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- Build Relationships Worth Dropping Everything For: My Top JUST PRESS RECORD '24 Moment #2
Build Relationships Worth Dropping Everything For: My Top JUST PRESS RECORD '24 Moment #2
feat. Cara Brookins and Rusty Guinn
Matt Zeigler
January 07, 2025
You can’t be real friends with everybody in the world. There’s a boundary. A line between your acquaintances and the people you’re truly close with.
But, you can still be friendly with the world. You kind of have to. Because the way you prove your friendliness, your openness to putting care and concern for those beyond yourself out there, is to welcome the reality of relationships, of all sorts of levels, into your life.
You have to believe in those relationships. You have to signal your desire for them. You have to look for others who get it too and say hello.
I wanted to introduce Cara Brookins to Rusty Guinn for a whole host of reasons. There’s the writing/book authoring angle, the tech/programming/user perspectives, but most of all, there were the stories of the homes they’ve each built.
Not just the physical homes either, the setting each home creates.
Cara’s got her built-with-her-kids-via-YouTube estate, and Rusty’s got his restored to now functioning apple orchard, but they’re both places of people. They’re places of intentions. They’re places of designed meaning.
Meaning is born of experiences, and experiences are born of time spent with others.
Without others too. Which is how Rusty opens the #2 clip,
“Always go to the funeral.” It has a lofty concept, but it’s also a very literal concept, which is “If you’re ever wondering whether to go to the funeral, go to the funeral.” And I think it could probably be augmented to say, “If you’re ever wondering whether to go to the 8-minute speech your friend is giving 8-hours away, go.”
Curiosity is a question about commitment. If you’re curious about something, it’s your subconscious raising the question of your commitment to it. You can shut it down or shut it off, you can skip plenty of events of all sorts along the way (and you will, or at least I know I will), but if you catch your curiosity lingering and it’s over a commitment to people you care about, “go.”
Going to the funeral is going for the others at the funeral who heeded a similar call.
Where’s it come from? Why do we deny it? Why do we need to know how to choose what parts of it are undeniable? As Cara puts it,
It was something that we had in those 120 people tribes. They didn’t let you get off track. If something was going on against their family, or to a friend, they’d kick you out of the tribe and - you’re dead. We have this sense of belonging and that’s a problem on social media too. We have that sense of belonging and we don’t want to get kicked out of the tribe so sometimes we end up getting pulled into things that are pretty far away from the beliefs that we should have.
But, in this case, to have a friend who’s going to hold you accountable if you’re off track in your business, in your personal life, in whatever, and you know they will tell me, “If I sense something,” or if they see something that they think is, “Ehhh this is not really aligned with the direction that I thought you were going, I think we should talk about this.”
Over time, those kinds of friends, or business partners, or accountability partners, or mastermind partners, or whatever you’ve labeled them—those kinds of people get to know you so well that they do know what you’re aligned to, if you’re truly, authentically showing yourself, and it’s hard to find.
See how hard it is? Alignment ain’t easy. But when we commit to others, and when we find our people, we have a system of inward and outward checks and balances to help guide us.
We can’t choose all the people. We can’t choose zero people either. We have to find a pack, or at least some friends, or whatever you want to label them as, so long as you all show up honestly with the intention to help check and balance each other for the better.
The world, at the global scale, feels more out of alignment than ever these days.
But, our worlds, at the local level, can offer so much more than respite.
Our worlds can serve as the connection to caring at the largest scales, if we take care of others as we want to be taken care of ourselves.
This message is deeply understood at the cores of both Rusty Guinn and Cara Brookins, so watch it as clip #2 in the best of Just Press Record episode below, or take the time to hear them fully unpack what a life with a pack means in their full episode.