Brewed From Within

Digitized Consciousness

Would you choose to live forever? Most say no. There’s something precious about the finite nature of life.

That said, making an impact, life extension, endowing loved ones, and leaving a legacy are innate ambitions.

As humans merge with machines, digitizing our life’s body of work can, technically, already be done. To illustrate this, the average human generates around two gigabytes of data per day. This data culminates from the text, audio, photos, video, and other creative expressions we create. Nanotechnologies may reduce the storage space needed, but even without that multiplex, if we generate 730 gigabytes of data each year and live 75 years, that equates to only 54,750 gigabytes, which is less than 55 terabytes. Everyone generates different types and levels of information, but storage is not the issue.

With storage negligible, the creation of authentic content, verifiable ownership, data management, lasting security, and personal privacy will always present concerns. Barriers are built to be broken, but information alone is unlikely to represent the enigma of one’s consciousness. The totality of one life’s output will present signals, but if those who follow are to interact with a digitized consciousness, how might the experience need to be supplemented to feel organic?

Interfacing with the brain will unveil depth in the human mind, but will that be enough to paint how consciousness is felt though the soul of our existence?

Replicants with your digitized consciousness may never fully represent the original, but that won’t stop such a resource from being appreciated. Humans thrive, thanks to a historic desire to pass our experiences on to future generations—whether through stories told, wisdom shared, or just a voice to comfort our descendants. As we continue to digitize the world, the option for mind uploading seems inevitable, and content creators have a head start.

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Consumption expires.

Create to live beyond time.

Let’s assume advancements in brain-computer interfaces, neural networks, and quantum computing unlocks the ability to effectively digitize consciousness. Who might activate it, and how would such an asset be portrayed, owned, and managed after the human dies?

Navigating this reality will require a combination of legal, ethical, and philosophical frameworks, but eventually the digital interaction becomes easy. It gets weird as this digital asset becomes a part of the physical world. What might a digitized consciousness paint on a canvas? Why not mix sounds into music? Could it run a humanoid robot?

Further down the road, what are potential risks and benefits of creating a digitized consciousness that is capable of self-improvement and adaptation? Final alignment may be needed before the human dies, so tiny details could be refined. Even with final tweaks to support transcendence, software gets stale, but updates could alter the asset.

It feels important to evolve elements that keep such an asset functioning, but the ideas, insight, perspectives, and overall interaction with such a digitized consciousness would need to be unscathed to remain true to the original source. If an uploaded mind was altered, a kind of digital entropy would fragment the asset away from its original purpose.

A transforming heart may keep this asset in vogue, but the identity of the human it represented would be lost. Any digitized consciousness will become outdated over time, but perhaps that will be part of the charm.

By Ben McDougal, ago

Storytelling

Humans are innate storytellers. We use (sequenced) stories to enjoy life, relay ideas, and network experiences. Passed over generations, the willingness to tell stories has helped our species survive. When collided, shared understandings then summon diverse environments connected to thrive.

As we narrow the narrative into an entrepreneurial lifestyle, the values of storytelling are felt as we learn, create interest, unite, and act beyond the shared moment. Over a brew, in the office, at events, out with friends, or on-stage, leaders must be able to translate the story of a business.

The environment, industry, audience, and format affect how a story is told. The sentiment should be consistent, but your story won’t sound the same each time. Agility, preparation, and awareness will keep a story genuine, truthful, and engaging. Preparedness also boosts our confidence to share our stories in any situation.

Internal storytelling between owners, co-workers, mentors, advisors, and customers is guided by listening, curiosity, data, transparency, and all that’s found in the Team chapter of You Don’t Need This Book.

Let’s expand the repertoire with a focus on storytelling with strangers. This is done by playing with styles and tinkering with creative formats for the story.What’s your style? How casual can you make it? How nerdy can you go? What feelings do you evoke?

Alongside different styles, timing also helps to format the story. One sentence is a sharp conversation starter. 42 Seconds is ideal for networking events and in small groups. 6 Minutes delivers details to support a valuable Q&A. 10+ minutes creates space for more depth, but don’t numb the audience. 45+ minutes is leading event sessions and keynote speaking.

Along with talk, relatable assets bring a story to life. Such creation uncovers flow for a story. So embrace branding, social media, website development, slide decks, one-pagers, and endless types of physical and digital materials that connect storytelling with an audience that cares.

