Overcooking the Meatloaf
Tequila-fueled thoughts about community hospitality
Last night, I met up with Aland Stamps, Founder and CEO of River Jordan, to take some photos for his upcoming story. (Sneak peek: it’s AMAZING and it’s coming out soon.) We were setting up in an alley, when two guys wearing black hoodies walked by.
“Where can we go to grab a drink?" they asked. "We’re not from around here and our flight takes off tomorrow morning."
It was 10 PM on Wednesday, and while most places were closed, Retro Rocks was open until 11 and just around the corner. I told said they’d have fun and showed them how to get there. They thanked me and left, and I went back to work.
Aland and I finished our photos, said goodbye, and I hopped in the car to drive home.
I’ve been thinking a lot about hospitality and its potential to make our communities better. Typically, the word only exists within the context of hotels, restaurants, and tourism. These are experience-based industries, so hospitality makes sense as a business strategy: improving the customer experience means they will stay longer, buy more, and come back again to spend even more money.
Meanwhile, many of our cities, towns, and villages—places that influence nearly every aspect and experience of our lives—don’t ever consider hospitality as something to pursue, and if they do, how that hospitality is expressed doesn't really mean all that much.
“We live here, after all, living our busy lives doing all of our busy things,” they say, “So if you’re new here, we’ll leave a couple mints on your pillow and can you just show yourself around the place, please?”
One definition I use for community storytelling goes like this: community storytelling can be any intentional interaction motivated by a desire to be known or to know someone better. It can be as simple and short as eye contact with a cashier and genuine, “How’s work going?” to a three-hour, soul-cracking conversation with a close friend. But regardless of the length or content, intentional interaction is an act that communicates, “I see you, I hear you, and you are important to me.”
As a community, it says, "You are important to us."
Acts of Hospitality
Intentional interaction is an act of hospitality. Last week, Ben Muldrow and I had a quick phone call about how the way we define words matters, and he defined hospitality as “...acts of service. Hospitality is something you DO." And he’s right. Hospitality, like intentional interaction, is an act that makes someone feel like they, in that moment, are seen, heard, and the most important person in the world.
This call towards greater hospitality is an inconveniently high standard. A couple weeks ago, I was talking to someone about how we are losing our willingness to accept that giving also means sacrificing.
"I’ll give you my time…as long as I don’t need it for something else."
"I’ll give you my attention…if there isn’t something more important that requires it."
"I'll give you my money...as long as there isn't something I’d rather use it for."
But true hospitality requires true giving: the sacrifice of our money, time, or effort to improve someone’s experience. There are likely 1000 different things needing those resources, and because these acts of hospitality likely don’t have a direct return on our investment, they’re often considered a waste of resources by those motivated only by spreadsheets and red and black lines.
Despite all that, however, the philosophy of "unreasonable hospitality" puts into practice the understanding that the sacrifice made is not only a critical act of care and love, but is an investment with a long-term reward.
Unreasonable Hospitality
Just down the road from the Empire State Building in New York City is a soaring, Art Deco, three-Michelin star restaurant called Eleven Madison Park, which in 2017, was named the best restaurant in the world.
But it wasn’t always that way. In fact, as far as fine dining goes, while the food was great, as a business, the restaurant was a mess: shoddy systems meant food would be arrive late and cold, the kitchen staff and the wait staff frequently went to war against each other, and its financials were nothing more than leaky, caviar-encrusted boat just about to sink.
Despite looking like “we will do whatever it takes to make you happy” on the outside, the people responsible for Eleven Madison Park didn't care about each other...and it showed.
Then, in only a few short years, Eleven Madison Park went from a leaky boat of a restaurant to the best in the world.
And it was hospitality that made the difference.
In 2016, Will Guidara was hired as EMP’s General Manager, and he credits the restaurant's transformation to adopting a philosophy he calls “unreasonable hospitality” towards its service.
Through an intentional process focused on improving the level of care the staff had towards customers and each other, Guidara created a restaurant that would surpass people’s expectations in every way—not because the staff was forced to by a dictator, but because they wanted to.
Here’s one example: One night, a family visiting New York came into the restaurant, and they wanted to treat their kids to a dinner like they had never seen before in the kind of restaurant they may never see again. Even better, when they had sat down at their table and looked out the window, they saw something else they had never seen: snow.
After hearing this, Guidara sent a waiter to the store to buy four sleds, and after they finished their meal, the staff surprised the family with a limousine ride to Central Park for a magical night of something they had never done before: sledding.
“Black and white” means you’re doing your job with competence and efficiency,” Guidara says. “‘Color’ means you make people feel great about the job you’re doing for them. Getting the right plate to the right person at the right table is service. But genuinely engaging with the person you’re serving, so you can make an authentic connection—that’s hospitality.”
Another definition of hospitality is the quote mistakenly attributed to Maya Angelou (but we’ll stick with it anyway because I love her) that goes, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.”
In the alley, I thought that telling two guys from out of town where they could grab a drink and how to get there was hospitality, but it wasn’t: it was only service in black and white.
What they needed was color, and I turned the car around.
