For years, I've been connecting with interesting people and documenting insights that might help my clients and myself. What was once private is now (mostly) public.
People often ask: "How do you know all these people?" and "How do you connect these (re: random) ideas?" The answer is simple: consistent relationship cultivation and thoughtful note taking. My north star is trusting my instincts, my maps are the constellations in these reflections.
This approach to multidisciplinary networking has helped dozens of clients, colleagues, and friends strengthen their networks and unlock new opportunities. Feel free to steal these ideas directly - that's what they're for! I can't promise you'll learn FROM me, but I guarantee you can learn something WITH me. Let's go. Count it off: 1-2-3-4!
Introducing... Aaron Hurst!
Do you know Aaron Hurst? Aaron is the founder of the Taproot Foundation, author of The Purpose Economy, and the driving force behind the Chamber of Connection - a national effort to rebuild American society around human connection, city by city, life transition by life transition.
If not, allow me to introduce you. Aaron has spent his career taking the ambition of a Silicon Valley startup and pointing it at the hardest social problems he can find. He's scaled a global movement, built and exited a venture-backed company, and is now doing what might be his most important work yet - designing the infrastructure for connection in cities across America.
I wanted to connect with Aaron because he's working on what he calls "the number one issue" - the collapse of connection and trust in American life - and he's doing it with the rigor of an entrepreneur and the heart of someone who discovered the problem by looking honestly at his own.
Our conversation is LIVE now on the Cultish Creative YouTube channel (and this Cultish Creative Playlist). Listen and you'll hear two people who've never met discover they've been working on the same question from opposite ends - one as a nomad who built movements, one as a small-town urbanist who never left home.
THREE: That's The Magic Number of Lessons
In the meantime, I wanted to pull THREE KEY LESSONS from my time with Aaron Hurst to share with you (and drop into my Personal Archive).
Read on and you'll find a quote with a lesson and a reflection you can Take to work with you, Bring home with you, and Leave behind with your legacy.
WORK: The Window Doesn't Stay Open
"What they realize is that onboarding of new employees, once someone's onboarded, you can't change them very easily. But in that first period of time, you're teaching them, like, what does it mean to be a Strong Towns employee? You're teaching them what your values are. You're teaching them what you value in them and how we do things here. If they've been there for a while and they start to sort of try to figure out for themselves, they're gonna deviate, and that's why so many change management programs are really ineffective, because people have been in the company for so long that they don't change. But that onboarding is always that magic moment, when people are actually open. And realize there's a lot more of those in our lives than just moving."
Key Concept: Every organization knows that onboarding matters, but Aaron's insight goes deeper - the window of openness is real, biological, and time-limited. After that window closes, change programs fail not because people are resistant, but because they've already written the code. The same principle applies everywhere a major life transition creates cognitive flux - a new job, a new city, a health scare, a loss. Those are the moments when new values, new relationships, and new identities can actually take hold. Miss the window and you're pushing against a closed door.
Personal Archive Note-To-Self: The first day of school always felt so strange. You'd get that mix of the place that didn't change (the smell, too), the people who sort of changed (holy growth spurts), and the nervy anxiousness of whatever was going on inside of you (this is the year they figure out how uncool I am). You know in a matter of months it'll all be a well-worn groove, but on that first day, it's all up in the air.
Life is full of first days of school. And that means there are all sorts of aspects we get to practice if we're looking for them. We can get good at being taken out of one groove and dropped into another. The biggest thing is always the micro decisions. How once you've done something for a long time you can go with the flow, but when you're starting out you have to think about every detail for a while. But it's a pattern that repeats and repeats and repeats.
The opportunity that inevitably arises, that Aaron's so keyed in on, is you can help people with this. There are ways to take the worst parts out of the first day of school, if you add a little compassion and some active awareness to the experience, and it can make all of the difference. Like so many puzzles, it's an awareness and attention puzzle, but the opportunity to help people get the most out of transition, it's an evergreen opportunity.
Work question for you: Where in your organization - or your own career - are you trying to change people who are already set, when you should be focused on catching people in the window?
LIFE: The Practice Retirement
"I called it a practice retirement. I was like, 'Okay, let's just pretend like I was retiring right now.' I don't have the ability to do that in any way, but just I have a little bit of time I can take off. What would it be like? And I was like, 'This would suck.' Like, I have been traveling so much. I have - like, I don't have close friends here. I don't have hobbies developed. Like, none of the things that would make for like a compelling retirement were in place, and really decided to sort of focus on that."
