Trust

Significance

Most of us seek peace, love, and significance.
All can be achieved by offering each to others.

Visions, missions, and titles guide teams in a shared direction, but linchpins want work that matters, and culture outshines even the most thoughtful strategy.

The race to revenue makes it easy to see why we’ve been seduced by surveillance, predictable profit margins, and forced productivity. Too often, the easy metrics borrowed from such compliance are the ones that get measured. This leads to endless meetings geared toward delivering information, avoiding blame, and asserting authority for those in charge.

The illusion is that control will lead to predictable results thanks to a maximization of resources. The problem is, humans are not a resource.

Extra Shot

Are your meetings led by a few people talking and most pretending to pay attention? Perhaps it’s time to get real by inviting the team to lead together.

Leaders who make a difference welcome tension from those who make a ruckus. We nurture initiative, even when results aren’t perfect. This creates enrollment, where enthusiasm is met with consistent action. Promises that are kept lead to progress, which makes intentional permeability easier to execute. When everyone on a team is proud of the impact they make, roles are better understood, contributions last longer, and appreciated energy would be missed if it were gone. This is work worth doing, and it sounds like a symphonic choir when everyone on a team is given a voice to sing their own song of significance.

Brewed From Within
#39 📖 Leadership

By Ben McDougal, ago

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.

Extra Shot

“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.

Extra Shot

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

Aphorism

Personal truths around life, health, wealth, and happiness evolve from entrepreneurial endeavors. As our own truths evolve alongside an observant mindset, learning to clearly articulate thoughts is transformative.

Knowing oneself can be parlayed with mindful aging to create more heartfelt conversations. How we explore big ideas depends on the environment, people you interact with, and knowledge you pursue.

The pursuit of building a business causes people to be more contemplative about other aspects of life. This makes me thankful for my own entrepreneurial experiences but, more important, for the immeasurable blessing it can be to expand our minds by plugging into startup communities and entrepreneurial ecosystems.

A willingness to show up and the trust built through such generosity allows leaders to become a part of so many other startup stories. As mentioned throughout YDNTB, consistent action over the long run is required, but insight learned along the way provides a path to understanding for anyone, on almost any front.

As we support entrepreneurs through the art of connection, the invitation to have more diverse discussions is unlocked more often. Whether it’s strategic, tactical, or philosophical, what a gift toward open-mindedness this becomes.

Adam Grant reminds us that, along with the value of stimulating conversations with agreeable peers in a support network, it’s also important to weave in the perspectives from a challenge network.

Extra Shot

Smart people change their minds all the time. Discovering you were wrong and are now less wrong can feel charming. This is not incompetency. It’s being honest, respectful, and willing to grow.

Challenge networks consist of disagreeable people we trust to point out blind spots. This helps to overcome weaknesses with feedback we may not want but need.

The peculiar interactions within a challenge network also unlock humbling opportunities to be wrong. This intellectual humility helps avoid misguided confidence and brings us closer to different forms of truth.

Brewed From Within
#51 📖 Leadership

By Ben McDougal, ago

Blurring Lines

Welcome back to Wisconsin! Ben McDougal was visiting UW Stevens Point to deliver You Don’t Need This Keynote at the 2024 Think Like an Entrepreneur event. As part of a wonderful whirlwind, he visited a local coworking and makerspace to record this special “In The Wild” episode.

Kevin Neuman leads the way as Assistant Dean within the Sentry School of Business and Economics at UW Stevens Point, while Christopher Klesmith is the Neighborhood Planner at the City of Stevens Point. Special thanks to Dr. Elizabeth Martin for coordinating such a unique collision between ecosystem allies!

Together, we discuss how placemaking connects with higher education and how entrepreneurial ecosystems can integrate students. We also celebrate agility within the future of work, ask what is school for, discuss collaboration between educational institutions, and close by solving the power paradox. EP54 is a timeless reminder for those who are blurring the lines between the classroom and community, which paints a reality that activates innovative ways for leaders to interface with the world.

LISTEN on APPLE PODCASTS
LISTEN on SPOTIFY

By Ben McDougal, ago

Conspicuous Kindness

These two hours between Elon Musk and Lex Fridman was fascinating. During their opening examination of war, Elon was sharing peculiar ways to deescalate tension with “conspicuous kindness”. This term caught my ear and has me wondering if the winds of outrage are human nature, perhaps conspicuous kindness can help us heal the future?

Conspicuous kindness feels empathetic, but not without boundaries. Like a vibe that welcomes other vibes. It keeps hope evolving, but everyone experiences the world differently. Consistency may be what people want in business, but the discipline to stay centered is challenged by constant change and history makes it hard to imagine world peace. Acts of conspicuous kindness are seen everyday, but what happens when conflict tests humanity?

We may long for a cosmic utopia where peace and progress co-exist, but reality can always be altered as long as humans play by different rules. Not rules based on objective truth, but the dynamic personal and political truths of mankind. Such variety of imbalance combined with endless complexity makes global alignment ostensibly impossible. While interplanetary travel may someday reduce geopolitical stress, when survival feels at stake, desperation sets in. Anonymity without kindness devolves into animosity and isolation fuels fear that can apparently justify begrudging rage.

Fortunately, life on earth has long been resilient.
Unfortunately, any single planet has limitations.

With over 8 billion humans all consuming finite resources and our species altering the earth like never before, conflict may be inevitable. If we know it’s coming, can the kindness we teach children be extended into our shared experience? What equilibrium must be achieved to make everyone feel thankful, happy, motivated, and significant?

Kindness cannot be the only answer, but it feels like part of an equation where we collectively assume positive intent, welcome the opportunity to be wrong, appreciate healthy debates without regret, and let others lead.

If versions of vulnerability are necessary, how can we lean into conspicuous kindness without being taking advantage of? If you saw how Lex and Elon interacted with xAI in the interview that prompted this writing, you may be reminded of how BEN BOT contributes in You Don’t Need This Podcast! This is pure human, but let’s brew in an interesting response from our conversational companion.

“I believe that leaning into conspicuous kindness without being taken advantage of starts with setting boundaries and expectations. It is important to be clear about what you are willing and not willing to do, and to communicate this to those around you. Additionally, it is important to be mindful of the intentions of those you are interacting with and to trust your instincts. If something feels off, it’s okay to take a step back and re-evaluate the situation. Finally, it is important to remember that kindness does not have to mean weakness; it is possible to be kind and firm at the same time.” –BEN BOT

As we rebound to human wisdom on such a heavy topic, my dad reminded me of how people’s life experiences impact innate responses. Has trust been broken before? Are there generational activities that seem destine to create tension? When distrust has been woven into the history of any interaction, good will can feel unfathomable.

Perhaps when kindness feels this
removed, is when it’s needed most.

By Ben McDougal, ago