No matter the situation, honest understanding, energizing enthusiasm, practice, transparent vulnerability, intellectual humility, and concise simplicity will serve you well. Nothing pushy, but pops of persuasion curate attention along the way. As a remarkable story comes together, feedback will sharpen the business and help tweak the transmission.

By Ben McDougal, ago

Isochronal

Repetition builds clarity for the stories of our quests. Isochronal means uniform in time or occurring at regular intervals. Let’s think through why recurring reminders are needed to motivate awareness, action, and steadfastness.

The starting state is what makes it hard to get anyone to do anything. Motion requires force. We don’t know what we don’t know. The dance of an entrepreneurial lifestyle takes time, and action calls for commitment.

That’s a heavy ask, and attention is scarce. Finding people who care, garnering feedback, and attracting customers will build momentum, but maintaining thrust calls for creativity.

Along the way, play with specificity to make any narrative feel less intimidating. These distinct, recurring pieces of the puzzle act like stepping stones. The distance between each stone can be short at first, but bigger obstacles will soon require longer leaps. Scaling a story is demanding, and activating even a small audience is challenging.

This is because such consistency requires sacrifice. When it comes to business, consistency is what most people want. Passion is fine, but are you healthily obsessed? The sacrifice is worth it when discipline makes business an authentic experience. It can almost become a hobby that pays. We enjoy hobbies, and it’s easy to be authentic when you enjoy something. No act required. It’s easier to be consistent when authenticity feels normal. When consistency is then united with discipline, perhaps we find our own isochronal.

Your own version of isochronal is thoughtful repetition that helps to deliver on whatever the promise may be. True fans can stay in-tune, then steadfastness catches fresh awareness along the way. What’s your smaller, more specific target audience? It’s a moving target, but how can nimble calls to action resonate with the smallest viable audience?

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When it gets repeated, the story grows.

To create intrigue alongside consistency, combine personal touch with true understanding. Humans can say less when something is understood, so tighten your vocabulary with fewer words. It must maintain reality, but fewer words can make things easier to remember.`

When anything becomes worth repeating, the motivators of a mission can be passed to future leaders. This is critical for long-term quests with ongoing rotations of participation. New leaders who keep innovating on what works can revitalize a team, add healthy succession in an organization, and keep dots connecting for the community. Without clarity, the fresh energy of future leaders can be misguided and may fracture progress.

Any story will always be evolving, which means clarity on a foundation of constants will fuel momentum.

For external communication, sequencing keeps each touchpoint lighter. Conciseness allows first impressions to be impactful, then content that rhymes over time can guide more isochronal action without hesitation. Repetition brewed with the staying power of sequencing keeps the narrative consistent and therefore transferable. Transferability helps make onboarding newcomers sustained, bold, honest, and efficient. Isochronal sequencing also bridges dips in clarity among different segments of existing stakeholders.

It’d be nice if recurrence wasn’t a part of the equation, but it’s loud out there! Attention is hard to earn and harder to maintain. We also know endless reminders are annoying, yet the weight of too much at once is daunting. This makes communication that guides lasting enrollment an art form. Be isochronal with a strategic cadence, trust-building consistency, perceptual learning, and patience for sequenced storytelling.

By Ben McDougal, ago

Oversubscribed

It’s a go-go world of busy, busy, busy.

With days scheduled from start to finish, what time is left for random acts of conspicuous kindness, welcoming serendipity, or just saying yes to more adventure?

Thoughtful preparation is often required to coordinate whatever it may be. There’s value in staying organized, but over planning is a trap. The thirst for productivity has made busy look to be successful. How often do we hear pride disguised as disgust, as someone complains about the constrictions of their frantic calendar? Yes, prerequisites include boundless hard work, a healthy obsession, and endless sequencing to be remarkable, but unexpected opportunities emerge when we’re not captive to a calendar.

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Planning is based in fear.

Doing is based in success.

Renting time can be lucrative, but in our connected era, there are ways to efficiently get things done without falling victim to a stacked routine of back-to-back everything.

