Life & Happiness

Gimmies

Golf is a walk in the park with a small objective. If gimmies are illegal, why are conceded putts common?

What’s the harm in an unquestioned finish? Does picking up that “unmissable” putt really save much time? There are unspoken social factors at play, but so few people are great at golf. Why not relish a satisfying sound of that golf ball dropping into the tiny cup?

Extra Shot

May your feet stay in the fairway.

There’s no harm in keeping things casual to share time however you want, but tacit assumptions do leave room for misunderstandings. The truth is we all give gimmies to be given a break on putts we might miss ourselves.

When we keep score, see how it feels to play without gimmies. Appreciate the missed putts and count those extra strokes. The unequivocal finish feels good and builds confidence for when gifts aren’t up for grabs.

Brewed From Within
#110 📖 Life & Happiness

BONUS CONTEXT
Along with enjoying golf, I’ve created cinematic art at Glen Oaks Country Club since 2014. This calming header image was commissioned as a large-format canvas inside the clubhouse and is titled Lavender Finish.

By Ben McDougal, ago

Anxiety

The mind is divine. It gives us superpowers, and the dots we electrochemically connect make us human. Such capacity allows us to achieve extraordinary things. At the same time, this mysterious grey matter can also hold us back and even cause havoc.

Anxiety is assuming failure in advance. As a mental cousin to fear, anticipation, worrying, and perhaps even desire, anxiety is like an unspoken agreement you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.This exhausting emotion is all in your head, yet the way anxiety affects your body is absolutely real.

For those who pursue greatness, the more we try to achieve, the tighter we wind the strings of life. When harnessed, this fuels strength, creativity, grit, and persistence. As the tension tightens, however, something is bound to break. Healthy habits and being mindful of your personal bandwidth reduces the frequency and severity of such breakdowns, but with the relentless pressure from never-ending progress, it seems impossible to completely avoid disquiet.

The most common way we attempt to manage such angst is to stop the pain by seeking reassurance. The nourishment of overthinking every scenario in an unknown future may satisfy the moment, but scratching this itch usually makes things worse. Even if we answer every possible question, the willingness to indulge the worry sets a precedent that keeps you coming back to what can become an endless loop.

An alternate approach is to acknowledge the suffering. Don’t run from it. Appreciate the relentless internal narrative you’re dealing with. Breathe. Be thankful for having something you care this much about. Find peace in knowing you’ve done your best to tip odds in your favor, but invite doubt and welcome an opportunity to be wrong. The anxiety is here and it’s dramatic, but it’s also normal. Let thoughts float by, focus your attention on what’s good, and allow time to heal the pain. Yes, this is like letting a forest fire burn without soothing it with water. It will get wild at first, but it eventually burns itself out. The scorched land is then ripe for renewal and less likely to burn again.

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Accepting that anxiety is inevitable may be a secret to finding equanimity.

By acknowledging anxiety, clarifying awareness helps us understand, even appreciate, the energy. This breaks the cycle and reduces the frequency of such misery. Courage over fear also adds an eagerness to lean on support systems, confirms confidence in how the pain will pass, and allows the mind to stay centered with less climactic swings.

Brewed From Within
#96 📖 Life & Happiness

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 zone. The pause before your name gets called. The place where you’re preparing for something, whether or not you think you know what’s next.

If we move our egos aside just long enough, we can 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 on their journeys. You don’t know where they’ve been, 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 nine-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 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 must pass through it. These pause points aren’t punishments; they’re where we catch our breath, integrate what we’ve learned, and prepare for what’s coming. To often, we take this wait personally. Like it’s evidence we’re not good enough, not ready enough, not deserving enough. We get frustrated. Resentful. Sometimes we even give up.

But your job is 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 helps us transform 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.

Brewed From Within
#97 📖 Life & Happiness

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 to use multimedia marketing skills to summon family stories.

Every moment is special. As creation becomes an acquired behavior, we can stitch together memories for our children to revisit interactively, any time, with or without us. We all have an endless collection of photos and videos on our smartphones, but scrolling around on a digital device does not translate into something a group can enjoy together. It’s easy for anything to get lost in so much noise. Spoken storytelling is always appreciated, but why not paint our most treasured stories with a few added brushes?

You can create quiet relics like photo slideshows, something that sits 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 art. In the early days of photos and video, recording family time was reserved for birthdays and Christmas; now, every day is a holiday. You don’t 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 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 organizing and producing such heartfelt content. Share this beauty in public if you want, but that can alter the art if it becomes performative. Do this for yourself and your favorite people first. Organize the massive library offline, then, if you want to play with the transitory channels of social media, that’s a personal choice.

Tracking neural activity patterns and electronic brain scans may retrieve memories without physically capturing content in the future. For now, it’s up to us to coordinate personal storytelling. Fortunately, compiling your own heritage is amusing and assembles positive emotions along the way.

This special interest becomes second nature as we enhance our own real skills to commemorate those we love. Technology can make editing content 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 a low view counts but will always be your favorite. Looking ahead, imagine being a child right now, then receiving such a thoughtful collection from your 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 the gift this inbox will be in the future! This email address can be shared and used for online accounts, but at a minimum, this tailored inbox curates a personalized time machine full of thoughtful updates.

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. Your gift can personalize an email address or support a personal website someday.

Avoid Routine

“Time flies” and “They grow up so fast” are 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.

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What’s your favorite parenting tip?

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.

Brewed From Within
#118 📖 Life & Happiness

By Ben McDougal, ago

Endowment

Leaving a legacy seems to motivate those who change the world. This leads to prolific focus and lasting ambition, but the psychological undertones are real.

Subconsciously needing to be loved, trying to counter death anxiety, and equating our legacy to symbolic immortality can slip toward self-centered intentions. A decorated life is legendary to the person living it, but a dilated ego becomes burdensome. This mental weight holds us back from living in the moment. It belittles simple pleasures. It fuels a fear of failure and disguises invigorating initiative by equating movement to risk. When the idea of leaving a legacy starts to echo a desire to be famous, impossible expectations harbor misery and unavoidable disappointment.

The entrepreneurial lifestyle is guided by leaders who create more than we consume, but there is freedom for those who are not engrossed with the hope of being remembered.

This may feel like an assault on the impacts we make or a wicked invitation to be complacent, but it’s neither. It’s forgiveness and a liberating release to keep building.

Brewed From Within
#124 📖 Life & Happiness

By Ben McDougal, ago