A few years ago, I started noticing something that bothered me.
The same people kept ending up around interesting things.
Not always the smartest people.
Not always the richest people.
Not always the most credentialed people.
Just people who somehow seemed to be standing closer to opportunity than everyone else.
They heard about companies before the headlines.
They got introduced to people before everyone else knew those people mattered.
They found jobs that never got posted.
They joined companies before they took off.
They invested before everyone else got interested.
They seemed to know what was happening while the rest of us were reading about what had already happened.
For a while, I called this luck.
Then I met enough of these people to realize luck wasn’t the full explanation.
Some were brilliant.
Some were average.
Some were frankly a little chaotic.
The common thread wasn’t intelligence.
It wasn’t hustle.
It wasn’t productivity hacks.
It wasn’t waking up at 4:00 AM and posting about it online.
It …
