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!

Introducing... Eric Pachman!

Do you know Eric Pachman? (Because I’ve been trying to introduce you!). Chemical engineer by original training, nonprofit founder, data analyst, investigative journalist at heart, writer/reflector, and currently the architect behind (the forthcoming) Data 4 the People - a platform dedicated to unearthing the real stories hidden in public datasets.

If not, allow me to introduce you. Eric has spent nearly two decades hopscotching across entirely different professional universes, each time bringing his distinctive blend of rigorous analysis and righteous indignation to bear on problems that matter. He's launched nonprofits around cancer research and drug pricing, built some of the most thoughtful financial analysis on the internet, and now he's channeling that same fire into making policy-relevant data accessible to everyone who gives a damn.

I wanted to connect with him because he represents something I've come to admire deeply: the courage to reconstruct your entire professional identity in service of what you actually believe, not what you've already built.

Our conversation is LIVE now on the Just Press Record YouTube channel (and this Cultish Creative Playlist). Listen and you'll hear Eric wrestle with serendipity, accidental life choices, the "hot ball of fire" that powers (and nearly destroys) his work, and why he's intentionally painting himself into a corner - on purpose - so the only logical thing left to do is push the ball forward for causes bigger than himself.

THREE: That's The Magic Number of Lessons

In the meantime, I wanted to pull THREE KEY LESSONS from my time with Eric Pachman 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: The Hot Ball of Fire

Key Concept: The most important work isn't powered by ambition for status or wealth - it's powered by the refusal to look away from injustice once you've seen it. Eric is describing something specific: that moment when you realize the randomness of your privilege, when you understand that the difference between you and someone struggling isn't virtue or work ethic, but accident. Once you see that clearly, walking away becomes impossible. The anger becomes fuel. That hot ball of fire isn't about ego - it's about integrity that won't let you settle for less.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: When my wife and I decided to move back to the area we grew up in, I found myself in a new period of personal perspective shifting. I always knew how grateful I was to have left, and, of course, to be able to return, but I started really seeing some of the chance differences in life in a strong way. That’s not to say there aren’t local lifers who are doing great, because there are. It is to say there are, however, a lot of lifers who are trapped in some of the same logical prisons I know - almost with certainty - that I’d still be stuck in, had I not gotten out.

When Eric talks about the hot ball of fire, because he doesn’t see an actual difference between himself and people in wildly different circumstances, I can relate. I know what it feels like to hold that hot ball of fire and not know what to do with it. Because I’m here now, looking at the lessons I learned and opportunities I received by leaving, and I’m struggling to put this fireball here, somewhere, in a more productive way.

There’s no good answer for this. It’s small steps. It’s - my wife and I deciding that, at a minimum, we could be another voice for our nieces and nephews in the area for what’s an option as they start to grow up, if we’re here. If we’re accessible.

Work, opportunities, and passing both down, across generations, happen at the one-to-one level. There are societal and philosophical layers, too, and of course they matter greatly. But if we don’t get the personal parts right first, on where we put our feet and how we spend our time, we’ll never have a shot for getting the big ideas right. It’s a struggle.

Work question for you: What's the injustice you've stopped looking away from? And are you building something that actually addresses it, or just talking about it?

LIFE: How Accident Shaped Everything

Key Concept: Eric's point isn't just charming - it's quite clarifying. If a stranger's motorcycle hadn't failed at exactly the right moment in time, Eric wouldn't exist. None of us would, in our own ways. We are all products of cascading accidents, random moments, timing we had nothing to do with. This isn't depressing to me. It's actually pretty liberating. It means you can't take yourself too seriously. It means you can't pretend your success was purely earned. It means you have an obligation to help others create the conditions where their accidents might work out better.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: There was a moment, when I was in 6th grade, where we found out through some older kids and friends at church, that the high school I was going to attend didn’t have enough books for the students. It was causing some chaos. Add on top of it how, at the time, the same system had bungled my schedule because my last name started with Z. Somehow, the new system rounded off me and some other kids at the bottom of the alphabet and put us into all sorts of random classes. I had a genuine moment of panic in a reading class when I realized I was the only kid in the class that could actually read.

