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... Spencer Kier!
Do you know Spencer Kier? He's a product leader in education technology, angel investor, prolific podcaster (Audience of One is his show where he talks to anyone he's interested in, regardless of whether anyone else is listening), and someone who sits at the intersection of about seventy different micro-communities. He goes 85% deep on something in a matter of weeks, then steps out and explores something entirely different. He reads voraciously, quotes prolifically, and uses cold outreach as a strategic tool for building genuine relationships - because podcasting, he figured out, gives you an artifact that makes people actually want to say yes.
If you haven't come across him yet, you will. He's the kind of person who notices patterns across seemingly unconnected fields and connects them in ways that make you go, "Oh, I never thought about it that way."
I wanted to connect with him because he embodies something I value deeply: the belief that you don't need to specialize in one thing to be remarkable. You just need to be genuinely curious, stay in constant beta mode, and let your spikiness be the thing that makes you unmistakable.
Our conversation is LIVE now on the Cultish Creative and Epsilon Theory YouTube channels (and anywhere else you get your podcasts). Listen and you'll hear someone who thinks deeply about authenticity, empathy, and why the people who refuse to get smoothed out by the world are the ones who actually matter.
THREE: That's The Magic Number of Lessons
In the meantime, I wanted to pull THREE KEY LESSONS from my time with Spencer 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: Find Your Spikiness and Stop Smoothing Yourself Out
"Most people shift to the norm to the mean, and they try to do things the way everybody else is doing them. They don't think about not doing things the normal way and in a way that stands out. But I think you have to find your unique traits, your unique qualities that help you stand out in a way that nobody else is. Cultivate those, lean into them. That's really where you start to get those compounding returns in a very unique direction that nobody else can compete with you on."
Key Concept: The instinct in competitive environments is to conform - to do what everyone else is doing because it feels safe. But conformity is a race to the bottom. The real competitive advantage comes from identifying what makes you distinctly you - your spikiness, your eccentricity, the things that might initially seem like liabilities - and leaning into them harder, not away from them. This creates a trajectory no one else can replicate because it's built on something only you have.
Personal Archive Note-To-Self: The hardest part about bringing your whole self to work is that most jobs are not built for truly well-rounded people. That might seem weird. I am sure some high school ‘90s guidance counselor is clutching her (or his) pearls right now as I type this. But it’s true. Most jobs want you to be a round peg in a round hole, and if you’re not, if you could just show up with the bits that fit in during normal work hours, that’s all they really care about.
They beat that instinct into you over your life, and that’s just the way the world is, but - really getting ahead requires you to figure out the way they say the world is that it actually isn’t. I’m not saying you should jam your square peg into the round hole and make everyone around you miserable. I am saying you should figure out exactly where, when, and why you easily fit in, or as the poet/philosopher, Too Short so eloquently put it, you’ve got to “get in where you fit in.”
Because if you stop trying to bring everything to the table, or ignore all the bits you’re not bringing to the table, you can focus on what will actually make a difference - showing up in your most impactful way, across multiple contexts. That might mean more than one job. That might mean accepting the breadth and depth of life.
But the better you get at embracing your spikey weirdness across domains, the more ground you are about to cover while everybody else is wondering how they’ll ever fit into where, without understanding it’s also a when and why problem. “A lot of people try to be what they can’t be / and when you be like that you just can’t see / what life is all about…”
Work question for you: What trait or interest of yours have you been hiding because you thought it would make you "less professional"? What if that's actually your competitive moat?
LIFE: Empathy Is The Foundation, Not An Afterthought
"I consider myself a very empathetic person. Often more for strangers than my immediate community, but I think it's all grounded in empathy and attempting to understand the other person. I always try to strike this balance between what I want to get out of a conversation - I want learnings... by pushing them on their ideas and questioning them. But you have to balance that with not coming across as too antagonistic or making them uncomfortable. You have to set them up to be able to return the lob."
