Playing With Networking (Weekly Recap 1/10/2026)

Authenticity Compounds: How Lived Experience Turns Frameworks Into Power

Author

Matt Zeigler
January 10, 2026

Let's connect some dots from this week's notes...

This week felt like watching the arc from personal integrity to market movement to cosmic inevitability. It started with Fela Kuti knowing exactly what matters and isn't worth your attention. It moved through the difference between saying you're consistent and actually behaving your way into being. Then it hit the critical distinction between inherited wisdom and hard-won experience. And finally, it reached toward understanding how these habits compound all the way up - from individual behavior to organizational systems to the inevitable convergence of intelligence itself.

The throughline that kept popping up for whatever reason was how frameworks without lived experience are just abstraction. But, in some weird way, when you start to understand them deeply enough to live them, they become invisible currents that move everything in and around you. Does that feel profound? It feels profound to me.

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Fela Kuti took the most expensive s*** in Nigerian history in 1974 - not as a novelty record, but as an act of defiance that became legendary. The audiobook Fela Kuti: Fear Not Man by Jad Abumrad gives you the full arc of his life, music, and movement, and it's genuinely worth your time if you've ever wondered why some artists feel genuinely dangerous. His genius was the punk energy underneath the Afrobeat - the audacity to declare independence, marry 27 wives, and make a hit song about bodily functions while the government watched. The real story though? It's about knowing what's actually worth your attention and what's just expensive noise.

Quote from the Personal Archive - on the cost of authenticity

"You can't mess with Fela's music, even if the more you learn about him, the more you ask, 'should I like this guy?'"

If you're caught between feeling inconsistent and knowing that change is the constant, Phil Pearlman has an answer: consistency is a rhythm, not a destination. This episode started with a clip from Nancy Burger and Julia Duthie about reinvention - two women who've completely transformed their lives multiple times - and Phil reframes the whole conversation around behaving your way into authenticity. The question that landed hardest came from his dissertation advisor 25+ years ago: "How long do you have to act a way before it's not a mask anymore?" His answer might be the antidote to every resolution that's ever failed.

Quote from the Personal Archive - as Phil answered his advisor's question

"Behaving your way into being is the only authenticity that actually matters."

The 4% Rule is everywhere right now - advisors are quoting Bengen's 1994 research like it's gospel, and our Panoptica narrative tracking shows "The 4% Rule Works" hit its highest signal in a decade. But here's what's getting missed: a rule of thumb is still just inherited wisdom, and inherited wisdom looks great until the market decides to do something Bengen's stress tests didn't predict. The real differentiation comes from Rules of Big Toe - the hard-won lessons you've learned through real client experience, the patterns you've actually lived through that a formula can never capture. When everyone is saying the same framework thing, that's exactly when the quiet authority of lived experience becomes invaluable.

Quote from the Personal Archive - on the difference between formulas and real experience

"What's your October 1968? What's your 2008? What's your COVID meltdown? Those answers are Rules of Big Toe. They're harder to defend than a backtest, but that's the point."

The Consumer Flywheel isn't sexy, but it's the skeleton key to understanding why your customers do what they do. Every transformation - whether Netflix is giving you emotional escape, a learning platform is giving you clarity, or a luxury brand is giving you status - follows the same pattern: something captures your attention, you get curious, you experience it, you form a habit, and then you repeat looking for the next spark. This framework applies across every business model, but here's what breaks it: trying to run the wrong flywheel for your actual relationship with customers. An enterprise B2C business that gets too artisanal collapses under its own customization. A boutique business that tries to scale loses the scarcity that made it valuable in the first place.

Quote from the Personal Archive - on what makes customers come back

"Muse: The moment something in the customer's world whispers, 'Pssst! Pay attention to this.' Curiosity: The active, 'What is this? Is it for me?' investigation. Experience: The actual contact with the product/service/story, where it's applied. Habit: The pattern that forms when experience + meaning yearn to be repeated."

If the Consumer Flywheel is how your customers' habits compound, the Creator Flywheel is the responsibility on your side. You can't just show up and hope the consumer wheel spins on its own - you have to deliberately structure how you find your muse, stay curious, create consistently, build the habit that closes the loop, and repeat in a way that gets faster over time. The danger is getting stuck: hoarding muses without acting, researching forever without shipping, creating in spurts and burning out, or building habits so routine they go stale. Understanding both flywheels together is the difference between showing up and actually moving the needle.

