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... Rachael Goldfarb!

Do you know Rachael Goldfarb? She's a fractional Chief of Staff, operational change maker, and catalyst for entrepreneurs who's worked everywhere from the Clinton White House to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She was literally John Podesta's assistant - the Margaret to his Leo McGarry.

If not, allow me to introduce you. Rachael has this rare combination of White House operational expertise and punk rock energy. She gets things done while helping others see the boundaries between what they can control and what they can't - turning operational chaos into organizational clarity.

I wanted to connect with her because she embodies something I value deeply: the wisdom to know that the most important work isn't always the most visible work.

Our conversation is LIVE now on the Just Press Record YouTube channel (and this Cultish Creative Playlist). Listen and you'll hear Rachael and Eric Pachman discover they've walked parallel paths through loss, transformation, and finding meaning in helping others succeed.

THREE: That's The Magic Number of Lessons

In the meantime, I wanted to pull THREE KEY LESSONS from my time with Rachael 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: Understanding People Is The Most Underrated Skill

Key Concept: Rachael understands that effective organizations aren't built on perfect processes or brilliant strategies alone - they're built on truly understanding the humans involved. As a Chief of Staff, her superpower is recognizing that everyone brings their complete self to work: their trauma, their hopes, their unique conditioning. This awareness allows her to navigate complex organizational dynamics, ensure people feel seen and heard, and create the conditions where real collaboration can happen. It's not about being everyone's therapist - it's about acknowledging that technical solutions fail without human understanding.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: It’s wild how fast the stigma of “going to see a therapist” has been normalized. It took Frasier and Dr. Katz to turn whispers into a laugh, and then The Soprano’s to normalize taking it seriously.

The unintended consequence, however - and it’s an ugly one - is that going to see a therapist doesn’t always equate to gaining more self-awareness. Add in social media and a bunch of pop-psychologist content creators, and here we are today under the avalanche of therapy-speak. This makes what Rachael does both more challenging and essential.

I learned, by going to a therapist, how I was bringing my whole self to work whether I wanted to admit it or not. That led to the realization that everybody else was doing some version of it too. But work isn’t the place for therapy, and just because TV and social media make it more normal, doesn’t mean we need it to be everywhere all at once.

My wife would summarize this as “have boundaries!” She’s not wrong. That’s a whole practice unto itself. But what do you do when you’re a leader too? How do you act when your self-awareness and awareness of others are part of your actual job?

Rachael makes the whole concept of Chief of Staff so much more clear to me here. That’s the job where you figure out what’s going on with everyone, without becoming a therapist, and while helping everybody contribute to a broader, mutual mission. The core starts at the individual level, but she’s explaining a Chief of Staff as operational intelligence at the organizational layer. Of course there’s a professional role for exactly this.

Work question for you: When was the last time you paused to understand not just what someone is saying, but where they're coming from when they say it?

LIFE: Grief Can Reshape You Into Someone Better

Key Concept: Rachael lost her mother to ovarian cancer and discovered something profound in that loss - that devastating grief can paradoxically open pathways to deeper connection and purpose. Her mother's death forced her to recalibrate what matters, leading her to help small business owners build better lives and to approach parenting with an awareness that time is finite. She's not saying loss is good - she's saying that if you have the space and support to process it, trauma can become a catalyst for living more intentionally. It's the difference between being broken by grief and being transformed through it.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: The first thing I struggled with in building up more self-awareness was accepting A. I always had a role in what was going on in my life, and B. so did others and all sorts of external factors too. I thought you just heaped the whole world on your shoulders all of the time. Looking back, I was so confused about how something as basic as responsibility worked for so much of my life.

When Rachael and Eric talk about their losses, they accept their lack of control around the disease/diagnosis, and move on to the boundary between where their lack of control ends - and their sense of control starts. This is discovering, or at least refining agency at its finest. It’s acknowledging what you can’t control (cancer), what you can witness but can only influence in a minor way at most (how others respond to the cancer), and landing on what they can do for themselves (self-aware processing of the shared experience).

Is managing grief kind of like being your own Chief of Staff? I think it is. It’s the act of knowing where to place both your energy and your intentions. It’s an internal operational intelligence. And if you get it right on the inside, you're free to do far more powerful work on the outside. That's what they've both built.

Life Question For You: What difficult experience in your life might be trying to teach you something about what truly matters?

LEGACY: Awareness Is The Foundation of Everything

Key Concept: When Rachael and Eric searched for the single word that captures what it means to be soulful, they both landed on "awareness." Not the superficial awareness of what's trending on social media, but the deep awareness of how you're showing up in the world and how others are experiencing their reality. Rachael practices this as a Chief of Staff by understanding not just what needs to be communicated, but when people are ready to receive it. This kind of awareness - of yourself, of others, of the moment - is what allows you to build relationships that actually matter and do work that creates lasting impact.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: Awareness is understanding where the internal and external control boundaries live in our lives. Having soul is being able to hover over that crossover point, and feel peace around where that barrier sits. You have to let in enough chaos to stay responsive, but not so much that it knocks you off of your game.

I can’t help but think about soul music. I can’t help but think about the call and response of a song like “Bring It On Home To Me.” There’s struggle, longing, and conflict in every verse of the song. Both sides have hurt each other. But the call and response creates something bigger than the individual pain - it creates a commitment to work it out together. The couple is going to “bring it on home” and - it’s a happy song(!).

This is the soulful practice of being a Chief of Staff. Understanding everyone's perspective, acknowledging the flaws in every system, managing the boundaries between what you can control and what you can't - all in service of bringing everyone home to the shared mission. That's call and response in organizational form and execution.

You can't do that work without developing internal awareness first. You can't sustain it without staying attuned to everyone and everything around you. No wonder Rachael's so good at her job.

Legacy question for you: How are you cultivating awareness of not just what you're doing, but why you're doing it and who you're becoming in the process?

BEFORE YOU GO: Be sure to…

• Connect with Rachael on LinkedIn

• Check out her fractional Chief of Staff work at goldengluestrategies.com and www.rachaelgoldfarb.org

• Take a moment to reflect on who in your life helps you see things more clearly

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.