Five More Minutes

I was on a beach in Colorado today, which is a sentence that requires a little faith. The state is landlocked, but nobody told the reservoir. My girls were in the water. I was on a rock at the edge of it, reading The Solitary Gourmet, a book about a man whose entire gift is paying attention to the meal in front of him.

And a sentence started loading in my mouth: five more minutes, girls, then we need to get to the next thing.

Nothing was wrong. Nobody was cold or hungry or bleeding. The water was doing what water does and the girls were doing what girls do in water.

The only thing pushing us toward the parking lot was the itinerary, and the itinerary was written by a version of me who wasn’t there. Some earlier Garth at a kitchen table, guessing at what a good day would look like, with no idea that the actual good day would involve a rock and a book about a man eating pork cutlets with total devotion.

I swallowed the sentence and kept reading.

I did the same thing at work the other week. I finished building an AI system, and the second it worked, the itch showed up: build the next one.

The itch felt like ambition. It dressed like ambition. But when I sat with it, it was closer to escape.

Starting something new is easier than asking whether the thing in front of you is finished or just functional. So instead of a new system, I invested the time adding small moments of surprise and delight to the one that already existed. Touches nobody asked for. The kind of thing you only add when you stay. It’s what actually made the system feel like it was made by me and not made by…well, anyone else.

Companies run this play constantly. Ship the feature, launch the campaign, hit the milestone, then immediately yell five more minutes at everything and sprint to the next roadmap item. New launches get applause. Deepening doesn’t. But your customers don’t live in your roadmap. They live in the thing you already shipped, today, the way my girls lived in that water. The roadmap was written by people in a conference room guessing at a future. The moment in front of you has actual people standing in it.

More is the default answer to what’s next. Deeper is the rarer one.

The man in the book never rushes a meal. He orders, he waits, he eats, and the entire drama is whether he’ll pay attention. It shouldn’t be gripping. It is. So it is in our life. If we let it.

Stay Positive & Five More Minutes