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 multi-million-reader platform, a podcast, a 501(c)(3), and 270-plus local action groups across the world. He's also the author of Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity and - as you'll hear in this conversation - a former drummer, a farm kid, a National Guard enlistee at 17, and a person who stayed three extra weeks in Southern Italy alone because he wasn't ready to go home yet.

I wanted to connect with Chuck because he is one of the rare people who builds movements by being relentlessly honest about why things are broken - and equally honest about what it cost him personally to see it.

Our conversation is LIVE now on the Intentional Investor YouTube channel (and this Intentional Investor Playlist). Listen and you'll hear a man who went to Italy for professional development, got abandoned by his hosts, and came home a completely different person - and that's just the first twenty minutes.

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 because he had answers. He started it because he was drowning in questions he couldn't resolve in his head alone. The blog was a therapeutic act - a way to force abstract anxiety into concrete sentences. Writing didn't document his thinking; it created it. The discipline of Monday/Wednesday/Friday wasn't content strategy. It was a commitment to keep showing up to the problem until the problem gave way. What became a movement started as a man trying to figure out if he was crazy or the world was.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: Writing to think, with the added pressure of sharing that writing with anybody else, even anonymously or without pushing it upon anyone else, has been one of the most useful exercises of my life, and Chuck saying this - it resonates.

Now, writing shouldn't replace therapy, there are other things you need to talk to another person, and maybe a professional about, so the feedback can be focused and thought-provoking in ways that won't come from inside your own head, so let's get that on the table, as a person who has appreciated therapy as much as my writing habits, even if my reach is a fraction of Chuck's.

Still, the sitting in front of a document to engage in a creation separate from your brain that you have to look back on, work out, restructure, edit, and play with works wonders. Yes it takes effort. Yes it takes time. Yes AI can help and can also steal all the benefits so you have to have a plan. But the act of writing to figure out what you think, why you think, and where you might take those thoughts next is invaluable.

Work question for you: What problem are you carrying around in your head right now that you haven't written down yet - and what might you discover if you did?

Key Concept: Chuck lost his band at 17 and spent decades chasing that feeling in other forms. What he's describing isn't nostalgia for music - it's a map of what deep collaboration actually feels like from the inside. The anticipation, the exploration, the gel: these aren't romantic metaphors. They're diagnostic tools. When you find a working relationship that has that quality - with a partner, a collaborator, a community - you recognize it because it feels like something you already know. The question Chuck leaves hanging is whether you're building enough of those relationships into your life, or just your career.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: The band metaphor is not just synonymous with my own experience, but literally my friends and I were in bands together or bands that played together for my entire upbringing and first formal years of adulthood. The unity of the projects. The shared experiences of going out and doing things. There is nothing like it.

In the rest of my life, and really from 25-35, I tried to suppress all that stuff. Band life wasn't a real job. How could I impose that over a world like finance where all these other people never experienced anything like band life? Yeah, "your time on the lacrosse team," sure, I see some parallels, but these aren't the same thing either. It's no wonder I couldn't get in the rhythm with people and felt so stuck out of place as long as I did.

When you're looking for people you can jam with, you have to look for all those same metaphorical pieces. People who want to play with you. The mutual aspect of appreciation and aspiration is the trick to not just a career moving forward, but an actual life - and it's ok if, like me, it takes you a while to figure out, so long as you eventually figure it out.

Life Question For You: Who in your life do you actually jam with - and when did you last make space to do it?

Key Concept: Chuck has spent 15 years arguing that what communities lose when they tear things down isn't just buildings - it's unrepeatable layers of human investment. The pew is that argument made physical. The mill that built it is gone. The people who worked there are gone. The knowledge of how to make it is gone. What remains is an object that connects Chuck to great-grandparents he never met, through a craft that can't be commissioned again at any price. That's not sentimentality. That's a definition of legacy - the things we leave that keep connecting people to each other long after we're no longer around to make the introduction.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: You know how to write, you know how to reflect, you know how to be in the band - but then what? That's what got me to change things up, and in a way why Chuck moved forward at 17, and it's also why both of us return to the metaphors. Life is about bringing some aspects of experience forward with us.

The legacy framing here is all about the pieces of life that travel forward through time, some of which are chosen, and the rest of which are almost accidental artifacts.

The underlying rhyme is that they all have stories. They all have meaning. They all have feelings that are tied to times and places - and all we're trying to do, as active participants in this world, is make some experiences have a little meaning with the people we care most about, because who knows how they may or may not think about it someday down the line? It doesn't matter how small (the local church pew) or how big (the Vatican), it all starts with personal experience.

Legacy question for you: What's something in your life that couldn't be rebuilt if it disappeared - and does the person sitting next to you know what it means to 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

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