with a phrase I haven’t been able to put down since: customers were “dropping off, but no one’s taking them off.” A customer hits a rough patch, needs a hand, and there’s a gap where three or four different people could have caught them, and somehow nobody does, because ownership was implied instead of assigned out loud, with a name on it. The customer is still falling. Everybody’s arms are folded.

That’s the exact same physics as the last meeting you were in, I’m sure. Attention doesn’t stay in the room once the room empties. It drops the second the last person logs off, and the only real question is whether anyone’s there to take it off, catch it, staple it to a mission with a name and a date before everyone scatters to go microwave lunch.

Good meetings almost never fail in the talking. They fail in the ten seconds after, while everyone’s already halfway into their coats. You can produce the sharpest hour of thinking your team has managed all year and still walk out of that room with nothing to show for it a month later, because insight and ownership are not the same animal. Insight is just weather. Somebody has to actually decide to bring the boots.

It’s the same reason sales pipelines don’t collapse… they rot, quietly, from the inside. A deal doesn’t go stale because the buyer got cold feet. It goes stale because it sat one email past its last real action, and everyone kept calling it “in progress” the way you keep calling a plant alive three weeks after you stopped watering it. Green isn’t the same as living. Nobody checked. (FWIW “Just checking in” isn’t actually checking in…but that’s a separate riff…)

I run a bar where this shows up smaller and dumber, which somehow makes it easier to see straight. Every so often a team meeting throws off a good idea: a new pour, a new house rule, a smarter way to run a Friday. The idea always survives the meeting just fine. What doesn’t survive is the doing of it, unless one specific person is on the hook by one specific day. Every good idea we’ve actually shipped has the same fingerprint: a name and a date, nailed to it before anyone stood up from the table. The good ideas we didn’t ship are every bit as good on paper. Paper has never once poured a beer.

So the discipline was never about running a tighter meeting or even speaking more eloquently…

It’s refusing to let one end before whatever charge it built gets grounded into somebody’s real list, in the room, before the static has a chance to wander off and become nobody’s problem. Same move whether you’re closing a sale, wrapping a strategy session, or ending a Tuesday huddle about what’s going on tap. Attention isn’t a resource you can bank for later. It spends itself the moment the meeting ends, whether or not you were the one who spent it.

Stay Positive & So What Are We Going To Do About It? (<<<— the question that needs to be answered before the call ends)

Doubling a recipe was never really about having more food. It’s about having enough left over to walk down the block with it.

I don’t know who started this, whoever first stood over a pot of chili and thought, “might as well make it a big pot,” but they weren’t doing math. If you needed six servings, doubling gives you twelve, and twelve is exactly the kind of number that gets a jar carried next door instead of just eaten alone at the counter. The extra isn’t waste. It’s the whole reason you doubled it.

I’ve been doing the same thing at work lately, on purpose, with customer conversations instead of onions.

Every positioning call, I push past what I actually need for the deck in front of me. I ask one more question. I let the customer ramble a beat longer than the agenda wants. Most of it goes nowhere. But every few calls, something sticks, a specific line, an objection nobody had written down, the exact moment a customer’s face changed when the framing landed. Those become pocket stories. Small enough to carry, sharp enough to use. I’ve got a handful sitting in my pocket right now for this week’s offsite. I’ll still have half of them left for the next one.

Plenty of good customer conversations end exactly on time. They confirm the pricing, answer the objection, close the ticket, and stop. Nothing wasted, technically. Also nothing left over. The team that only ever cooks exactly what the meeting needs never has anything to bring to the next meeting (or, where I prefer, the hotel bar later). They have to start from scratch every single time, re-litigating the same positioning with the same thin evidence, wondering why nobody in the room seems convinced.

You can’t share a jar you didn’t make. You can’t pull out a customer’s exact words if you never stayed on the call long enough to hear them say something unscripted. The surplus has to exist before you can be generous with it, and generosity, it turns out, is just planning that happened early.

None of this is really about being a nicer person, either… though it doesn’t hurt. It’s cheaper than the alternative. Making a little extra costs you almost nothing in the moment, a few more minutes on a call, a slightly bigger pot on the stove, and it buys you months of not having to start over. The people who seem effortlessly ready with the right story at the right time usually aren’t quicker thinkers. They just made a second batch a while back and now the opportunity to finish and share it is here.

Stay Positive & Doubling Up On Purpose

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