Creativity

Linchpin

We are often told that being extraordinary makes us special. We each write our own story in life, but as Neil deGrasse Tyson suggests, perhaps the sameness of our cosmic composition is what makes each of us fundamentally special from beginning to end. This eliminates the need for permission and actually invites us all to be remarkable.

The factory, which can be thought of as any existing organization with established systems, relies on profit margins and replaceable cogs that follow instructions to keep the vast machine churning. The factory was designed to maximize productivity during the Industrial Age, but in our connected era, factories are fading. Gone are the days of clocking in on time and keeping your head down just long enough to climb a ladder built to resist change. The factory worker’s willingness to play it safe may extend a sense of security, but this choice makes you easy to replace with cheaper labor, faster tools, and advancing technology.

In 2010, Seth Godin gave those who choose to be indispensable a name: linchpins. Linchpins are artists who go beyond mediocre. Linchpins solve interesting problems and make judgement calls without a map. They welcome weird. They are scientists who stay curious. They are generous and passionate about the art of connection. Through an inclusive, positive-sum lens, linchpins lead and let others lead without seeking credit. They are fearless in that they are unafraid of things they don’t need to be afraid of. Linchpins leave resumes behind by curating a body of work that transcends time. They keep building at the speed of trust and relentlessly #GiveFirst, knowing that accelerating others generates unmatched energy.

Cogs in a machine are replaceable and therefore can be paid less. When you are a linchpin, you leverage your own superpowers and get rewarded for creative expressions that are rooted in lasting purpose. The skills of a linchpin are hard to quantify with traditional metrics, but a willingness to bring your true genius to work is an open invitation. Over time, the linchpin’s art becomes meaningful to many, which makes work less about trading time for money. This also brews a centered state of indispensability, where nobody can compete with being you.

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“Leaders don’t get a map

or a set of rules. Living life

without a map requires a

different attitude. It requires

you to be a linchpin.” –Seth Godin

If indispensability is accessible to anyone, why doesn’t everyone accept the invitation to be wonderfully weird?

One primal reason is the indoctrination of an education system that was designed to produce factory workers. From an early age, we are brainwashed to pursue perfection, to color within the lines, to follow instructions, to care what others think, and to define success by worldly consumption.

Fortunately, progressive teachers are activating modern students to go beyond the system. Instead of molding obedient factory workers who hope to be taken care of by factories built on promises of the past, we can teach people to take initiative. To honestly assess Playforce Principles. To invite doubt and to solve interesting problems while leading with reverse charisma and confident humility.

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What makes you indispensable?

Whether fueling innovative action as an intrapreneur, diversifying your career portfolio with an inventive side hustle, or building as an entrepreneur, we may only live once, and life is too short not to enjoy your work.

Brewed From Within
#38 📖 Leadership

By Ben McDougal, ago

Head Start

The entrepreneurial lifestyle resists definition.

Business owners paint with strokes of curiosity, determination, and innovation. When people build with creative ambition, experience is valuable, but the symphony of desire and attitude plays an equally important role. It takes heart to start and resilience to execute early moves, manage focus, build teams, maintain sales, and provide lasting customer service to maintain momentum.

The best part about an entrepreneurial lifestyle is that it’s accessible to everyone. This can be seen as students explore projects that transcend the classroom. It’s intrapreneurs fueling positive change in existing companies. It’s startup founders achieving product-market fit with new ideas and others who acquire an established business.

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This contribution was written by Sheldon Ohringer. Along with helping us buy a business, Sheldon is an investor and board member who led large sales teams, developed acquisition programs, and as CEO took a technology company public.

Starting a brand new business is one way to explore the entrepreneurial lifestyle, but buying an existing business is also an interesting way to write your own story.

While there may be a higher cost for the head start, acquiring an existing business presents an interesting side door to the entrepreneurial lifestyle.

Organic growth is important, but there are added benefits in augmenting internal development with external acquisitions as well. As you consider a business to buy, avoid future headaches by understanding industry requirements, such as licenses, permits, zoning, and environmental requirements. As you work with existing ownership to determine a purchase price, a valuation based on capitalized earnings, excess earnings, cash flow, and tangible assets are all methods to guide fair negotiations. In the end, the right price is one that delights the seller and excites the buyer.

As details come together, partner with legal and accounting experts who focus on mergers and acquisitions (M&A) to document the transaction. A letter of intent, confidentiality agreement, contracts, leasing documents, financial statements, tax returns, and sales agreements are all important documents to talk with your M&A team about. Many transactions include a vesting schedule as well, so stay in tune with these details to avoid unwanted surprises.

There are a variety of strategic ways to acquire a business, but once the transition takes place, new owners are given keys to a kingdom that hails an established team, customer base, and operating procedures. As we see in the Exit section of the Results chapter in YDNTB, there will be challenges during these transitory times, but in the end, virtuous leaders listen to keep the culture balanced.

All the good that comes with a business is important to maintain, but an audit of negative aspects is important too. This focus on areas that need improvement is stressful, and concerned employees may exaggerate issues to make their own contribution seem important. To stay proportionate, talk with everyone for context, invite resolutions that may solve issues, get hands-on, and stay optimistic to keep your assessment honest and weighted against the big picture.

Searching and finding undervalued, cash-flow businesses may take time, but it serves as a viable alternative to growing a business from scratch. Intentional candor with areas to improve allows new owners to build on past success while charting a renewed vision for lasting prosperity.

Brewed From Within
#29 📖 Entrepreneurship

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

ArtOfficial

Art for art’s sake is vital to humanity and innovation.

