GarthBox

I love the idea that laminators may be going extinct.

I love it because folks are realizing two things:

1. What works today may not work tomorrow. No point in investing the time in laminating a sign that won’t likely be used five years, one year, five weeks or even a day from now.
2. We know variety is key; and not only does that include the variety of messages, but the means of communicating them too.

There’s a better way to communicate to the neighborhood about a yard sale. There’s more certificates of achievement to get than the one we used to laminate. That family member isn’t going to believe we care if we don’t send them an annual card, handwritten card. Inventory is purposefully changed on the regular in the shop down the street.

If you’re using a laminator, it’s worth pausing to consider what impact it really has on your business or project or guest experience.

Stay Positive & New Is Always Better Anyway

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The first way is to get involved, work your way through and up until you can make better decisions for an organization that has otherwise made poor ones until you made it to a position of power. This is starting with grassroots until you have the authority to make grassroots the point.

This is tough work to do. It requires you to knowingly start with a struggle. You know you’ll be short staffed, under waged; you’ll have to work harder and smarter because you’ll have access to fewer resources. It’s doable and it feels damn good when you get there.

The second way is to create your own organization or business that offers a better way to solve a problem. Perhaps it’s the same kind of organization as the one in the first example above, but you fill it with better leaders. Perhaps it’s designing the organization in a completely different way that inevitably either raises the bar of others trying to solve the problem or it forces them to convert to your more impactful model.

Both can be fortuitous and both are tough to do.

Stay Positive & What’s Important Is Knowing (And Sticking) To One Of The Two

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There’s not enough time to get together for a brainstorm.

No time to train a person beyond the few hours that got scheduled.

No time to write 1,000 words every day.

Probably don’t have time to sit down for a full meal with the entire family and be 100% present.

Definitely don’t have time to collab with yet another regional organization.

When you actually write down and acknowledge the things you’ve said you don’t have time for, it’s pretty damn clear that it’s the things that are worth making the time for.

Stay Positive & Prioritize

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The best things often are.

Hours of investment, care and maybe even a little stress in the details for something that gets gobbled up in 1/10th of the time it took to make.

Of course, bellies were full and people were happy with it. They may even tell their friends.

The work worth doing is often like cheesecake.

We can either be upset that one second the cheesecake was there and then it was gone… or we can head back to the kitchen.

Stay Positive & We Know Where The Best Chefs Go… How About You?

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Here’s a plea. Let’s save auto pilot for planes only.

And maybe a few factories, too.

Otherwise, if you’re a human interacting with a human, turn the auto pilot off.

It doesn’t matter if you give the same spiel multiple times a day or if you have similar minded people walking through your store’s doors; make it at least feel personal.

Just because it might be easier to rip from a script or repeat a service flow, there are very few people who enjoy working with or being served by robots.

Stay Positive & /End Rant

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The gap between mediocre service and remarkable service isn’t that wide.

You can make a significant leap simply by showing interest in the person you’re working with.

That requires asking more questions (oft unrelated to the thing they contacted you about), expressing your excitement in their endeavor (“wow, that’s special” goes a very long way), and following up after an exchange (even if it’s just a “hope everything is smooth sailing from here”).

This applies to sales, customer service, organizational communication and, you know what, just about any interaction.

And if you’re worried about the interest coming off as fake because you don’t actually care, carry on and fake it anyway. You’ll be surprised to find that fake interest begets real interest.

Stay Positive & Enjoy Improving All Your Relationships

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Control is mainly a story we construct up to make us feel okay when things are tough or make us feel better when things are going well.

After all, that award we got? We earned that! And that time someone else was selected to have their work on display and not ours? We had no control over it.

The problem isn’t that we’re wrong with either, it’s that we give each too much weight. We didn’t just earn that award, it was our effort combined with good timing, the right people evaluating the work, and a dozen other variables that one could argue are out of our control.

And that time someone else was picked over us? Sure we didn’t have control on the selection process, but we did have control over the quality of work we submitted.

Going forward, it’s in our best interest to use stories of control in a way that helps us be more generous and create better work. The truth is that we’ll always be in control, to a degree. What matters is what we do with the control we do have. Can we shape it to include others? And about that control we don’t have… can we shape it to better ourselves first?

Stay Positive & Lean Into Control Appropriately

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