In this solo diary‑style episode of Founders Journal, Alex Lieberman, co‑founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew, shares a personal revelation that his network of close connections and role models was heavily weighted toward startup founders, which left gaps in the values he wants to embody—integrity, empathy, service, and commitment. To address this, he outlines a concrete 9‑step, 15‑minute annual exercise designed to audit and deliberately reshape one’s circle of influence. The process begins with two sheets of paper: the first captures all current inputs—personal connections, role models, communities, and content sources—while the second centers on the listener’s name surrounded by up to eight core values. Alex then maps each input to the values they support, identifies items that cannot be linked, and spots empty value slots. The final step is to recognize these gaps and take low‑friction actions (e.g., curating Twitter lists, adding new content sources) to fill them, thereby aligning daily inputs with desired personal outcomes. He encourages listeners to complete the exercise, share their reflections via email, and emphasizes that this systematic curation can profoundly impact personal and professional growth.
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What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founders Journal, my personal diary made public for the world. I'm Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew. Today I am talking about a playbook for surrounding yourself with the right people in life, something I think everyone should be thinking about as we head into the new year. Let's hop into it. I've probably heard the following saying 1,000 times in my life. You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with. It's one of those sayings that's so overused you 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 really 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. That led me to a 9-step process that I went through that I revisit annually and that I highly encourage you to go through in order to feel confident that you're surrounding yourself with the right people in life. So let's go through it. Step 1, grab 2 sheets of blank paper and a pen, pencil, or Sharpie. I recommend a pencil 'cause you're probably gonna make changes. If you happen to have 15 minutes now and wanna do this process with me, pause the podcast and go grab your sheets of paper and 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, people that you would invite to your wedding, and if they can't make it, you're really, really upset about. For me, this includes My mom, my wife, my co-founder Austin, and my best friend Justin, who's my oldest friend from Michigan and was the best man at my wedding. I ended up writing this list and I got to 17 connections. Step 3, on the same sheet of paper, make a list of your role models. These role models can be dead or alive. You know them or you don't know them, but they must embody a trait that you desire to emulate. So I'll give 4 examples from mine. My dad, and he represents integrity. Morgan Housel, one of my favorite writers on the internet. His trait is storytelling. Jason Fried, the founder of 37signals and Basecamp. His trait is independent thinking. And my mother-in-law, who represents wisdom. Step 4, on the same sheet, make a list of your communities. And these are the collection of people that are in real life or digital that you have a shared interest or experience with. For me, my communities are startup Twitter, The creator economy, the University of Michigan, golf as a sport, and people who are in the golf community, and Hoboken, which is where I live. Step 5, on the same sheet, make a list of your content sources, meaning kind of all of the content that act as inputs that go into your brain on a weekly basis. And as you make this list of your content sources, you should focus on the 10% of sources where you consume 90% of your content. So if, if you think about the last 10 things that you've consumed, the last 10 pieces of content you've consumed, whether it's Books, newsletters, YouTube videos, whatever it may be. Think about the one or two that really matter. And so, for example, my list is Morgan Housel, who I mentioned, the book 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, Jason Fried, Hacker News, and Casey Neistat, the YouTuber. Okay, we're gonna take a quick break there. So I'm gonna give you a little intermission. Stand up, stretch, crack your knuckles. And as you do that, I'm gonna tell you what we've done. What you've done is you've outlined your current circle, all of the inputs in your life that have an outsized impact on who you will become. Because your inputs are the things that define your outputs. If you notice, I don't think about 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 and behaviors as something that is in your circle and needs to be carefully curated. Okay, intermission over. Back to the exercise. Step 6, put sheet number 1 to the side, grab sheet number 2, and on it draw a bubble with your name in the middle. Step 7, on that same sheet, connect your name to the values that you want to embody in life. So it almost should look like a hub that is your name, and the spokes are the values that you're writing out and drawing into a circle. You should write out max 8 values that you want to embody in life. Otherwise, it becomes tough to focus on who you want to become. And so, for example, my values include Creativity, curiosity, discipline, service, empathy, self-awareness, and contentment. Next, step 8, take all of the items from sheet 1. So your content, your role models, the people that are closest to you in life and your communities, and you start connecting those to the most relevant values in sheet 2. So for example, I write my mom on sheet 2 and I connect her name in a bubble to the service value, which is one of the values that I want to embody. Then I write my mother-in-law. I connect her to the empathy value. I write my wife. I connect her to the discipline value. I write Casey Neistat. I connect him to the creativity value. So that's step number 8, is basically take everything from the first sheet, bring it to sheet 2, and connect it to a value. And if you aren't able to connect someone in your circle on sheet 1 to a value, that's okay. Leave them off for right now. Step 9. It's the last but the most important step in this process. Find holes in your circle. 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, or the content or communities that you surround yourself with. There are a few things to think about as you go through step 9. First, take note of the things that you couldn't assign to a value. If it's family, maybe you're so close to them that it's hard to separate values for a family member, or maybe you have family members who don't embody any of your values, but that's okay because family trumps utility. Let's say it's friends. Maybe you need to think really hard about if this friend who's currently in your close connections actually serves you in your current chapter of your life, irrespective of if they served you in your previous chapter. And if it's something like a content source that you weren't able to connect to a value, adding or removing it is lower friction. Same thing with a community, especially a digital community like for me, startup Twitter. If startup Twitter I couldn't connect to a value, I think really hard about why am I still part of this community? And perhaps you become ruthless about only consuming content that supports one of your values. Second thing to keep in mind, take note of the values that are bare. So in the first step, we were thinking about all of the inputs, the communities, the role models, the close connections, the content that can't be tied to a value, and auditing why those things are still in your life. Now we're looking at the values that are connected to your name, and there isn't anything connected to those values. So for me, curiosity and contentment were less occupied than, say, service or discipline. And so now I think about what can I do to introduce things in my life that embody those values? An example would be, let me create a Twitter list of the 20 most curious people that I follow so that I can introduce more curiosity into my life in a low-friction way, because that's easier than, say, going out into the world and finding a hyper-curious person that I'm really value-aligned with on day one. Now, I want you to just sit for a second and think about how important This 9-step exercise is for the entirety of your career and your life. You'll have goals that map back to values, and one of the fastest ways for you to become your values is to surround yourself with the right things, the right inputs, the right communities, content, role model, and close connections. And this is the playbook that I use 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. It's a 15-minute exercise that you can do annually to potentially change your life experience forever. If you do go through the exercise, Shoot me an email to 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 step 9? Feel free to let me know if you have any questions. I'm happy to help you through the exercise because I think it's that important. As always, thank you so much for listening and I'll catch you next episode.