Quote from the Personal Archive - as the mirror reveals itself

"There is no consumption without creation. In practice, it's usually easier to see the consumer perspective first, hence why we're laying it out this way. The Creator Flywheel is what people want to jump into, but below, as you read this, you'll hopefully understand why now you're really ready for it."

Tony Greer spent three decades in markets learning the hard way what actually works. He's survived catastrophic losses at 27, watched the 2008 collapse, built TG Macro from 60 subscribers on election day 2016 into a functioning media business, and somewhere in that journey figured out something most people never do: the difference between playing a role and becoming trapped by it. Our full conversation is live on YouTube, but the three lessons that land hardest are about clarity of role, the allies who show up when everything's sideways, and how building systems and teams is the only path to actual freedom in what you love.

Quote from the Personal Archive - on who stays when it all goes sideways

"You find out who your real allies are when half the world like doesn't want to know your name. And the other half is like, Hey man, how can I help?"

Grow Your Network: Phil Pearlman Is A Reinvention Coach

Phil Pearlman is proof that you don't need to wait to feel ready - you can simply decide to behave and become. At 58, he's getting faster at running every year not because of some genetic advantage but because he decided to run, kept running, and the identity followed the action. The deeper insight applies everywhere: your kids are absorbing what you actually do, not what you intend. Your team is reading the current you generate, not your strategic statements. And your legacy isn't built against some external benchmark - it's built by moving 10% in the right direction from where you were yesterday, compounding that direction over time.

Quote from the Personal Archive - as Phil lives it daily

"You can just act your way. You can just decide you're going to do something, decide you're going to behave, decide you're gonna run every other day and go a little bit farther and go a little bit faster... we behave our way into being, and that becomes who we are."

Jonathan Hickman's House of X/Powers of X - written years before ChatGPT - frames artificial intelligence as a discovery, not an invention. Like fire. And if that's true, then there's an inevitability to what comes next: man and his creations eventually merge, and any intelligent species in the universe follows the same pattern of divergence and convergence. Hickman takes this to its conclusion - cultures that celebrate both inventors and artists, who harness fire and describe its power, are the ones that ascend. The black hole becomes destiny, the absorber of all information into dense singularity, and somewhere in there is a really beautiful meditation on what happens when everything compounds enough to collapse into itself.

Quote from the Personal Archive - as Hickman imagined it

"Hickman's central idea is this: artificial intelligence isn't an invention. Through his characters and some exposition, he frames AI as a discovery. That is a twist worth rolling over in your brain a few times. It makes you start to think of AI like fire. Man doesn't invent fire, he discovers it, and then invents a million and one tools to harness it."

Where Else I Showed Up This Week

Three Excess Returns episodes anchored some of the week's deeper thinking. Ben Tuscai (my partner at Sunpointe) and I sat down with Jack Forehand to break down our Bill Bengen interview - the conversation that directly inspired the Panoptica post about Rules of Thumb vs Rules of Big Toe. If you want to see how lived experience validates (or questions) inherited wisdom, that's the episode that matters. I also joined Bogumil Baranowski to interview Gautam Baid, to dig into frameworks and investing thinking, and then rounded out the week doing a macro chart roundup with Justin Carbonneau and Katie Stockton, where we applied all this framework thinking to real market conditions in real time. The connective tissue: understanding how to read the patterns and then actually live by what you're seeing, again and again.

Personal Archive Prompts

WHAT'S ONE BEHAVIOR YOU'RE WAITING TO FEEL READY FOR, WHEN YOU COULD ACTUALLY JUST BEGIN TODAY?

Who are the people closest to you right now, and what are you actually modeling for them - not what you intend, but what you're genuinely demonstrating daily?

In your own work right now, are you trying to be both the risk-taker and the price-maker simultaneously?

what's your "Rule of Big Toe" - the hard-won lesson you've learned through real experience that contradicts conventional wisdom?

WHICH FLYWHEEL ARE YOU RUNNING RIGHT NOW - AND IS IT THE RIGHT ONE FOR YOUR ACTUAL CUSTOMERS?

When was the last time you were genuinely sideways, and who actually showed up to help?

are you building something that requires you to show up every single day, or are you building something that sustains itself through others?

As always, I did my part, now it's your turn to write some reflections in your own Personal Archive.

(then, be sure to let me know where you're keeping it, I'm in search of the others too)

ps. Claude helped me organize and synthesize these thoughts from the week's posts. If you are curious how I use AI, read this post: Did AI Do That: Personal Rules