Brewed From Within

Fructifying Fortitude

Watching toddlers learn to walk is adorable. This instinctive right of passage reminds us that fresh motivation may be needed when progress stalls.

At first, early moves feel natural, and then crawling did the job. As children see what’s possible, expectations rise and success begins to feel inevitable. If progress stalls, parental motivation can lose its luster and concern sets in. But what if the breakthrough simply awaits fresh encouragement?

As new motivation is introduced, even when it’s unplanned, progress proceeds almost all at once. We scramble for the camera and those precious first steps are beloved by all. More practice is still needed, but this achievement renews momentum that keeps little ones moving upright and forward.

Extra Shot

For parents smiling as they read this, know that Pure Wonder, Wayfinders, Winding Whys, Training Wheels, Playforce, Santa is Real, and many timeless episodes from You Don’t Need This Podcast are energizing extensions on this topic!

As we build into new quests, our dance with innovation may also require shifting gears. Next time an engine stalls, step back to consider an alternate angle, talk to peers with different perspectives, take time away, or show up unannounced to adapt and get back on track.

By Ben McDougal, ago

Waiting Rooms

The waiting room is that season where you’re not where you used to be, but you’re not yet where you want to go. It’s the in-between. The pause before your name gets called. The place where you’re preparing for what’s next, whether you think you know what’s next or not.

If we can move our egos out of the way long enough, we’d see the beauty here. The waiting room is where character develops. Where preparation happens. Where we create, reflect, and release what no longer serves us.

But we want to bypass it. We grow impatient and intolerant. We think our will—our force—can push us through faster. It doesn’t work like that. You’ll only exhaust and burn yourself out.It’s easy to watch others get called before you. The mental chatter starts: “When will it be my turn?” “Will I ever be ready?” “Why them and not me?”

The problem with watching others is that you have no idea where they are in their journeys. You don’t know where they’re being called to next—or what’s waiting for them when they get there. Their timeline is not a reflection of yours. It never was.

Everyone gets called at exactly the right time for their highest good. Not a moment sooner. Not because the universe is withholding opportunity, but because love doesn’t set us up to fail. The waiting room keeps us from walking through a doorway we’re not ready for. It’s protective. We wouldn’t hand a six-year-old the car keys just because they felt ready to drive. Your higher wisdom knows better. That child stays in the waiting room until they’re actually equipped for what’s next.

EXTRA SHOT

Watch Vanessa narrate this riff on-stage!

No one wants to be in the waiting room. But everyone has to pass through it. These built-in pause points aren’t punishments—they’re where we catch our breath, integrate what we’ve learned, and prepare for what’s coming.

We take the wait personally. Like it’s evidence we’re not good enough, not ready enough, not deserving enough. We get frustrated. Resentful. Sometimes we give up right here.

But your job is to learn to sit in the tension of not being where you want to be without making it mean something’s wrong with you. When we are able to loosen the grip, the pause can be strategic. You can recalibrate here. Gain mastery here. Rest here. The waiting room is the bulb that leads to the flower—fertilized by your patience and who you choose to become while you wait.

EXTRA SHOT

This contribution was written by Vanessa McNeal. Vanessa is a social architect and keynote speaker who transforms the nervous system to lead through love.

Life is full of waiting rooms. When the time comes, we move forward and eventually, we find ourselves in another waiting room. We create suffering if we believe we’ll arrive one day at a place with no more growth, no more waiting.

That’s not how it works. What would we learn by skipping the journey to reach the destination? How would we develop patience, self-trust, or resilience?

Right now is transitory, but micro-moments add up and coalesce into the story of our comprehensive progress. Waiting rooms are where we become the person who’s ready and open to what comes next.

By Ben McDougal, ago

Feedback is Data

Customer discovery paves the path to profitability.

This really is the work for entrepreneurs starting a new business. Customer discovery requires trust in your early moves, obsessive curiosity, patience, thick skin, humility, an interest in being wrong, discernment, and a willingness to adapt. No problem, right?

For many entrepreneurs, impartial feedback can be scary. Customer discovery puts ideas on the hook, and colliding new conversations may contradict past assumptions. That’s the point! Interacting with the market you seek to serve allows us to learn from no in a way that gets us to yes.

As you collaborate with those who criticize what you’re building, learn why naysayers debate your hypotheses. Be humble. Either attack the massive lift to change the product and even the target customer or make your concept more compelling to win over those who care.

The more you learn from others, the more you’ll recognize supply and be able to meet true demand. Collecting real-world data is human and intellectual capital that attracts more network and financial capital. 

