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... Bogumil Baranowski!
Do you know Bogumil Baranowski? He's the founder of Blue Infinitas Capital - a boutique investment firm that manages money for multi-generational families with infinite time horizons. He's also the host of Talking Billions, a podcast where he's conducted 200+ conversations with fascinating investors, thinkers, and builders about how they think about money, business, and legacy.
If not, allow me to introduce you. Bogumil was born in Poland just as communism was collapsing, came to America inspired by Peter Lynch's "One Up On Wall Street," and spent the last 20+ years building a practice centered on one simple idea: forgotten money held patiently compounds into generational wealth. He's the kind of investor who can hold a stock for 10+ years, not check the market for a day (or more), and ask you about your life instead of your P&L.
I wanted to connect with him because he embodies something I value deeply: the discipline to build a business around relationships and patience, rejecting the noise of the markets to focus on what actually compounds.
Our conversation is LIVE now on the Cultish Creative and Epsilon Theory YouTube channels. Listen and you'll hear how someone raised under communism thinks about freedom and markets, what to do when your best positions become "overheated," and why the most profound business principle is one he discovered almost by accident - that serving the right people matters more than chasing everyone.
THREE: That's The Magic Number of Lessons
In the meantime, I wanted to pull THREE KEY LESSONS from my time with Bogumil 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: Where Do I Go? The Seller's Dilemma
"I have a dilemma. Because if I sell it just because too many people like it and it gets overheated, I don't have a good practice for when to go back. I think it's very hard to go back. Do I go back when it sells off by 10%? By 20%? It may never sell off more than 20%. And I think a lot of money - at least from my perspective in the long term holding business - gets lost when people sell a stock because the multiple went up. It's not a reason, but I know a lot of people that say, 'I can't hold it. It's trading at this much.' And anyways, it's my dilemma because right now in my portfolio, I have a few stocks that clearly are not a bargain, but just selling them because they're overpriced, overheated - where do I go? Like, do I sit?"
Key Concept: Bogumil has identified one of the deepest problems in long-term investing - not knowing what to do after you sell a winner. The dilemma isn't theoretical. It's real: you own something great. It compounds. Everyone starts talking about it. The multiple expands. Now it's expensive by your original criteria. Do you sell? If you do, where do you put the money? At what price do you buy back? This gap - between the discipline that got you in and the discipline required to stay calm while it compounds past your comfort zone - is where real money gets left on the table. It's not the stocks that hurt you. It's the decisions made in the fog after you sell.
Personal Archive Note-To-Self: One of the hardest things in life has to be knowing how or when or why to stop doing the thing that made you successful. Professional athletes are the worst example of this, and by “worst” I mean, it’s so immediately visceral. You spend your whole life practicing, training, and competing - and at just about every step of the way, you get validated. The results compound and for the best of the best it’s up and to the right.
But then, one day, you’re a step off and it’s not a recovery thing. The reality of aging starts to catch up with you. And the entire identity you’ve had since you’ve started is called into question.
Life is full of far lesser versions of this. When Bogumil talks about it in terms of stuff you own, I see the athlete lesson, and my own brain goes flying back to the balancing act that is realizing “What you do is who you are” while “Your job should not solely define your identity.”
Change is coming for you. You can come for change, too, but it’s gonna getcha. You have to know how to stay with an idea long enough to get the benefits, but never so long as that it makes you brittle and can become the thing to break you. Even Michael Jordan had to retire and move on from professionally competing. Maybe I’ve got too many Lindsey Vonn lessons on my mind this week, but this is such a deep and profound question to ask what you do when you leave what’s made you your best.
Work question for you: What are you sitting on that's gotten too expensive for your original thesis, and where would you actually go if you sold it?
LIFE: The Gas Station on the Right Corner - You Don't Own the Price
"I have this anecdote about an owner, a founding family of some business that he happened to own, and that owner is walking with him. They're talking, and the owner is asking him where does the stock trade these days, meaning his own stock of his own company, and to me it's such a telling moment, where you are as a business owner in most privately held businesses. You don't actually know the price of your business. Say you own a gas station. You have no idea how much that gas station should sell for. All you know is the receipts and how much it costs to run this thing and are the employees happy, and many other things you worry about, but you don't walk around and say, ‘I have a $2 million gas station. How was your day? I have a $2 million gas station.’ That's not how you live your life, right? You have a gas station on the right corner in the right town - that's all that matters."
