Sam Calagione - Co.llaboration

Cover image and design: Dogfish Head Craft Brewery

Copyright 2016 by Sam Calagione. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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ISBN 978-1-119-14169-3 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-119-14170-9 (ebk);

ISBN 978-1-119-14171-6 (ebk)

This book is dedicated to all of the leaders, past and present, who have helped Dogfish Head grow into the strong, off-centered company we are today; especially Nick Benz, Todd Bollig, Mariah Calagione, Cindy Dunson, Tim Hawn, and Neal Stewart.
Namaste!

For me, art that's alive and urgent is art that's about what it is to be a human being. And whether one is a human being in times of enormous profundity and depth and challenge, or one is trying to be a human being in times that appear to be shallow and commercial and materialistic, really isn't all that relevant to the deeper project. The deeper project is: what is it to be human?

David Foster Wallace

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes.

Robert Frost, Two Tramps in Mud Time

Sitting in the driver's seat of my new used muscle car, paintbrush in hand, the sound of the throaty engine music to my ears, I began painting the words Go Slowly, Go Thoughtfully in bright-red acrylic paint on the center of my steering wheel.

Just before I turned 46, my grandmother Jessie passed away at the glorious age of 96. She had run a small business with her husband, Sam, and had been a great inspiration to me. As I thought about her life, I figured if my grandmother lived to the age of 96, then it was certainly reasonable to assume I could live to be, say, 92 if I started taking better care of myself, stopped stressing out so much, and stopped trying to do so many new things so quickly.

Go slowly, go thoughtfully.

So I decided to treat my 46th birthday as my definitive midlife momentthe unofficial halfway mark of my journey along this mortal coiland celebrate this existential milestone memorably with gusto.

I traded in my sensible used Volvo sedan for a 500-horsepower three-year-old Dodge Challenger Super Bee. This isn't just any muscle car. It's the newer iteration of my boyhood dream car that I have thought about since I was a six-year-old doodling the earlier model upon my grade school textbooks back in the late 1970s.

I bought the car on my 46th birthday and within just two months had to bring it in for service twice. The mechanic explained that the car's big-ass engine (mechanic's term originally, now mine as well) needed more time to warm up than normal, much smaller engines do; I couldn't just jam the car into drive and peel out.

Hence, the go slowly reminder. And the go thoughtfully part is to remind me not to check my phone for any reason while driving. To focus on the present, the task at hand, and to enjoy the journey.

This is me in my new used car wearing the road-mullet wig I keep in my car to embarrass my wife when I peel out incognito.

This reminder, to go slowly and go thoughtfully, now emblazoned on my steering wheel, has also become the mantra for the thoroughly enjoyable, illuminating, and challenging personal and vocational midlife crossroads I find myself navigating. Like my engine, I am warming up to the notion that I can't move as fast and take as many risks with myself or my company as I did a couple of decades ago when we were both much younger.

Within a few weeks of my birthday, Dogfish Head celebrated a milestone as well: our 20th anniversary as the first brewpub in the first state. I figured if I were going to treat 46 as a halfway point in my personal life, it would also make sense (at least to me) to treat the 20th anniversary of the company I founded as the halfway mark of my role within this company. Thus, I reasoned, Dogfish Head would be the only company I would ever work for. Why? Because I love what I do and I love the people I have gotten to know as coworkers and beer lovers throughout the two decades of my entrepreneurial journey. But I also realized that to be the most beneficial to the company, my role at Dogfish Head over the next 20 years needed to be different than the type of work I did during the first 20 years. In a word, I needed to evolve. The work priorities and habits I had relied on in those first 20 years could not sustainably remain the same for the next 20.

To commemorate, capture, and internalize this epiphany, I got a tattoo.

Like the famous line spoken by Blanche DuBois in the play A Streetcar NamedDesire, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers. At the heart of Dogfish Head's exploration of goodness is our off-centered version of the golden rulealways aspire to do for others as you would want others to do for you. With the help of hundreds of amazing, talented coworkers past and present, we have succeeded in building a company focused on producing the types of beers, spirits, food, events, and spaces that we envisioned other creative, adventurous, rebellious people would want to experience, engage with, and rally around.