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 Jason Friedman? He's a former advisor at Merrill Private Wealth who quit his job on May 5th, 2022 (Cinco de Mayo - on purpose) to build something he thought was missing from the wealth management world: a way for people to actually find the right advisor, not just settle for whoever was in their network.

That company is Advisor Finder, and three years later it's connecting people with advisors managing $2.3 trillion across partnerships with some of the largest firms in the country.

I wanted to connect with him because he embodies something I value deeply: the willingness to build something genuinely useful instead of something that just looks good on a pitch deck - and the honesty to admit when the early days were absolutely terrifying.

Our conversation is LIVE now on the Cultish Creative YouTube channel. Listen and you'll hear two people who've both made big career pivots trying to figure out what it actually means to build something from nothing, how to show up authentically when everything is uncertain, and why the people around you matter more than the business plan.

In the meantime, I wanted to pull THREE KEY LESSONS from my time with Jason 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: The insight here isn't about being perfect - but it is about consistency and alignment. Jason is saying that trust isn't built through one heroic gesture or a polished presentation. It's built through thousands of small decisions where you show up as yourself, do what you say you'll do, and prioritize what's right over what's easy. The flip side is brutal: one moment of misalignment - one time you prioritize yourself over the person you're supposed to be serving - can erase years of careful trust-building. This is why authenticity matters so much in his business. You can't fake it for three years and expect people not to notice.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: People are always romanticizing the high-status and high-glamour versions of consistency. Nobody wants to talk about the joy of the toilet flushing, and - I get it. I want to read Batman comics on my weekends. I want to think about how magical it must be for Commissioner Gordon to fire up the Bat Signal into the clouds and know the Dark Knight will show up. I don’t want to worry if my toilet is flushing. I especially don’t want to have to trouble shoot why it’s not.

But what’s the difference besides romance, status, and glamour in those two examples? They’re both about consistency. They’re both about reliability. They’re both about showing up. I have both the comics and the “uh-oh” toilet stories to validate what happens when that trust is broken, for good and bad reasons.

Jason’s doing very interesting work by building platforms where you can indicate the vast in-between of trust on the Batman-to-toilet-flushing continuum. He’s making it more than a Roto Rooter emergency call, but he’s not making it less than an investment of time and energy to vet how somebody shows up and why you trust it the way you do. I appreciate the level of respect he has for it. Trust isn’t built on a google search, it was always going to take more, and it deserves to be treated that way.

Work question for you: In your most important relationships - with clients, with colleagues, with your team - are you showing up as consistently trustworthy, or are you gambling that they won't notice the gaps?

Key Concept: There's a vulnerability in this that's easy to miss. Jason is admitting that a month into quitting his job to start a company with zero investors and zero product, he needed someone to tell him: don't change. That's permission, not instruction. It's the difference between "here's how successful people operate" (which invites imitation) and "your way of being is already enough" (which invites authenticity). The principle transfers everywhere - to parenting, to selling, to leading a team. The moment you start performing a version of yourself you think people want to see, you've already lost the thing that makes you trustworthy in the first place.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: I got some advice, early on in my professional advice giving days, that everything would work out for me when I started to figure out how to “play in more traffic.” The metaphor, as crude as it may be, stuck. Partially because who wants to get hit by a car? But also because - no seriously, why is the advice to get hit by cars?!

People have to notice you. And let me be very clear, they have to notice YOU. Alan, the kind person who said this strange metaphor to me, wanted me to know I had something going on he both appreciated and respected. It was very thoughtful of him. He also realized the normal mediums weren’t giving me an avenue (see what I did there) to be me, and he was recognizing how out of place I was feeling. I couldn’t be me at a swanky networking event and I’ll be damned if you ever see me on a golf course, but if not there, where was I supposed to find a car to Christine me? (That’s a movie reference bespoke-placed for Drew, to be clear)

You can’t imitate what everybody else is doing because you think you can be them. You can try, sure, I did it, it didn’t work but, figure it out for yourself, and then - what you can do, is you can unapologetically act, speak, and think on your terms provided you learn how to frame your version in a way that’s valuable to others.

Play in more traffic, on the right roads, and don’t take this advice literally - got it?

Ps. Obligatory shoutout to Sheryl Hickerson - what a gift she gave Jason.

Life question for you: Who in your life has given you permission to be exactly who you are - and have you returned that permission to anyone else?

Key Concept: This is a masterclass in how small choices signal who you are. Jason had a choice in that moment: respond like a professional networking at a major firm event (formal, careful, measured), or respond like himself (casual, spontaneous, genuine). He chose himself. And because he did, he created a genuine connection instead of another transactional business relationship. The legacy here isn't about getting hockey tickets - it's about the pattern this represents. The people who matter most in your life will remember you not for how polished you were, but for how real you were. That text message is a permanent record of his choice to show up as himself, even when it would have been easier - and more "professional" - to pretend.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: People don’t take people up on stuff they offer often enough. I get it. It feels imposing, or you start replaying an episode of Seinfeld in your head and imagine yourself as Kramer, innocently stumbling into a smuggling scheme because who else would be so dumb. I’ve talked myself out of so many versions of Drew’s story, and it’s always back to that high-status and high-glamour idea of “Who does that? not people like me.”

Now, to be clear, this is not to encourage spending time doing activities you don’t want to do with people who you don’t want to hang out with. I have thought about this level of detail a lot here because, people will dangle stuff in front of you, and even if you want to do what they’re doing, if it looks like a bad hang you really ought to say no. But, in a story like Drew’s here, he was super excited about doing something like this and the yes was just as much of a no brainer as he made into.

You don’t have to think if an action is authentically aligned with who you are. Batman doesn’t think “Oh, I’m a little tired to night, go to sleep Gordon” when he sees the Bat Signal. My toilet (which is old school, an AI toilet might operate otherwise) does not say “Nah, I don’t feel like working this time, you jerk” before it flushes.

There’s no trust in others without trusting yourself first. And, the ease by which everything operates once you’re there, in and out of your domain, is the closest thing to being like a superhero I can think of.

Legacy question for you: What relationships in your life exist because you chose authenticity over performance - and what might you be missing by not taking more chances like that?

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