Playing With Networking (Weekly Recap January 3, 2026)

Discipline, Discernment, and the Right Playbook: Moving Into 2026 With Intention

Author

Matt Zeigler
January 03, 2026

Let's connect some dots from this week's notes - a week that started with (De La Soul’s) Dave's peaceful reflection on survival and ended with the habit structures that actually make it stick.

We're talking about maturity as a practice: building before you spend, listening to the signals that matter, staying committed to what's actually true about your work and relationships, and compounding it all through discipline. This isn't about optimization. It's about staying awake.

What Playing With Networking Is

Since I realize some you are new here - Playing With Networking is my weekly synthesis of the best thinking from my daily posts at Cultish Creative and anywhere else I showed up over the given week. I keep these notes in public so you can follow along, and increasingly - for my own sanity, as a reflective logging exercise, since I’m doing a lot of stuff these days.

Over the past year I found out some people want just a weekly recap, while other people like hearing from me daily, so - thanks to Beehiiv - we made it possible for you to manage your subscription preferences here (click on your profile in the top right, and look for “manage subscription” to pick if you’re getting just the weekly notes, like this, or everything as it’s published, once daily, around 6am US-EST).

Dave's final verse on the newest De La Soul album is framed against Grandmaster Flash's "The Message," but it sounds nothing like crisis. There's a major key bouncing underneath, almost-singing in the chorus, a mature peace-making that sounds like the inside of his head. The evolution from ego-driven work to ego-less-ness to wisdom - all compressed into four minutes of letting go. Not ego, never life itself, never forgetting where you came from. Just peace with it.

Quote from the Personal Archive - Dave's survival as reflection

"How even when life is supposedly getting better in the world around us, it only matters how we think about life inside of our heads."

Kissinger's insight (via Ben Hunt from this year's “best of Intentional Investor” clip show) hits harder when you recognize the constraint: you don't build new capital once you're in power, you only consume it. The discipline isn't about avoiding action, at all. It's really about carving out the time to keep learning before you need to decide. Leaders who can say "I got that wrong" are leaders still building capital to challenge their convictions.

Quote from the Personal Archive - the conviction before the power

"The convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high office are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they continue in office."

Variance cuts both directions - the same swing that generates your best reactions also generates pushback. My podcast intros polarize people, and that's exactly the signal I needed. The people annoyed by them are identifying the thing that works. Lean harder into healthy variance in 2026, not away from it. Differentiated isn't a bug in your creative work - it's the evidence you're taking a real swing. Hopefully this post encourages you to go looking for variance in the same way.

Quote from the Personal Archive - variance as signal

"Risk isn't a bug in your creative work, it's an actual feature, offering you evidence that you're taking a swing and inspiring a genuine reaction."

The framework: Enterprise vs. Boutique × Logical vs. Emotional transformation - each has a specific playbook, and mixing them destroys what made it work. Amazon chased status with a commodity mindset. Gap erased decades of belonging with a generic logo rebrand. Specialist firms abandon referral cores for cold outbound and lose the margins that made them special. The discipline isn't only a result of knowing which game you're playing. While that certainly helps, it’s only a starting point. If you really want to make progress, it's about finding your clarity of focus, and then staying committed even when another playbook looks sexier or more scalable.

Quote from the Personal Archive - the boutique betrayal (one of several examples)

"You never want to turn a boutique relationship (scarcity, story, you 'know a guy') into a commodity play (discount codes, blasted ads, everyone has one/can get one)."

Best of Just Press Record top 10 - a year validated two core beliefs: do good things with good people, pursue relationships with shared values and complementary skills. Jack and I are different enough to cover ground together, rare enough to know it. The John Candeto painting metaphor tucked in at the end says it perfectly: revisit the same conversations and you're different each time, so reflection becomes appreciation of change. An invitation for 2026 - reach out, surround yourself with "switched-on" people, measure progress in joy and community. Wow, do I know some cool people.

Quote from the Personal Archive - the painting as mirror

"Revisiting these clips works the same way as John in front of the painting: the conversations are the same, but we're a little bit different every time we come back to them."

Habits compound toward heaven or hell - and we live with a mix of both. The work isn't perfection but making net-good “average use” of what we've got. The real discipline: help yourself and the people you love develop simple habits that compound in the right direction. "If habits are the key, then just show me the lock" - what's the structure you're actually committing to in 2026?

Quote from the Personal Archive - the mechanism

"Habits are either the best or the worst things in the world; they either carry us to heaven or hurl us to hell."

Where Else I Showed Up This Week

I spent time synthesizing year-end market forecasts with Jack Forehand on Excess Returns: 22 2026 Market Forecasts - we read through the major Wall Street outlooks so you don't have to, and more importantly, we talked about what consensus reveals about hidden assumptions and where the real risks live.

Same week, I sat down with Ben Hunt for The Intentional Investor Top 10 Clips of 2025 - the episode where he shared the Kissinger framework I featured this week. Both conversations live in the space between building capital and spending it wisely.

Personal Archive Prompts

What intellectual capital are you actively building right now - before you need to spend it?

HOW ARE YOU MEASURING SIGNAL IN YOUR WORK? What's the variance you should be leaning into instead of optimizing away?

Which playbook are you running - and more importantly, are you running it consistently, or mixing frameworks based on what feels easier?

WHO ARE YOUR "SWITCHED-ON" PEOPLE? Are you making space to grow alongside them in 2026?

What's one simple habit that, if compounded, would move you closer to the person you're trying to become?

WHAT WOULD IT LOOK LIKE TO STAY DISCIPLINED ABOUT YOUR ACTUAL TRANSFORMATION INSTEAD OF CHASING SOMEONE ELSE'S?

If you had to choose between scaling and staying true, which matters more to you - and does your 2026 calendar reflect that choice?

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