We need fine artists and creatives who do not conform, who lead even when no one else follows. The calculated confusion we experience in contemporary, experimental, and abstract art pushes boundaries so that ideas, styles, and ways of thinking can emerge. Immersing ourselves in these misunderstood realms trains us to trust strangeness. What feels unfamiliar today often becomes inevitable tomorrow.

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This contribution was written by Siobhan Spain. Siobhan developed a new financially self-sustaining nonprofit model providing affordable creative workspace to over 200 artists of all disciplines in downtown Des Moines, Iowa. She now consults, podcasts about nonprofit ecosystems, and owns an arts licensing agency.

Practicing artists see potential before there’s proof. They have a high tolerance for risk and are willing to invest years of invisible labor while operating with restricted resources.

Artists and founders both shape how people think, feel, or behave. The divergence comes in their relationship to the market. Founders must satisfy a market need; ignoring users is fatal. Artists, meanwhile, can deliberately resist or ignore market signals. This alienation can become the feature rather than a flaw.

Then there’s the question of success and perceived impact. Founders are validated externally: users, revenue, growth. Artists answer to internal measures: mastery of a medium, conceptual rigor, or making work that holds personal meaning.

In the contemporary art world, a purist code of practice is common. “Selling out” is to be avoided at all costs, lest the merit of both artist and artwork be compromised. Selling out can mean creating work primarily for aesthetic beauty or mainstream appeal; heaven forbid it be mass-produced.

The commercialization of fine art often inverts traditional capitalist values, where financial success is viewed as a betrayal of artistic integrity. However, communities that prioritize robust creative ecosystems recognize artists and creatives as powerful drivers for economic development, cultural identity, innovation, and social cohesion.

They foster diverse economic and social opportunities in which titles, race, career, and socio-economic status dissolve into a culture of curiosity and inspiration that spark cross-disciplinary collaborations that benefit artists, companies, and civic entities alike.

As these sectors blend a financially sustainable infrastructure is now possible, motivating artists to lean into their creative visions with a sense of purpose.

Artists are critical thinkers who imagine what does not yet exist. They collaborate to form solutions before markets know to ask for them. They rehearse cultural shifts, test narratives, and expand our collective tolerance for the unknown.

Artists show us how to use emerging tools, including AI, with intention rather than conformity.

When artists stop being an afterthought and start being recognized as founders with foresight, viable economic pathways emerge, cultural relevance deepens, and irreplaceable talents can be engaged by all.

Brewed From Within
#37 📖 Leadership

By Ben McDougal, ago

Creation vs. Consumption

Before the music, before the crowd, there’s one voice asking a simple question: Can you hear me? Creation starts here. Not with a perfect line or the finished song. But with the smallest test of presence.

EXTRA SHOT
This contribution was written by Corey Dion Lewis. Corey is a leader in healthcare who creates impact networks where care is equitable and shared far beyond the clinic.

Creation over consumption sounds like a slogan, but for most of us it’s a balancing act. Consumption is how we learn from the world around us. It’s also a comforting remedy that helps us reset. This supplement for the soul keeps us tranquil, but in excess consumption mutates into a drug devoured by a subconscious addiction.

We are all imaginative, and being creative makes us happier, but we live in a world where algorithms reward spectators. This has us scrolling, watching, and absorbing everybody else’s thoughts, pain, and opinions before we check in with our own. This does something to our mind, and it’s not neutral. Consumption without creation leads to overload. The American Psychological Association reports that heavy, unfiltered exposure to news and digital content is associated with higher stress, anxiety, and burnout. There’s just too much coming in. This feeds unfair comparisons. Suddenly, everyone else’s life is your own measuring stick. We start to feel like our voice, our story, and our unique angles do not matter as much as the polished content we continuously consume.

As the emcee of your own life, there’s no time to hope someone hands you the mic. We must choose ourselves, make sacrifices to unite an audience, step into the light, and even when our voice is untested, speak to add energy into the room. Whether we succeed or learn, such personal progression brings us to life as we feel the thrill of creation.

That is mental health in action. When we create, we regulate. When we speak, we release. When we name what we feel, it loses some of its power over us. Pressure turns into expression. More thoughts, often the hard and heavy ones, become art. The sounds, images, pages, and other multidimensional content become part of our creative practice. Creation is the path to descriptively understand systems, parts, processes, and how we make things better.

The beauty is, it doesn’t have to be dramatic or impressive. Drawing, even badly, reduces stress and eases anxiety. Gardening can do the same. Cooking with intention—chopping, seasoning, tasting—pulls you into the present. All forms of creativity ask your brain to be active, engaged, and creative. This produces positive emotions.

Creation builds a sense of mastery and progress. This strengthens self-esteem and resilience. It gives you a channel for self-expression, so emotions and experiences are being worked with, not just numbed by distractions. Over time, crafted creations become the highlights of your stories. These bookmarks add depth to future moments and drive toward a joyful side of our own mental health continuum.

While consumption can bump our spirits more toward a depressive state, the goal is not zero consumption. Some of what you consume is nourishing. It feeds your ideas, your learning, and your rest. The balancing act is spending more of your day making, expressing, and contributing than you do scrolling, binging, or buying.

We don’t have to change everything overnight. We don’t need a ten-step plan or a perfect morning routine. We need one small moment each day where we choose to create instead of consume—one page, one sketch, one idea voiced, one boundary set, one feeling named. Creation over consumption is not a rule; it’s a relationship we build with our own voice. Express one true thing in your own way, knowing we need you and await your creations.

Brewed From Within
#97 📖 Life & Happiness

By Ben McDougal, ago