The Dead Spot You Didn't Know To Ask About

I left beverage alcohol for a job that came with its own list of things nobody mentioned in the interview. That’s not a complaint. It’s just true of every job, every house, every city, every partner you picked over the one you didn’t. We are extremely good at cataloguing what’s wrong with where we’re standing. We are almost never good at pricing out where we’re not.

People like to say the grass is greener on the other side. It isn’t. You just can’t see the dead patch by the fence from where you’re standing. Distance doesn’t make things better. It just makes them blurry enough to skip the parts that would talk you out of it.

I’ve bought two houses now. Every listing photo gets taken from the one angle in the room where the water stain doesn’t show. You move in, and a year later you know exactly which corner of the basement eats the wifi signal, which pipe knocks at 2 a.m., which neighbor gets strange about the fence line. None of that was hidden from you on purpose. It just doesn’t photograph. You only learn a dead spot by living inside its range.

Jobs work the same way. I knew the title, the comp, the mission statement, before I signed anywhere. I did not know that half the building was still quietly arguing over whether the flagship product and the new product were one story or two, and that the argument was setting the temperature of nearly every other disagreement in the place. You cannot see that from the listing photo. You find it standing in the corner of the basement holding your phone up like an idiot, looking for a bar or two of signal.

People ask me pretty often when Garth’s Brew Bar is opening a second location. The answer is never. Not because a second bar wouldn’t look good in the brochure. Because I already know exactly where its dead spot is: the day I’m not standing behind either bar, and both of them can tell.

Apply it to whatever you’re building or selling. A competitor’s category looks easier when you’re only looking at the parts that made it onto the site. Enterprise looks easier from SMB. SMB looks easier from enterprise. The agency side looks freer from the brand side, and the brand side looks steadier from the agency side. Every position has a dead spot. The job was never to find the one without one, that job doesn’t exist, and anyone selling it to you is selling you a listing photo. The job is figuring out which dead spot you can actually live with, on purpose, with your eyes open.

The people I trust most in this business aren’t the ones who tell me they made the right call. They’re the ones who can point to the exact spot in their own basement where the signal drops, and still tell you they’d sign the lease again.

Stay Positive & Check The Corners Before You Sign