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 Chuck Marohn? Chuck is the founder and president of Strong Towns, a nationally recognized urbanism movement built on one deceptively simple idea: the way America builds its cities and towns is making them financially weaker, not stronger - and most people in power either don't know it or won't say so.

If not, allow me to introduce you. Chuck is a civil engineer and urban planner who turned a therapy blog into a two-million-reader-a-year platform, a podcast, a 501(c)(3), and 300-plus local action groups across the country. He grew up in Brainerd, Minnesota, still lives there, still sits in the same pew at the same church, and has somehow used that rootedness as a launching pad for seeing American cities more clearly than almost anyone else.

I wanted to connect with Chuck because he is the rare person who has been both deeply rooted in one place AND has traveled everywhere - and has figured out how to use that contrast as a lens rather than a contradiction.

Our conversation is LIVE now on the Cultish Creative YouTube channel (and this Cultish Creative Playlist). Listen and you'll hear Chuck meet Aaron Hurst for the first time and watch two people who built very different things realize they've been building toward the same thing.

Watch the full conversation here

In the meantime, I wanted to pull THREE KEY LESSONS from my time with Chuck Marohn 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: Chuck didn't start Strong Towns out of ambition - he started it out of honest confusion. His consulting practice failed in part because he kept giving advice that cost him money but helped his clients, which is a pretty clear signal that you're in the wrong business model. The blog was his way of testing reality: either my understanding of cities is right and the world needs to hear it, or I'm wrong and I need to find out. Writing three days a week was how he ran that experiment. What came out the other side was a movement.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: I like to think about reflective writing (and having a personal archive) as existing in a fourth space. It's based on the old third space idea, where home is first, work is second, and the third is a social space like a bar, a cafe, or a megabrand who read a book about this and realized they're really, really important to community building. A fourth space is a slight overshoot, where you do something in public, which could be social media or any space where you can put stuff up that others can see, like a blog.

The critical difference here is it's like the posting board outside of a third space. Anybody can see it. Anybody can ignore it. But if you get some attention, it can drift back INTO a third space, if not into a second too.

Which, when Chuck breaks this down, it's the ultimate gift of the internet, right? You start a blog, it exists beyond social media, but it eventually comes back to there, and then a business gets formed around it. All the spaces are connected. The reminder of how important fourth spaces are to work stuff out in our own head before it resonates with others is magic.

Work question for you: Where in your career are you talking yourself out of contracts - and is that a bug or a signal about what you're actually supposed to be doing?

Key Concept: Chuck is a civil engineer and urban planner by training, so when he has a human insight, he reaches for a structural metaphor - and this one lands. The leaf blower is identical in both cities. What changes is his brain's relationship to novelty. At home, the default setting is judgment. In transition, it's curiosity. The insight isn't just personal - it's architectural. If you want people to be open to new ideas, new relationships, new ways of living, you need to catch them when they're already in motion.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: All the spaces we occupy, no matter if we're at home or work or a third space or even archiving our reflections, somebody is just waiting with a leaf blower. It's the bad interruption to our little bubbles of existence. But the interruption is important.

The short-circuiting is a life thing. It's change with an element of chance - sometimes expected, sometimes surprise, sometimes invited, sometimes invasive. The leaf blower doesn't care which one it is. What matters is what happens in the moment after the interruption lands. Do you stay on the porch and get annoyed, or do you shift into traveler mode - suddenly curious about what's actually going on over there?

Tying it back to the spaces and our headspace - how we approach the interruption, and how we help others approach it, can make for all sorts of opportunities in designing the experience. Chuck lives this contrast every time he comes home from a trip. Aaron built a whole institution around it. The leaf blower is coming either way. Might as well be ready.

Life question for you: Where in your life are you reacting from the porch - and where could you choose to be the tourist instead?

Key Concept: Chuck isn't making a religious argument - he's making a structural one. Shared belief, even in something that looks absurd from the outside, is one of the most powerful trust-building mechanisms humans have. The problem with a pluralistic society isn't that diversity is bad - it's that it removes the automatic trust shortcut that shared belief provides. Chuck's legacy work at Strong Towns is essentially about rebuilding that shortcut across difference: not by finding a new shared belief, but by building shared experience of place.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: I wonder if we can have an actual belief unless we've walked it through all four spaces in some way, shape, or form. As if that's the full identity being formed. We have to carry the corpus across home, work, the bar, and in our reflections before it's part of who we are.

And that's for better or for worse. If you think Elvis lives - it's because you read it at home, picked it up probably coming home from work, chatted about it with your buds at the bar, and then hand wrote a manifesto about it once (probably post a few too many at said bar), thusly cementing the king having stayed with us all that extra time.

Those are the types of beliefs that transcend lifetimes too. You pass that stuff on because it rubs off of you in all these various places. There's a mystical magic to it.

What Chuck is doing at Strong Towns, and likewise, what Aaron is doing with the Chamber of Connection, is figuring out ways to take transformations rolled up across all four spaces beyond anyone's individual life experience, so we can all feel the connection, and feel less alone, for the better.

Legacy question for you: What's the unbelievable thing you believe - and who else believes it with you?

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