GarthBox

Between two songs at the show last night, the singer leaned into the mic and started telling us about a different night, at a different brewery.

“We had a few people up saying the verses with us, and we got to the point of really challenging them, over at Lone Girl.”

He smiled at the memory. You could tell it had been a good night. People singing the verses back, the band pushing them to go further, that rare electricity where a room stops being an audience and becomes part of the act.

And the room he was standing in did nothing. Not because we were rude. Because we weren’t there. He was describing the most participatory moment a crowd can have, and he was describing it to a crowd that could only watch him remember it. The story was about being inside the thing. The telling left us outside it.

His intentions were good. That’s what stuck with me. He wasn’t bragging. He was reaching back for something real and trying to share it. But reaching back is the problem. He pointed at a door he’d already walked through and shut, and asked us to admire it from the hallway.

A friend of mine runs a consulting practice and writes about how he got started. I wasn’t there for any of it. I have no idea what his first month felt like. And yet every time I read him, I’m in it. He doesn’t tell me what it was like for him. He puts me in the chair. He writes the fear I’d be feeling, the math I’d be doing at 2 a.m., the moment I’d want to quit. Same raw material as the band guy. Opposite move. One reflects. One invites.

I know the difference because I’ve been the band.

For years I told the story of getting the liquor license for the bar like this: it took eight months, a binder thick enough to stop a door, three trips to a county office where nobody made eye contact, and at least one night I was ready to walk away from the whole thing because the neighborhood eats businesses up that they think will result with people puking in their front yards. That’s a true story. It’s also a story about me, performed for people who weren’t in the binder with me. They nodded. They were polite. They weren’t there. I’ve since changed the tune.

Here’s where it stops being about songs and bars.

Walk through the founding-story page on almost any company website. The origin video. The wall of awards in the lobby. The “our journey” timeline with the little dots. It’s the band guy, professionally lit.

A business standing on stage, reaching back for its proudest night, describing a moment of connection to a customer who wasn’t there and isn’t being invited in. We started in a garage. We won the thing. We grew. The customer reads it the way we watched that singer. Nice for you. I wasn’t there. And you’re not actually talking to me.

The fix isn’t humility, exactly. The band guy was humble. The fix is a change of address. Stop narrating the memory. Build the doorway. Take whatever was true about your proudest night and rebuild it so the other person is standing inside it, feeling what you felt, facing what you faced, before you ever tell them how it turned out. Hand them the key in the hallway instead of the photo album of a vacation they didn’t take.

Most of the people who get this wrong are not careless. They’re the opposite. They care so much about the moment that they hold it instead of handing it over.

They had something true and they kept it warm in their own hands while the room went cold.

We weren’t there. We’re never there. That’s not the obstacle. That’s the whole job.

Stay Positive & What’s The Next Verse?

Every few weeks I run a quiet count. Six columns, the 6Fs: family, fun, finance, fitness, faith, and the one I always forget to list, which tells you most of what you’d need to know about how I’m doing in it. I total them up like a guy counting kegs in the cooler on a Sunday night. Nobody is watching. There’s no applause for the count. There’s me, a number, and the slow honesty of looking.

Usually I’m counting to find the empty one. Fitness has slid to zero because finance got loud. Fun got crowded out by a season of saying yes to the wrong things. I find the gap, I patch the gap, I feel briefly like a functional adult.

Hirohiko Araki wrote a book about making manga, and the part that stuck to me had nothing to do with drawing. He breaks every story into four elements: character, story, setting, theme. Then he says the real work, the work behind the work, is relentless analysis. Read everything. Take it apart. Figure out why the thing that moved you moved you. He treats it as the foundation and he means that literally. You cannot build on ground you have never surveyed.

That is inventory. It’s the least romantic word in any craft and it’s the whole game. Every artist I’ve studied does the same unglamorous thing. They take stock. They count what’s already on the shelf before they decide what to make next. I just took inventory of our beer cooler at the bar, too. Fun isn’t how I would describe the time. Alas.

…Here’s a count worth running on your own life. Not what you do, but how you came to do it. Some things you got thrown into. Some you signed up for. Some you still get coached on as a grown adult, thank God. Some you do for nothing in return. Some you do entirely for the return.

A full life has all of them on the board. A stuck life is usually missing two and has no idea.

The part I get wrong, every single time, is that I only hunt for the zero. The empty column is honest. It announces itself. You feel the absence of fun or faith the way you feel a missing tooth.

The dangerous column is the full one. The thing you do entirely for the return, quietly running at a hundred, eating the hours that used to belong to the things you did for love. It doesn’t read as a problem. It reads as discipline. It reads as winning. Nobody audits a winning streak, and that is exactly why it gets to keep growing in the dark.

