Sponsor the next email to 200,000+ entrepreneurs →
I think one of the silliest things I see on the internet is when people get angry about successful entrepreneurs promoting one another.
Someone launches a new book, and suddenly your timeline is filled with a bunch of popular entrepreneurs promoting it. Give it an hour and the comments are usually full of hatred and complaining. Grifters! Sellouts! The same names always promote one another!
Everyone piles on like they’ve caught someone cheating.
Have we really reached a point where people think promoting someone you know and admire is suspicious? Of course successful people help their friends. They've already spent years getting to know each other, sharing ideas, and working through challenges together. Why the hell wouldn’t they promote them?
And, of course, all of the people complaining have identified a very real advantage. Having successful friends with large audiences, valuable connections, and enthusiasm for your work can be incredibly helpful when you're building a business. I would think that recognizing the advantage would make someone curious about how to go develop it themselves. Not get angry about it.
That attitude is incredibly self-defeating. When you start to believe that successful people helping each other is somehow cheating, you're training yourself to resent the exact behavior that could help you become successful. And if you spend your time thinking that every promotion or show of support is some kind of grift, you'll never build a group of people who genuinely want to help one another.
Because you cannot build the kind of network you spend your time resenting.
When I first started writing online back in late 2018, I became friends with people like Austin Belcak, Scott Leese, and Scott Barker. At that point in our careers, we were all doing reasonably well. None of us were well known online, but had built relatively successful careers offline. And we had no clue how successful anyone would eventually become with the whole online thing.
Austin and I have had a standing quarterly catch-up for years to compare notes about our businesses and see if we can help one another. Scott Leese and I started a weekly live show called Thursday Night Sales back in 2020 during the pandemic, and we've maintained a friendship ever since. With Scott Barker, it started with a few dinners, eventually investing in his firm, and later helping him grow his Substack.
There's nothing special about most of that stuff. It's all very ordinary and normal networking. Nobody was “internet famous” when we met. Nobody had built a million-dollar business yet. We simply met each other, liked each other, thought we were all building something interesting, and decided to stay in touch. Over the years, some of our audiences and businesses grew a little, and some grew a lot. Naturally, as that happened, the friendships became even more valuable because we had more experience, bigger brands, and more connections to share with one another.
You can build a powerful network long before anybody in it is powerful.
Once you see how big this opportunity is, you cannot unsee it. There are millions of smart, ambitious people flailing around online right now trying to make something of themselves, just like I was back in 2018. You have the best (and most) tools available to you in modern history to connect with them. And you can begin building those relationships today. Some of those people are going to become wildly successful in the next few years, and many are probably at the exact same stage as you are today.
Think about what would happen if you became friends with even a handful of them right now. You could book a recurring call to compare notes, start working on an interesting project together, promote stuff you're both creating, and work together to solve each other's biggest challenges.
Now, give those relationships five years or a decade to develop. I'd be willing to bet that some of your new friends will build incredibly successful companies. Others will become successful authors, creators, podcast hosts, and media legends. If you’re lucky, maybe you'll have built something pretty amazing yourself. If you've invested in spending time with all of these people, you now have a group of people who care about what everyone else is building and are genuinely excited to help one another succeed.
The best part is that you can start today. There is nobody and nothing stopping you other than yourself. You don't need a big audience, or a successful business, or a bunch of wealthy friends to get to know good people who are working to accomplish interesting things.
Some of the most important people in your network ten years from now are trying to figure out step one of the online game.
They don’t know you exist yet.
Imagine how different your life could look if that changed today.