Meetings led by talking heads, fracturing lunch affairs, and youth sports are all common versions of this trap. Each activity is cool, but when combined, days are booked and every night has something. A few hacks for each include less scheduled meetings throughout the week, but an eagerness to meet anytime. Instead of lunch, meet folks for a brew on either side of the day and consider more adventurous ways to share time. Audibles include parlaying a first meeting with an event, going for a walk and talk, or adding nature into the interaction. This breaks routine and conversations can be more provocative as a shared encounter adds depth to any relationship. Lastly, appreciate limitless play, but organized sports will not define a child’s future. In fact, it more commonly limits the experiences a family enjoys together. The entire game resets at puberty and even at high levels, the idea that sports provide a lasting future is one of society’s biggest fallacies. Organized sports deliver camaraderie, fitness, teamwork, loyalty, problem solving, business opportunities, and a competitive rush, but camps provide these benefits with less time and cost required.

Comfort without a plan leaves space for the unexpected. Things will not always come together, but if the calendar is a tool to keep promises while staying quietly organized, complacency gets replaced with unplanned marvel. If you feel oversubscribed, try flying without a plan. May the voids filled with no agenda unravel a freedom to be your best.

By Ben McDougal, ago

Interested Introductions

Leaving a networking event with a pocket full of business cards can feel rewarding, so why do these relics from past interactions quickly feel more like rubble? This can happen when introductory conversations are approached as transactions for immediate progress, instead of connections built for consistent progress over time. When the focus is quantity, we tend to set authenticity aside and put on a show in hopes of getting what we want as quickly as possible. Playing this type of networking game may connect the dots that sit on the surface, but this approach typically won’t convert conversations into a foundation for memorable and sustained connectivity beyond the moment. Flipping this tendency is simple, but it requires shifting the goal from what we want out of the first contact with someone, to what both/all parties need to feel a connection. That shift comes much easier when we make the conscious decision to be more interested in who we’re meeting than we are concerned with being interesting to them.

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This contribution was written by Nick O’Brien. Nick is a founder and creative economy strategist who connects people to people, people to place, and people to potential.

When meeting people, it doesn’t matter what we’re working on. Ironically, being valuable in a first encounter is about listening and learning rather than presenting ourselves as valuable. It’s about making mental links between them and others in our network. It’s conjuring inverse charisma, leaning into playforce principles, and igniting feelings in others that differentiate our first encounters from agenda-focused introductions. These feelings produce a neurochemical reaction that sparks the brain’s amygdala and hippocampus simultaneously. It’s as if a potent cup of coffee is being poured into the parts of our brain responsible for creating and storing memories. In other words, when introductory conversations unlock the true emotions of connection, the chances for strong memories of the interaction significantly increase. This makes it easier to stay in tune with more variety as our network expands.

After years of observing the ways we approach meeting someone new, a few basic trends emerge based on different types of people. Introverts are more careful with what they say. They’ll share experiences, perspectives, and opinions, but typically not without being asked. Extroverts are more likely to stand out, as they share their experiences, perspectives, and ideas more openly. While there’s a complex conversation required to further understand extraversion, introversion, and ambiversion, let’s zoom in on how introverts and extroverts encounter the first moments of potential connection.

When introverts meet, they typically stay on the surface. The hidden intent is to not stand out, especially if what they say or do might make them seem less interesting. While this reserved approach might lead to an easy, free-flowing conversation, it’s not conducive to getting below the surface where unique experiences, perspectives, and insights can be exchanged. This play-it-safe approach actually decreases the chances they’ll remember each other, because unique feelings were not shared during the interaction.

As two extroverts collide, they both dive right in. With an intent of being interesting to the other person, they soon begin to subtly one-up each other to earn attention. Both extroverts may be energized, but the feelings of this memory are built on comparisons to the other person. Instead of feeling genuinely intrigued by what’s possible, confident people are left dwelling on their shortcomings, or worse, become driven to clash rather than to connect.

When introverts and extroverts cross paths, it’s natural for an extrovert to dominate the conversation. Unsurprisingly, both personality types are comfortable during these interactions. The introvert is less worried about standing out when all they have to do is listen. The extrovert shares their most interesting attributes, which makes them feel comfortable as well. While the introvert learns about the extrovert and may have experienced emotions to help them remember more, without the extrovert learning about the introvert, it’s unlikely that the extrovert feels much connection when they did all the talking.

