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 Drew Feldman? He's a filmmaker, screenwriter, and director who spent years making art - everything from Shakespeare tours to off-Broadway shows to directing television - and somewhere along the way discovered he had a gift for helping people understand their money. So instead of choosing between his two worlds, he refused to choose. He became a financial advisor at Core Planning while continuing to write and direct.

He just passed his Series 65 exam a month ago, which means he's officially new to the advisor space. But he's not new to the art of helping people - or to the discipline of showing up and doing the work, even when nobody's paying attention.

I wanted to connect with him because he embodies something I value deeply: the commitment to building genuine things for genuine reasons, and the willingness to be a journeyman in more than one industry if that's what it takes to stay true to who you are.

Our conversation is LIVE now on the Cultish Creative and Epsilon Theory YouTube channels. Listen and you'll hear two people navigating the tension between ambition and authenticity, between building something big and staying connected to why you started in the first place.

In the meantime, I wanted to pull THREE KEY LESSONS from my time with Drew 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: This is the entrepreneurial mindset disguised as casual observation. Drew is saying something profound: the skills you developed in one domain transfer completely to another if you stop thinking of them as separate domains. He pitched screenplays to producers the same way he now pitches financial planning to prospects. He managed variable cash flow from acting gigs the same way he now manages the variable income of building an advisory practice. The lesson isn't about the specific job - it's about recognizing that you've already done the hard part. You've already learned to survive uncertainty, to pitch your value, to keep showing up when rejection is the default. Everything else is just application.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: Pretty much all through my high school and college years, I lived out of a day-planner/calendar, where I’d slowly get stressed about what bands I was in had booked over the next 1-6 months, until on a random Saturday or Tuesday, I’d start frantically calling (and sometimes emailing) venues, bookers, band-friends, etc. to make sure we had places to play. It wasn’t about getting work, exactly, but knowing you have work, which is some form of proof or validation. You can’t be an artist if you’re not making art.

Drew got that feeling of comfort from action as validation bubbling in my head with this quote. Booking gigs, and practices, and recording sessions, and odds-and-ends side-jobs to pay bills is sort of the only way I’ve ever known how to operate. Him too, apparently.

It’s not a bad thing. Maybe it’s a defect sometimes (my wife knows the crazy look in my eyes when these wheels are turning). But it is the reality of your actions validate not only what you think you do, but what others know you do. The building blocks cross domains, quite easily. If you want to do a thing, start doing the thing.

Work question for you: What skills are you underestimating because you think they only apply to your "real" career - and what would change if you recognized them as transferable superpowers?

Key Concept: Drew observes something most of us miss: the problem isn't the phone - it's the inability to stop. He scheduled his first major directing job to end before Shabbat (his weekly technology-free practice) not because he was being precious about religion, but because he understood something neurological. Your nervous system needs time to come down. Your brain needs space to process. When you're constantly accessible, constantly notified, constantly pulled back into the work, you never actually recover. You're just cycling through states of activation. The real insight here is that complete disconnection isn't a luxury for people with less to do - it's essential infrastructure for people doing important work. You can't think clearly about your next move if you never stop thinking about your last one.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: I call this downshifting. I don’t know if that’s the right term. I aged out of gear-shifting on mountain bikes when I got a driver’s license and despite a poor attempt at half-learning to drive stick, I’m fearful I’m mixing a metaphor incorrectly, but why stop here? I know what it means to be really moving quickly in one direction (or six), and then the proverbial whistle blows, and I’m sitting down to dinner with my wife or trying to walk my dogs, and I have to close my eyes and take a deep breath to shift down to no longer be operating at that gear.

The phone is a big part of it. I put everything on silent at 5 and basically try not to look at it aside from parts that won’t remind me work that will wait for tomorrow. And this is me figuring it out at 44. Like Drew, if I had to figure this out at 14 or 24? I don’t even know if I’d be alive now. What drugs would it have taken to take that edge off? I’m being serious.

Gear management has to be one of the great modern challenges. Especially with so many tools that can get an increasingly higher gear out of us (AI, I’m looking at you). If you don’t know how to downshift in the modern era, I think you’re sunk. 30 years ago learning to break and trusting your automatic was good enough. These days, it’s like we’re driving F1 cars and we had better be aware of it.

Life question for you: What would it look like to build a real boundary - not a "I'll try to put my phone away for two hours" boundary, but a "this time is non-negotiable" boundary - into your week?

Key Concept: Drew is articulating something that separates good advisors from great ones: the willingness to see clients through the lens of their struggle rather than their assets. Most financial advice starts with the outcome (retire at 65, grow your net worth, minimize taxes). Drew's approach starts with the conflict: what are you fighting against? What's hard about your situation? Why can't you solve this alone? This reframe changes everything because it shifts from transactional (here's what you should do) to relational (here's why I'm the person to help you through this). The legacy piece is that this approach creates lasting change. You're not just managing money - you're helping someone navigate their hero's journey, which means they remember you not for the returns but for how you showed up when things got difficult.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: I wrote a note back in 2023 about how understanding tension (and resolution) was the key to having a complete thought. There’s nothing original about it. It’s just my eureaka moment about why I’d started this Personal Archive quest, and maybe more honestly, what I loved about music and literature and all the stuff I pressed pause on in life when I decided it was time I figure out how to be an adult by making myself miserable in an effort to find happiness. Yeesh.

As it turns out, and as I can tell you with confidence and clarity now, there’s tension in everything. Resolution, too! Go figure. My hunch is that creatives and artists, people like Drew especially, have an intuition for spotting tension, and recognizing it as the actual point of interest.

Every job, every industry, every miserable and non-miserable path in life has tension and resolution at its core and you can learn to look for it. If joy (or at least enjoying life) is your purpose, you can even learn to make it joyful. Hearing Drew figure this out in financial services approximately 15 years faster than I did is inspiring. And even more so, watching him take film storytelling metaphors and apply it across multiple domains - artists, we have so got this.

Legacy question for you: In your most important relationships - professional or personal - are you focused on the outcome or on understanding what they're actually fighting against?

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