Beyond the psychology of it all, customer discovery can feel like a drag because it is often a protracted process. The time commitment is real. This market exploration can be slow at first and may seem less necessary as signals of traction emerge. The potential need to rethink ideas makes feedback scary too. As always, if the entrepreneurial lifestyle was easy, career nirvana would not be so fleeting. Knowing this, we can seek honest feedback that strengthens our value proposition to eventually go further in the right direction.

When learning from the perspective of others, it’s imperative to remember that feedback is data.

Collect, organize, and examine data from feedback like a scientist. Inference is more informed with data. Decisions that are made become more in tune with reality as you continue to collect and learn with data.

As you translate decisions into action, you must also find your own way. Even with good intent, people who provide you with feedback are doing so based on their experience. The experience of others is based on their own past, and no feedback is likely to fully harmonize with your vision. There are many ways to navigate the idea maze. Gather feedback like power-ups in a video game and use diversified data to guide your quest toward product-market fit.

By Ben McDougal, ago

Wayfinders

Startups that pay in love are a blank
canvas that comes to life through us.

By nature, parents want to provide the means for children to go beyond their potential. Family requires immeasurable resources, but the love from our kids unlocks more hours in the day. The added productivity comes from seeing the best of ourselves in someone we care so much about. Purpose is renewed and the heart we put into our creative work can make our presence as parents even more interesting.

Summon Stories

Children grow up fast, so we stay in the moment. Everyone tells us to cherish the simple joys of life, but it may be worth getting a little extra creative. One way to enhance your family’s ability to relive memorable moments, is by using multimedia marketing skills to summon family stories.

Every moment is special. As creation becomes second nature, handpicked memories can be stitched together to revisit interactively, any time, with or without you.

Most of us have an endless collection of photos and video on our smartphone, but scrolling around on a digital device doesn’t translate into something a group can enjoy together. It’s easy for good things to get lost in so much noise and spoken storytelling is always merry too, but why not paint more stories with a few added brushes?

Quiet relics like photo slideshows, something printed that sits beautifully on the shelf, a mix of audio recordings, art on the wall, or a cinematic feature film that highlights your adventures. You’re the creator with endless ways to create.

We all do a form of this, because family is our favorite, but the time required is real. A rigid cadence is not required, since any day is a good day to ship this type of of art. In the early days of photos and video, it was only birthdays and Christmas — now everyday is a holiday. No need to rush, but keep producing new surprises. Everyone will love the end result and as more come together, the growing playlist becomes a sequence of stories that follow kids growing up. With our constant collection of content, a good story is always ready to tell, but at a minimum, why not share an annual gift with your kids, partner, and other loved ones?

Along the way, attentive and controlled organization will make a growing collection of relics easier to craft. This takes an ongoing commitment, but file management is easy and helps bring life to life with shared memories.

Your future self will then thank you for an effort to organize this heartfelt content. Share in public if you want, but that can alter the art if it becomes a show. Do it for yourself and your favorite people first. Organize what will be a massive library offline, then, if you want play with the transitory channels of social media, that’s a personal choice.

No matter who resists whatever it may be, time compiling legacy projects will rarely feel wasted. It’s using our real skills to commemorate those we love. Scanned memories may give us content without capturing it in the future. For now, it’s up to us to trap time for personal storytelling.

Compensation is not money, but this does enhance your content creation skills for other areas in life. Technology also makes editing content more productive, but this is not your average task. This is the type of sincere storytelling you enjoy spending time with.

As kids grow up, these projects will have the lowest view counts, but always be your very favorite. Looking ahead, it’s crazy to imagine being a child right now, then receiving such a gift from my parents someday!

You’ve Got Mail

Consider setting up an email for your little one. This inbox can be used as a communication channel to write to your child as they grow up. Whether you start writing before they are born or later in their life, imagine what a gift this inbox will be in the future! This email address can be shared with family and used for online accounts if you want, but at a minimum, this curates a personalized time machine full of thoughtful updates.

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What’s your favorite parenting tip? Share it as a comment or hit me up!

Along with sentimental content, your kids will appreciate an email address that can be used after childhood. First and last name with your preferred email provider should stand the test of time. This is also a good chance to register a URL using their first and last name. This can connect to their email or support a personal website someday.

Avoid Routine

“Time flies” and “they grow up so fast” is accurate, but avoiding routine may slow down time.

The freedom to be spontaneous is a privilege and everyone will define such flexibility differently, but a proven path to explore such a reality is entrepreneurship. Boundless hard work, dedication, and resiliency are what this lifestyle takes, but suffering provides a stronger sense of purpose.