This is also, for whatever it’s worth, the whole secret of positioning, and most people building brands have it pointed the wrong way. They think positioning is an act of invention. A new story, a clever line, a fresh coat of paint. It almost never is.

Positioning is an act of inventory.

You take honest stock of what you already are, you find the column sitting at zero in the customer’s mind, and you find the one running so hot it’s crowding out everything else you could be to them. Most brands don’t need a new story. They need to count the one they’ve already got, and notice which shelf is bare and which one is about to tip over.

The count never gets easier. That’s the thing I keep waiting on and it keeps not coming. You’d think after enough Sunday nights with the cooler you’d run out of surprises. You don’t. Last time I ran mine I found that the column I’d been bragging about was the one bleeding all the others dry. Not the empty one. The full one. The one I was proud of.

Survey the ground. Even the part you’re sure you know.

Stay Positive & Especially That Part

There’s a river near my house called Sugar River. It is not made of sugar and it is not sweet. Somebody, a long time ago, tasted the water or the maples on its banks or just liked the sound, and the name stuck the way names do, which is to say arbitrarily and forever.

I walk along it almost every weekend. For years I would have told you, if you asked, that Sugar River is a thing. A noun. A blue line on a county map. Something you point at the way you point at a parked car. It’s (and I do mean it’s) a river I drink by often and might just kayak down this summer.

Then I learned that in Potawatomi, one of the languages that named this land long before anyone thought to call the water sugar, a bay is not a noun. The word lands closer to “to be a bay.” The water is not sitting in a category. It is doing something. Being a bay is an act the water performs, the way you perform being awake, or being in love.

About seventy percent of Potawatomi words are verbs. In English the number is closer to thirty percent. We took a living, moving, weather-having world and filed most of it under nouns. Rocks, rivers, hills, Saturdays. We turned the world into inventory and then acted surprised when we started treating it like inventory.

Here is what the grammar does to you, quietly, before you notice. And having two daughters, I’m highly sensitive to it now.

When Sugar River is a noun, I am the subject of the sentence and the river is the object. I am the one holding the verb. I walk, I look, I own the riparian rights, I decide. The river just sits there being itself, waiting for me to do something to it or about it. The grammar puts me in charge. It hands me the clipboard.

When Sugar River is a verb, the whole arrangement comes apart. The river is doing something. It was doing it before I got here, in the dark, with no audience, carving the same bank it has been carving since the glaciers left and the meltwater had to go somewhere. It will keep doing it after I am gone and after the county map is a museum object. I am not the subject of that sentence. I am a guy who showed up partway through, stood on the bank for a few hundred afternoons drinking beers, and called it sugar.

That is the part I keep circling. Not that the river deserves my respect, though it might. The smaller, stranger thing: the river does not need me to finish its sentence. I have spent my life inside a grammar that told me I was the one with the verb, the protagonist of the watershed, the one things happen to and through.

And the river, doing its slow patient work in the cold, was never asking. I am the guest. The word “it” was how a temporary visitor talked himself into feeling like the landlord.

I will not pretend this is only a nature thought, because it followed me back to work, amidst my 15 claude projects and flooding LinkedIn feed.

We do the same thing to companies. We make them nouns. We are the leader. We are the platform. We are the category. Every one of those sentences plants a flag and stops moving, and a flag is a thing, and things sit on shelves, and shelves get reorganized.

The brands that harden into nouns are the ones that get carried off by the current while still insisting they are the river. Kodak was a noun. Photography was a verb, and it walked away without them, the way Sugar River would keep flowing if every map in the county burned and the brewery beside it shut down.

The humbling version, the one I actually believe, is that no company is the river. The market was here before you and it is doing something whether or not you show up to narrate it. You are a guest who arrived partway through and got to stand on the bank for a while and call it yours.

That is not a small thing. It is just not the large thing we keep pretending it is.

I still call it Sugar River. The name is wrong and I love it anyway. But lately, when I’m looking out over the bridge, admiring wildlife with my daughters, I try to hold the other grammar in my head at the same time. Not the river. Rivering. Something the water is doing, has been doing, will keep doing, with or without a name, and with or without me there to watch it go by.

Maybe just maybe my daughters use the name as a verb. I promise not to correct them.

Maybe just maybe we did marketing justice by calling it marketing. It sounds right to everyone I say it to, but internally I really am referring to the market as a verb and not the work of a noun.