Key Concept: Aaron didn't wait until retirement to audit his life for connection - he ran the simulation early, while he could still do something about it. What he found wasn't a financial gap but a relational one: no close friends nearby, no hobbies, none of the texture that makes a life feel full when the work stops. The practice retirement is a diagnostic tool anyone can run. You don't need time off to ask: if the calendar cleared tomorrow, what would actually be there?
Personal Archive Note-To-Self: Obviously, the financial planner in me loves this experiment for a million varied professional reasons, but thinking of it next to the first day of school reminder, Aaron's practice retirement is a perfect framing of the variables you need to become aware of if you want to get good at getting into new grooves.
Purpose, place, and people are the variables that matter most, and they're pretty easy to identify if you're looking for them. Think about the jump from middle school to high school - you have the same basic purpose (go to school), but you swapped the location and half the cast of characters. You had to learn where A and B were before you could solve for getting from A to B, and depending on your homeroom assignment, the new social geometry was getting totally reshuffled. Every transition in life has that same triple-variable problem, which is why it's so disorienting even when you know it's coming.
A practice version of a theme, like retirement, with the place, the people, and the activities in place for you to work out, makes for a perfect first day at a new school scenario to see how you have the details covered or this might not be a good idea for you at this time.
Life question for you: If you ran a practice retirement on your life today - not financially, but relationally and personally - what would you find missing?
LEGACY: The Next Chamber of Commerce
"The Chamber of Commerce was started by the president about 120 years ago, and it has taken our country to the point where corporations have more rights than individuals. Like, they've been remarkably successful. I would argue that's not a good outcome, but they achieved their desired outcome. I was like, we need that now for connection. We need a chamber of connection that for the next 100 years completely rebuilds our American society around connection, and that connection is sort of the core design principle."
Key Concept: Aaron isn't trying to solve loneliness with an app or a program - he's trying to build an institution. The Chamber of Commerce analogy is instructive precisely because it's uncomfortable: a 120-year coordinated effort reshaped American society in ways the founders intended. Aaron is asking what happens if you apply that same patient, structural ambition to connection instead of corporate power. Legacy thinking at its most literal - not what you leave behind, but what you build to last a century.
Personal Archive Note-To-Self: When you're thinking about your experience in your new school (or whatever variation you're reliving reading Aaron's quotes), it's easy to forget to zoom out and realize everybody else in that story is trying to solve a similar version of their own problem. All those lost child looks in the incoming freshmen eyes - they can feel like personal failures, but at the meta level, there are design issues. Maybe even design failures. Schools, cities, and beyond aren't built for connection as their core output.
The reason the Chamber framework works as such a cool reference point for helping solve the design problem of navigating the purpose, place, and people variables, is that it applies a top-down institutional effort to help the bottom-up individual effort.
Most of us are working out lunch plans on the morning of. Zooming all the way out to the Aaron Hurst institutional level means accepting you won't see the outcome. The callback: the first day of school feeling never fully goes away, but you can build the infrastructure that solves the original problem a well-designed community is meant to solve - you make life a little less lonely for anyone and everyone who comes after you. That's the entire spirit of Just Press Record, and Aaron is doing it on a next level.
Legacy question for you: What would you be willing to spend 100 years building - not for recognition, but because the problem is real enough to deserve that kind of commitment?
BEFORE YOU GO: Be sure to…
Connect with Aaron Hurst on LinkedIn
Learn more about the Chamber of Connection
Check out Aaron's book The Purpose Economy
Explore the Taproot Foundation
Take a moment to reflect on all these ideas!
You have a Personal Network and a Personal Archive just waiting for you to build them up stronger. Look at your work, look at your life, and look at your legacy - and then, start small in each category. Today it's one person and one reflection. Tomorrow? Who knows what connections you'll create.
Don't forget to click reply/click here and tell me who you're adding to your network and why! Plus, if you already have your own Personal Archive too, let me know, I'm creating a database.
Want more? Find my Personal Archive on CultishCreative.com, watch me build a better Personal Network on the Cultish Creative YouTube channel, and listen to Just Press Record on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and follow me on social media (LinkedIn and X) - now distributed by Epsilon Theory.
You can also check out my work as Managing Director at Sunpointe, as a host on top investment YouTube channel Excess Returns, and as Senior Editor at Perscient.
ps. AI helped me pull and organize quotes from the transcript, structure the three lessons, and sharpen the Key Concepts. If you're curious about how I use AI while keeping editorial control and my own voice intact, I wrote about my personal rules here: Did AI Do That: Personal Rules
