GarthBox

“I just don’t care what they think.”

Dinner after a customer visit. We had been circling a decision for most of the meal, less about the decision itself and more about the roster around it. Who would need to be walked through it. Who would take it personally. Whose blessing was load bearing and whose only felt that way. And somewhere in there the director of sales set down the line, easy as ordering another round.

I have heard that line at a lot of tables now. Different companies, different decades, different rooms. It always comes out sounding like a small door closing.

Except the people who say it are never the people who care the least. They are the ones still in it. Still arguing hard about one or two things long after the rest of the room has learned to have a mild opinion about everything and move nothing.

So the line is not a resignation. It is a repositioning.

She had cut a segment. She had fired a whole book of accounts she used to service with her attention and kept the few that actually pay. That is some of the hardest strategic work a person ever does, and she did it quietly, over years, without a slide. You have done it too, probably this year, about something you used to answer emails about at eleven at night.

Then she announced only the cut.

That is the whole problem. Every no has a so-that on the other side of it, and the so-that is the half that never gets said out loud. She stopped caring what the room thought so that she could finally make a call inside her own head… but all those around the table got was the subtraction, and subtraction by itself always sounds like a person going numb. (It’s unsettling, really.)

Companies do this in public every quarter. We’re sunsetting the product. We’re exiting that segment. We’re focusing. (Focusing is the most confident word in business and it is almost never followed by an object.) Customers hear the leaving. The team hears the leaving. Nobody hears what got fed with everything that came back, because nobody bothered to write that part down.

We are never opening a second Garth’s Brew Bar. Flat like that, it reads like a ceiling. With the second half attached, one room, so we can keep changing it without asking permission from a second set of taps, it reads like a plan. Same decision. Only one of them makes anybody want in. In one view, I’m completely apathetic. In the other, you know I’m entirely passionate.

The no is cheap to publish because nobody can check it. The so-that is a commitment with a witness, which is exactly why it stays in the drafts folder.

What I should have asked her at that dinner, and didn’t, was what she picked up with the hands she freed.

She hadn’t stopped caring. She had just stopped telling anybody where it went.

Stay Positive & Name What It Freed

Did you check…

Somebody asks it, usually kindly, and the floor tilts a little. Because you did check. You checked four things. And in the half second before you answer, your brain hands you a list of ninety six other things you could have checked, then wanders off to get a coffee.

The list is the problem. Not the work.

We all know the ship-it half of this already. Done beats perfect, momentum beats polish, we have had that poster hung on us since our first job. Fine. True. Also useless in the moment, because nobody actually freezes over the principle. They freeze over the arithmetic.

Checking isn’t hard. Checking is easy and faintly satisfying, like wiping down a counter at close. What’s hard is not knowing when to stop. A task with no edge feels enormous no matter how small it actually is, so we give it a respectable name. Thorough. Careful. Time consuming. (I have called something time consuming that would have taken eleven minutes. More than once…)

So put an edge on it. Give yourself a number.

Mine is most often eight. If I handed someone eight bullet points of what I looked into before asking them to look at this, would they think, damn, they did some prep? That’s the whole bar. And once you say it out loud, eight gets a little embarrassing. Eight is twenty minutes. Eight is a search, a scroll back through the channel, two competitor sites, one person who has done this before, an AI review, reading it out loud, and a check on whether we already tried it two years ago and buried it.

Notice who the eight are for. Not you. You already believe. The eight belong to the person whose attention you’re about to spend, and they answer the question that person will never ask you out loud, which is whether this is serious or whether it’s going to cost them an hour to find out it isn’t.

I did a version of this in a hiring process once. Instead of another round of questions about how I think, I asked to run a real working session on something actually sitting on their plate. The pitch was that they’d walk away with something usable whether or not they hired me. That’s an eight. It costs me a weekend and it saves them the entire question of whether I’m bluffing.

Same mechanic in a pitch, by the way. The buyer isn’t grading your conclusion, they’re checking whether you went outside before you arrived.

