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 Joseph Moore? He's a historian, professor, and the author of the national bestselling book How to Get Rich in American History - a 300-year tour of financial advice that worked, didn't work, and changed dramatically along the way. He writes at josephmoorebooks.com, and if you sign up there he'll send you chapter one for free so you can decide for yourself.

If not, allow me to introduce you. Joseph didn't set out to write a personal finance book - he set out to question the premise of every personal finance book ever written. He's a historian who tripped and fell his way onto the national bestseller list, sold out his first print run, and is already thinking about the next mountain.

I wanted to connect with him because Joseph is one of those people who believed in a story nobody else could see yet - and kept believing in it through 90 rejection letters, multiple agents, and years of being told the book didn't have an audience.

Our conversation is LIVE now on the Just Press Record YouTube channel (and this Cultish Creative Playlist). Listen and you'll hear two storytellers - Joseph and Simon Egan, producer of The King's Speech - discover just how much they have in common, including the part nobody tells you about: what happens after the mountain.

In the meantime, I wanted to pull THREE KEY LESSONS from my time with Joseph Moore 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: Failure as feedback isn't a mindset trick - it's a data collection strategy. Joseph didn't succeed because he avoided failure; he succeeded because he kept failing long enough to finally catch a break on attempt number sixteen. The insight isn't that persistence is noble. It's that every failure before the breakthrough was load-bearing - and he only knows that by looking backward.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: Failure is just feedback because failure is just air. It's all around us, all the time. You forget that there's atmospheric resistance until the wind blows really hard - or a densely humid day like we've been having lately reminds you about it - but it is ever present. And especially us creative folks can stand to be reminded.

You don't fight failure. You have to accept it. You have to talk to it. You have to roll with it and, when possible, Aikido it to your advantage. And anything you get good at will have a failure component to it.

That's the hardest lesson to remember, I think. The one where the act of succeeding is the act of surviving a seemingly endless amount of failures. That might be the ultimate work lesson. There is no job you can't force into an inverted perspective: if you want to have a lot of clients you'll have to experience losing a lot of clients / if you want to write a bestseller you'll have to write a no-seller / if you want to succeed you will have to fail.

Work question for you: What skill or struggle from your past shows up quietly but unmistakably in the work you do today?

Key Concept: Joseph handed in a national bestselling manuscript and immediately fell apart. Not because something went wrong - because something went right, and then stopped. The creative energy that had been fully deployed for five months suddenly had nowhere to go, and without an outlet it curdled into something that felt like failure. The lesson isn't about burnout. It's about what happens when the thing that makes you feel most alive goes quiet.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: What do you do when you don't know what to do with yourself? This is the mean-reversion idea I talked about in Simon Egan's Grow Your Network post too - go read that one if you haven't.

Here's a life concept that's easy to forget - you're always going to be trying to figure out what to do with yourself. Just like life has highs and lows, so does figuring out what you should be working on at any given moment. When you go really hard, you'll probably retreat. When you're taking it too easy, you'll probably need to remember to go really hard.

But that awareness - if you can know it in your bones - you can find more meaning in life by reaching for higher highs via avoiding lower lows. Yeah, sometimes you'll need to revert to your college self for a minute to remember you don't ever want or need to go back there. But this is a sign of growth. When you do the old things and realize you're too old for that s***, it's a sign you're growing up, at least a little.

Life question for you: When was the last time you achieved something significant and felt worse afterward than you expected - and what did that tell you about what you actually needed next?

Key Concept: Some people aren't built to enjoy what they've made - they're built to make the next thing. Joseph illustrates this through a coach who won a national championship and immediately pivoted to next season, not out of ingratitude but out of wiring. The same architecture that makes someone capable of building something great is often the thing that prevents them from sitting still long enough to appreciate it.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: The legacy idea here is - you have to know who you are relative to the people around you. They should make you better and you should make them better. If they're making you worse, or you realize you're making them worse, call timeout. We are living in the village, whether we want to admit it or not.

The broader idea about how some people aren't built to enjoy what they've made - just the act of making it - is a self-realization. That might not be you. I know it's me, so no judgement if it is you because - me too. But let's be real. If you are compelled to do something, you're probably not compelled to stop doing it, and that means you need to also understand where you fit into a bigger system.

Our own weird tendencies can help push others forward. It's the prior themes in this post - it's growth, and it happens from seeing the failures as a part of who we are, and the work-truth of knowing what we've outgrown so we don't go back. To quote Isbell, which I know Joseph will appreciate, "It gets easier but it never gets easy." The trick is, we have help - all around us, all the time, if only we look for it.

Legacy question for you: If the drive to create the next thing is hardwired into certain people, what does that mean for how you measure success - and when, if ever, do you let yourself just sit with what you've already built?

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 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