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Grow Your Network: Eric Markowitz Is A Strategic Longevity Thinker
Here's HOW and WHY to connect with Eric
Matt Zeigler
May 29, 2025
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.
Find my Personal Archive on CultishCreative.com, watch me build a better Personal Network on the Cultish Creative YouTube channel, and follow me on social media (LinkedIn and X).
This approach has helped tons of clients strengthen their networks and unlock new opportunities. You can:
This approach has helped dozens of clients strengthen their networks and unlock new opportunities. You can:
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I can't promise you'll learn from me, but you'll definitely learn something with me. Let's go. Count it off: 1-2-3-4…
Do you know Eric Markowitz? He's an author working on a book called "Outlast" with Scribner (Simon & Schuster), a public markets investor, and a former journalist who thinks deeply about what enables businesses and ideas to survive and thrive over decades rather than quarters.
If not, allow me to introduce you. Eric is researching companies that have lasted centuries (some in Japan for 1400 years!) to decode the principles of longevity in an increasingly short-term focused world. I wanted to connect with him because he embodies something I value deeply: the wisdom to prioritize sustainable growth over hypergrowth that flames out.
Our conversation is LIVE now on the Just Press Record YouTube channel (and this Cultish Creative Playlist). Listen and you'll hear us dive deep into social media as genuine connection rather than marketing, the power of sharing work-in-progress, and why customer obsession beats customer acquisition.
In the meantime, I wanted to pull THREE KEY LESSONS from my time with Eric Markowitz 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: From Growth Obsession to Customer Obsession
"In a mindset of growth, you're often not listening to your customers. You're rate limited by time. And so, given the limited amount of time you have, you end up spending most of it looking for the next customer as opposed to listening to your current customer."
Key Concept: The relentless pursuit of new customers while neglecting existing ones creates a "leaky bucket" business model where you're constantly replacing churned customers rather than deepening relationships with current ones. Enduring businesses like the 400-year-old Lock and Co Hatters focus on developing multi-generational customer relationships, working with customers, their kids, and their grandkids. This approach requires slowing down enough to truly listen and respond to feedback rather than being perpetually in acquisition mode.
Personal Archive Note-To-Self: At my old employer, they had all these minimum customer size metrics. The fight I’d always have over the “too small” relationships I’d bring in was, “Instead of what they are now, can’t we think about what they’ll become? Or, at least the lifetime value of these relationships since I can get them now, before they’ve built up what you want for a minimum?”
The response I got was - well, there’s a reason I’m not there anymore. That wasn’t their business model. They wanted the people who could pay the revenue now, and that’s how I justified my spot in their pecking order, and while that might help them get through the next quarterly shareholder report, it was a bad fit for my career.
Sometimes you just have to zoom out. Sometimes you just have to ask, “What do these people want and can I give it to them?” And, if you can zoom out and find a market who is underserved while still able to pay you for really high quality work… there’s a reason I’m 17 years in financial services (and no longer at that company).
Work question for you: What would change about your current projects if you spent 80% of your customer-facing time listening to existing customers rather than pursuing new ones?
"I think of it as there's a creative impulse, especially if you're a writer or an artist to fully finish the work before you release it out into the world. But the best way to build community, to build friendships is to just share as you go and to use it as a platform where it doesn't need to be a fully finished product."
Key Concept: The traditional model of perfecting work in isolation before release creates barriers to genuine connection and community building. Instead of waiting for the "perfect moment," sharing work-in-progress allows for real-time feedback, course correction, and relationship building. This approach mirrors natural human communication - we don't have hour-long monologues with strangers on the street; we share bite-sized thoughts and build relationships incrementally over time.
Personal Archive Note-To-Self: Anne-Laure Le Cunff explained the overwhelming success of her community as the realization that since she wasn’t an expert, she didn’t want to tell people to learn from her, as if she had some better-than-thou authority. But, because she was working towards becoming an expert (an advanced degree, with a lot of great professional experience before resuming her studies), a lot of people were very interested in learning with/alongside her.
Any time I’m on a mission, like even in improving my network with this YouTube series, it’s good to leave breadcrumbs. It’s good to share what you are doing, with people who might want to pick up the trail, and then easily follow along. If you don’t leave breadcrumbs, how will they find you? But, if you do, the more breadcrumbs you leave, the more moments in people’s lives you just might find yourself a part of.
Life Question For You: What creative project or idea are you holding back from sharing because it's not "perfect" yet, and how could you break it into smaller, shareable pieces?
LEGACY: Innovation Flows Up, Not Down
"Innovation doesn't come from the top, it comes from the bottom. It comes from the worker who is actually working on the product or on the service, and those ideas filter up to the top. And the only reason it works is because the top is open to the idea of what the line worker actually is suggesting."
Key Concept: Lasting organizations flip the traditional top-down innovation model. Companies like John Deere and Amazon have continuous improvement systems where any employee can suggest process improvements. This creates resilient organizations because the people closest to the actual work - and closest to the customers - are the ones driving innovation. Leaders become facilitators and enablers rather than idea dictators, creating systems that can adapt and evolve beyond any single person's vision.
Personal Archive Note-To-Self: When I was telling my old employer I had some great early investments in promising relationships, and I had all sorts of ways we could earn their trust now to further develop them later, they did my favorite thing big companies do. They said, “Tell us all about it, and then we’ll tell you which 10% is good enough to maybe use. After we discuss it, we’ll ask you to present and pitch it to manager type people for the next 2 years, that is of course until leadership changes over again, at which point your ideas will die along with your dreams, and that’s how we’ll keep this machine moving forward the way it’s always been.”
I mean, they didn’t literally say that, but their actions did. There was no innovation or openness to “new” coming from the top. I won’t bet on their demise, but I will bet on their continued loss of market share as an increasingly older workforce plays that game forward over the years.
This is where all of the opportunities live. If you want to grow, figure out who’s moving too slow. That’s your opportunity for growth - to do what they do, faster, better, whatever your gut is telling you. And then, if you succeed and decide you want to stick around, never, ever, ever forget that you’ll have to keep growing and playing defense, at the same time, on all fronts. It’s not easy for a reason.
Legacy question for you: If you're in a leadership position, what systems do you have in place to capture and implement ideas from the people doing the actual work, and if you're not in leadership, how are you documenting and sharing insights from your front-line experience?
BEFORE YOU GO: Be sure to…
Connect with Eric Markowitz on Twitter @EricMarkowitz and LinkedIn
Check out outlastbook.com to follow along as he writes his book
Sign up for his weekly newsletter, The Night Crawler
Follow his writing on Big Think
Take a moment to reflect on all these ideas!
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.
Last thing: 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.