Tequila and a Stolen Credit Card
“Can I buy you guys a drink?” I said, sitting down next to my two new friends, Tanner and Donovan from Oklahoma City, who were here for work.
Our first choice was whiskey, but then we decided tequila was a little bit more fun.
Tanner and Donovan are called “ethical hackers”. Large companies with highly classified or sensitive information hire Tanner and Donovan to try to hack their cybersecurity systems before the bad guys do. They will do everything they can to “steal” what cannot be stolen—everything from hacking and phishing to impersonating people on the phone to physically picking locks and security systems to break into buildings. In the process, their work exposes weaknesses so they can be addressed before the identities of 10 million people or information threatening national security is stolen.
We take our shots of tequila.
“Can I see your wallet?” Tanner asks me. I put it on the bar, and he sets a small device on top. After two seconds, he flips the device over and shows me the screen.
“Is that your credit card number?”
It was, and I was stunned.
“Looks like, either way, you were buying us drinks!” he says.
Donovan started the company by himself, a struggling solopreneur trying to make ends meet, but today, he’s the CEO of an international company with 25 employees—and an Irish Pub being inside their office they’ll call ‘O’Farrow’s’. They’re motivated by more than just business and drinking whiskey at noon, though; they’re on a mission to use technology to fight against those who use it to cause harm.
Including the FBI.
“People get accused of doing something wrong they didn’t do, but because courts and juries don’t understand technology, they’ll be convicted anyway,” he says. “People don’t have a chance. More than that, the FBI would file charges they knew were false to fill a quota because they knew they could get away with it. Before we started being called in as expert witnesses, the FBI’s conviction rate was close to 100%.”
My mouth drops open.
He smirks and says, “But it’s not anymore.”
I told them I was happy I stopped by and that we now had a “Bay City connection.”
The woman behind the bar says with a smile, “...and that connection is me!”
At first, I didn’t understand, but now I do: had Retro Rocks not been open or not existed, or had she told me to go away because there was only 30 minutes until closing, it’s likely that we’d never have had that shot of tequila, Tanner would never have stolen my credit card number, Donovan would never have told me about the FBI, and I wouldn’t be here, more than 24 hours later running on only a few hours of sleep, riding a high and writing about any of this.
These moments of spontaneous and intentional interaction is why “third places”—not home, not work, but somewhere in between; places like bars, coffee shops, and dense, walkable, and populated downtowns—are so important to the life and health of a community. They are part of an “infrastructure of hospitality” that provides an environment for opportunities of intentional interaction that strengthen a community’s fabric and enrich our lives.
But how we act within those spaces, both as individuals and as a community, means everything.
The Aggregation of Marginal Gains
A city is a home. If people don’t stop by to visit, it could be because no one bothered to send them an invitation. If people don’t like it there, it could be because citizens acted like they don’t like it there, either. If people don’t know what the city can offer them, it could be because the community assumed they’d figure it out for themselves. If they didn’t stay long, it could be because, intentionally or not, they got the impression that nobody wanted them there in the first place.
Sure, maybe it’s because the beer ran out or somebody overcooked the meatloaf, but maybe it’s the negative side of something the British cycling coach Dave Brailsford calls “the aggregation of marginal gains”.
In 110 years, no British cyclist had ever won the Tour de France, and within that time, they had won only one Olympic gold medal. Things were bad with no sign of getting better, and so in 2003, Brailsford was hired to try to turn things around. In five years, the British had won 60 percent of the gold medals at the Beijing Olympics. Four years later, the team set 15 records at the London Olympics and in the same year, Bradley Wiggins became the first British cyclist to win the Tour de France.
How did the change happen? Instead of thinking big, Brailsford starting thinking small.
Really small: the aggregation of marginal gains.
Brailsford says, “The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by 1 percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.”
In his book, Atomic Habits, author James Clear breaks it down like this:
“Meanwhile, improving by 1 percent isn’t particularly notable—sometimes it isn’t even noticeable—but it can be far more meaningful, especially in the long run. The difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding. Here’s how the math works out: if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done. Conversely, if you get 1 percent worse each day for one year, you’ll decline nearly down to zero. What starts as a small win or a minor setback accumulates into something much more.”
Applying the philosophy of unreasonable hospitality to a community is an application of the transformative power of the aggregation of marginal gains. Every friendly “Hello!” or lack of it, every “Let us show you around the place” or lack of it, every act that says, “We’re so glad you’re here and we’d love it if you’d stay” or lack of it, will make our community one hundred times greater—or almost nothing.
An Inconveniently High Standard
It’s an inconveniently high standard of behavior that applies to everything from how employees interact with customers, to how people talk to each other during City Council meetings, to comments on Facebook, to the signs we make and how we build our roads.
And it’s a standard that every community everywhere needs to aspire to because our lives depend on it, because the quality of our single opportunity to experience life on this
Retro Rocks was about to close and I had a pair of cranky babies at home, so I thanked them for the evening and wished them a safe flight back. They’ll be back in three months or so, and invited them onto the podcast, and we agreed that there will be more tequila and it will be awesome.
Because of the nature of their work, I can’t tell you most of what they told me, but I can tell you this: life is better when we take the time to buy someone a drink.
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