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... Lara Crigger!
Do you know Lara Crigger? She's a writer and editor with over 20 years of experience, known for sharp editorial instincts and a rare ability to see exactly what's broken in a piece of work - and why. She's currently freelancing with bylines at etf.com, among other places around the web.
If not, allow me to introduce you. Lara is the kind of editor writers dream about finding - someone who gets what you're trying to say before they tell you how to say it better. That combination of understanding and precision is rarer than it sounds.
I wanted to connect with her because she embodies something I value deeply: the ability to tell the truth about creative work without losing the trust of the person who made it.
Our conversation is LIVE now on the Just Press Record YouTube channel (and this Cultish Creative Playlist). Listen and you'll hear us dig into what makes feedback actually useful, why trust has to come before revision, and what inauthenticity really costs you when you don't catch it in time.
THREE: That's The Magic Number of Lessons
In the meantime, I wanted to pull THREE KEY LESSONS from my time with Lara Crigger 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: Know The Difference Between Bad and Wrong
"Bad advice is like somebody hands you a poem and they say, 'Oh, this is fantastic. Oh, it's the greatest thing ever,' and then they never give you anything useful. Or, 'This is the worst thing I've ever read. It just sucks, and you should just scrap it' - but that's bad advice. It's not very actionable. It's just a reaction, right? Wrong advice can be very actionable advice, but they just don't get what you're trying to get at. So if you go out and solicit a bunch of advice from a bunch of different people, you're gonna get a lot of wrong ideas. You have to have trust in yourself and trust in the people that you're getting critique from."
Key Concept: Most people think bad feedback means harsh or unhelpful feedback. Lara draws a sharper line - bad advice is just a reaction, useless but harmless. Wrong advice is the dangerous kind: it's specific, it's actionable, and it points you in exactly the wrong direction because the person giving it doesn't understand what you're actually trying to do. The antidote isn't finding better critics - it's finding fewer, more trusted ones.
Personal Archive Note-To-Self: Most of the beginnings of any career is bound to be plagued by wrong advice. All of mine was. It's because you have people who have succeeded 10 or 20 or more years before talking about what they did to succeed and it doesn't apply anymore. The quicker you figure out they're not giving you bad advice, just wrong advice, the better.
This really is everywhere, so I shouldn't be surprised when Lara talks about it with creative work, but she's right. Because just like in jobs, if you have a sense for what's good, you also have a sense for what's bad. The problem is, especially early on, or when you're vulnerable with something like creative work, that confidence is fragile, frail, or even flimsy.
That internal discernment gauge - whether what somebody is telling me is actionable and in line with what I know to be my authentic self - is everything. I know when advice is wrong or bad by how in alignment it feels with where I am trying to go, vs how much of a distraction solving for it feels like. Listen to Lara, this will keep you on your track, moving farther at a faster and faster rate, but only if you get it.
Work question for you: Think about the last time you got feedback that felt off even though it was well-intentioned - was it bad advice or wrong advice, and how long did it take you to tell the difference?
LIFE: Trust First, Revise Second
"The revision process is one of trust. It requires a really firm bedrock of trust between the writer and the editor - or whoever's offering the feedback. Not just in the sense that the writer has to trust that the editor knows what they're talking about, and the editor has to trust that the writer's not gonna freak out. But a deep, bone-deep level of trust that the writer trusts the editor gets what they're trying to say, and that the editor trusts the writer has something worth saying in the first place. And you can't really get meaningful critique, meaningful dialogue about what works and what doesn't work, without that trust underpinning it."
Key Concept: Feedback only works when both people are safe - safe to say what's broken and safe to hear it. Lara identifies two distinct layers of trust that have to exist simultaneously: the editor trusting the writer has something worth saying, and the writer trusting the editor actually understands what they're trying to say. Miss either layer and the feedback becomes noise at best, damaging at worst.
Personal Archive Note-To-Self: Dave Nadig started this part by talking about his "first read" people in our Notes on Notes conversation for Panoptica. You just can't revise without trust. So you start with trust and then get into revisions.
For an isolated act like creative writing, this feels a little abstract at first, doesn't it? You have to build a real relationship with a real person who knows the real you before they can be capable of being your editor. There's no replacement for it.
The pro-social aspect of the task, especially since it ultimately is supposed to be read by other humans who don't know you but will like you if they earn their trust, seems to check out to me here. Creative work creates a bubble of safety around the people sharing in it for the reasons we share anything, and the creative act might start in isolation, but the first giant baby step is to share it with one other trusted person who helps prepare it for a broader audience, of any size.
Life Question For You: Who is your bone-deep first reader - the person who both believes you have something worth saying AND gets what you're actually trying to say?
LEGACY: You Can't Fix Inauthenticity
"The reason it was wrong is because that wasn't the problem. The problem was I was writing from a place of inauthenticity. The conflict I had written was just not real. It wasn't grounded in realism - and that was not something that the mentors could really put their finger on. I don't even know if they knew that was the problem. You cannot fix inauthenticity. You have to tear it out, break it down, and replace it with something that is authentic. It's just not something that's fixable in its state."
Key Concept: Wrong advice can send you chasing the wrong problem for years - and the real problem might be one nobody can name for you. Lara discovered that her manuscript wasn't broken at the plot level; it was broken at the authenticity level, and no amount of structural fixes could reach that. Inauthenticity isn't a crack you can patch - it requires a full teardown and rebuild from something real.
Personal Archive Note-To-Self: For the layers of audience, and trusted first read editors, and all the steps between a celebrated work and a rough product that needs refining, it really does all start here, right? With us. Individually. It's humbling and exciting at the same time.
Without alignment, we aren't actually us. We're one person still, sure, but we're pulled in multiple directions. We're torn even if not visibly. So this idea that you can sense inauthenticity but you can't fix it - this might be the most human and most important of them all from my talk with Lara.
The greatest gift we can give another person is to see them as not just a whole, but a collection of pieces, that we can help them to align - if they want it - and they can do the same for us. We can't demand what way the pieces fit in their puzzle, but we can get to know them, how their pieces fit together, and keep them all snapping into the right places, without forcing anything.
If you want a legacy, be authentic and help others align themselves with who they are. Beyooooteeful.
Legacy question for you: Where in your life are you patching over inauthenticity instead of tearing it out - and who do you trust enough to help you see it?
BEFORE YOU GO: Be sure to…
Check out her freelance work, including at etf.com
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.
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