Positioning that lands is rarely the smartest positioning in the room… It’s the positioning that came back with mud on it. The evidence isn’t there to prove you right. It’s there to make it cheap for somebody else to say yes.

And if you lead people, steal the number. Be thorough is not an instruction, it’s a mood, and a cruel one, because it can never be satisfied and everybody knows it. A number can be satisfied. Tell them eight. Watch the dread turn into a chore, which is the best trade available, and watch the work get better because nobody is bracing for the ninety six.

Let me be vulnerable for a moment more… I still get this wrong. I still feel the hundred more often than I wish I did. Except I’ve learned to decide after I sense that pressure. Decide today isn’t the day, and I go find something with a clearer finish line…

The fix was never discipline. The fix is refusing to let the thing stay uncountable, because a hundred was never a number. It was a feeling wearing one.

Stay Positive & Eight Tends To Suffice, Give It A Try

“You know you don’t have to do that.”

Somebody said that to me once while I was right-clicking my way through a paste-special the way you read a menu in a language you almost know. Then they handed me three keys. Alt, E, S, V. Four seconds a shot, and I have used it more times than I can count since.

The advice that usually gets pulled out of a moment like that is old and has a beard on it. Let people watch you work. Shadow somebody. Ask for feedback. True enough, and nobody needs another paragraph about it. But let’s look at how the hard work shows itself.

Almost every improvement system we build points at an artifact. The doc, the deck, the campaign, the number at the end of the quarter. Feedback is an opinion about a thing after the thing exists. It shows up too late to touch how the thing got built, so it fixes the thing and leaves the habit exactly where it was.

Witness is a different animal. Witness is somebody watching the motion. It catches the twelve minutes spent formatting a table no one asked for, the four tabs you keep re-finding, the file you rebuild every Monday that could have been a template back in March.

Feedback tells you the thing you made was fine. A witness tells you the way you made it was ridiculous.

Marketing already knows this, which makes it worse. The entire research discipline is built on the gap between what people say and what people do. You don’t ask a customer how they would use the product, you sit behind them and watch them use it, because the survey answer is a performance and the click is the truth. We pay real money for that. We build labs for it. We have never once pointed the instrument at our own workday.

One move this week. Take twenty minutes of real work, not a demo, and share your screen with somebody who has no stake in the outcome and no business being there. Someone from another team. Your partner. The newest hire (…especially the newest hire.) Do not present. Do not narrate. Work badly and honestly in front of them, and let them interrupt whenever they want to ask why you just did that.

You will hate the first four minutes. They might, too. Then somebody will say you know you don’t have to do that, and you will get those four seconds back for the rest of your life.

Ten smart people are not there to judge the work. Judgment is cheap and available everywhere and it always arrives after the thing is already built. What has gotten scarce is a witness.

Your work is more recorded than it has ever been and less watched than it has ever been. Those are not the same thing, and only one of them makes you better.

Stay Positive & Share Your Screen With Someone Who Has No Reason To Be Looking

Rest used to come included in the price of making things.

Nobody designed it that way. Production was just expensive. You could not shoot the video, write the whitepaper, build the microsite, and rewrite the deck in the same week, so the week had a shape whether you asked for one or not. The gaps were structural. The quiet between the swings was paid for by how hard the swinging was.

That subsidy is gone, and nothing replaced it.

I built a machine whose entire job is to tell me my writing is not good enough yet. There is a gate my drafts have to clear before I ever read them, with a list of phrases that get killed on sight and a test that fails anything a stranger could have written. I wrote that gate. I also sat and answered something like a hundred questions about how I think, and had the drawers in my house photographed, specifically so that nothing I do gets to hide behind a vague question anymore.

It works. The writing got better in a way I can point at.

And some mornings I open the laptop and see the column of chats and tasks and projects standing there with their arms crossed, every one of them ready to push back, and I want to close it before I’ve typed a word…

The usual prescription for that feeling is a treat. Build in a delight moment. A little reward every fifth prompt. Something cute waiting at the bottom of the list. That is a vending machine bolted to the wall of a factory, and it fixes nothing, because tiredness is not the malfunction. Tiredness is the readout. The malfunction is that the work has no shape.

