Meeting Others Where They Are

One of capitalism's dirtiest lies is that the best product wins. 

It doesn’t. 

It never has. 

The product is always just the bait; the hook is how you make people feel once they’ve stepped into its orbit. The world will swear otherwise. It will parade its pitch decks, croon about features and polish, chant price points and delivery speeds like gospel, shower you with the sterile glitter of innovation cycles that make investors’ pupils dilate. 

But people aren’t line items on a quarterly report. They are walking tempests sewn together from hunger, doubt, grief, and rare flashes of impossible joy.

If you want to matter to them, you don’t meet them on some high, untouchable summit. You wade into the storm. Whether you’re a voice actor, a developer, a stage designer, or a server steadying a tray of sweating glasses, your work isn’t the thing in your hands—it's the human being trusting you enough to take it.

We live in a marketplace of relentless appetite...people chase experiences like the dehydrated chase rain. They’re not just buying tickets, drinks, downloads, or entry...they’re buying the brief miracle of being someone else for a while, or someone more themselves than they thought possible. And if you want to give them that, there's a spiral worth bleeding for.

First: Shove through the noise and static of their overfed, over-advertised minds. Not by screaming louder, but by cutting cleaner...with something so precise it feels like you built it for them in the dark while they were dreaming.

Second: Give them a challenge that pulls them under until time stops, until they’re inside that dangerous, glittering flow state where they’re becoming something more.

Third: Give them the payoff...not the hollow pat on the head of “thanks,” but the bone-deep hit of “I did this, and I didn’t think I could.”

Fourth: Take that new pride and spin it into the next hunger, the next dare, the next spiral upward. That's the rhythm at the heart of great games, great theater, unforgettable stories, and moments people replay for the rest of their lives.

And the mark of its success is simple...they leave not thinking you’re amazing, but knowing they are.

And here's the part that gets lost in the conference rooms:

This spiral doesn’t just belong to customers. It belongs to leadership.

On Wednesday, I sat down with a junior team member, bright-eyed but still shaky in their footing. We talked shop, sure, but we also talked soul...the difference between being a boss and being a leader, about how the world is drowning in Tony Starks, brilliant and self-satisfied, and starving for more Steve Rogers: the ones who throw themselves on the grenade because that's the cost of care. They asked how to get promoted. And I told them the truth: you get promoted by being the one people can trust. Not the one who pretends to have all the answers, but the one who will find them.

Then, the next day, I asked another colleague how their one-on-one with their supervisor had gone. They looked down. “It was only five minutes.” The meeting was supposed to be half an hour. They’d cleared their calendar. They’d prepared to be seen. What they got instead was a box ticked on someone else's to-do list and a silent message that they weren’t worth the time. That's not leadership. That's cowardice dressed up as efficiency. That's the lie of high-performance culture...the one that worships speed and scale while quietly bleeding out the human beings it depends on.

Unreasonable hospitality is the antidote, and it's not rocket science. It's just a few things, really: The will to do it, the 95/5 mindset...knowing that yes, service costs money but it's worth carving out that five percent for the moments that make it unforgettable...and the guts to act on it. It works in customer service. It works in leadership. Give people the full half-hour. Celebrate the trying as much as the winning. Let them know their fears and ambitions aren’t just tolerated but wanted. The spiral is the same: attention, challenge, payoff, curiosity. Feed it and it will feed everything you build.

Your team is the heartbeat of your success, and you can’t elevate the customer experience while grinding down the people delivering it. You can’t expect loyalty from strangers or colleagues if you’ve trained them to expect neglect. If you center their growth, their pride, their chance to matter, you’ll create something more enduring than any product: a culture that holds.

Because the product will change. 

The market will shift. 

The trends will go brittle and blow away. 

But the way you make people feel...your customers, your team, the stranger at the table in the corner...that's the thing they’ll carry. That's the impact they’ll pass forward. So show up.

Like it matters.

Like they matter.

Like they deserve better.

Because they fucking do.

In Case You Missed It

This week, I shared a lot of reflections on burnout, showcased how we can better optimize stories for surprise, explained how we can write for repetition while not boring our readers, and discussed how I navigate bottlenecks while working.

Three Good Things

• If you couldn't tel, I've started reading Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect by Will Guidara which shares how today how every business can choose to be a hospitality business—and we can all transform ordinary transactions into extraordinary experiences. And if you haven't seen this clip, it's absolutely grand.

• If you want to see that spirit in action, Creatures & Cocktails—our live role-playing game night with candlelight, cocktails, and full-tilt immersion—has been extended by popular demand! Every week Allistar Barrett and I plot, build, and unleash an evening designed to surprise, delight, and pull you into the story. If you want to see what we’ve been cooking up, please come like us on Facebook.

• Sue Me by Audrey Hobert is my favorite song this week. Absolutely dazzling.

Today's newsletter is a little later than ususal because I spent the better part of my morning with a media affiliate for an interview. But with all of that running around over, I'm going to enjoy this strangely autumnal weather (Augtober weather?) and settle down for the weekend. I hope you can to.

Don't take any wooden nickels,

David