Cultish Creative Weekly Recap (12/14/2024)

My belated-birthday reflection after turning 43 last weekend, including: thoughts on sharing these Personal Archive entries (daily!) for 7 straight years, the years of note-taking before I felt comfortable sharing them with yous guys, and why the thing I’m most excited about is the YouTube channel I started earlier this year—all of those thoughts are here.

I met Yuri Khodjamirian while doing my professional work and knew I had to get him on an Intentional Investor episode.

The common trend on this whole series, in collaboration with Epsilon Theory, is “look how non-linear people’s lives are.” Talk about searching for the explanation between the map and the reality(!). One of my goals for next year is to figure out how to get this show into the hands of more business/finance adjacent 25-35 year old’s. Yuri embodies why I want to get more stories like his into the public.

Yuri and his family emigrated from Armenia during the politically turbulent fall of the Soviet Union. He attended both the Russian and International schools in Copenhagen, worked his way to the UK to continue his education, and with a bit of a chip on his shoulder, sought to focus on the problem his scientist parents were always struggling with: how do you get stable money to good ideas?

The stories, the mentors, the life lessons along the way… you could make a movie. Watch Yuri share his story right here or search for Epsilon Theory wherever you get your podcasts.

Over on Excess Returns, Jack Forehand and I did a rundown of some of our favorite answers to the question “What is one lesson you’d teach the average investor?” that we recorded in 2024.

Other Personal Archive entries you may have missed:

An essay on Ice Cube’s classic, “It Was A Good Day.” I just feel like, if you’re going to talk about the bad times, you have to talk about the good times, no matter how rare they are, too. As Rob Harvilla put it, thus inspiring this note, “It was a good day is a song about one good day. The rest of Ice Cube's catalog is about every other day.”

A riff on recording what you find curious, making time to reflect on the curiosity it triggered to create something new, and then performing it (in any medium) for others.

More Seinfeld notes keep appearing for a reason. This one, on how Seinfeld quit everything for two whole years after the show ended, is an important story for anybody on either side of a career transition to read. That’s gold Jerry, Gold! (extra shoutout to Scott for replying to my Seinfeld posts with this, you are appreciated)

One more Yuri-ism to share, specifically on the topic of mentors, “Any successful mentor needs to be secure and selfless.” Again, where was that line (and a smack on the back of my head followed by a “really?!”) when I was 25-35? Spread the words. And, be a good mentor. On both measures.