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Good morning Launch Key 🚀 community!

Last week I recharged my batteries with a road trip and golf weekend in the NC mountains. And in one afternoon experienced sun, wind, rain, sleet and sun again - all within about 30 minutes.

As much as I love the mountain air, the weather wasn’t the story.

It was the people.

Comment below and let me know if we’re on the right track.

Table of Contents

• Pull to Eject

• Modern Tools

• Old School Wisdom

• Free Knowledge

• Recommendations

• Visual Crapshoot

Pull to Eject

The technology in our pocket is just empty calories compared to the human interaction of community.

On my way to the mountains, I visited neighbors on my old street, had dinner with my son and daughter-in-law, and was warmly welcomed back by kids and dogs. Apparently, absence makes the heart grow fonder for the smaller beings.😉 

Launch Key subscriber Cara Burk emailed me a suggestion a while back asking for community ideas. And I’ve been noodling that in the back of my mind for a few months. I thought about how a newsletter might add more community. I told her that I knew I didn’t want to be a Slack channel hall monitor.

But I realized, I have had the good fortune of leaning on many of you for answers as I built my own career portfolio. 

There are more than 15,000 subscribers today, but this list started with friends and family. Some of us go back 30+ years.

You’ve been friends and partners, employees and trusted confidants. Some of you pushed me to write. Some have been business sounding boards along the way. Some have been clients. Some of you worked for me. You’ve celebrated with successes and picked me up after failures. You’ve given sound legal, accounting, HR, marketing, operational and more-than-my-fair-share of valued advice over coffee or a beer.

And a number of you asked when we might do some sort of Launch Key meetup.

We rectified that last Wednesday in Charlotte with a dozen or so folks - many whom had not met before.

The grey-haired cabal introductions were great. Nobody was selling insurance or office space to each other. Authentic interest in what others were working on stole the spotlight.

A friends side-hustle product might have found potential distribution. Writers shared stories - and maybe sold each others books in their respective networks. A couple of guitar players shared contact info. Who knows what else was uncovered - I wasn’t in many of the conversations. But the follow up emails and texts lead me to believe we need to do another event. Stay tuned Charlotte.

I was reminded of the jar of rocks lesson.

We all have more space in the jar, for time with our people.

I’ve not been a fan of needing a mentor or ‘life coach.’ But we do require community.

Shoutout to Cara for making me appreciate mine more. Look for Launch Key guest columns in the coming months as a few of them share their own entrepreneurial insight.

I hope you all find the people who make you better.

Now go launch something 🚀 

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Modern Tools

Be careful how far off the business path you stray, but Reddit does have a lot of good information. Your mileage may vary.

Old School Wisdom

Free Knowledge

Of course he has a paid community, but the free course has a lot of positive feedback and 60,000 likes. See for yourself.

Recommendations

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🧠 The Cautionary: Join 30,000 newsletter subscribers to discover the patterns that lead to failure and learn how to avoid them.

📕 MGMT Playbook : Practical management insights straight to your inbox every Wednesday.

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Visual Crapshoot