Overtime

Meaningful moments form faster without an agenda.

When communication is graded by productivity, meetings, pre-planned talking points, goals, and recorded remains, there is mysterious value in extended conversations that have purpose but no end goal.

Extended discussions create space to pass interesting anecdotes, opportunities, and unforeseen knowledge grenades. While it’s uncommon, consider how bonus time connects friends who simply haven’t met yet.

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Many people are oversubscribed. When being busy makes us feel important, the illusion leaves less room to uncover peculiar variety.

Long-term leaders expand minds while tightening impact networks along the way. Respect the extra time required, but invite these verbal volleys and when asked to go into overtime, stay thirsty and see what happens.

Brewed From Within
#49 📖 Leadership

By Ben McDougal, ago

Collide

Education can be less about compliance and more about painting a reality for indispensable students who do not need permission to color outside the lines, build without a map, embrace wonderment, and never fear the beauty of their own inextinguishable light.

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Students do not need permission to build on the timeline of now.

Whether it’s rethinking career day in elementary school, high school students flexing innovative muscles earlier, or college students earning a degree while also building a profitable business, the education system is becoming more than just a machine to produce factory workers. Students must still learn to play the game of school, but it’s not all about following rules, good grades, and earning that expensive piece of paper to work for someone else.

Students become leaders when an educational system welcomes the weird. No matter the age, curiosity and initiative are required to go beyond the status quo, but that happens more often when students are introduced to the opportunities of an entrepreneurial lifestyle.

The future of education is providing a safe space to learn how to learn. To explore knowledge, different cultures, social interactions, and activities that feel like play to us but look like work to others. Along with activating students in the classroom, invaluable insights await educators who prioritize activity outside the walls of a school. Participating within a startup community is often seen as extra effort for educators already asked to do so much, but there is ease in leveraging community members eager to share experiential wisdom in the wild as well as back inside the classroom.

As we keep things interesting by colliding students with founders and intrapreneurs, educational organizations infuse recurring energy into startup communities and entrepreneurial ecosystems. Ongoing collaboration is required between educators and community builders, but as lines blur between classrooms and community, students are introduced to reality.

When students are set free to paint their own future in ways that transcend a class, school feels less like day care. A thirst for conformity can be replaced with curricula that rewards pure wonder and life-long learning for students of all ages.

Brewed From Within
#55 📖 Leadership

By Ben McDougal, ago

2 Hours

Greg Horowitt is a social architect and pracademic. He is an accomplished entrepreneur, investor and global advisor. I always knew of Greg because he co-authored The Rainforest with Victor Hwang. After years of learning from Victor, I decided it was time to connect with the other half of this intellectual equation. I reached out to Greg and he was generous enough to setup a time to chat. We had no agenda, but ended up talking together for two hours!

This extended discussion allowed me to enjoy fun anecdotes about a bestseller so many entrepreneurial ecosystem builders have on their bookshelf. I learned about Greg’s innovation design role at UC San Diego and his upcoming book about the religion of innovation too. We riffed on entrepreneurship, venture capital, innovation ecosystems, complex adaptive systems, how humans think, economic development, the speed of trust and how storytelling brings everything together. Here is a Twitter thread with our photo and a few more memorable moments, but having Greg Horowitt lob knowledge grenades my way was such a treat.

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Meaningful discussions can form faster without an agenda.

This enlightening interaction has me reflecting on how a hint of initiative unlocked another cool connection. Also, how that extra hour gave Greg and I time to discuss a variety of topics with space for this thoughtful exploration to go deeper. Look at your bookshelf or social media feed. All of us have giants we’d love to meet. Do you seek out learning sessions with people you admire? How might a significant conversation evolve if you give it an extra hour to develop?

We’re all busy, sure, but a peculiar conversation is rarely a waste of time. Perhaps it’s only done occasionally, but more cerebral conversations allow us to go beyond protecting our knowledge with fancy jargon. Perpetual learning with a coexisting effort to accelerate others will release innovative energy that sparks creativity and reveals a path to deconstructed understanding.

By Ben McDougal, ago