Stay Positive & Worth Looking Up At The Skying Today

A streak on glass is a confession. It says someone was here, someone tried, and someone quit a half-second before the job was actually done. You catch it at a slant of light you didn’t plan for, a smear across the windshield in exactly the spot your eyes want to go. The glass was cleaned. That’s the insult of it. The effort was spent. The streak is just what’s left when the effort was about getting done instead of getting it done right.

Streaks are the marks you leave by accident and would take back if you could. They sit entirely inside your control, which is why they sting. Nobody forces a streak on you. You leave it by hurrying, by half-caring, by wiping in one direction and calling it clean.

Footprints are a different thing entirely. You leave them by walking. You don’t arrange them, you can’t reach back and tilt one so it photographs better, and the good ones, the ones that mean anything, you don’t even know you left. By the time someone finds them, you’re already somewhere else.

This is where it should bother you a little.

Brands spend most of their budget on footprints they will never get to place. So they stage them. They pour wet concrete in the lobby, press their own hand into it, and call it culture. They write the press release about their impact before any impact has happened. All that managed, polished, on-message effort to be remembered a particular way is not a footprint. It’s a streak. The residue of trying too hard, smeared right across the part of the glass everyone has to look through.

A company I used to work for just won a serious award for their AI. A real one, the kind the people in the room actually respect. I wrote the submission. I also submitted it, which sounds like nothing until you’ve done it. The work was a slog. Chasing people for reviews. Coaxing engineers to talk about the thing we were building in terms of where it was headed instead of where it happened to be that particular Tuesday. Turning an unfinished vision into a sentence a judge would believe. I had all but forgotten I did any of it.

Then they won. And the people who know where to look can see my footprints all through that submission. I didn’t stage them. I couldn’t have. By the time the award landed I’d long since walked on to other things, and that’s the only reason it felt like anything at all. The footprint you end up proudest of is almost always the one you forgot you were leaving, because you were too busy doing the work (the hard work, the frustrating work, the work no one else wants to do, mind you) to stop and pose beside it.

That’s the whole trick, and it refuses to behave like a trick.

You cannot author your impact. You can only author your carelessness.

Best to spend your attention where you actually hold the pen. Wipe the glass right. Do the forgettable, unglamorous labor well enough that it leaves a clean surface behind you. Then let go of how you’ll be remembered, because that was never in your hands, and the harder you grab at it the worse it smears.

The footprints take care of themselves, or they don’t. Either way they were never yours to place. Your job was always the wiping.

Stay Positive & Streaks Are Inevitable, Footprints Are A Choice

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I took my wife to a pottery class for our anniversary. The instructor says the thing that breaks beginners is not the spinning. It’s the waiting. Clay stays honest for a short window. Wet, warm, willing to become almost anything you lean it toward. Then it stiffens. Wait too long and it sets into a shape you never actually chose, and now you own that shape for good. The wheel didn’t punish you. The clock did.

Decisions behave the same way, and we keep pretending they don’t.

We’ve dressed up hesitation in good clothes. We call it due diligence, alignment, gathering more data, getting buy-in. Sometimes it is those things. Mostly it’s a person standing over a slab of wet clay, hoping that if they study it long enough the pot will throw itself and pull its own walls.

It won’t.

The only thing that grows during that pause is the cost of having paused.

So the actual skill, the one that separates the people who move from the people who narrate, is not brilliance and it’s not nerve. It’s a particular relationship with two things: the clock and the result.

The clock first. “Good” is not a grade you settle for. Good is the amount of shape you need to get the wheel turning. You can’t iterate on a thought. You can only iterate on a thing that exists in the world, however lopsided. Shipping a B-minus version this week beats theorizing an A-plus version that never leaves your head, because the B-minus comes back to you with information attached and the theory comes back with nothing. Speed isn’t recklessness. Speed is just refusing to let a decision sit out and harden into something you have to live inside.

Then the result. Here’s where most people quietly lose… and where the great ones have made a strange kind of peace.

They’ve decided, in advance, that the outcome doesn’t get to own their mood. A bad result is not a verdict on your worth. It’s a reading off an instrument. The people who move fastest are not the most thrilled by winning. They’re the least wrecked by losing. (It’s worth reading that again.)

They’ve pre-negotiated their relationship with failure so that when it shows up, and it always shows up, it finds them already calm and already curious.

I’m saying this while it still stings. I recently bombed an interview on the exact subject of execution. Told, in so many words, that I came up short on the thing I’d built a whole identity around. You can hold a result like that two ways. You can carry it like a sentence you have to serve, or you can treat it as a reading and adjust the next throw. The first one is the kiln. The slow heat that takes a soft, fixable thing and bakes it permanent. That kiln has a name. It’s regret. Regret is the firing you never ordered, and it costs more than any single bad decision ever could, because a bad decision you can redo, and a fired pot you can only stare at.

