The tape gun keeps jamming. It is 2:49 PM, and I have spent the last 39 minutes trying to unstick a roll of clear adhesive that seems determined to bond only to itself. My fingers are tacky with residue, and there is a stack of 19 shipping mailers waiting to be filled with branded hoodies that, if I am being honest, nobody really asked for. This is the glamour of revenue diversification. This is the dream they sell you in the airport business books: don’t just be a dispensary, be a lifestyle brand. But right now, as I stare at a Medium sweatshirt that has a weird ink smudge on the sleeve, I don’t feel like a lifestyle brand. I feel like a very poorly paid warehouse clerk who is neglecting the $9999-a-day business happening on the other side of that drywall.

I’ve reread the same shipping label five times now. The address is in Ohio. Or maybe it’s Oregon. My eyes keep sliding off the text because my brain is trying to calculate why we spent $499 on a heat press we’ve used exactly nine times. We were told that we needed to diversify. ‘Don’t leave money on the table,’ the consultants said. They make it sound like the money is just sitting there, waiting for you to pick it up, like a lost $20 bill on the sidewalk. They don’t tell you that to pick up that $20, you have to stop running your actual company for 49 hours a week.

The Sin of Dissolved Focus

Ivan E.S. would hate this room. Ivan is a water sommelier I met at a trade show in 2019. Most people think water sommeliers are a joke-the kind of thing people with too much money invent to feel important-but Ivan is the most focused human I have ever encountered. He can tell you if a bottle of mineral water was sourced from a limestone aquifer or a volcanic ridge just by the way it hits the back of his palate. He once told me, while swirling a glass of 7.9 pH artesian water, that the greatest sin a brand can commit is ‘dissolved focus.’ He argued that if you add too many minerals to water, it ceases to be refreshing and starts to be medicine. If you add too many ‘revenue streams’ to a business, it ceases to be a service and starts to be a clutter.

“

He was right. We are currently cluttered. I look at the shelves behind me. There are 29 boxes of custom-printed rolling trays that we ordered because we thought they’d be a ‘high-margin impulse buy.’ They have been sitting there for 149 days.

To sell apparel, you have to be a fashion designer, a supply chain expert, and a logistics manager. I am a water sommelier’s friend who knows how to curate high-end cannabis. I am not a garment worker. Yet here I am, worrying about the thread count of a drawstring. I have become a mediocre version of myself.

Achieving ‘Quiet’ Mouthfeel

I remember Ivan E.S. describing the ‘mouthfeel’ of a particularly pure glacier water. He said it was ‘quiet.’ It didn’t fight with the food; it didn’t demand attention; it just did its job perfectly. A great business should be quiet in that same way. It should do one thing so well that the complexity of the operation is invisible to the customer. When we started bringing in all this extra noise, we became ‘loud.’

This is the distraction tax. It’s not just the money you lose on unsold inventory-it’s the $5999 you don’t make because your brain is too fried to notice a shift in market pricing. We’ve turned our experts into telemarketers for trinkets. It’s a tragedy of misplaced ambition.

Trading Life for Pennies

I spent my entire weekend sitting on the floor of my living room, testing 499 grinders by hand, screwing and unscrewing them until my palms were raw. My wife asked me why I wasn’t playing with our kids. I told her I was ‘building an empire.’ In reality, I was doing quality control for a product that represented less than 0.9% of our annual revenue. I was trading my life for pennies because I was obsessed with the idea of ‘vertical integration.’

The Cage Built of ‘Good’ Ideas

I realize then that I’ve built a cage out of ‘extra revenue.’ Every new product line is another bar in that cage. We think we’re building a safety net, but we’re actually just building a distraction. Resilience doesn’t come from having 19 different ways to make a dollar; it comes from having one way to make a dollar that is so efficient, so pure, and so focused that it can weather any storm.

Resilience vs. Distraction

You have to say no to the ‘good’ ideas so you have the energy to say yes to the ‘singular’ idea. I’m going back to the flower.

No More Tape Guns

It’s 4:59 PM now. The sun is starting to dip. I’m going to stop rereading this invoice. I’m going to go out there, apologize to that customer, and tell him we don’t have the burnt orange hat, but we do have the best cannabis he’s ever smoked. I’m going to be a water sommelier of the weed world. No more dissolved focus. No more tape guns. Just the core. Just the thing that actually matters.