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... Brianna Collins!

Do you know Brianna Collins? She's the keyboard player, co-songwriter, creative director, and visual architect for Tigers Jaw - one of the most consistently vital bands to emerge from the Northeastern Pennsylvania DIY scene over the last two decades. If you haven't been paying attention, that's your loss.

If not, allow me to introduce you. Brianna showed up to a church basement show in seventh grade because she liked a boy who made her a mixed CD. She crowd surfed. She found her people. By sophomore year of high school, she was in Tigers Jaw - having never written a song before in her life, just knowing she could play piano and she loved going to shows. Twenty years later, she's teaching art, designing all the album/merch artwork, keeping meticulous control over the band's creative vision while working a day job in sales, and somehow keeping it all moving forward.

I wanted to connect with her because she represents something I'm obsessed with: the person who shows up early, does the actual work, stays committed to their community through every phase of life - and builds something genuinely meaningful without needing validation from outside to know it matters.

Our conversation is LIVE now on the Cultish Creative and Epsilon Theory YouTube channels. Listen and you'll hear two artists from opposite coasts and opposite decades discovering that they built their movements the exact same way - through church basements, through DIY logistics, through showing up for people, and through the simple stubborn refusal to move away.

THREE: That's The Magic Number of Lessons

In the meantime, I wanted to pull THREE KEY LESSONS from my time with Brianna 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: You Belong to the Band the Moment You Show Up

Key Concept: Brianna didn't join Tigers Jaw as a "full member" - she joined as someone who could play keys and loved going to shows. She didn't need the title first. The permission to belong came from showing up. And once she was in the room - fully committed, fully present - her role naturally expanded. She became a songwriter. She became the art director. She became the keeper of the visual identity. She didn't wait until she felt like a songwriter or an artist director. She became those things by doing the work alongside people who already trusted her to be there. That's how you grow into your own role - not by proving yourself first, but by participating authentically and letting the work reveal what you're capable of.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: One of my work mantras is “Shared values with complementary skills.” I stole it from Howard Marks. It gets at this core idea, that if the people you are working with have the same values as you, so long as everyone is bringing something unique to the table, you’ll be part of something that not only has the potential to do good, but it will also feel good.

When Bri told the story about not knowing where she got the guts to offer herself to cover on keys at a Tigers Jaw show, after the original keyboard player quit, my brain immediately went to “shared values.” What she justified, beyond the confusion of being shocked she pitched herself, was that she loved going to shows, loved playing piano, and if she could be at a show AND playing keys, that sounded pretty neat. It was an expression of her values - worth putting out there, at least in an instant messenger chat, to see what happened, right?!

Having skills is where greatness starts. Any success, or achieved greatness, comes with others. Either in making art or experiences together, or receiving them from the outside, you can’t do it alone.

The reason it’s one of my work mantras is because look at what happened with Bri here. Basically cold outreach to join the band, then she dove into covering keys and doing some art (just hear the album art story I asked her about at the beginning of this episode), and now she’s singing and contributing songs - she didn’t fill out the band, she elevated everything about it. We all can do that and we can all find the person that does this for everything we’re working on IF we look for shared values and complementary skills.

Work question for you: What role are you still waiting to earn the right to step into? What if the permission is already there?

LIFE: The Comfort of This Place (Is Your People)

Key Concept: She could leave. She wants the California sun. But her people are here - her parents, her husband (whom she met at a show), the majority of her friends. She's thought about it. She and her husband talk about it. The rational pull toward better weather and bigger opportunities is real. But the pull toward the people who shaped you and the community you helped build is stronger. That's the choice: a place that's easier on your body, or a place where you know everyone and everyone knows you. She chose the latter. Not because she's afraid to leave, but because she's clear-eyed about what matters.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: Maybe it’s because I have a decade of life on Bri, but this idea that you have to leave home before you can return, with a true sense of appreciation, but also without a sense of frustrated demands - it cuts different.

My wife and I are both products of growing up in the same area, we both (separately) found our way out, and only much later in life did we, A. get married, but then B. make the mutual decision to come back. We have a million of the same types of stories too. Not with any musical or arts successes to speak of, but where we both had to leave home to realize who we were and what we were capable of in the rest of the world, in order to have the right perspective to come back home.

There’s some extra nuance here too, though, that came out as Bri and Allison talked through this. As your opportunity set shifts, you do have to re-examine your geography. It does matter. Watch Bri’s face when Allison talks about going to New York, then leaving New York, and how many opportunities she found for herself once she got to LA. Note what’s not even in between the lines here: Allison didn’t go back to Olympia, and she definitely didn’t move to Scranton.

You figure out your powers by leaving home. But then sometimes you need to go away again or re-assert the question on what opportunities you want to put to the test at different points in life. My wife and I are local because work allows me, in particular, to be global at the same time I sit in some very affordable and family-oriented space. Time will tell for Bri and what she does, but the fact that she’s asking these questions and aware of what the opportunity sets both are and aren’t where she’s located, it’s fascinating to watch her figuring it out.

Life question for you: What would you have to give up to leave? What would you have to give up to stay?

LEGACY: The Full Circle Moment Is The Point

Key Concept: You show up. You play shows. A kid in the crowd is watching - maybe you don't know it. His mom does your hair and you become friends. Years pass. That kid becomes eighteen. He forms a band. He plays a show. And you go to it. The circle completes not because you orchestrated it, but because you stayed. Because you came home. Because the DIY community you helped build was rooted in a real place with real people. You didn't know Gavin was watching when he was seven. You didn't know he would become a musician. But you stayed long enough to find out. That's legacy - not fame, not influence you calculated, but the multigenerational ripple that happens when you refuse to leave and when the kids watching grow up and create their own art. You are visible whether you know it or not.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: Maybe it’s because we were still in the holiday haze when we recorded this episode, but - this clip has you thinking at least a little of George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, right? Bri has the gift in this case of seeing her indirect influence on the community. A friend’s kid, growing up a fan of her art, now enabled, or empowered, or - honestly, just aware that it’s an option to do something you know somebody else can do.

If she wasn’t there, would he have figured it out? It’s a question worth asking. I think about it a lot, and I especially think about it in terms of this area. I missed Bri’s era in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre scene by the very nature of our age difference. I was out figuring out my way through the world while she was playing shows at Metropolis and whatever other DIY venues I cut my teeth at too. I had absolutely nothing to do with her band, I never even caught a show back then, but I heard about them, and I felt some pride just knowing I came out of the same tradition of copying what the older kids and touring bands showed us was an option.

That behavior gets passed down. Sometimes it results in success. Sometimes it results in a formative experience. Making sure that the opportunity to both do and witness creativity, because who knows what might happen - there might be a Tigers Jaw or a Title Fight or a Menzingers at any point in time - feels like both really special, and really important work.

Throw a lasso around that moon. If nothing else, because you possess that value set, and you want to share it with others, in case they decide to do something with it too.

Legacy question for you: Who are the kids watching you right now that you don't even know about? What does it look like to stay long enough to see the full circle?

BEFORE YOU GO: Be sure to…

• Connect with Brianna Collins on Instagram (@brnncllns) and find Tiger’s Jaw on their website and all the socials too

• Pre-order Tigers Jaw's new album "Lost On You" coming March 27th, 2026 (and why not get it from the Wilkes-Barre indie record store of choice, Gallery of Sound?)

• Watch for new singles rolling out monthly until the record drops

• Catch Tigers Jaw on tour in March - April and May - June (hitting LA June 7th at the Regent - come say hi to Allison Wolfe there too!)

• Listen to the full conversation with Brianna and Allison Wolfe on Just Press Record

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