It really is who you know, not what you know. It’s networks all the way down. And left and right, too.

But how do you keep track of them? How do you strategically do it?

And what if the only answer is - you just do it?

There’s no perfect strategy or replicable formula you can just port over and load in as a self-help podcast/.skill/”I know kung-fu” download.

The only thing there is, is to see networks as a framework of ecosystems you become aware of, and then can figure out access to. It’s like a puzzle.

Sometimes it’s easy and sometimes it’s hard, but if you can spot people with a connection, you can figure out what might connect them back to you.

For this - I’ve got a framework.

It’s one of my favorite expressions and it goes, look for “shared values and complimentary skills.” Those are where you share some alignment on what you’re working on, and a minimal amount is redundant in what you’re doing.

It’s like having a chef and a farmer working together. One grows, the other makes. Everybody gets to eat. It’s a real win-win.

If you see networks, and successes, as variations on the shared values and complimentary skills that are present between people, you can unpack just about anything.

This is all a big part of why I love hearing about the background people amongst people’s success stories as much as I do. Both because it highlights how non-linear every success story is, but also because no person ever acts in isolation. There’s always a network present. And it’s especially exciting when the bridges between personalities occupy all sorts of geographic space and realized time.

Relationships, with all their shared values and complimentary skills, are the core concept inside of every single episode of The Intentional Investor.

I’ve gotten so many ideas from recording this series, many of which I share here on Cultish Creative, but many more of which get applied to the other work I do, that I decided it was worth taking a minute to reflect on.

I was pinging stuff over to my podcast partner and editor extraordinaire, Jack Forehand, when I realized it might make sense to just press record on the conversation.

So that’s what we did.

I flagged the moment in my Mike Perry interview where he explained finding “the ceiling” in cross country races in high school. How he trained with two of the best runners in the state and there was no beating them. That lesson of what it means to stand next to greatness and accept your natural limitations has followed him through the rest of his life.

He needed those friends and that situation to internalize the lesson.

Then there’s the Marc Rubinstein realization, coming out of college and into the financial industry, where he’s weighing research vs. trading and research is kind of a no-brainer. He saw how the traders were wired. He understood how his quieter, contemplative, less hair-triggered personality made him fit in on the research side, and stick out with the traders.

He needed those comparative groups to make a comparison across multiple variables, which - that’s such an analyst way to look at it.

And Mat Cashman, with stories about stumbling into life-altering mentorship, and then the real-world break in via trading pits on the Chicago Board Options Exchange that if you didn’t live it, how would you know this is how it worked? Mat was already moving from music into finance and felt like an outsider. On a learning curve like this, all you can do is read the room, copy what you can, and slowly piece together your own voice.

He needed a mix of goodwill and hard-pressured confidence to keep showing up.

Jack and I talked through each of these.

That's what we do. I'm the creative one. Jack's the data guy. Neither of us builds what we're building without the other. The network… works. By design.

We talk about how different podcasts/shows have different ceilings and we think about it within our marketing conversations.

How Excess Returns has a large but niche audience, while Just Press Record has a higher technical ceiling (which, Jack’s dad gets this, you’ll have to listen to hear the explanation), and all of this means it requires a different approach to building that audience in the face of the algorithms.

How The Intentional Investor lives somewhere in the middle, but can take a business/finance person from the Excess Returns network to a deeper level, and for the most fun and interesting, we can get them to a non-financed-focused discussion on Just Press Record - IF it’s warranted (and when we know it is, it really is sooooo cool).

And once you’ve been taken through our various shows, the rapport we’ve gotten to build with our guests along the way is truly remarkable. We’ve made actual friends. We’ve seen business deals get done.

Because spreading the word is a shared value and we have a skill to do it in these formats that not everyone is as focused on.

We’re just two regular guys. We’re trying to build a media network on the side of other jobs. We have the insane gift of getting lots of takes and angles on the same stories from people we thought were the best and brightest in our various fields and now they want to talk to us.

Everything is connected.

Might as well be connected back to it.

WITH

Shared values and complimentary skills.

This was a joy to actually capture the way Jack and I talk through this stuff. Let me know what you think because I’m inclined to do this more often. It is, after all, the reflective compliment to actual networking.

Watch it now - on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts: