Who you know is up to you

Reach Out Party 2.0. is for those who yearn

I am one of the yearners… A person who is not satisfied.

I’ve got this tug in my gut. This nasty little hungry little pull inside that knows there is more. I’ve been this way my whole life. Never able to relax. Always wondering what if… What if I moved to London? What if I went to Juilliard? What if I ended up with that guy?

As a lifelong practitioner of this strange art, I’ve come to know the unhealthy yearning modes well:

Two failure modes of yearning

Ignoring the tug. Maybe you’re working a job that doesn’t fulfill you, but you know you should be satisfied. You may spend years convincing yourself that the yearning you feel is something you can turn away from until a stale yellow crust grows over it and you’ve ended up building an entire life around something you care little about. Ignoring the tug is usually fine in the moment but there is a high risk of negative compounding effects overtime.

Blowing up your life. This typically happens after you’ve spent so long ignoring the tug that you’ve entered a rabies-like state and you don’t care what kind of carnage you leave behind. You quit your job, you dump your boyfriend, and you move to Denver.

For years I’ve toggled back and forth between these two modes and wouldn’t recommend either. But in between these two extremes there is a lightness to be found.

The superpower yearning

The superpower of the yearner is the ability to be in constant touch with the great unknown. To believe in the serendipitous possibilities that we are all so are lucky to have access to.

To nourish the yearning in you, there is only one consistent thing you need to pay attention to: People. The ones you know and the ones you don’t know (yet).

If I could track every incredible opportunity, beautiful experience, meaningful relationship, and interesting idea back to a core source, it is the same thing every time: One conversation that sparked an idea. One connection that opened a door. One person leading to the next and the next.

Connections make things happen. Connections start powerful ideas, businesses, and love affairs. Connections move our lives forward.

But most of us let connections operate in the background of our lives.

“Life is about who you know,” we say to ourselves as an accusation or excuse. If only I knew the right people, we cry. And it’s not false. Life actually is about who you know. We know that.

What I think we’ve all forgotten is that you are much more in control of the people you meet than you think. All it takes is one person at a time. And your ability to show up again and again. This is how you design a life that leads to outsized opportunities. This is how you nourish the yearning in you.

Halfway there

I’m reaching out to one person every day for 100 days. I’m halfway there.

This challenge is an experiment in prioritizing connection when I don’t have the time for it. I have a full life. A busy career. A toddler. But I’m experimenting with setting my future-self up for success. The 5 and 10 and 30 years from now version of me who will still be yearning, who will still be imagining what if.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

The conversations I expect to be useful rarely are. The connections I make that seem random or have been the most joyful and generative.

It will always be scary to reach out to someone you admire. It will always be scary to ask. But with enough reps, it starts to feel good like being sore after a workout. Like you’re onto something.

The worst outcome is never as bad as your brain predicts. Most people are flattered to be reached out to. And even when they’re not, you survive.

The best outcomes are beyond what you can imagine. Not because they’re dramatic, but because it feels like you have a direct hand in engineering the kind of serendipity that feels too good to be true. The yearner loves this.

I’ve dedicated years to developing the skills, ideas, and routines that can help us prioritize connections, even, and especially when we’re afraid, overstimulated, and don’t have time for it.

Reach Out Party 2.0

I ran something called Reach Out Party during COVID. Originally a container to help people early in their career break out of their shell and find the next step, we met daily on Zoom. After 2 years and 12 cohorts, I moved on.

I thought the feeling of yearning would go away when I found the right job or the right partner or the right friends.

It didn’t. And as I’ve rediscovered the practice of making intentional connections, I’ve fallen in love with it all over again.

I’m bringing Reach Out Party back, rebuilt for who I’ve always been and who I think you might be. For the yearners.

For the person who already has a network and already has a life that feels busy and overstimulating but who still feels the tug.

For the person that’s gotten too comfortable, too passive, too stuck letting life happen to you instead of shaping it.

You might be starting something new or beginning to think about what’s next. As a deeply feeling and creative person, you might be turned off by networking. You don’t want transactional relationships. You care about real people, and want connections that actually mean something.

You are, for better or worse, a yearner. You have that little glimmer of hope. Sparkle in your eye. The slightly delusional belief that maybe, maybe, reaching out could actually change your life.

Reach Out Party is a two month mastermind built to develop a lifelong relationship to making meaningful connections that help you inch toward the vision you have for your future.

The main frameworks and tools are largely asynchronous, which means if you have a full time job, if you are a parent, if you are completely overwhelmed with the chaos of your daily life, it is in fact made for you.

But it’s also built on the simple insight that the more you reach out, the luckier you get. And that the people alongside you make it easier and more interesting to keep going.

I’m so proud to be doing this wholeheartedly, after years of pushing against it because of my own fears of failure or judgment.

Connection is a lifelong practice

As AI starts to creep further and further into our world, our relationships, our “soft skills,” our ability to reach out and be human with each other will become even more important.

We only have so much time on this earth to find our people. You cannot wait until they find you. You cannot wait until you’re in the mood. You cannot wait.

If you want to join us, there are only five spots left. Once it’s full, I’ll close applications until the next cohort in October 2026.

Life really is about who you know. And who you know is up to you.