Daydream Playbook Entry #3

For decades I’ve had an obsession with a progressive art-centric college that only operated for a couple of decades yet has stood the test of time in terms of being an incubator for creativity and collaboration across a multitude of artistic mediums and geographies – Black Mountain College, which was located near Asheville, NC. The school existed from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s and members of this artistic community included luminaries as diverse as Josef and Anni Albers, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, Ruth Asawa, Cy Twombly, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, and Buckminster Fullert.

The informal rallying cry at Black Mountain College has inspired the off-centered ideals of the Dogfish Head community since we opened our doors as the smallest commercial brewery in America over three decades ago: LEAP BEFORE YOU LOOK! It sounds counterintuitive, but it feels right. It feels invigorating, impulsive … but in the best, most rewarding way possible.  

If you are waiting for a neon sign to flash and say THIS IS THE RIGHT MOVE, you are going to be waiting a long time. We believe it's better to take risks and fail. To learn, to fall, to fail forward and get up. Learn from our mistakes and success, and fail and succeed again.  

Me and my talented community of coworkers have learned and continue to learn that trusting your instincts isn’t glamorous. It’s not cinematic. Most of the time it feels like standing in front of two doors, both slightly terrifying, and picking the one that makes your pulse jump a little faster.

Over the years at Dogfish, I’ve learned that instinct is about alignment. When something feels aligned with who we are and why we exist, the decision gets clearer. When it feels off, even if it looks like the safe-bet and impressive on paper, that’s usually my cue to slow down and work with our team to reconsider the right path forward.

We’ve had plenty of moments where accelerated growth opportunities were staring us in the face. Bigger deals. Faster expansion. More focus on high volume core beverage recipes and less focus on bespoke small batch experiments. Opportunities that would’ve made us look smart at a dinner party. And sometimes the instinct was to say yes. But other times the instinct was to say, not yet, or not that way. Because scaling at the expense of maintaining the soul of our off-centered brand is a trade-off we're not interested in making.

There’s a myth that good leadership means having all the answers; I think it’s the opposite. It’s about asking better questions and paying attention to the energy in the room. One of our rallying cries at Dogfish Head is: Our differences make us stronger. When our team lights up about an idea one of us brings to the table, when the brewers are geeking out on something no brewery has ever attempted before, when the creative crew starts riffing and nobody’s checking the clock, that’s instinct in action. You can feel it.  

On the flip side, if an idea requires too much convincing, too much forcing, too much spreadsheet gymnastics to make it look good, that’s usually a sign we are pushing something uphill that does not want to roll.

Instinct in business is really just accumulated experience plus honest self-awareness. It’s knowing what we stand for and what we don’t. It’s understanding that not every trend is our trend. It’s remembering that the long game beats the quick win almost every time. In life, it works the same way. The right move is rarely the easiest one; it’s the one that feels true, even if it is a little uncomfortable.

I still make mistakes – plenty of them. But I’d rather make a mistake chasing something that feels authentically Dogfish than succeed at something that feels like we borrowed somebody else’s playbook.

Your gut isn’t perfect. But if you feed it experience, humility, and a little courage, it becomes a pretty reliable compass. I wise man once said: You gotta know when to hold them, know when to fold them. Similarly, there are times when it makes sense to look before you leap. And there are times when it makes sense to leap before you look.  

-Sam