The system produced plenty of fine adults. I have loads of friends and acquaintances who figured it out. But I can still look back and think how things were not going the way you want to see them going. Sometime that year, my mom, who was going through career changes of her own, found herself getting a long-term subbing job at a local private school, with a teacher out on maternity leave. She took it, and at the end of the year, a full time role opened up. Alongside the full-time role was free tuition for me and my brothers, at a school where tuition rivaled what most people paid for college, and we could be sure there would be no book shortages.

The transition wasn’t easy, but I’ve thought about it a lot. For starters, learning that people had separate summer and winter cars, let alone a car at all, I’m still in awe. But I get all sorts of educations by the new classmates, not all of which were rich, and it expanded my mind into all sorts of areas I am forever grateful for. So, if some teacher I couldn’t even tell you the name of didn’t get pregnant and then decide not to return to work, from 7th grade on I have a completely different educational experience. I don’t know what would have happened, but I do know the advantage what did happen meant for me.

I get credit for what I did with the opportunity, but I don’t get credit for the opportunity itself. Plus, I bungled lots of stuff too, so I’m sure I could have done way more with it too, but that’s not the point. The point is, we’re all living on the bleeding edge of a billion accidents, and a little luck goes a long, long way. If you can remember that about yourself, and others, there’s a lot of empathy you’ll start to have towards the world. Eric’s a living example, especially with this quote and story.

Life Question For You: What accident are you the product of? Have you traced back far enough to really see how arbitrary your existence is?

LEGACY: Set a Goal You'll Die Before Achieving

Key Concept: This is Eric's actual operating system. He's not chasing a pension or tech millions or even recognition - he's pushed those goals off the table entirely. What's left? The radical freedom to work on something so large, so important, so genuinely unfixable in one lifetime that you can only measure success in inches moved. You stop needing to see the finish line. You stop needing to be remembered. You're just pushing the ball because that's what a conscious person does when they see a ball that needs pushing - and then other people will keep pushing it after you're gone.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: I was getting ready for a birthday when Eric and I recorded this. As is my birthday tradition, I was also thinking about The Vandals, and their song that I listen to every year on my birthday (“Happy Birthday to Me”) since not long after I started in that school mentioned above, but also their song that I have joked should be played on my eventual death day, “Flowers are Pretty.”

The takeaway of the later song is that “Entropy, uncertainty - won’t yield to you.” Basically, no matter what you do or don’t do, nothing will matter in the grandest scheme of things. It’s a little nihilistic. It’s extremely existential. At my most cynical moments, I believe it in full. But, because I believe in laughter, and especially love for that matter, I remember the title. That flowers are pretty. There’s a contemporaneous joy to being alive. It’s miserable to be contemptuous about that detail. You can at least make silly songs about your fury, if you must.

So what’s the mature, 44-year-old angle on what to do with that feeling? It’s to start setting more goals that can’t be achieved by me, in my lifetime. It’s planting a tree that somebody else will enjoy the shade of, much much later. Because entropy is everything and serendipity might actually be a crapshoot that’s mostly crap, but that doesn’t mean there are still moments of beauty in life.

I believe you can engineer moments of beauty. I believe you can choose some to make outside of your life, in the moment. I believe you can choose some to make beyond your life, if you really think of it. Eric’s doing it with his kids. He’s looking to do more if it by revisiting policy work. I find myself very inspired by him.

I’m back in this area, with my wife, with my family, and I can see way farther than I could see the first time I was here. I don’t know yet what’s going to outlast me for the benefit of somebody else, years into the future, but I’d like to figure it out. All I know is that for now, it’s making the people around me smile a little bit more, see some opportunities that might otherwise be hidden to them, and living my life as an example that it’s a big world and I’ve seen it.

Legacy question for you: What would you do with your work and your life if you genuinely expected not to see the end of it?

BEFORE YOU GO: Be sure to…

• Connect with Eric Pachman on LinkedIn or X/Twitter

• Keep an eye out for “Data 4 the People” - launching soon with deep dives into SNAP and poverty data (you can get on the mailing list now if you visit the site)

• Read his reflections on Reclaiming Soulfulness, his personal blog

• Take a moment to trace back one accident that shaped everything in your life

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.