We were good at this once. Before the cost of production collapsed, marketers were coordinators before they were makers. You sequenced. You knew a campaign had a build, a peak, and a long exhale, because you only had so many arrows and you had to decide when to spend them. The exhale was not mercy. It was composition. Then the arrows became free, and we stopped composing without ever deciding to. Now we just fire.

Pacing used to be a side effect. Now it is a line item, and almost nobody is budgeting for it.

Your audience is living the same week you are. They open their feed and find every company they’ve ever given an email address to, all producing at full tilt, all day, forever. Volume is the floor now. Everyone can flood. What almost nobody does on purpose is build a rhythm with real silence in it, which means silence has quietly become one of the few positions still available. A brand that goes quiet and comes back with one heavy thing gets read. A brand that never stops gets scrolled, and eventually gets muted by someone who does not dislike it at all.

The same math sits on your team. The person three seats over is running the identical wall you are, with less control over the settings than you have. Nothing on the calendar is going to produce their exhale for them. Someone has to put it in there deliberately, and that someone has a title and a salary and probably a direct report.

The tension itself is not the villain. I want the argument. I want the tool that tells me the draft is a lie, because it usually is. But adversarial-at-all-times is a setting, not weather, and it only feels like weather because we forgot we typed it in.

You wrote the instructions. You chose the cadence. You decided what is standing there waiting for you at nine in the morning with its arms crossed.

Or you didn’t decide, and it got decided for you, which is still a design.

It’s just somebody else’s.

Stay Positive & Go Read Your Own Instructions.. Then Edit Accordingly

Somewhere along the way we started writing better documentation for software than for people. We’ll revise a prompt eleven times to strip out ambiguity, then hand a new teammate a login and tell them they’ll pick it up. The customer gets the polished narrative. The team gets a shrug and a net.

Flip that.

The team is the one that needs the manual, because they’re the ones who end up writing the customer’s. And, really, when has “use common sense” actually worked out as a reliable bet?

Stay Positive & Say The Obvious Thing Out Loud

Horrible Therapist runs on one rule. Each round, one person is the judge. Everybody else plays a card meant to land with that judge, the judge picks a winner, and then the job moves one seat over.

Two plays are available every round, and they are not the same play.

You can play to the judge. You know this person. You know the joke they’ll pretend not to laugh at and then laugh at anyway. That’s a read, and it’s a good one, and it wins rounds.

Or you can play to the table. The card that makes six people at once go oh, that’s the one before the judge has finished reading it. Different instinct entirely. You’re not solving for one taste, you’re solving for the sound a room makes.

The second play looks softer and is actually the colder calculation, for two reasons. Judging is temporary. Everyone at that table is going to hold it, and people remember who made them laugh in the rounds they weren’t in charge of. And judges feel the room. When a card lands out loud, the judge’s job quietly stops being taste and starts being confirmation. Very few people pick against a room they can hear.

It costs you though. Playing to the table loses rounds you could have won by reading one person correctly, and you will sit there watching someone take it with a lazy card because they know exactly what the judge’s ex-boyfriend was like. That’s real and it will annoy you.

Worth separating two things that look alike: playing to the table is not the same as pleasing it. The card that makes a room go quiet counts too. Pandering is a table-read with the spine removed.

My first sales kickoff at a company, an account manager took the mic during some open-floor stretch and told nearly a hundred people she was glad I’d joined. Then she said why. She named the intel and the backup I’d given her on accounts she was fighting for, in specifics, on a microphone, to everyone.

What my manager thought of me that quarter, I could not reconstruct for you now. Those thirty seconds I could recite.

It wasn’t only that it felt good, though it did. It kept working after she sat down. A room’s opinion has legs. It walks into other rooms, shows up in meetings I wasn’t invited to, sits in somebody’s answer when my name comes up in a hallway. A judge’s opinion ends when the round ends. The table’s opinion goes home with everybody.

