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!

Do you know Carly Valancy? She's a growth consultant, connection architect, and the person behind the legendary Meet-a-Person Challenge - where she reached out to one stranger every single day for 100 days (and kept going past 500 because the compounding returns were too good to stop). Theater trained, startup-experienced, and now building the Reach Out Party - a networking mastermind for people who otherwise hate networking.

If you've heard her name in recent years, it's because she's quietly become one of the most thoughtful people thinking about what authentic connection actually looks like in a world obsessed with transactional "networking."

I wanted to connect with her because she embodies something I value deeply: the belief that reaching out to strangers - with real vulnerability, specific gratitude, and zero expectation of return - is not a hack. It's a practice. And practices compound.

Our conversation is LIVE now on the Cultish Creative and Epsilon Theory YouTube channels (and anywhere else you get your podcasts). Listen and you'll hear someone who spent five years figuring out how to break every "rule" of networking while staying authentic to herself - and who is now helping others do the same.

In the meantime, I wanted to pull THREE KEY LESSONS from my time with Carly 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.

Key Concept: Every industry has a rulebook for "how you're supposed to network." Most of that rulebook was written to sand down your edges and make you palatable to the broadest possible audience. Carly's insight is radical: what if the rules that are supposed to help you actually undermine you? What if the apologies, the hedging, the performative professionalism - the things you're supposed to do - are exactly what make you forgettable? Breaking the rules that don't serve you isn't reckless; it's the only way to stay authentic while reaching out to people you admire.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: The sheer agony I can still feel in my gut of being handed a list of names and told, “It’s a numbers game, that’s how I did it, start smiling and dialing.” At what point do you have the confidence to say, “How you did it is not how I am going to do it, and I’m not sorry to tell you to pound sand, because I don’t need any of these people telling me to pound sand today.”

Cold outreach is such a funny thing. I remember being told I had to make a bunch of phone calls at the beginning of my financial services career, and I did these in all sorts of capacities. I called people about loans, I called businesses about loans, I felt awful about it because of that Global Financial Crisis, and then I called people about investment ideas, and more about if they needed a financial plan or to examine all their financing options in a post-GFC/ZIRP world. And you know what I hated? All of it.

Contrast that to cold outreach for getting people on a podcast. I could do that all day. I don’t care if people say no. I have nothing to apologize for. I’m asking for time and it’s because I’m interested in who they are. Like Carly, I leave lots of personality in an email too. I didn’t spend all this time trying to practice writing how I talk for nothing. If I’m going to laugh to myself saying “Just so’s you know” in my head, you’re damn right I’ll put it in an email too.

But reconciling the sense of authenticity and purpose you have to put into cold outreach - that’s the big realization you only come to with reps. Hopefully a person doesn’t need to do soul-sucking sales outreach to get there, but even if you do, the purpose is to discover not only what works for you, but what works because you’re you. When I hear Carly saying to break the rules, I can’t help but think of how you have to learn which rules are worth breaking, and that’s something I’ll bet on any day of the week (and I’d sing it like, “I’ve got the horse right here, his name is Paul Revere…”).

Work question for you: Which "networking rule" have you been following that actually makes you less authentically you? What would your outreach look like if you broke that rule?

Key Concept: The career ladder assumes a singular path up toward a fixed destination. But for creative people - and really, for anyone building something authentic - there is no ladder. There's an ecosystem. Everything connects to a core belief or value you're building toward, and you say no to things that don't serve it. This requires facing yourself. It's lonelier than following a predetermined path. But it's the only path that actually works for people who refuse golden handcuffs.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: The cold-calling your way to success, aka the smiling and dialing of it all, was such a boomer BS broken ladder that almost feels funny to me in hindsight. A completely preset process is a sucker bet. If you’re playing by the same rules as everybody else, and especially if you’re declaring “it’s a numbers game” - how can your numbers add up to be anything else?

A creative person sees more than the ladder, and that’s what I hear when Carly’s explaining this metaphor. A creative person sees the ground under the foot of the ladder. They see the height, the pitch, the wall it’s against. They consider the environment around the ladder, can assess where they want to be, and if there’s a better way to solve for any of the variables.

The people who tell you to climb the ladder have vested interest in you having horse blinders on. And that’s no fun for a creative person. Maybe work isn’t supposed to be fun, but once you realize it can be fun, are you ever going to want it another way?

The game of life has lots of ladders in it. But the game of life also has tons of other ways to get up and down surfaces that don’t resemble ladders. There are elevators and escalators and shortcuts and longcuts and - I don’t know box jumps or pogo sticks or whatever else you want to imagine. The trick is to figure out what works for you (and, above all, don’t get cider in your ear if you can avoid it).

Life question for you: Are you climbing a ladder that was never built for you? What would change if you stopped thinking about "up" and started thinking about "coherent"?

Key Concept: We live in a culture obsessed with overnight success stories. But real brand - the kind that endures and means something - takes five years minimum just to exist, never mind to become known. During those five years, you'll fail repeatedly. You'll share things you think are brilliant and get crickets. Ninety-nine percent of podcasts die at episode twenty. Ninety-nine percent of projects stop before compounding kicks in. The legacy belongs to the people willing to show up, fail publicly, and do it again anyway.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: OK so I’m clearly hung up on Guys and Dolls (partly because my wife and I just so happened to rewatch it for the 1,047th time right before I recorded this episode), and this one is too much for me to break away from that metaphor. Nothing says overnight success like a gambling win. That’s - pretty much the entire point of Guys and Dolls. People love a quick, no-work, win.

And why wouldn’t they? Who wants to work all those hours, and practice all those days, when you could just win? Oh, wouldn’t that be loverly (I won’t ADHD off, I won’t!). But as Guys and Dolls also teaches us, it’s a lot of stress to be the person who provides the entertainment of a place to shoot craps. it’s also a lot of stress to be a person who’s only meaning in life is derived from taking the next bet and the next bet and the next.

We need each other. A guy needs a doll and a doll needs a guy. We need friends. We need community. We need connection.

Not short term, quick hit, no work connections. Actual reinvested effort and actual maintained confidence. It’s the only place meaning emerges (and, “Please, let us not have a vulgar scene” because we can work it out if we believe in repair, and if we believe in love, and we believe in connection. And if you don’t believe me, “sue me, sue me.”)

Legacy question for you: What are you building that you're willing to show up for even when nobody's watching? Can you commit to five years of failure before you expect to see real results?

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