The Empty Column Is The Honest One

Every few weeks I run a quiet count. Six columns, the 6Fs: family, fun, finance, fitness, faith, and the one I always forget to list, which tells you most of what you’d need to know about how I’m doing in it. I total them up like a guy counting kegs in the cooler on a Sunday night. Nobody is watching. There’s no applause for the count. There’s me, a number, and the slow honesty of looking.

Usually I’m counting to find the empty one. Fitness has slid to zero because finance got loud. Fun got crowded out by a season of saying yes to the wrong things. I find the gap, I patch the gap, I feel briefly like a functional adult.

Hirohiko Araki wrote a book about making manga, and the part that stuck to me had nothing to do with drawing. He breaks every story into four elements: character, story, setting, theme. Then he says the real work, the work behind the work, is relentless analysis. Read everything. Take it apart. Figure out why the thing that moved you moved you. He treats it as the foundation and he means that literally. You cannot build on ground you have never surveyed.

That is inventory. It’s the least romantic word in any craft and it’s the whole game. Every artist I’ve studied does the same unglamorous thing. They take stock. They count what’s already on the shelf before they decide what to make next. I just took inventory of our beer cooler at the bar, too. Fun isn’t how I would describe the time. Alas.

…Here’s a count worth running on your own life. Not what you do, but how you came to do it. Some things you got thrown into. Some you signed up for. Some you still get coached on as a grown adult, thank God. Some you do for nothing in return. Some you do entirely for the return.

A full life has all of them on the board. A stuck life is usually missing two and has no idea.

The part I get wrong, every single time, is that I only hunt for the zero. The empty column is honest. It announces itself. You feel the absence of fun or faith the way you feel a missing tooth.

The dangerous column is the full one. The thing you do entirely for the return, quietly running at a hundred, eating the hours that used to belong to the things you did for love. It doesn’t read as a problem. It reads as discipline. It reads as winning. Nobody audits a winning streak, and that is exactly why it gets to keep growing in the dark.

This is also, for whatever it’s worth, the whole secret of positioning, and most people building brands have it pointed the wrong way. They think positioning is an act of invention. A new story, a clever line, a fresh coat of paint. It almost never is.

Positioning is an act of inventory.

You take honest stock of what you already are, you find the column sitting at zero in the customer’s mind, and you find the one running so hot it’s crowding out everything else you could be to them. Most brands don’t need a new story. They need to count the one they’ve already got, and notice which shelf is bare and which one is about to tip over.

The count never gets easier. That’s the thing I keep waiting on and it keeps not coming. You’d think after enough Sunday nights with the cooler you’d run out of surprises. You don’t. Last time I ran mine I found that the column I’d been bragging about was the one bleeding all the others dry. Not the empty one. The full one. The one I was proud of.

Survey the ground. Even the part you’re sure you know.

Stay Positive & Especially That Part