It’s all who you know.
Traditionally, “it’s all who you know” is a phrase that we all use to explain people’s progress climbing the ladder in whatever vertical they may be in. I have a different, more independent view of that phrase relative to what it means to me personally.
Since I heard this phrase for the first time in business settings as a teenager, I did not fully accept that my net worth would boil down to my network.
While the concept of “it’s all who you know” is not wholly inaccurate (and, I would argue, generally reasonable), there is a foundational component of the idiom that people on a whole are missing.
In my view, “it’s all who you know” is mostly about knowing oneself first and foremost before anyone external is even considered much less incorporated into one’s network of commerce. This train of thought is nowhere near people’s consciousness as a whole. That distance is evident by what pop culture deems significant as well as what it measures.
I have faith that today’s very intelligent, empathic, technology-savvy children will come across my content one day and conclude that it is more important to know themselves first. Self-knowledge must come before knowing anyone outside of themselves who may hold importance to a larger goal. I hope they can arrive at this conclusion through the information and rare insight I can provide through my experience on the road.
Knowing myself has meant fully knowing the moment I live in. Living in the aspect of the moment is living without expectation of the future. It’s living with the introspection of the past to allow clarity around the current focus in terms of small optimizations to create the bigger picture.
Who you know will always be predicated on who you’re able to find. Who you’re able to find will forever be based on an internal system that prioritizes self-health over net worth. One’s worth is based on being able to take the least flattering aspects of the missteps we all make and apply perspective to the negative. This allows space to grow in the mind between the intelligent fiction it is capable of contouring and the simplicity of reality in all regards.