This is where the new variable enters, the one nobody had five years ago. You can now keep a coach in your pocket that tells you, without flinching and without flattering, exactly where the pot is leaning. No politeness tax. No waiting for the quarterly review to learn the truth.

That’s a gift, and it’s also a bill.

Candor on tap demands thicker skin than most of us have built, because the feedback doesn’t soften itself to protect the relationship. But thick skin is precisely the soil that tenacious cultures grow in. The teams that get strong are the ones that made honesty cheap and made being wrong survivable. You can now build that pressure for yourself, daily, before any room ever does it to you. (Thanks Claude)

And the rooms matter more than we admit. You slowly become the median of the people allowed to decide near you. Stand in a room of waiters and you’ll learn to wait beautifully. Stand in a room of people who throw the pot while the clay is wet, who treat a collapse as a Tuesday, and your own clock recalibrates without you noticing. The luckiest move is finding that room. The better move, the one that outlives you, is shaping it for the people who haven’t found theirs yet. Hand someone the wheel. Show them the clay won’t stay soft. Let them feel that a wobbly bowl is worth ten perfect drawings of a bowl.

Agency really is one of the great feelings this life hands out. The vertigo of getting to choose.

But it travels with a twin, and the twin is regret, and the twin is heavier. You don’t get to keep the first while dodging the second by being careful. You keep it by keeping the clay moving. Decide while it’s warm. Adjust before it sets. Don’t wait for a kiln you didn’t order to make the decision permanent on your behalf.

The wheel is already spinning. The clay is already drying. That’s not pressure. That’s just the medium. And quite frankly, my wife and I had more joy and laughter at of our bowls folding in on us and learning from that than we did the end product. Ain’t that grande?

Stay Positive & Fulfilling When Wet

Walk around the back of almost any business and you’ll find a door nobody photographs. No real sign. A dumpster, a buzzer that half works, a square of concrete stained by a decade of weather. This is the door everything you sell comes through before a customer ever lays eyes on it. The product. The talent. The cash. The suppliers who decide whether you get the good berries or the bruised ones.

The front door gets the money. Warm lighting, a greeter, a thousand tiny experiments on the word “Welcome.” The loading dock gets a padlock and a prayer. (My back door at Garth’s Brew Bar auto-locks which is it’s own sense of symbolism I’ve gotta unpack now…)

The quiet part is that you are already marketing to that loading dock. You just never wrote it down, so you’re doing it on instinct, which usually means doing it poorly.

Every business serves two audiences. There’s the one you sell to, and there’s the one you buy from, hire from, borrow from, or build on top of. Demand and supply. You can leave the second one out of the plan, but you cannot leave it out of reality. A restaurant with a dazzling dining room and a kitchen nobody wants to cook in is a restaurant with a countdown timer hanging over the host stand. A marketplace swimming in buyers with no sellers is a very expensive empty mall.

Plans love to treat supply as a procurement problem. Find it, sign it, move on. But supply has ears. The best chef in town hears how you treat your line cooks. The maker with a waitlist hears how you paid the last vendor. Capital hears everything. Treat your supply side like a vending machine and you get vending-machine supply: whatever’s cheapest, sitting closest to the glass.

So you’re in a tug-of-war. One rope, an audience on each end. Pull too hard for customers and you can squeeze suppliers until the quality you sold them on walks out the back. Pamper supply and forget to actually sell, and you’ve built a beautiful thing nobody buys. The move is not to win the rope. The move is to stop treating it like a fight and start treating both ends like guests you’re courting at the same dinner. (Being able to effectively do this when I worked at marketing for Schneider is what I attribute to Schneider’s ability to rise to an IPO.)

Here are a few others who figured this out, none of them the usual suspects.

Michelin. A tire company in 1900, back when there were fewer than 3,000 cars in all of France, decided the fastest way to sell more tires was to give people reasons to wear them out. So the Michelin brothers printed a free guide telling drivers where to eat and sleep across the country. The customer bought tires. The “supply” was the open road itself, and the restaurants worth driving toward. They grew demand by lavishing attention on the thing that created it. A century later the Michelin Guide is more famous than the tires, which is either the greatest marketing accident in history or the least accidental one.

A24. On paper they sell you a movie ticket. In practice the real recruiting happens at the loading dock, where a director decides who gets to hand out their strange little film. A24 built the brand on the filmmakers, not on itself, handing over creative control and trusting the work to find its people. The audience fell for the logo precisely because the filmmakers fell first. Court the supply of talent, and demand shows up already wearing your merch.

Gymshark. In 2012 it was a teenager sewing gym vests in his mum’s garage with no ad budget and no customers. So he mailed free clothing to fitness YouTubers sitting at 30, 40, 50 thousand subscribers, the ones the big brands ignored. Those creators weren’t customers. They were the supply of attention and credibility. He marketed to that side first, for the cost of shipping, and the customers arrived pre-convinced.

Faire. A wholesale marketplace pairing small makers with the boutiques that stock them. The smart part was noticing each side was terrified of a different thing. So Faire gave retailers net-60 terms and free returns so a shop owner could try a new product without betting the rent, and made listing free for makers, charging only when a genuinely new buyer turned up. One company, two completely different pitches, each aimed at a completely different fear.

Notice what none of them did. None of them split into two brands with two voices. They found the one true thing the business stood for and let it read differently depending on which door you walked through. That’s the whole craft. Positioning that’s strong enough to mean one thing to the person buying and another thing, just as true, to the person you’re buying from.

Which leaves you one piece of homework, and it’s smaller than it sounds. Name your second audience out loud. Not “procurement,” not “vendors.”

The actual humans whose yes you quietly depend on and currently take for granted. Maybe it’s the senior engineers you need to hire before you can promise customers anything real. Maybe it’s the indie suppliers who could sell to your competitor by Friday. Maybe it’s the creators, the landlords, the regulators, the bank. Write down who they are, what they’re afraid of, and what story would make them pick you. You’ll probably find you have a polished answer for the front door and close to nothing for the back…yet.

Stay Positive & How Do You Answer If Someone Asks “Mind If I Leave Through The Back?”

The first real recipe I ever tried to cook repeated three words that have followed me around for years. Season to taste.

To taste. As if I had one. As if somewhere in my mouth lived a calibrated little library of how this dish was supposed to land, and all I had to do was look it up. I stood over the pot holding a box of salt like a man holding a map of a country he has never visited, written in a language he cannot read. (Was it even the right kind of salt?!)

The person who wrote the words had made that dish four hundred times. Their tongue knew the destination. Mine had no idea. And in three breezy syllables they had handed me the single hardest decision in the whole recipe, the one bit of judgment that actually separates food from disappointment, and strolled off assuming I already had what it takes to make it.

That is the quietest failure there is, and you are doing it to someone today. (Maybe even to yourself…)

The onboarding screen that says “just connect your account.” The deck that says “align the team.” The senior marketer who tells the new hire to “make it pop” and walks away feeling generous. Every one of those is season to taste. Every one assumes the reference already lives in the other person’s head. And when the new person freezes at the stove, we decide they are slow, when all we really did was hand them a map in a language we forgot they could not read.

The move is simple and it is the entire job of a professional… Be the one who tells them what it is supposed to taste like.

A lot of advice for young marketers assumes you already know why any of it matters, so it skips straight to the clever part. This won’t.

The unglamorous truth that most experienced people glide right past is that the person who explains is worth more than the person who impresses. Explaining feels junior. Naming the obvious feels like admitting you are not in the club yet. So almost nobody does it. They are all too busy seasoning to taste and quietly assuming you can taste too.

Which is exactly why teaching stands out. Not as a tactic. As a near-vacancy.

Walk into a room full of people performing how much they know, and the one who stops to hand you the actual palate becomes unforgettable in about nine seconds, for the embarrassing reason that they were the only one who bothered.

You wanted to be different. This is the door. Difference is not a louder version of what everyone is already doing. It is doing the plain, useful, slightly tender thing they all decided was beneath them. And the beauty is that you get to… you’re not a book!

It is also the only honest way to build a team. You do not hand a new hire “season to taste” and then grade the salt. (Again, which kind of salt? Pink Himalayan? Blue Persian? Salt precisely picked out of beach sand?)

You stand at the stove and let them taste yours first. You give them the reference, the right salt, and then their own judgment has something to grow from. A team that has been taught the palate goes on to teach it to the customer. A customer who has learned what good actually tastes like will pay for it for the rest of their life. It runs in that order or it does not run at all.

Right now there is someone at the stove holding the salt, convinced that everyone else was simply born knowing how much. They weren’t. You weren’t. I stood there with the box in my hand and no idea, and the only thing that ever fixed it was somebody letting me taste theirs and saying, there, that is what we are aiming for.

Tell them. Say the part you assumed they already had. That is nearly the whole secret of being useful to another person.

Stay Positive & You May Even Find That Taste Is Actually A Feeling