Key Concept: Empathy isn't soft or weak - it's the foundation of real conversation. It means understanding where the other person is coming from, what they want, what makes them comfortable or uncomfortable. But it also means you can push them, question them, challenge their thinking - because you're doing it from a place of genuine curiosity, not ego. The best conversations are a tennis match where both people feel set up to succeed, not caught off guard.
Personal Archive Note-To-Self: Remember the old principle’s office poster about everything I learned I learned in kindergarten? I think it was the principle’s office where I read that a few too many times. Spencer’s point takes me right back there (not making me feel like I’m in trouble, but definitely making me feel the weight of that simple signage).
Empathy, sympathy, and apathy all play a role in learning. Empathy is feeling somebody else’s feels, sympathy is caring about somebody else’s feels, and apathy is drawing a line where you no longer care or are concerned with their feels. All of them matter here, if we want to learn, and if we want to grow.
Community requires reciprocity. It requires feelings on the table, and you can’t expect everybody to put their feelings on the table automatically. You have to draw them out, you have to infer them, which means you have to build that curiosity muscle like Spencer has (and, candidly, like Carly has, which is part of why it’s so amazing to hear them go back and forth on this stuff).
If you’re building a community, you want to enter with curiosity, and then quickly develop how you’re empathizing with others, sympathizing appropriately, and yes - where apathy is a defense mechanism to not get absorbed into the unfortunate undersides of community. It’s not easy. But doing it right is so rewarding.
Life question for you: In your last difficult conversation, were you trying to understand the other person or trying to win? How would it have changed if empathy came first?
LEGACY: Always In Beta
"I think treating yourself as always in beta, always in an experimental mode, is a more enjoyable way to do things. Having a collection of small experiments, you're stopping and starting and evaluating. And having a collection of them, even if disparate, and allowing each of those things to express across different projects... The expression of those things in their own lanes is enough. And I think far too often people don't allow themselves to do that because they don't see how there's like this unified compounding path. But I think treating yourself like always in beta is better than waiting to specialize."
Key Concept: The pressure to pick one thing and go all-in is relentless. But what if you treated yourself as perpetually in beta - always experimenting, always learning, always willing to try something and then step out when it's run its course? This isn't lack of focus; it's a different kind of focus. You don't need to wait for a grand unified theory that ties everything together. Each experiment is valuable in its own lane. The compounding happens across the collection, not within a single track.
Personal Archive Note-To-Self: Always in beta doesn’t mean never getting anything done. Always in beta means a fresh sense of awareness, a healthy amount of empathy, sympathy, and apathy, and an inner fire of curiosity to keep listening and keep experimenting. And that’s before we even get to the creative tendency it produces.
You have to make stuff. It can be something physical or it can be something experiential. It’s going to be stuff though. If you sit on the couch and do nothing, you’re still making a sitting on the couch and doing nothing experience. If you get up off the couch and go out and be a psycho in the world, well, that’s a thing too. So, healthy choices is what I’m getting at here.
Because when you start making stuff from an always in beta mindset, you are going to iterate, learn new lessons, and then grow (grow, grow). I’m remembering how Too Short was the first rapper to put out 10 records and then retire, but also then not retire. He was so in beta he couldn’t get out of it, and he basically is still going. Partly to release albums, but also to release the experience of his music, whatever you think about it, to the world and his fans, over and over.
If you’re curious, you’ll never get bored. And if you’re never bored, it’s safe to assume you’re always curious, and always making a new product or experience that’s plugged in to not just the community around you, but the world you’re living in, and committed to making more interesting for everybody else who is in it with you.
Legacy question for you: What would you give yourself permission to try if you knew it didn't have to be your forever? What's one experiment you've been putting off because it doesn't "fit your brand"?
BEFORE YOU GO: Be sure to…
Check out spencerkier.com and listen to old episodes of Audience of One until I can convince him to put out new episodes
Take a moment to think about what your spikiness actually is - and whether you're letting it show
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
