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... Simon Egan!
Do you know Simon Egan? He's the producer behind one of the most beloved films of the last twenty years - The King's Speech - a movie that won four Academy Awards including Best Picture, and somehow managed to make a stuttering British monarch into the most relatable person in the room. He runs Bedlam Productions, and he's been in and around film - documentary, feature, development - for decades.
If not, allow me to introduce you. Simon didn't arrive at The King's Speech by climbing a straight ladder. He came through finance, then film school, then documentary, then a detour through an unmade play that landed on his nightstand at 3:00 in the morning and changed everything. What he built afterward is the kind of thing people spend careers trying to manufacture - and almost never do.
I wanted to connect with him because Simon is one of those people who found his life's work by being honest about his life's wound - and then had the discipline and patience to fight for it for years before anyone else believed in it.
Our conversation is LIVE now on the Just Press Record YouTube channel (and this Cultish Creative Playlist). Listen and you'll hear two storytellers - Simon and Joseph Moore - discover just how much they have in common, including the part nobody tells you about: what happens after the mountain.
THREE: That's The Magic Number of Lessons
In the meantime, I wanted to pull THREE KEY LESSONS from my time with Simon Egan 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 Thing That Already Knows You
"We're in about 5, 10 pages. I'm like, 'This is pretty good. I'm really enjoying this.' And then, you know, sort of midway through, I'm, 'I'm quite excited now.' And I got all the way through to the end - it was probably about 3:00 in the morning. I'm a very slow reader. And just, I found... I wanted to wake my wife up and, 'I've found it. I've found it. I've found the thing that I wanna make.' And I think for me, the thing that chimed the most was something deeply personal - because I couldn't read out at school. So, as a director, wanting to direct actors, I thought I needed to have something that I could talk from my heart about, from an experience about. And what I found so appealing was this experience of somebody at the completely opposite end of the scale - he was a future king of England, all the privileges that brings - but he had something as debilitating as I did, and yet he still persevered and pushed through."
Key Concept: Simon didn't find The King's Speech by searching for a great script - he found it because it found him first. A story about a king who couldn't speak in public landed in the hands of a filmmaker who spent his childhood hiding from any moment he'd have to read aloud. That personal resonance is what gave Simon the conviction to fight for it through years of rejection, remortgage, and closed doors. The lesson isn't "find a story you love." It's find the story that already knows something about you.
Personal Archive Note-To-Self: The weirdest thing about whatever you end up doing for work - and this is a constant theme of The Intentional Investor too - is that something you are paid well to do is inevitably linked to a skill you have developed over the course of your life. When Simon explains the depth to which this undiscovered play resonated with his soul, and the sheer heights it went to beyond what he alone could have imagined, that's exactly what's playing out.
Work is about taking our natural gifts and basically monetizing them. I don't want to cheapen it, but I think that's true. We have all of our struggles and quirks and they seem kind of pointless and random in how they stack up.
But no job is just one thing. Every job - whether you're the janitor or the visionary CEO - is about all the things that happened before, good and bad, that make you great (or terrible!) at the job at hand. I see it profoundly in my own work. My job is all about listening to people and creating space for them to express ideas. Sometimes I help them execute on next steps, but most of the time I help them just excavate the thought - and I've been practicing versions of that skill as far back as I can remember.
Work question for you: What skill or struggle from your past shows up quietly but unmistakably in the work you do today?
LIFE: The Hotel Room Nobody Sees
"Sort of cut to three days later, I'm sitting in my underpants in a hotel room in New York, sort of slightly rocking backwards and forwards - it's almost like you're hyperventilating because you're like, 'Is this... What the hell? What's all this about? I don't quite get it.' It was literally almost like clinically depressed because afterwards it was just like the normality was just too... Like that guy (referencing a world-famous figure Joseph Moore described overhearing on an airplane, confessing at the end of his career that he felt his life had been a failure), 'What have I done with my life?'"
Key Concept: The King's Speech premiered at the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. Everyone told Simon his life was about to change. Three days later he was alone in a New York hotel room, rocking, hyperventilating, unable to process any of it. The crash after a creative peak isn't a sign something went wrong - it's almost a structural feature of the process. The higher the summit, the stranger the descent back to ordinary life feels.
Personal Archive Note-To-Self: There's Greg Larkin's second mountain problem all over again - if you haven't heard that conversation with Greg and Mishka Shubaly, go find it. Success doesn't mean living on top of the mountain. Life mean reverts all those emotions - and the real skill, almost the only real skill, is staying in front of that mean reversion.
I love Simon's framing because you can feel it in both ways. He's at the top of the mountain, after mind-bending success with the film, and yet he's in his underpants in a hotel room like a crazy person. The mean reversion to baseline is already happening. It echoes a "he's been here before" vibe too - of having no success and sitting around in his underwear wondering if nothing will ever happen.
That's why this feels so important. It's all fleeting. It's hard to enjoy the success just like it's hard to ignore the thick of being in failure. Life is the lesson of learning to live with these moments and not have them destroy us from the inside out - even though it almost always feels like the attack is coming from the outside in.
Life question for you: When was the last time you achieved something significant and felt worse afterward than you expected - and what did that tell you about what you actually needed next?
LEGACY: Wired For The Next Thing
Joseph: "If you are designed in terms of who you are to build the type of thing that hits at that level, that resonates with people at a deep level, you are not built to enjoy it. You are built to go on and do the next thing."
Simon: "Because you feel like you need to be in that moment all of the time, and it's like an unnatural drug high. You know, it's artificial. It's wonderful, but there's a downside to it."
Key Concept: The people built to create things that resonate at a deep level are often the least equipped to enjoy what they've made. Joseph names the mechanism - you're wired to go, not to stay. Simon confirms it from the inside - the high is real, but it's artificial, and the crash is structural. Legacy isn't about savoring what you built. It's about accepting that the drive to build the next thing is the actual gift.
Personal Archive Note-To-Self: Oh no, now Simon's done it - he took Joseph's idea of if you're built to do something you might not be built to enjoy it, and somehow raised the stakes. Directly out of the lookbook on his own success, he reminds us we will be tempted to permanently find a way to keep ourselves in full success mode all of the time - and that's the type of belief that can kill you.
I hate being stressed. I hate being overwhelmed. My wife will joke with me and say "You love the chaos" - but I don't. Not really. I love solving puzzles. I love the challenge. I love not feeling like there's nothing to do.
But it's born out of this knowing that I'm not the kind of person who can just enjoy what was done yesterday. I have to be in today. I have to be thinking, at least a little, about tomorrow. The balancing act is to not get addicted to it - and to make sure the others in our life realize we aren't dragging them into an unnaturally induced state with us. It really does take a village.
Legacy question for you: If the drive to create the next thing is hardwired into certain people, what does that mean for how you measure success - and when, if ever, do you let yourself just sit with what you've already built?
BEFORE YOU GO: Be sure to…
Check out Bedlam Productions for what Simon is working on next
Watch The King's Speech if you somehow haven't - and watch it again if you have
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 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