Which is the whole reason to point your work at the people beside you instead of the person above you. Your team carries your work into rooms you’ll never see the inside of.

Same game on a grocery shelf. The pull-instead-of-push idea has a beard on it by now, and every marketer nods along and then goes right back to building a deck for the buyer.

The category buyer at Woodman’s is the judge. The obvious move is the pitch: margins, velocity, planogram fit, a sell sheet with your best photograph on it. Fine. Fine wins rounds sometimes.

The other move is to make the aisle loud before you ever walk in the building. Get enough people asking for it, requesting it, mentioning it to the guy stocking shelves. Then the buyer’s decision changes shape. They are not evaluating you anymore. They are being handed cover.

That’s the part worth sitting with. Buyers are rarely trying to be convinced.

They’re trying not to be the only person holding the bag if it doesn’t sell.

A room full of demand is an insurance policy with your logo on it, and no pitch is required, because the pitch already happened in seven hundred small conversations you weren’t in.

Careers built entirely on judge-reading have one specific failure mode. The judge leaves. Reorg, new boss, acquisition, she takes a job in Denver. And then you find out whether anyone at the table would have picked you.

Stay Positive & Go Find Whoever Grabbed The Mic For You

I put a courtroom into Herough Herough.

Not a scene about a courtroom. A transcript. Speaker labels, the clipped call and response of testimony, the format doing the work description usually does. Nothing in the book asked for it. I wanted to see if I could hold that structure, and I thought a witness under oath would hand over backstory in a way a paragraph never could. People answer questions differently when they can’t leave.

Right now I’m in the middle of a Murakami novel where a chapter stops being prose and lays itself out in newspaper columns. After a couple hundred pages of one rhythm, the page changes shape in your hands. The reading muscle you’d been using gets to set its instrument down. Best twenty minutes of the book so far. Fifteen minutes between sets, and the second set hits different because of it.

Half the people who hit a chapter like that shut the book. They didn’t sign up for columns. They wanted the thing they were already enjoying, more of it, uninterrupted, and the author got cute. The other half sit up straighter, because somebody is clearly driving.

It’s a smoked beer. Rauchbier splits a room inside one sip. Campfire, ham, a bonfire in a glass, and you either want the whole pint or you want it moved to the far end of the bar. Nobody is neutral. Nobody forgets it either. (As craft beer geek of a person I am, get that smoked beer away from me…)

The easy lesson here is be polarizing. That lesson is thirty years old and has been laundered through so many decks that it’s now the safest thing a marketer can say out loud.

The move only works under two conditions, and both of them are boring.

First, you need a rhythm worth breaking. The newspaper chapter is a thrill because two hundred pages taught your hands what the book feels like. Same reason smoke is interesting in a glass: you’ve had enough regular beer for your mouth to have an opinion. Swerve on page one and you haven’t swerved, you’ve just started weird. You don’t get to be strange until you’ve been legible. Most brands reaching for divisive skipped the years where anyone learned their shape.

Second, the reason can’t be the reaction. I didn’t write the courtroom to split readers. I wrote it because I wanted the challenge, and because it lit the backstory from an angle prose couldn’t reach. When the only argument for a strange move is that it’s strange, people taste it. There is a difference between a beer that’s smoked and a beer that’s smoked for the ad.

Which makes the swerve less a marketing decision than a permission structure. Somebody on staff has to be allowed to put the rauchbier on tap and be wrong about it. (Take it from me, just get it in cans. It really ruined one of our beer lines and I had to replace the whole thing…)

If your team can only make choices that poll well, your brand can’t make a decision. It can only make an average.

…And an average is safe the way a hallway is safe.

The people who love the courtroom chapter aren’t loving the courtroom. They’re loving the evidence that a person was at the wheel and could have crashed. That’s the entire transaction. Nobody has ever felt chosen by something that was never at risk of refusing them.

Stay Positive & What Have You Been Talked Out Of?