9 Steps To Elevate Your Inner Circle

What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founder's Journal. Today I am talking about a playbook for surrounding yourself with the right people in life. Let's hop into it. I have probably heard the following saying 1,000 times in my life, and the saying is, you are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with. It's one of those sayings that is so overused that you actually don't know who the original author of the quote is. And while the saying has truth to it, I always just understood it as something that was obvious, but that I didn't actually feel or notice in my day-to-day life. But then I came to a realization while building Morning Brew that completely altered my view on the importance of surrounding yourself with the right people. After selling Morning Brew, I realized a few things. I realized that most of my close connections were exclusively startup founders. I realized that most of my role models were also startup founders. People like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos— smart guys, but not necessarily the best family men. And I realized that while startup founders filled up my cup for intellectual and professional growth, many of the other values that I wanted to embody in life, like integrity, empathy, service, and commitment were not best modeled by entrepreneurs. So once I came to this realization, I thought about what's something that I can do to reset my circle, something that allows me to clearly articulate my values, how much of my circle embodies those values, and where there are clear deficiencies or gaps in my circle that necessitate change. And that led me to a 9-step process that I went through I revisit it annually, and I highly encourage you to go through it in order to feel confident that you are surrounding yourself with the right people in your life. So let's go through the playbook. Step 1, grab 2 sheets of paper and a pencil or a pen or a Sharpie. Very easy first step. It gave you a layup. And if you happen to have 15 minutes now and want to do this process with me, pause the podcast, go grab your sheets of paper and a pen, If you're driving, definitely don't do that, but I encourage you to follow along later. Step 2, on the first sheet, make a list of your 10 to 20 closest personal connections. For me, this includes my mom, my sister, my grandparents, my wife, my co-founder of Morning Brew, Austin Rief, my friend Justin, who is my oldest friend from the University of Michigan, and he was the best man at my wedding. And I get to 17 connections on my list. Step 3, on that same sheet of paper, make a list of your role models, dead or alive. You could know them or not know them, but they must embody a trait that you desire to emulate. For me, that includes my dad, who embodied integrity. For me, that includes Jay Shetty, who embodies empathy, and includes LeBron James, who embodies commitment and perseverance. Step 4, on the same first sheet of paper, make a list of your communities. And the way I define community is a collection of people that you have a shared interest or experience with. For me, my communities included startup Twitter, the University of Michigan, and the golf community. Step 5, on the same sheet. So Sheet 1, still make a list of your content sources and focus this list on the 10% of sources where you consume 90% of your content. For me, that includes Packy McCormick, who writes the newsletter Not Boring. That included Ben Thompson, who writes the incredible tech and media newsletter Stratechery. That includes the therapist Lori Gottlieb, and that includes Balaji Srinivasan, who was the former CTO of Coinbase. He's an angel investor, and just— I would consider him like a modern-day philosopher. Okay, that was step 5. Now we're going to take a quick intermission. Stand up, stretch. Actually, don't stand up again if you're driving, but stand up if you're sitting. Not in a car. Stretch, crack your knuckles, and realize what you've done is outlined your current circle, all of the inputs in your life that have an outsized impact on who you will become. And if you notice, I don't think about my circle or your circle in the traditional sense, where it's just the people that you spend the most time with. I think of anything in your life that has a direct line to your brain and therefore has an impact on your thoughts, your feelings, and your behaviors. as something that is in your circle and needs to be carefully curated. We're going to take a quick break, but more from Founders Journal when we get back. Back to the exercise. Step number 6, put sheet number 1 to the side, grab sheet number 2, and on sheet number 2, draw a bubble in the middle of the sheet that has your name. Step number 7, on the same sheet, sheet number 2, connect your name that's in the middle to values that you want to embody in your life. It can be max 8 values, minimum 2 values. Otherwise, it becomes too tough to focus on what you want to become. So my values include creativity, curiosity, discipline, service, empathy, self-awareness, and contentment. And so what you could visualize now is this one bubble in the middle. That's my name. And then basically lines going to other bubbles around it. And those other bubbles are the 8 values that I just listed off. Step number 8, take all the items from sheet 1. So that was content, community connections, and role models. Take all of those items and connect them to the most relevant values in sheet 2. So what you can imagine is I have Alex in the middle. One of the bubbles that Alex is connected to is discipline. And I connected discipline now to a bubble that says Austin, my co-founder from Morning Brew. And then my mom, I connected to the value of service. Jay Shetty, I connected to the value of empathy. My friend Justin, I connected to the value of integrity. So that's step 8. And so what you can envision now is basically this web that has your name in the middle, your values, 2 to 8 of them that are connected to your name in the middle. All of those values are circled. So you have the first layer of the web. And then the web goes out by one more layer, and it's all of the people, the communities, the connections, or the role models in your life that relate to one of your 2 to 8 values. Now, step 9, this is the last step, but the most important step is to find holes in your circle on sheet number 2. This is when the fun starts and when things become really eye-opening. This is when you audit and optimize who you surround yourself with. And so a few things. to get you going as you think through step 9. First, take note of the things that you couldn't assign a value to. If it's family, maybe you're so close to them it's hard to separate values, or maybe they don't embody any of the values. But that's okay, because sometimes family does trump utility in life. If it's friends that you're not able to connect to values, maybe you need to think really hard about if this is someone, if this is a connection that serves you in your current chapter of life. Irrespective of if they served you in a previous chapter of life. If it's something like content, adding or removing content is lower friction, and so that's generally an easier thing to make a change to within your circle. Same thing with community, but a little bit harder with community relative to content. Perhaps you become ruthless about only consuming content that supports one of your values. The second thought is you should take note of values that are bare. For me, curiosity and empathy were less occupied than service and discipline. And so now the thought becomes, what can I do to introduce things that embody those values, the values of curiosity and empathy? So an example would be create a Twitter list of the 20 most curious people that I follow, because by following them, I will be exposed to other content that is probably representative of ways to be more curious. Think about how important this exercise is for the entirety of your career and your life. You will have goals that map back to your values. And one of the fastest ways to become your values is to surround yourself with the right people, the right communities, the right role models, the right things. And this is the playbook to do that. I really, really encourage you all to do this. I think it can have a profound impact on your life like it did on mine. And it's a 15-minute exercise to potentially change your life experience forever. If you go through the exercise, shoot me an email at alex@morningbrew.com and let me know what the experience was like for you. Was it easy? Was it hard? What takeaways did you have when you got to the end in step number 9? I would love to know your thoughts on this. As always, thank you so much for listening, and I'll catch you next episode.