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 Julia Duthie? She's the host of People Are Everything, a semi-structured long-form conversation podcast now in its fourth season with nearly 50 episodes recorded. But more importantly, she's a connector - someone who understands that scenes aren't built alone, they're built together through intentional relationship cultivation and genuine curiosity about disparate groups of people.

If not, allow me to introduce you. Julia has created a genuine community through her podcast by refusing to shorten conversations, valuing depth over metrics, and treating every guest as a potential friend by making space to listen to them talk about the people most important to them. She's built four or five true friendships in just one year of doing this work - and that's what she considers real success.

I wanted to connect with you because you embody something I value deeply: the understanding that making a scene requires co-collaboration and the willingness to bring people together without taking that privilege for granted.

Our conversation is LIVE now on the Cultish Creative YouTube channel. Listen and you'll hear these creators wrestling with friendship, tribe, identity, and what it means to build community in an era of both endless connectivity and profound loneliness.

In the meantime, I wanted to pull THREE KEY LESSONS from my time with Julia Duthie 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: Julia identifies friendship as the only major relationship category without inherent structure or convention. Unlike romantic relationships (which have courtship, stages, clear expectations) or family (which has defined roles and language), friendship offers complete freedom. This freedom is precisely what makes friendship both fragile and powerful - and why it deserves intentional cultivation rather than assumption.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: My wife and I have a short-cut descriptor we use in our house all of the time to define who somebody is, mostly focused on role in our life, but also relative status. Take work-Jack (one of my partners at Sunpointe) vs podcast-Jack (aka “he who rolls the clips” and works on every podcast with me) vs. a couple of different client Jack’s (usually they get an approximate location/age tag, too), and if I only know somebody from internet comments, that would automatically make them internet-friend-Jack. This is our shorthand to quickly explain who I am willing to talk to and when, and on what terms, because we have no other way to say all this stuff.

It only gets narrower from there. Like how internet friends aren’t real friends, they’re strange modern acquaintances, until you mutually agree to communicate in some way that feels like, well, like how being friends feels like when you’re in middle school. It’s the “I like this, we should hang out at lunch, or maybe on the weekend” thing, vs. whatever the hell “engagement” even really is.

So where are the modern conventions for this? They’re bespoke only. You literally have to write your own friendship book and then probably listen to Nina Badzin or Anna Goldfarb whenever you have spare time.

So when Julia explains how confusing friendships are and how they lack conventions, I can’t help but take it one step farther, and not just agree - but highlight how you have to come up with these conventions amongst your friends, cascading out from the most important best-friends, to the friendly-friends, down to the acquaintances, etc. There is no manual and if you can embrace it, it’s a feature and not a bug.

Work Question For You: In your professional relationships, are you treating them as transactional (like they're supposed to have rules) or as friendships (where the real magic happens)?

Key Concept: What began as a survival mechanism in childhood - learning to navigate different social groups by understanding each group's unique language and values - became Julia's superpower as an adult. She reframes early social flexibility not as belonging nowhere, but as the ability to belong everywhere. This skill isn't passive assimilation; it's active sociological problem-solving applied across contexts.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: Whenever people (by which I mean copywriters for Target, presumably) say “survive and thrive” I think of my elementary school bus stop. That was the one where I learned how to survive and thrive and why I would never buy a mass produced piece of wall art to suggest it could be casually purchased. You’ve gotta earn that, you can’t buy it - I know Julia gets it, which is probably why we get along so well.

At this bus stop, some brilliant planner, or more likely a hungover, overworked, undereducated, wannabe principal turned office admin, had the genius idea to put the vocational high school kids, who’s bus left later than the high school kids, at the same location and pickup time as the much younger, more easily abused, elementary school kids.

Amongst the lessons I learned from those vo-tech kids, who arguably taught me more than 90% of my college professors, include: why you shouldn’t light cigarettes with lighters and hairspray, how a crossing guard isn’t a real cop so you “what’s he gonna do about a snowball fight” (that one got ugly, real cops got involved, eventually), and if you can make them laugh, you can at least preserve the safety of yourself and your friends.

Now, I was already on the fast track for learning these “life hacks” in the rest of my life, but let me tell you, a 17-year-old who has no problem picking a fight with a 10-year-old can bring a certain amount of focus no pompous professor can ever hope to garner. That bus stop taught me to read the room, learn how to disappear into a crowd (no matter how small), and how to score social status points with older kids, younger kids, occasional parents, jocks, nerds, and everyone in between. Hard to look back on that and hate it.

And, to the handful of older kids, like neighbor Brian, and far too big for our age Daryl (he was 6 feet tall in 5th grade, you could hide behind him when he was in a good mood), the small acts of kindness on the way to surviving, even when there was minimal thriving involved - much like how Julia talks about Denise - thank you.

Life Question For You: Which groups in your life do you move between? Are you treating that movement as a liability or recognizing it as a rare gift?

Key Concept: Julia articulates a philosophy of intentional abundance - recognizing that time is finite but curiosity is infinite, so the strategy is to bring the world closer rather than wait to travel it. Her approach isn't passive consumption but active curation of experiences, relationships, and cultural exposure right where she is. This creates a sense of richness and fullness available to anyone willing to pay attention.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: Between the experience of vo-tech kids at the bus stop, and then a few years later the culture shock of transferring from a public school to a private school and having to learn a totally new set of cultural dynamics, I had decided the place I grew up in was weird and wanted to get out of it as fast as possible. I figured a broader set of potential friends would do me good. By 17, I really needed it.

And I did that. I got to travel. I, strangely, made great friends with some people from my hometown who I never met until I left (what’s up Mike), and I got to experience all sorts of newness in a way I craved. The internet helped out a bit too. The world was way bigger than the bus stop, even if the ultimate lesson was - it was just a giant bus stop after all.

When my wife and I had decided to eat those words (and mutually shared although we weren’t together when we independently experienced those wishes, long ago) and move BACK to the strangle land where we grew up, it was with a totally different perspective. We came back to help show some people there’s a bigger world out there. We came back to show the weirdos, and the massively growing population of other cultures we were here to eat at their restaurants (the food scene here - shhhh), and we came back to have Secret Pizza Club meetings with old friends.

If you’re not here to fight, and if you’re here to have a good time, you can actually have a good time. That’s what most of want, in the end, and it’s a magical thing. If you can find a way to leave home to experience the world, and then bring that desire and those stories back home to share with friends (metaphorically back home OR in the new place you call home), that’s the best we as humans, and friends of humanity, can ever offer.

Legacy Question For You: What windows into other worlds are already available to you that you're not looking through yet?

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