About a year ago,
’s own Greg Revak introduced me to a guy on Twitter in the DM’s…His name was Mikhail Bryan.
When I saw he had a blog, I read a few of his pieces until I stumbled on this one:
Development of an Infinite Game…
After I read this one, I sent him a message about how I liked his article and have also written a ton on the infinite game concept, so I shared something I did out of reciprocity to get a deeper conversation going.
He hit me back with some thoughts and then the DM conversation with the exchanging of phone numbers to hop on a call.
We chatted about a week later for the first time and I tried a new approach with a first phone call because most are too formal and stuffy for me:
In recruiting I like to say, if the player doesn’t say ‘fuck yes’ to what we are offering, it’s ‘fuck no’. If they are lukewarm about you, forget it.
Applying that logic to how we meet future colleagues and friends is a great application to this recruiting concept.
Say something that pushes a boundary or offends ‘most people’ because most people aren’t ‘your people’.
You’re trying to find your people:
You’re Trying to Meet Your Warren Buffett
The late Charlie Munger met his lifelong bestie at a restaurant 60 years ago and until his passing, they talked every day. They ID’d each other as intellectual sparring partners and built on top of masterminded ideas that compounded for 60 years.
That’s finding a long-term player and playing a long-term game.
Buffett speaks to their meeting and friendship:
“I knew after I met Charlie, after a few minutes in the restaurant, I knew that this guy's going to be in my life forever. We were gonna have fun together, we were gonna make money together, we were gonna get ideas from each other. We were both going to behave better than if we didn't know each other."
I’d bet the farm that one of those two said something ‘out of pocket’ in their first meeting. That comment led them both to say internally, ‘this is my people.’
Charlie shit-tested Warren or vice-versa:
The Value Isn’t the 100K, the Value is the 5 ( or the 1)
A few months after our initial phone call together, I sent out a personal podcast:
Mikhail sent me fired-up audio message(which I didn’t know was a thing) to my iPhone. He pushed back on some of my takes and gave his perspective. He returned an out-of-pocket comment my way and I knew he was ‘my people’.
We haven’t stopped talking since, we started a podcast:
So what’s the point of telling you all this? Finding lifelong friends in this industry is rare because most aren’t long-term players playing a long-term game.
Finding them takes a better approach than what we did in the past.
Here’s the new and better way, try it out for yourself, you just might find your people.
Reminder: You’re trying to find this person on the left: