This is Help Wanted. The show tackles all the big work questions you cannot ask anyone else. I'm Jason Feiffer, Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, and I'm New York Times Wrestling author and money expert, Nicole Lapin. The helpline is open. Alright here's a question. What is your most valuable resource? A lot of people will say it's your network. It's not money, it's your network, your network is your most valuable resource.
And I think that's true. But you know, that puts a lot of pressure on our networks. You might worry, for example, do I know the right people? Do I have the right mentors? And how can I meet more of them? Well today I want to offer you a different way to think about your network. One that doesn't treat your network like some asset or a collection on a shelf and that doesn't make you feel like a failure if you're lacking that perfect collaborator.
For me, this subject began with an email that I got from a newsletter reader of mine named Caitlin Condy. She's writing a book about what she calls life teams and wanted to know how I built mine. I asked her what a life team is and she explained it like this. She wrote, quote, it's a group of people who support, inspire, challenge and encourage you in and throughout your life.
The group of people who celebrate you when you're high, hold you close when you're low and motivate you to be your best self. And quote, so again, that was Caitlin Condy's explanation of what a life team is. And that's a lovely idea, right? But as I thought about it, I realized, I, me, Jason, I have no singular fixed team. And I think that that's a good thing because when you stop worrying about who's on your team, your team suddenly gets a lot larger.
Here in this episode of Help Wanted is how to meet the most important people in your life, which I will tell you in two ideas. Idea number one, people are visitors. You know, we love when people enter our lives and we often hate when they leave. It makes us feel bad as if we somehow failed, as if relationships are meant to be permanent, as if endings somehow devalue beginnings and middles. But what if permanence isn't the point? What if people are not meant to be collected?
What if everyone we know is actually just a visitor and your job, our job, my job is to lower their barrier to entry. Years ago, a friend introduced me to an idea called the theory of visitors. It seems to come from an essay by guy named Sam Lansky, who either popularized it or just straight up invented it. I don't know. Either way, I'm going to read you the main point from his essay goes like this.
All relationships are transient. Friends who stab you in the back. People you network with at a fancy party. Relatives who die. The love of your life. Everything is temporary. People come into your life for a limited amount of time and then they go away. So you welcome their arrival and you surrender to their departure because they are all visitors. And when the visitors go home, they might take something from you, something you can't ever get back.
And that part sucks. But visitors always leave souvenirs and you get to keep those forever. That was from Sam Lansky. I find this idea so appealing. You can encourage visitation, but you cannot control the visitor. They are visitors in our lives just as we are visitors in theirs. And when you think this way, you stop worrying about the shape of relationships. You know, should I be closer to this person? Can that person be my official mentor? Whatever. Instead, you focus on what matters.
Which is how to be welcoming and how to attract more visitors and how to make the most of every visit for however long that is. And here's the best part. There are so many visitors to come, which leads me to my second idea. Idea number two. People are TV characters. And to explain that, I'll back up a little bit. I live with my wife and kids in Brooklyn, New York. And when the pandemic began, March of 2020, we moved in with my parents in Colorado.
Because they had a lot more space than we do. You know, Brooklyn is tight on real estate. And then we stayed in Colorado for 18 months because the camps and schools operated better there than in New York. When we finally went home to Brooklyn, it was weird. Everything was the same, but different. Many of our friends had left and other stayed, but their lives had changed. And we had a hunch. Some of our closest friends will be people that we haven't met yet.
Soon, I came to think of our life like a TV show. Before we left, that was season one. Now we were returning for season two. And why this metaphor? Because, you know, consider what happens in each season, no TV show. The setting is the same, but the plot advances. The cast gets a refresh. Main characters usually stay as main characters, but not always. Sometimes side characters are promoted and sometimes new cast members take center stage.
I use this metaphor a lot now and not just for COVID, because life is a rolling series of TV seasons. People come, they go, and they take different roles and levels of importance, and all of it contributes to the ongoing quality of the show, which, you know, is your life. Sometimes I see friends and I think I'm lucky that they've been a main character for so long. Sometimes I meet someone new and I wonder, is this person about to join the cast?
Sometimes I'll reconnect with the side character and we'll have the kind of conversation where I think, is this their breakout season? And sometimes characters go away for a while, or maybe even forever, which is okay, even if I miss them. Maybe their storyline ended, but they set in motion another one, or maybe life is long, and their greatest roles yet to come. All of which is to say, your network is not and cannot and will not be fixed. It should be in a state of constant flux.
Remain open to the possibility that people can and will always be added. Actually, let's say that more actively. Remain open to the possibility that you can and will always add more people. If I see the potential for someone to play a more meaningful role in my life, for example, I explore that. My wife and I are proactive socially. If we like people, we want to see them, and I am proactive professionally. If I click with someone's way of thinking, I reach out, we get in touch, we talk.
I want to know what we can do together, even if it's just to kick ideas around or make each other smarter. And as I do this, I want to be mindful of the greater role that my older closest friends have, and to be open to how their roles might change or grow or melt. But it won't be easy. It'll be messy. I could spend the next 10 minutes just listing off names of people that I wish I saw more, or missed an opportunity with. I don't have a strategy to any of this. I just have an attitude.
The attitude is this. An ever-changing life requires an ever-changing cast, and we are fortunate for the good ones who stay with us a long time, and also fortunate for the new ones who appear out of nowhere. Somehow ready to visit for a while, to be the main character in the next season. As if it was a role they were prepared for all their lives. Don't just build a team. Consider everybody a potential teammate. That's how to build the most important resource in your life, your network.
Now, that, as you may know, is from my newsletter. It's called One Thing Better, each week, one way to be more successful and satisfied at work, and build a career or company you love. It's a companion to help wanted. And you can hear the newsletters right here on Help Wanted. I read them a couple of weeks after they come out in the newsletter. Or you can subscribe, get them in your inbox, and get a whole bunch of other stuff that I send out to. You can get that at onethingbetter.email.
That's a web address. Just plug it into the browser. Onethingbetter.email. And hey, reply to the email. Get in touch. I like building my network. It's the most important resource I hear. Help Wanted is a production of Money, News, Network. Help Wanted is hosted by me, Jason Feiffer. And me, Nicole Lapin. Our executive producer is Morgan LeVoy. If you want some help, email our help line at helpwantedatmoneynewsnetwork.com for the chance to have some of your questions answered on the show.
And follow up on Instagram at Money News and TikTok at Money News Network for exclusive content and to see our beautiful faces. Maybe a little dance. Oh, I didn't sign up for that. All right, well, talk to you soon.