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- Playing With Networking Weekly Recap (10/25/2025)
Playing With Networking Weekly Recap (10/25/2025)
When You Look In The Mirror, You See The Work: Legacy, Loss, and Learning to Live Soulfully
Matt Zeigler
October 25, 2025
Let's connect some dots from this week's notes...
If you receive these recaps and haven't yet subscribed to the daily notes, might be a good time to hop into your preferences and toggle between daily and weekly. Both hit different - daily keeps you in the conversation, weekly gives you the thematic landscape. Your choice, your inbox, your rules.
D'Angelo passed away this week at 51, and what struck me most wasn't just the loss - it was the lesson his three albums teach us about what it means to leave a real legacy. He didn't repeat himself. Brown Sugar bridged generations. Voodoo broke how modern music thinks about rhythm. Black Messiah synthesized everything that came before into something entirely new. Three albums. Three distinct sounds. Three ways he mattered. In a world obsessed with consistency and personal branding, D'Angelo showed us that true artistry means evolution, even if it takes fourteen years between records. His music became the soundtrack to three different eras of my life - and now it's a reminder that the work we do doesn't need to be prolific to be profound.
Quote from the Personal Archive - on what funk actually means as a philosophy "Funk is not as slow as the blues... it's in the middle. It's like you bring the temp up, throw it in the pan for the sear, and then let it rest for a minute, after, while you stand there salivating. You get the benefits of the internal cooking, and the char, all together."
This week taught me the most important reading skill I've developed: asking "Why am I reading this now?" It's the difference between consuming information and actually understanding what it means. When everyone knows something but nobody says it, you're in a dangerous narrative dead zone. Then someone speaks it aloud - a debate flops, a bankruptcy happens, a career shift becomes unavoidable - and suddenly the hidden truth everyone knew becomes the thing everyone admits. I saw this pattern with Biden's debate, with my own career move out of corporate finance, and now with private credit bankruptcies nobody's talking about yet. Learning to spot these moments - in headlines, in corporate messaging, in your own life - is how you stay ahead of the curve. Not by predicting the future, but by recognizing when the present reality has finally caught up to what we all already knew.
Quote from the Personal Archive - on knowing when to leave "I had been living in the 'Bring your whole self to work! Uh, except those parts' world for too long... when the stories institutions tell themselves no longer match reality, it's time to shift."
I got asked this week how I ended up surrounded by high-quality people, and the answer is deceptively simple: I play long games with good people. It took ten years of knowing Ben Tuscai before we officially started working together, but I never forced it. I just kept the relationship alive, paid attention to his other relationships, and waited for the stars to align. This isn't patience born from passivity - it's a deliberate investment strategy applied to human connection. Figure out what "good" means to you (it should feel like a gut sense, not a checklist). Watch how people treat others and talk about their relationships. Don't stretch yourself too thin trying to maintain everything - that's a recipe for shallow connections everywhere. Protect your bandwidth. Invest deeply in the fires worth keeping alive. The people who introduce you to your future collaborators, the ones who see your whole self and still show up - those are the long game relationships that matter. Everything else is just noise.
Quote from the Personal Archive - on how Ben and I actually connected "When Ben and I met, it was because not one but two mutually known, good people introduced us... they both told me I should know Ben, that someday he was going to be doing amazing work. The pattern shows in everything I do now."
When I introduced Rachael and Eric for our JUST PRESS RECORD conversation, I had no idea they'd both walk parallel paths through losing their mothers. What emerged from that conversation was something I keep turning over in my head: the difference between algorithmic connection and soul-to-soul connection. Algorithms push us into extremes because that's what's easiest to understand and monetize. Real connection requires presence, awareness, and the willingness to understand not just where you are, but where the other person is coming from. Rachael called it riding the escalator on the metro - most people stand oblivious to those around them, not realizing they're blocking the way. Eric described it in terms of the Zen koan of "not killing" - simple rules become infinitely complex in practice. Their secret to soulfulness? Grief forced them both to look in the mirror. And once you do that, you can't unsee it. You can't go back to living on autopilot.
Quote from the Personal Archive - on what soulfulness actually means "Aware to your life... awareness of your awareness. Understanding not just where you are, but where others are coming from."
Rachael's superpower as a Chief of Staff isn't process optimization - it's understanding people. She knows that every human walks into work carrying their whole self: their trauma, their hopes, their unique conditioning. Most organizations pretend this isn't true. Rachael leans into it. She figures out where people come from, what shapes their perspective, and how to create the conditions where real collaboration happens. But here's what made me want to document this: understanding people doesn't mean becoming everyone's therapist. It means recognizing that therapy-speak is everywhere now, but self-awareness still isn't. The real skill Rachael has is operational intelligence at the human level - knowing what people need without overstretching into territory that isn't yours. She helps entrepreneurs see the boundaries between what they can control and what they can't. She does the work of figuring out what's actually going on with everyone, while keeping the focus on the broader, mutual mission. That's a job that deserves way more respect than it gets.
Quote from the Personal Archive - on understanding as the underrated skill "Part of what I love about being a chief of staff is figuring out people... the soul is a critical part of how we need to operate with each other. We're all unique, and we all have unique perspectives and experiences."
Eric spent years looking for crystal balls - in data, in the next promotion, in solving big world problems like drug pricing fraud and inflation. But he discovered something that changed everything: the crystal ball is actually a mirror. You can expose healthcare fraud and still feel empty. You can publish brilliant data visualizations and still be miserable. The real transformation comes when you stop trying to predict the future and start looking at who you actually are right now. After his mother's death, Eric could have doubled down on macro impact. Instead, he became a middle school cross country coach. He built a business with childhood friends. He started writing about reclaiming soulfulness. These aren't lesser ambitions - they're the result of finally understanding what actually matters. He learned that the most selfish way to live, if you're chasing happiness, is to live it for others. Not because it's noble, but because it feels better. He's planting seeds he'll never see grow, and that paradoxically makes the work more meaningful than any achievement he could control.
Quote from the Personal Archive - on pointing your awareness "There's all this ugliness out in the world and there's all of this beauty... the only thing that I can control is where I point my awareness. I can absorb more ugliness if I immerse myself in the beauty of this world, and the beauty of THIS friendship that is now forming."
Where Else I Showed Up This Week
Had some great moments outside the newsletter this week. I jumped on a couple of video conversations that hit different - one exploring some market dynamics with the crew, another diving into bigger picture thinking. Ben Hunt and I have been cooking on some things at Perscient Pro if you're tracking financial narrative and market behavior (head to https://pro.perscient.com/ if that's your lane). And I got to connect with Remi Tetot over at The Mad King - if you're interested in how storytelling and strategy intersect, that's worth your time too (https://themadking.com/).
One more personal note to self: The week felt like a lot of conversations about what happens when you finally look in the mirror instead of the crystal ball. Fitting, given everything this week's posts are trying to say.
Personal Archive Prompts
When was the last time you paused to understand not just what someone was saying, but where they're coming from when they said it?
WHAT FIRES IN YOUR LIFE ACTUALLY DESERVE TO KEEP BURNING, and which ones are you maintaining out of obligation?
How are you currently pointing your awareness - toward ugliness or toward beauty - and is that choice serving your capacity to show up for what actually matters?
What difficult experience in your life might be trying to teach you something about what truly matters?
WHO IN YOUR LIFE HELPS YOU SEE THINGS MORE CLEARLY, and when was the last time you told them that?
Are you using your expertise to predict the future or to avoid examining your present?
What seeds are you planting that you'll never see fully grown, and why does that feel more meaningful than harvests you can control?
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