As this purpose is layered in later stages of life, experiential wisdom can be channeled into more treasured time doing things that make us happy. While hardship is part of the deal, children make their parents happy. Perhaps a reward for parents who lead by example, is the opportunity to share everything with those who matter most.

By Ben McDougal, ago

Table of Riffs

Brewed From Within: Energy for the Entrepreneurial Lifestyle compiles 125 riffs into four timeless sections. Here’s a VIP snapshot tour, with a handful of riffs linked for early access!

Imagine holding your new book. After the cosmic cover art is initially observed, we open to a title page, one blank page for personalizations from the author, and then the publisher’s copyright page. After the heartfelt dedication page and motivating preface, you’ll find the table of riffs. While the book flows from start to finish, each riff is individually numbered and includes a snapshot of Key Topics and a unique QR code that supports easy referencing and quick sharing. The Foreword from Brad Feld and the book’s Introduction prepares you for what to expect and then we dive in! The Table of Riffs below is your first look at the modern circus that’ll energize whatever you’re building. After the book becomes a new favorite, we end with the book’s closing matter. Readers can refill their mug even more in the About The Author pages, meet the 21 contributing authors, acknowledge those who brought this book to life, sneak backstage for people interested in writing a book or book marketing, play in a mini crossword puzzle, and explore more timeless resources to keep us all building… TOGETHER.

PART ONE: ENTREPRENEURSHIP

1. Uncharted
2. Early Moves
3. Maverick
4. First in Line
5. Ideaworks
6. Pain Relievers vs. Vitamins
7. Minerva
8. Prismatic
9. Fresh Powder (cc)
10. Escorting Execution
11. Slow & Fast
12. Triangulation
13. Real Skills
14. Ship It
15. Storytelling
16. Super Sentence
17. Isochronal
18. Sequencing
19. Feedback Is Data
20. Down Under (cc)
21. Slide Deck Design
22. Attention Traps
23. Captive
24. Momentum Mountain
25. Fructifying Fortitude
26. Shifting Gears
27. Echoes
28. Breakout Valuation
29. Head Start (cc)
30. Not to Lose
31. Landing
32. Voices (cc)
33. Diplomacy Disrupted (cc)

PART TWO: LEADERSHIP

34. Listen
35. Jargon vs. Understanding
36. Small Business Owners
37. ArtOfficial
38. Linchpin
39. Significance
40. Permeability
41. Everyday Activism (cc)
42. Generosity Builds Trust
43. Atmospheric
44. Winds of Outrage
45. Executionist
46. Import Knowledge
47. Líneas Invisibles (cc)
48. Interested Introductions (cc)
49. Overtime
50. Decisions
51. Aphorism
52. Airport Foot Massage
53. Enchanting Events
54. Reluctance
55. Collide
56. Playforce (cc)
57. Playforce Principles
58. Adaptability (cc)
59. Adapttitude (cc)
60. Extra Credit (cc)
61. Tenured & Tired
62. Seasonality
63. Linear
64. Diversified Career Portfolio
65. Visualizing Variety
66. Hiatus

PART THREE: TECHNOLOGY

67. Pure Wonder
68. Innovation Curves
69. Tinker
70. Wireframing
71. Hybridize
72. Time Trappers
73. Cyberspace
74. Producing a Podcast
75. Dollowers
76. Welcome to Web3
77. Mechanized Money (cc)
78. Woven Worlds (cc)
79. Phygital
80. Munch Munch
81. Septenary
82. Conversationalized
83. Yin-Yang
84. Bridges to Tomorrow
85. Digitized Consciousness
86. Replicants
87. Incentivized Reality (cc)
88. Propulsive
89. Neon Future

PART FOUR: LIFE & HAPPINESS

90. Open to Next
91. Indexing
92. Uncertainty
93. Anticipation
94. Recursion
95. Horizons
96. Anxiety
97. Creation vs. Consumption (cc)
98. Waiting Rooms (cc)
99. 1% Better
100. Training Wheels
101. Bloop
102. Winterizing
103. Santa Is Real
104. Front & Center
105. Pebbles
106. Goodnight Moon
107. Totality
108. 13.8 Billion
109. Dark Matter
110. Gimmies
111. Hole-In-One (cc)
112. Serendipitist
113. Bookmarks
114. Feng Shui
115. Sedona Sands
116. Love Letters
117. One & Only
118. Wayfinders
119. Winding Whys
120. Oversubscribed
121. Intrinsic
122. Conspicuous Kindness
123. Sharing
124. Endowment
125. Perpetuity

For more details or to consider creative ways to collaborate, download the book summary, grab a book, and connect with the author to talk through more ideas.

By Ben McDougal, ago