GarthBox

Gifts on your birthday are good, but not as good as gifts not on your birthday.

Same for any holiday, really.

There’s something about getting an unexpected gift that really sits with a person. Universally, the feeling of being seen and appreciated and connected to someone – and then to have something tangible to remember that feeling by – is in the simplest form, magical.

This isn’t to downplay the intangible gifts of listening and empathy, but it is a reminder that there’s an opportunity in every interaction to make it more valuable with an unexpected gift.

If you’re graced with a marketing budget, it might be worth investing some of it there.

It doesn’t even need cute packaging. “Here. This is for you.” goes a long way.

Stay Positive & There’s Enough Bad Unexpected. Let’s Do What We Can To Make More Of The Good Unexpected

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Which is better?

$1,000 on a magazine ad or $1,000 on swag to include as a surprise & delight?

100 email opens or 100 handshakes?

An hour spent evaluating SEO or an hour spent sharing your thoughts on a podcast?

We decide what’s productive, how to be efficient and what ROI means to us.

Stay Positive & More Questions Like These, Please

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You know you’re at where your people are at when you can just feel it in your gut.

Sales might be a slight indication or the line out the door.

The commentary you get from the people around you might be positive.

Your friends showing up might be a signal too.

That said, there are times when all of those are true, but something still feels off.

At the end of the day, that feeling is everything.

Why?

Because if you felt it in your gut, your people did, too.

And it’s that feeling that nurtures loyalty.

Stay Positive & Feeling > Seeing/Hearing

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A realtor shared that she doesn’t like adding love letters into home purchasing offers because the feeling of rejection is even worse when it happens.

Not only did they reject your offer… after they read your love letter, they rejected you, too.

It’s personal.

Except it’s not.

Not if we don’t want it to be.

The narrative we tell ourselves is written by… ourselves. No one else.

Perhaps I could tell myself they never read the love letter and just took the highest bid.

Maybe it’s that another person offered 100K more. Even I would take that, no matter how lovely the love letter.

You know, it could have been for the best that we didn’t get that bid because we just put an offer on a house even better.

The list of narrative options can go on… with none of them making us feel personally rejected.

This doesn’t just apply to homebuying of course.

Stay Positive & Tell The Story That Helps, Not Hurts

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The rotten truth about the urgent is that the queue of it never ends.

Even when we’ve tackled all the to-dos that others tell us are urgent, we make up a few of our own so we can keep busy.

Of course, this is damaging to our future and our feeling of long term fulfillment.

Alas. The answer isn’t to get done with the urgent stuff faster, in an attempt to have time to focus on other non urgent, but more important matters.

No.

The answer is to scrutinize the urgent and, when possible, put it off a day so you can do the meaningful stuff.

It’s not about having time. It’s about making it.

Stay Positive & Who Puts The Label Of Urgent On Something?

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There’s a story out there about a co-packer that tells a brewer, “on a scale of 1-10, 1 being the easiest beers to make and 10 being impossible, you’re all 9s.”

That says something about both the co-packer (who is willing to do the beers) and the brewer (who is willing to ideate and pay for the production of them).

Which begs the question: where do you fall on the scale with your line of work?

It’s probably no surprise if I told you the co-packer and brewer are making millions. It does beg the question, are they sticking with 9s on the scale because they have the money or do they have the money because they stuck with the 9s.

In case you need the answer, it’s the latter.

It usually is.

And it’s not always just money. It’s whatever you designate as success to you. The reality is that to get there, you’ll need to stick on one end of that scale, which requires risk and vulnerability and care and no shortage of failures.

You can easily guess which side of the scale that is.

Stay Positive & Are You Up For It?

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When we talk about the whole pie, we talk about the perfect crust; we talk about the freshly picked raspberry filling; we talk about the excellent whip cream display on top of it. Oh, and that garnish, too.

We treat a lot of our work and aspirations and dreams the same way.

Which is a bummer because it sets us up for frustration.

The whole pie also needs to include painstakingly managing the oven temperature and duration of bake time to ensure everything is cooked proportionality. We gotta talk about the blood drawn on our legs from the brush we walked through to pick the raspberries and that little rash that hasn’t totally gone away yet. We should probably talk about that person that hates pie and how we’ll deal with them, too.

We do ourselves a disservice when we ignore the hard work that goes into great work.

Of course it would be great to get a grant before we even do the pitch for it or that we’ll make people laugh at an improv show without hours of practice before showtime. That’s not the reality though.

We don’t help ourselves maintain grit and gumption when we ignore what really goes into a whole pie.

Stay Positive & Don’t Even Get Me Started On Those Who Half Pie It

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