Key Concept: There's a profound difference between owning something and obsessing about its price. A business owner with a gas station doesn't walk through life announcing its valuation. They care about the cash flow, the customers, the team, the location. The price is secondary - it emerges from the fundamentals. Yet most investors do the opposite with stocks. They own a piece of a business but treat it like a stock ticker, constantly checking if the price has validated their intelligence. Bogumil's insight: you don't own the price. You own the business. The location (the quality of the business) and the corner (the market conditions) matter infinitely more than what the sign says the property is worth on any given day.
Personal Archive Note-To-Self: One of my favorite parts about writing is the exhaust valve it provides my brain. When I write, ideas get developed and released, and they don’t just well up behind my eyes, waiting to wake me up at 3am. I mean, they still wake me up at 3am, but not in the way they do when I’m in the regular writing process.
So if somebody pays me to write (it happens!), or when I have to put a price-tag on my wares, it’s so weird. I’ll do it - because, we are not communists, but I know, from experience, that the minute you start defining the process by the value placed on it, you’re going to be waking up at 3am worrying about all of the wrong things.
The psychological balance sheet has as much room for debts and savings as the financial balance sheet. When you have something you love, when you know that surplus is there, in the identity of the action that produces it, you can’t start mortgaging it up or become distracted by what people will pay for it. You have to stay in love with it, above all else.
I’ll keep repeating this line for the rest of my life, “Don’t sell yourself to fall in love with the things you do.” Just fall in love with the process. It’s where all the value is.
Life Question For You: What do you own - a business or a price? How would your decisions change if you only knew the fundamentals and never checked the quote?
LEGACY: A Thousand Ways to Accomplish What You're Trying to Do
"I think there's a thousand ways to make money and Matt knows that I've had 200 guests on Talking Billions. And if anything I’ve learned through the process, it’s that there are more ways to make money than I could have ever imagined. I'm not here to judge and say this is the way. If you find a way that works for you, I think that at the end of the day, what I tell people is if you found a way that allows you to accomplish whatever you're trying to accomplish, do that."
Key Concept: After 200 conversations with brilliant investors, traders, and builders - all with wildly different approaches and timeframes and philosophies - Bogumil's learned something most people never arrive at: the path matters less than the fit. There's no one way. Tony trades 2 minutes to 2 years. Bogumil holds for decades. Some people use options, some avoid them entirely. Some are systematic, some intuitive. All can win. The only real requirement is that the method allows you to accomplish what you're actually trying to accomplish. Not what you think you should accomplish. Not what makes you look smart at the ideal dinner. But what you actually, genuinely want to do with your life and your wealth. That clarity - not the method - is what compounds.
Personal Archive Note-To-Self: We were at a party and somebody who more or less runs their own business was opining how he wished he could “just get paid by somebody to wash a floor, sometimes.” No extra effort, no extra thinking - just a simple paycheck in return for a simple task being completed. Plus, you could have headphones on, and that’d be fun, right?
Customers are tough. Fans are tough. People who leave YouTube comments are - I’m not actually sure if most of them are even people, but, yeah. People are stressful. That’s the truth. And business is putting a bottleneck on that stress, somewhere, of somebody having to deal with something in return for money, and then the other people needed to help standup the whole charade.
It’s really hard to be on the front line of that. I won’t pretend it’s not. But don’t we want, if not need, some of that stress, too? I know if I’m just washing the floor I’m miserable. Maybe if the floor washing allowed me to focus on other pursuits I could make it work. I do think about that a lot. But what is work without stakes?
It’s back to the athlete idea again. You’re not going to do this forever. You are going to save your little surplus onto your psychological balance sheet, if you’re lucky, you’re going to find out those skills are actually worth something, and then what? You have to not squander it. The identity we find is fluid, and it’s a process to keep reshaping it, as everything else in our tiny little world changes over and over and over again.
You figure out what you love to do, and then you figure out how to do it. If you can keep the floor clean along the way, you get bonus points. I’m sure of it.
Legacy question for you: What are you actually trying to accomplish - not what you think you should accomplish? Is your current path getting you there, or are you following someone else's map?
BEFORE YOU GO: Be sure to…
Connect with Bogumil on Substack - where everything lives and where he writes personal emails to new subscribers
Check out Talking Billions on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube (200+ episodes of pure long-term thinker philosophy)
Read his books on investing, time, and legacy (and more)
Explore Blue Infinitas Capital to understand the boutique approach to multi-generational wealth
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
