Brewed From Within

Goodnight Moon

Star parties assemble people who are curious about the cosmos. Let’s set the scene. Imagine a remote place with dark skies and very little light pollution. Each campsite includes 1–3 telescopes. The astronomy equipment ranges from homemade to expensive. There are scopes made for visual observations and others geared for astrophotography.

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Explore my cosmic creations.

Daylight is relaxing, but the heavenly show starts as the sun begins to set and the first observations kickoff an evening of exploration. Tonight, our first stop is our own setting moon. From there, we spin the scopes to target a transitory comet. Planets in our solar system are next, then we go deeper. Globular clusters form dimensional shapes, with distant galaxies that look like eraser marks on black paper. The Milky Way can be seen all night, as constellations help star gazers navigate the rotating sky.

Space is for everyone, and astronomy makes everything feel small. Star parties remind us how we are all weird. Not an alienating type of weird, a wonderful weird that bonds people who care about anything together.

Brewed From Within
#106 📖 Life & Happiness

By Ben McDougal, ago

Real Skills

Talent is natural.
Skills are learned.

Instead of abstracting, even nerfing the value of what makes us indispensable by using terms like soft skills or power skills, “real skills” invite the new reality. Knowledge, action, and persistence are still required, but real skills help us connect, communicate, and collaborate as we pursue peculiar work fueled by significance in our connected era.

As Seth Godin writes about, real skills help students, founders, intrapreneurs, and people-centric organizations activate humans working toward shared understandings. This updated term removes the optional vibes out of subtle superpowers that help us go beyond the status quo. To close his 2023 manifesto for teams, The Song of Significance, Godin shares this working encyclopedia of categorized real skills.

SELF-CONTROL

Adaptability to changing requirements
Agility in the face of unexpected obstacles
Alacrity and the ability to start and stop quickly
Authenticity and consistent behavior
Bouncing back from failure
Coach-ability and the desire to coach others
Collaborative mindset
Compassion for those in need
Competitiveness
Conscientiousness in keeping promises
Customer service passion
Eagerness to learn from criticism
Emotional intelligence
Endurance for the long haul
Enthusiasm for the work
Ethics even when not under scrutiny
Etiquette
Flexibility
Friendliness
Honesty
Living in balance
Managing difficult conversations
Motivated to take on new challenges
Passionate
Posture for forward motion
Purpose
Quick-wittedness
Resilience
Risk-taking
Self-awareness
Self-confidence
Sense of humor
Strategic thinking taking priority over short-term gamesmanship
Stress management
Tolerance of change & uncertainty

PRODUCTIVITY

Attention to detail
Crisis management skills
Decision-making with effectiveness
Delegation for productivity
Diligence and attention to detail
Entrepreneurial thinking and guts
Facilitation of discussion
Goal-setting skills
Innovative problem-solving techniques
Lateral thinking
Lean techniques
Listening skills
Managing up
Meeting hygiene
Planning for projects
Problem-solving
Research skills
Technology savvy
Time management
Troubleshooting

WISDOM

Artistic sense and good taste
Conflict resolution instincts
Creativity in the face of challenges
Critical thinking instead of mere compliance
Dealing with difficult people
Diplomacy in difficult situations
Empathy for customers, co-workers, and vendors
Intercultural competence
Mentoring
Social skills
Supervising with confidence

PERCEPTION

Design thinking
Fashion instinct
Judging people and situations
Mapmaking
Strategic thinking

INFLUENCE

Ability to deliver clear, useful criticism
Assertiveness on behalf of ideas that matter
Body language (reading and delivering)
Charisma and skills to influence others
Clarity in language and vision
Dispute-resolution skills
Giving feedback without ego
Influence
Inspiring to others
Interpersonal skills
Leadership
Negotiation skills
Networking
Persuasive
Presentation skills
Public speaking
Reframing
Selling skills
Storytelling
Talent management
Team building
Writing for impact

What a provoking collection of conversation starters! This encyclopedia is a guiding light for when we are being honest with our own abilities, filling gaps on the team, considering session topics for an event, or working to reform educational curriculum. Special thanks to Seth Godin for granting permission to share these real skills as they were written. Real skills are regularly updated to meet emerging demands as well.

Let’s add inclusivity, curiosity, showing up, content creation, systems thinking, accelerating others through the art of connection, identifying founder-market fit, thinking big, mindfulness, following up, pure wonder, and having fun.

What will you brew into the mix?

Brewed From Within
#13 📖 Entrepreneurship

By Ben McDougal, ago

Uncertainty

Comfort with the unknown is not common. Uncertainty feels heavy when we’re not used to the mental weight. This makes juggling uncertainty a healthy exercise. Start with small things that don’t matter. Let the chef select your dinner, say yes without a plan, or try new ways to stand out at a public event.

What’s the point of such preparation? The freedom to build your own reality requires sacrifice, and the sense of certainty holds us back from where we want to be.