Maintaining an interest in perpetual learning is the key when meeting new people. With practice, you’ll become more knowledgeable and better at recalling what you know about who you know.

What you know about who you know can be a superpower in the form of making introductions. The goal is for the introduction to be concise (15-20 seconds), aligned, and engaging enough to not only have sticking power, but also generate immediate interest in taking action as a result of the conversations you help curate. An interested introduction can be boiled down to a compelling story that includes 5 elements – exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution.

  1. Exposition = Name The Story
    The names of who you’re introducing become the title of this story, creating a new folder in the introducees’ minds for the information you’re about to share. Many struggle to remember names, which correlates with why we struggle to remember what we’ve learned about people. As you evoke unique feelings with your introductions, you’ll find yourself remembering the names and related details of more people. Once names are shared, one go-to detail to include is how you met the introducees, especially if you met through mutual connections, at a place they’re both drawn to, or during an activity they both enjoy. This will create immediate feelings of proximity, while demonstrating that the details of your connection are meaningful enough to remember. The relevant context also helps us tap into the knowledge we’ll need for taking the next step in making unforgettable introductions.
  2. Rising Action = Spark Connection
    Briefly explaining your knowledge about each person’s purpose or mission can spark early feelings of connection.  Remember, what someone cares the most about is rarely found on their business card. As you notice the introducees’ intrigue in each others’ callings, this is when you’ll align both parties with the shared potential between their respective missions. A connection sparked through what each person cares deeply about welcomes a variety of uniquely-aligned feelings that deepen memory, and sets the intro up perfectly for what comes next.
  3. Climax = Celebrate Together
    Now we open the door to shared feelings, as the emotions of celebration are useful to tap into at this stage. By sharing a milestone that the people you’re introducing have recently experienced, each can revel in their own interesting journey while also learning about and cheering on who they’re meeting. Ideally, the milestones being celebrated are linked to the details you’ve shared already.  This can be tricky if you don’t know people well, but get creative with small wins to always have this option. Large or small, professional or personal, mutual celebration is an experience of shared emotion that will make the moment more memorable.
  4. Falling Action = Align Focus
    With connection established and shared celebration flowing, the introducees will be eager to learn how else they can engage with each other. If possible, highlight an obstacle they’re facing or a potential milestone within a project they’re enthused about. If you don’t have these details, hint at potential intersections between their respective journeys. The context we add here invites the exchange of experiential wisdom and new ideas into the conversation that follows.
  5. Resolution = Invite Action
    The stars of this story feel less pressure to act interesting, because you’ve done it for them. Now finish the intro story and encourage a longer sequel! To do this, mention (types of) people who each may need to meet in the next chapters of their respective stories. Ideally, these are folks the other knows and can easily make an introduction to. If you don’t have deep knowledge of the introducees’ networks, name people you know are relevant to the connection between them. If the suggestions are genuine, a sense of being in the right place at the right time, inspires emotions that come with action.

We have now set the stage for a memorable, emotion-based conversation by including relevant information that makes any personality type feel significance. This introduces equitable, level-setting hooks for a conversation to flourish without you as a constant conduit between them.

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Create Your Magic

When this method sets a virtuous tone between the people you introduce, there’s no need to rush away, but be quick to hand the mic. Enjoy listening and watch the story you curated take the spotlight. It’s beautiful to see people meet someone they feel a connection with and the more we do this, the more often our interested introductions lead to a new, but lasting node within the startup community. More memories are made, others strengthened.

Overtime is always nice, but remember we must also keep moving to share time with others, especially when we’re hosting the networking event. The art of stepping away in style is an added real skill. As we read about in You Don’t Need This Book, this is handy when one conversation starts to monopolize time. To stand out, bring more people into the circle. Introduce everyone using this same method and watch the value swell. You then have the option to stick around or excuse yourself. Even if you leave the chat, your energy will remain a part of that new conversation as you mingle elsewhere. Another approach is to joke that it’s time for everyone to go meet more new people. This lighthearted suggestion is rewarded as connectors become connected and more people are invited to build relationships without always needing you in the room.

As these unique interactions are personified by emotion, mutual memories lay a foundation for true connection. When true connections show up, follow up, and keep adding diversity through a positive-sum mindset, the expansive value of a community can be realized.

By Ben McDougal, ago