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... Neils Ribeiro-Yemofio!

Do you know Neils Ribeiro-Yemofio? He's the Executive Director of Why We Lift, a nonprofit focused on breaking the poverty cycle by investing in parents, and the author of "From Vision to Reality" - a guide for starting nonprofits that begins where most end: with actually writing the idea down.

If not, allow me to introduce you. Neils is a comic book nerd who understands that superhero origin stories aren't just entertainment - they're blueprints for understanding how the same circumstances can forge either heroes or villains, depending on a single choice you make about what kind of person you'll become.

I wanted to connect with him because he embodies something I value deeply: the understanding that the moment you feel most alone is the moment that determines whether you'll become someone who lifts others or someone who only lifts yourself.

Our conversation is LIVE now on the Just Press Record YouTube channel (and this Cultish Creative Playlist). Listen and you'll hear how Dr. Doom, college access work, and superhero origin stories all connect through one central truth: your choices about who you become matter more than your circumstances.

THREE: That's The Magic Number of Lessons

In the meantime, I wanted to pull THREE KEY LESSONS from my time with Neils Ribeiro-Yemofio 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: Write It Down First, Believe It Later

Key Concept: The gap between wanting something and actualizing it isn't about strategy - it's about writing it down. Most people never translate internal dreams into external commitments. Once it's written, it becomes accountable and real in a way that living only in your head never does.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: I didn't always understand how you could think but not reflect. You could have an idea in your head, like when you're doing dishes or folding laundry or driving around, but that's just idle thinking. Once you stop and reflect on that idea - ideally by writing it down, but I'll count speaking it into existence to someone who will judge your expressed thoughts, too - then you've converted the whole idea into something that exists in the world, outside of the space between your ears.

That transformation, of a thought in your head to a reflection on the page, is incredibly powerful. Neils didn’t bring it up by accident. He didn’t put it in his book by accident either.

Inspiration and ideas are all around us all of the time. The only question is if we have the net to catch the butterfly, the jar to put it in, and the discipline to go looking for another. It's easy to daydream and doom scroll through life. But it's not really all that hard to take the one extra step to write an idea down. To get some air on it. To put the thought on paper and feel the weight of what it means to be out of your head.

It's extra true at work. Not just because the habit element of collecting new ideas matters in a "work" environment, but because the room between noticing, creating, and collecting is what allows us to put our own spin on what we're creating. Unless you are truly on an assembly line, there is always room to spin this creative flywheel.

Work question for you: What idea are you protecting by keeping it vague in your head instead of specific on paper?

LIFE: The Fork in the Road

Key Concept: When you're alone and unsupported, you face a fundamental choice: become someone who ensures others don't feel that pain, or someone who doesn't care. But the hero path has its own trap - ego. Dr. Doom has everything to be the greatest hero, but his inability to accept that someone else might be smarter destroys it all. That's the real danger: not choosing wrong, but letting ego sabotage the right choice.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: If you've ever felt backed into a corner with nowhere to go and nobody to turn to, and pretty convinced that “this might be it” for you, you know the choice Neils is talking about. Yes, in comic book terms, but you know it's real. How some people get there and blame the world. They know the solution is to do it their way, and they decide they’ll spend the rest of their life imposing their will upon the rest of humanity. That is the formula for the supervillain and if you’ve seen it, you see it. You know how it happens.

The superhero path is better. It’s right there, too. It turns back towards helping humanity instead of inwards to helping yourself. But there's a third path Neils doesn't name explicitly, though I think he lives it.

I think about telling a therapist some years ago, when questioned about who my friends were that I was talking to about the struggles in my life - and I admitted, I wasn't telling anybody. I was literally paying the therapist for that. Obviously. Why would I tell anybody when I could pay somebody to listen? And that's the corner I was backed into. If you can’t tell in the video - I don’t have a cape or a cowl, so (spoiler), nothing super is going on here.

What the therapist explained to me over the next several sessions, and then several years, was how to help myself first, and then, how I could help others who were worthy of my attention - so I wouldn't get drained again, like I was when I finally found my way into that office. It didn't make me even close to a superhero, I assure you. It did rewire my brain about the world, however. I saw rougher edges than I had seen before. Or, at least, I was ready to admit they were there all along.

That rewiring committed me to not get stuck on them ever again, and to make sure anybody I care about doesn't get stuck there either. We all agree that the world doesn't need more supervillains. Even supervillains think it - they just want to be the only one. And we don't need capes or heroes either - we just need more people willing to help when and how they can, without sacrificing themselves.

That's the real choice. We all make it. Not to become a superhero or a supervillain, although the metaphor helps make it clear. Just: Can you help without breaking?

Life Question For You: When you felt most alone, what choice did you make - and what part of your ego might still be sabotaging that choice?

LEGACY: I Have Chosen to Be a Superhero

Key Concept: Legacy isn't something that happens to you - it's something you choose. Neils' choice to be a superhero wasn't made once and forgotten; it's a daily commitment to lean into supporting others. That's the legacy that lasts: not what you accomplished alone, but what you enabled others to accomplish by refusing to let your pain become their burden.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: After you make the choice between a life of service and a life of serving your ego, you have to figure out how to pass it forward. Yes, to help others, but then to figure out how you'll help beyond your lifetime. As Eric Pachman put it to me, how to start something that will outlast you.

The comic example I come back to over and over again - and I hope Neils appreciates this, and maybe Tyrone picks up a graphic novel with it - is in Frank Miller's telling of The Dark Knight Falls. The whole Dark Knight series, and you really have to appreciate the plays on words in that title - don't think too hard about it, just appreciate it - the books follow an aging Batman. The aches. The pains. The aging frustrations and existential questions of "What is this really for?"

Anybody over their mid-30s has started to sense it. All I know is that by my mid-40s writing this, I can't take a punch and I can get a cramp in my leg from sitting and typing all day so, seeing Batman taking his lumps, I get the respect and fear for the grind he's a part of. I'd want to quit too. But it's where that series goes.

Miller gives us a hero who comes to some sense of peace with his limitations. He comes to some sense of peace with the realities of the world. And we find, without massively spoiling it, a character who is set on teaching the world to fight for itself long after he's gone, with that as his legacy.

Neils is trying to do that. Tyrone is trying to do that. They're in the invest in others mode of middle-age. I'm trying to figure it out too. Just like we don't have to save the world all by ourselves or for ourselves, we also have to help others alongside others, and make sure we're teaching them how to help the future too.

Legacy question for you: What choice about who you want to become are you still waiting to make official?

BEFORE YOU GO: Be sure to...

• Connect with Neils Ribeiro-Yemofio on LinkedIn

• Check out Why We Lift at whywelift.org

• Read his book "From Vision to Reality" about starting nonprofits, AND the book he co-wrote with his education access activist wife, Shamelle, “C is for College”

• Take a moment to reflect on your own origin story and what you chose at that fork in the road

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.