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... Scott Shadian!
Do you know Scott Shadian? Scott is the co-founder of Sayara - a research and evaluation company that operated across 30 countries - and the founder and CEO of Emergence Field Labs, where he's building tools to flip the data pyramid and put research power back in the hands of grassroots organizations.
If not, allow me to introduce you. In 2021, Scott helped organize and execute the evacuation of over 1,200 vulnerable Afghans from Kabul in the final days before the US withdrawal - navigating Taliban checkpoints, charter planes, diplomatic back-channels, and a suicide bombing, largely without government support. He did it the same way he's done everything: by finding the alternate route when the system stops working.
I wanted to connect with Scott because he embodies something I value deeply: the belief that every problem has a solution, and the willingness to go looking for the back door when the front one is locked.
Our conversation is LIVE now on the Epsilon Theory YouTube channel (and this Intentional Investor Playlist). Listen and you'll hear one of the most remarkable stories I've had the privilege of sitting with - and the systems thinking underneath it that made it all possible.
THREE: That's The Magic Number of Lessons
In the meantime, I wanted to pull THREE KEY LESSONS from my time with Scott Shadian 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: The Report That Goes Into a Drawer
"A USAID organization would hire us, and we would do this amazing work and turn in this incredible report with all this learning, and we would always joke that it would go into somebody's desk, and we would never hear about it again. And then we'd see another program pop up that's repeating the mistakes that we had seen before. No one was reporting anything wrong. So if no one was doing anything wrong, then there's nothing to learn from. And so what I started to question was the entire sense-making apparatus - that we weren't really being genuine or truthful to ourselves about any of this. And then eventually what you end up having is this cognitive dissonance grows and grows and grows until something like Afghanistan happens and you have a collapse."
Key Concept: Most systems don't fail because people are doing bad work, but they falter, erode, and break down because the incentive structure makes reporting failure impossible. Scott watched this pattern repeat across administrations, countries, and programs: excellent research, accurate findings, and then silence. When the system only rewards success stories, it loses the ability to see itself clearly. Scott's alternate route wasn't to fix the reporting - it was to flip the pyramid entirely, building tools that let grassroots organizations own their own data and tell their own story upward.
Personal Archive Note-To-Self: The great Roger Mitchell has said to me, in various forms, that the best consulting businesses know how to answer the plea to "take my pain away." I love that advice as a reminder for what constitutes well paid work, most of the time. The pain and the price they'll pay to have it removed are powerful incentives to be aware of.
And it goes a step further. If you are in the consulting seat, you have to understand the nature of the pain you're removing, as well as the psychology of it. The pain might just be to get somebody else off their back. That's what I see when Scott is telling this story, and it's a pervasive type of pain you'll find everywhere.
Sometimes pain is just surface level like that. You are doing work you think could change the world, but the pain it is removing is just to check a box for a manager before the Friday deadline. I've been humbled by it so many times. That's why Rog's statement rings so true in my head, and why when I hear Scott say it, you realize how the pain he's treating is about to switch. When he's handing reports to government agencies, the stakes are middle-management stakes. It's not until the pain is getting his own people out of a warzone that the pain becomes very, very real.
Work question for you: Where in your own work are you writing reports that go into a drawer - and what would it look like to change who owns the data?
LIFE: A House Divided
"I was researching Lincoln's speech, the house divided speech, and I realized that's what was happening within me - that I was living in this half slave, half free inner world, that I was really experiencing an inner civil war. And that my body was the evidence of the civil war - my own immune system attacking my own body. And I looked at that as my own inner cohesion starting to tear apart. And so the more I was working on my own self-healing, I started to see the relationship between my research - my understanding of why a society attacks itself - and why a body attacks itself."
Key Concept: Scott spent his career studying why societies fracture - the fraying of social cohesion that opens the door to fear, tribalism, and eventually collapse. When he was diagnosed with an immune-system disorder, he found the alternate route to understanding his own health through the same framework: a body attacking itself isn't so different from a nation at war with itself. The question he brought to his own healing was the same one he'd been asking in the field - where has cohesion broken down, and what would it take to restore it?
Personal Archive Note-To-Self: Taking pain away for other people is nothing like taking pain away from yourself. That's why people ask for help. And you have to learn to ask for that help, or even ask any question at all, which is what Scott is figuring out here.
For all the civil war studying in the world, he never flipped the logic and applied it to his inner conflicts. Life is funny like that. The places that take up all of our attention aren't there for one dimensional reasons, if we really start to look closely.
I know exactly when I started to look closely, inward, finally, instead of always and only outward. For me it was about music and listening. It's wanting to help structure and clean up other people's works of art in a producer's seat that eventually drew me to the world of advising and consulting, and not until I realized I wasn't heeding any of my advice did I turn that back and say - the project that is my life is in crisis and I need somebody to help produce a path out with me. This is where work meets life, and it is this real.
Life question for you: Where in your own life is a house divided - and what would it look like to negotiate a peace deal with yourself?
LEGACY: We Figure It
"I think I got that from my dad. Watching somebody who didn't really have much of an education always figure it out. He always had this thing he would say: 'Don't worry. We figure it. We figure it.' Like, it was always this idea that every problem had a solution. And I think when you're someone like myself who didn't do very well in high school and just always was getting in trouble with the administration, you were always just kind of looking for back doors. So when the system does collapse, I was very comfortable in a situation where we didn't have to follow the rules, and we could kind of imagine what the routes were - where the back doors were. So yeah, that's always been a feature, which I credit my late father for."
Key Concept: The alternate-route instinct isn't stubbornness or rule-breaking for its own sake. In Scott’s framing, it's a deeply inherited belief that every problem has a solution if you're willing to look sideways. His father modeled it in a tourist shop in Coronado, seven days a week, no college degree, no safety net. Scott carried it into the White House, into Kabul, and into a charter plane operation that didn't exist 48 hours before it needed to. "We figure it" is a legacy worth naming.
Personal Archive Note-To-Self: First you learn about how the world works. Then you learn about how you work. Finally you learn how you have to put both of those things together, and how obvious that is and always was, but you have to wait for it to click for you.
The poetic simplicity of "we figure it" as his dad's enduring message, that he keeps applying later and later in life, it's almost too perfect as a legacy sentiment. It's a personalized aphorism. In DNA form, really.
There's a humility in realizing somebody has to show it to you - in a positively or negatively reinforced way, let's be honest - and then there's the responsibility you feel to show it to somebody else, ideally in a positive way. That's the phase Scott's at now, sharing a story like this with me on a podcast.
All the growth in the world means nothing if you don't pay it forward. That's what this whole show is, if it's not clear. These stories weren't easy to gather, evacuating those people and building businesses are hard, but the hardest step is paying it forward, and I'm hoping my attempt to produce this organization means as much for others as it means to me.
Legacy question for you: What phrase or instinct did someone hand you early in life that still shows up when the system stops working?
BEFORE YOU GO: Be sure to…
Check out Emergence Field Labs and what Scott is building
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