This appears to be dramatic, but when it comes to our work, certainty is often an illusion contrived by the industrial age. The “safe” position in an existing organization is one decision away from a broken promise. The employee’s willingness to play it safe may extend a sense of temporary security, but that choice makes anyone easy to replace with cheaper labor, faster tools, and advancing technology.

Reliable outcomes seem safe, but indispensability thrives when comfort zones are expanded. This does not mean irrational decisions loaded with risk. This is showing up, keeping a promise, and remaining consistent to honor the time we have on stage. It’s feeling what others cannot see. It’s inviting a challenge, gradually leaning into what’s hard, and coordinating momentum, even when uncertainties exist.

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Comfort in the unknown creates space
to see potential cloaked by uncertainty.

As we find rhythm by sequencing simple steps, more complicated moves can be introduced. With practice, contentment combined with confidence will have us dancing with the uncertainties that hold others back.

Brewed From Within
#92 📖 Life & Happiness

By Ben McDougal, ago

Tinker

When technology moves so fast, we’ll always feel behind, but that is your invitation to tinker.

Instead of letting the unknown scare us, we can use curiosity to prompt action. Even when life feels occupied by existing responsibilities, there’s more room to push further. To prove it, hold your arm as high as you can. Now, hold your arm higher!

Tinkering requires initiative. Thankfully, we all have extra gears to avoid feeling like we left something on the table. Yes, the barriers of busy are unavoidable, comfortable feels safe, and easy is nice. But why not turn a few knobs to let that idea breathe, to see your idea twinkle in the wild.

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An early no beats a long, wrong yes.

It’s amazing how much happens by showing up and activating a few early moves. When we accept an invitation to tinker, financial capital can speed things up, but time is required to make something exist.

While more of everything will be needed to make it better, thinking about commercialization as being a season of exploration versus a strategic goal reduces weight and welcomes smaller steps toward progress.

If you’re having a hard time finding inspiration or if excuses keep you saying someday, avoid isolation and force yourself into environments where others are tinkering too. Activity within a startup community can provide energizing human, intellectual, and network capital. Conferences are cool, but when was the last time you attended a multi-day, hands-on hackathon? Classrooms, skill-building workshops, industry groups, maker spaces, coworking, and networking events also have people tinkering together.

As you create more than you consume around others doing the same, you’ll find energy, direction, and opportunities. You’ll feel less alone, surprise yourself, push past barriers, and collide with people able to help.

Whether it’s at home or in public, tinkering celebrates pure wonder and will nourish your innovative spirit. Even if the answer is no, at least you’ll know.

Brewed From Within
#69 📖 Technology

By Ben McDougal, ago

Hiatus

The calculated hiatus can nourish a leader and provide a waiting room to equip us for the next creative season.

Regardless of how you define a centered state, intentional stillness commemorates what’s been accomplished, keeps us in the moment, and adds fresh perspective on what needs to come next. This form of hibernating can also refocus a team or provide space for an entire community to recharge.

When a sense a flow is felt, time away can feel like a waste of time. When a light hibernation is thoughtful, benefits outweigh the time away. If a hiatus is only an excuse to avoid the work, then, yes, worthless wandering is a trap. It can actually devolve into a dangerous habit and can easily become an excuse that feels like self-care but stifles progress, which leads to more pain. Unless it’s time to quit, even a short hiatus should be used to rejuvenate your return.

What about an extended hiatus? This could be time away, setting a project aside, or even taking breaks in a relationship. When things get tough or positive momentum starts to fade, it’s tempting to avoid reality by pushing pause. This may keep things afloat, but it’s often a lackadaisical move to avoid reality, which may include the challenges of calling it quits.

If an extended hiatus is truly strategic, the time should feel restful and build confidence as rearranged resources add renewed motivation. If this time is wasted, a false restart can be hard to recover from and will further expose what always needed to change. If a hiatus is an excuse to dodge blame, instead of being fainthearted, perhaps the illusion of an endless break should be replaced with a more disciplined effort to make the bigger decision.

The length of any hiatus is relevant and so are the people you spend time with during a break. Lone wolves can make their own decision without dissent, but without feedback from customers, mentors, and fellow community members, solopreneurs may not see the bigger picture.

When more contributors are impacted, a hiatus becomes complex. If only a few people decide on behalf of many, it’s easy for the decision to be rooted in that gang’s own situation. The more stakeholders, the more thoughtful this needs to be to ensure your well-being and what’s best for everyone.

When leaders feel significant, promises are kept and more people are set free to lead.

As we lead together, limitations of some won’t compromise the prosperity of many. This agency supports creativity, enrollment, and honesty between leaders who collectively decide when a healthy hiatus will be most invigorating now, and also stretch long-term endurance down the road.

Brewed From Within
#66 📖 Leadership

By Ben McDougal, ago