What is your Earth Tax?

Where has Swampy gone?

When I was a kid, he seemed to be everywhere. On the news, in tunnels, up trees, being dragged out of places by people in hard hats and high-vis jackets while the rest of us tried to work out whether he was a nuisance, a hero, or as my dad may well have put it: a bloke with dreads who doesn’t like roads.

It turns out that he was up to his old antics as recently as 2020 when he was arrested attempting to stop the destruction of Jones Hill Wood for HS2, which I must’ve missed.

At the time, I don’t think I properly understood what he was doing. Looking back now, there was something very clear about him. He stood for something, and in every literal way, put himself in the path of something he believed was wrong. 

What was unspoken but admirable was that, whether you agreed with him or not, you knew there was a belief underneath it.

This thought came to me while I was listening to Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia.

It is the story of Patagonia over the last 50 years, it is refreshingly not really a business book in the usual shiny sense of promising endless wealth and success by “changing just these 5 small things”. It is not full of neat tricks, growth hacks or the sort of advice that makes you feel like you need a new business dashboard, a better morning routine, and six more acronyms to your name.

It is about values, stubbornness, responsibility and the awkwardness of trying to build a successful company while also being honest about the damage you are doing just by making a product and selling it.

He claims that in the absence of these things existing, he needed to create their own Earth tax to keep them on track. This became 1% for the planet, something every business can and should do.

This honesty is why Patagonia’s commitment to grassroots activism clocks over $100 million, because Chouinard’s view is that this is where change actually happens, not in governments or corporations that seek to keep the status quo.

And I think that is probably why Patagonia’s story is so easy to tell. It is not that they say the right things. It is that you can feel the quality of the outcomes and the weight of the choices in their products.

Flow state and feeling

Last month I wrote about death and mentioned John Virgo, the legend, passing (and thank you by the way for amount of lovely comments and stories you shared with me about this article).

The World Snooker Championship has also been on this month, and through thick and thin, I realise it’s been a warm comfort blanket in my life, and despite a nice testimony, it will be lacking without Virgo’s memorable voice from here on in.

Of course it’s snooker, so I’m not always watching it properly. I love the soft clack of the balls, the gasp of the Crucible after a bad miss, the occasional cougher, and the fact that every so often I can glance up and something incredibly skilful has happened.

There are some people in sport who are just infinitely watchable, even if you don’t fully understand what game they are playing.

A Roger Federer backhand is one of those things. You don’t have to know anything about tennis to appreciate his majesty. Ronnie O’Sullivan clearing a table in five minutes has the same quality, shifting between hands and gears as he races around the table in a sport that demands no pace.

Ronnie didn’t win the World Championship this year, and he had a brilliant match with John Higgins before going out, but there was something fascinating about watching him try to consistently find his own level (somewhere in the clouds compared to his peers).

You could see the frustration in him. The little twitches, the irritation, the sense that he knew what was available to him but could not quite get to it yet. Then, every now and again, he would start to go through the gears, and the whole thing would change.

The table would start to look different because he seemed to be seeing it differently. Not just the shot in front of him, but the next ball, the one after that, the angle he needed three shots later, and the version of the table that did not exist yet but somehow already did in his head.

That is what makes him so watchable to me. It is not just the skill, it is the feeling of watching someone access something that is very clearly part of them, this part still needs to be discovered in the moment.

Which brings me, less elegantly, to football.

I am still just about playing with my son, which is one of those small dad privileges I am trying not to take for granted.

I say “playing” quite generously, because my knees are more or less gone and now sound like a bowl of Rice Krispies whenever I try to change direction.

But I still love it.

Not because I’m any good, and certainly not because anyone needs to witness what remains of my first touch, there is immense pride in being on the pitch with him. There is an unspoken connection. 

As someone who kicked a ball as soon as they could and continued into my 40s, I find my flow in football, losing time and perception of anything outside those white lines. 

I don’t have any expectation to win, I just enjoy it now, but a few months ago I challenged myself to make an impact on a game we were losing (like I was 25 again). I came on after a breather with 5 mins to go and scored 3 goals which meant we won by a goal. I was lost to the moment and likely got a slice of good fortune, but maybe this is the point.

Swampy was not memorable because he had a polished message. Patagonia is not interesting because it found a clever way to describe corporate responsibility. Ronnie is not watchable because someone could turn his performance into a tidy list of lessons about excellence. Playing football with my son is not meaningful because there is an output to measure at the end of it.

These things stay with us because there is feeling attached to them. Because something matters enough for someone to keep showing up for it.

What’s love got to do with it?

This month’s quote I have likely used before, often attributed to Maya Angelou, it goes:

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

In business (and our marketing), we can become very attached to the bit we can measure.

The campaign, the post, the landing page, the lead magnet, the report, the content plan, the click-through rate, the conversion rate, the neat list of things we made and published. Outputs.

Those things matter, obviously. But even with great storytelling as a part of them, they are rarely the whole story, and they are not always the part that people carry with them afterwards.

Most of us remember how something made us feel before we remember the exact wording. We remember whether a company seemed to understand us, whether a person made something feel clearer, whether an idea gave us a bit more confidence, or whether a brand seemed to care about the same things we care about.

And we remember when automation used our full name when your contact uses your short name.

A brand can say all the right words and still leave you cold, because you can’t feel the choices behind them.

The work that tends to stay with people is usually the work where something real has made it through. A belief. A standard. A point of view. A bit of humour. A frustration. A sense of care. A tiny detail that makes someone think, “yes, they get it”.

That does not mean every piece of marketing needs to be emotional in a big, dramatic way. Nobody needs a fridge seal supplier to behave like a perfume advert, and not every B2B website needs to be “circling around” on something and resolving it “by the end of play”.

The modern customer needs to feel something, and to qualify that, you need to DO what you show up to talk about.

That’s where a purposeful brand becomes an impactful one. And to be completely honest, I am trying and failing at this all the time.

We pay B Corp fees, then accept the extra friction that comes with being more selective about who we can work with.

We lose out on new work every month due to priced-based decisions, knowing that part of the reason we cost more is that we scope the project transparently, do not use cheap offshore labour, and a proportion of our profit goes to charity.

The Positive Nature Network organises free environmental events and still gets very little engagement.

I’m not grumbling, all these thingsqualify the right clients to us, and demonstrate a commitment to a cause. But these are our Earth taxes (to borrow Yvon Chouinard’s phrase). The commitments that cost something. The choices that are not always convenient, easy to explain, or commercially sound.

Because if your values never cost you anything, they probably are not values yet. They are just preferences.

Not “what do we want people to think about our brand?”

But “what are we willing to keep doing, even when it would be easier not to?”

What is your Earth tax? what does it cost you and how does it make others feel?