Spaghetti Anyone?

Spaghetti Anyone?

If you haven't already learned, having a teenager will teach you very quickly that quality and consistency beat quantity every time. Those long weekend days, the nights full of stories, the questions that reveal genuine wonder begin to give way, faster than you expect, to closed doors and "goodnight" yelled from across the hall. Time begins to feel like it's slipping away faster than you can grab for it.

I was just talking with my wife about how there was a night, a little less than two years ago, when I gave my son his last nightly kiss on the forehead. I didn't know it was the last one until much later. That's usually how it goes. When the people around you change, you have to change your strategy. The job doesn't disappear. Being a present, loving parent is still the job. But the way you apply for it looks completely different than it used to. Fewer chances means every one of them matters more.

The same logic applies to how you run your business.

None of the spaghetti is sticking.

Fun fact: no one ever actually threw pasta at the wall to test for doneness. The trick appeared in an American cookbook in 1946 to convey Italian "authenticity." It was a gimmick dressed up as wisdom, and it worked just long enough to become conventional.

Sound familiar? The winery pouring at every tasting event in the county hoping something converts. The small tech startup blasting LinkedIn with outreach no one asked for. The nonprofit sending the same appeal letter to a list that stopped opening emails two years ago. None of it is sticking, and all of it costs more than it returns: time, money, and the quiet erosion of your brand's credibility.

The answer isn't fewer attempts. It's more deliberate ones. You're going to miss. The winery that tries a new club model and loses six months of margin learning it, the startup that bets on a channel that doesn't convert, the nonprofit whose gala falls flat... those aren't failures of courage. They're the cost of staying in motion. What kills small organizations isn't risk. It's unfocused risk. It's throwing things without knowing what you're trying to learn.

What actually works.

Thoughtful, decisive action focused on depth of engagement. People need to trust you. They need to drive past three other tasting rooms to get to yours, renew their software seats without shopping the competition, or open your year-end appeal because they believe their dollar does something real.

Trust is not built through volume. It's built through consistency and honesty, and a real focus on both will find its way into every external relationship you have: donors, customers, the people deciding whether to bet their next round on your team.

Show up, meaningfully, every time. And just taste the noodles.

Keep swinging …

Every owner and business leader hits a slump eventually. Sales go soft. A hire does not work out. A new offer falls flat. A decision that felt smart a month ago suddenly looks expensive. In those moments, it is easy to start pressing. It is easy to confuse one bad stretch with permanent decline. It is easy to panic.

My current favorite baseball player, Ronald Acuña Jr., is one of the most exciting players in the game. Part of what makes him so compelling are the amazing defensive plays and his offensive brilliance, that said, he’s not known for never having a bad month. To really understand his success, you have to take the long view and pay attention to the intangibles. The same is true of leaders.

The long view

The baseball season is long. Really long. There are 162 games in the regular season alone, which means there is plenty of time for hot streaks, cold streaks, bad luck, and correction. For fans, that is part of the fun. For players in a slump, it can feel endless. The best players understand something important, though: a long season rewards macro consistency, not emotional reactions to every small sample.

My dad used to say, “Hitting a baseball is the hardest thing you can do in professional sports. If you can hit a baseball three out of ten times, they put you in the Hall (of Fame).” That idea has stayed with me because it cuts against how most of us experience struggle. We expect competence to feel clean. We expect good performance to look smooth. But in baseball, and in business, excellence includes a lot of misses. One great game can carry a player through a long stretch of bad at bats because the season is long, and numbers don’t get tabulated until the end.

That is a useful reminder for business owners and leaders because slumps rarely stay contained to the numbers. They become emotional, a slow month starts to feel like a verdict, tne missed opportunity starts to rewrite the story you are telling yourself about your judgment, your team, or your future. That is where leaders get into trouble. Not because they hit a rough patch, but because they overcorrect in response to one. They chase bad pitches. They abandon sound habits. They confuse urgency with clarity.

When you take a chance and get it wrong, or you see sales dip for a month, it is easy to catastrophize. In those moments, it helps to remember the larger record. Remember the wins. Remember the judgment that got you here. Remember that consistency does not mean doing the same thing robotically, but it does mean showing up, reading the field, and continuing to make disciplined decisions over time. Sometimes that means swinging. Sometimes it means taking the walk. What it does not mean is panicking and flailing at everything near the plate.

That is one of the hardest disciplines in leadership. Owners, especially, feel pressure to prove they can fix every problem immediately. But not every downturn calls for reinvention. Sometimes it calls for steadiness. Sometimes the right move is not a dramatic pivot but a calm return to fundamentals: clearer priorities, better follow through, sharper conversations, and the patience to let good decisions compound.

The intangibles

One reason Acuña is so much fun to watch is that he brings an infectious energy with him. He is the kind of player whose presence changes the feel of the game. When he is playing well, the team responds. More importantly, when he is not playing well, he still brings visible joy to the field. When a teammate makes a great play or gets a big hit, he is often the one leading the celebration. He understands that being part of a team is not just about personal performance.

That matters even more in business than it does in sports. A leader’s mood is rarely private. It spreads. Your team takes cues from how you handle pressure, how you talk about setbacks, and whether you can still recognize progress when it is not your own. If you only celebrate the game winning hit, people learn to wait for heroics. If you celebrate smart decisions, steady effort, and smaller wins along the way, you build a healthier and more durable culture.

For owners and senior leaders, this is one of the real intangibles of leadership. You are not just setting targets. You are setting tone. You are teaching people, constantly, what matters here. Whether you mean to or not, you are showing them what a bad month means, what a mistake means, what resilience looks like, and whether confidence disappears the moment results soften.

It is easy to feel, in the middle of a slump, like you will always be there. But take a look around. The team is still doing its part. Progress is still happening in places you may not have noticed. Even at your best, you were never going to win it all on your own. Good teams carry each other for stretches. Good leaders let them.

So keep swinging. Stay disciplined. Do not start chasing balls in the dirt just because you are frustrated. Take the long view. Protect the culture around you. And remember that one of the clearest signs of leadership is not perfection, but the ability to keep your head, keep your standards, and keep stepping up to the plate when the last few at bats did not go your way.