Guess what?

I have a smile curling my mouth, showing every wrinkle on my face. It took just a couple of weeks of random connections. I decided to call a bunch of people that, for too much time, I had placed in the special drawer of those things you never do because I convinced myself I didn’t have the time. Months accumulate, and the cobwebs that envelop your fear of guilt become an impossible mountain.

This week is about the power of random connections with people.

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There is a time to just observe the points

I have always been obsessed with beauty and talent. What I found is that there exists an incredible connection between beauty and creativity. Beauty is not only the result of creativity. Beauty ignites sparks of creativity in the world.

So, I coined my mission: to trigger talents to build a better world together with beauty.

I use my mission as a razor to make decisions. But life is a rollercoaster, and I barely work for my big life plan. My only trick is to write it in my Weekly review as a reminder. Until the moment comes a time in life when you have to see what you have accumulated and harvest it.

In the last few weeks, I have been rejuvenating my networking skills. It was astonishing.

Everything started answering to someone who dropped in a WhatsApp group the message he was visiting a couple of towns near me. I usually refrain from participating in this group. However, some passing spirit whispered, grabbed my index finger, and responded that I was available those days. This contact told me he was short in time but would like to meet me for dinner with another person.

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I am an introvert by nature, so I got stuck for seconds but decided to give it a chance. I scheduled some meetings nearby and reached out to him just before dinner. And the following happened:

• In that place, I met someone who was managing the swimming club I frequented when I was young
• Also, it's 100 km from my town. I met an entrepreneur who lives where I live for the first time, and that was the other one invited to dinner.
• During the dinner, this person from my town invited three business partners.
• We were at a steakhouse that was classy and raw at the same time, and the owner told us the story of six different types of oxen.
• While the others were hearing, I answered with specific questions from the only experience I had with wagyu in Japan 5 years ago, and they ended up being fascinated
• This helped me like an icebreaker.
• After sharing our stories, we noticed overlapping values and synergies to be fostered.
• They asked me to visit them to join our effort for a business project they are building.

You notice the smile?

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I’ve never devoted myself to networking, like a kid during a boring class. But as Steve Jobs said, “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you must trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

And they are connecting.

This is what The People's Garden is about: empowering people to spread the sprouts of a beautiful world—as leaders, as parents, as people.

So, pick up your phone and connect with five people.

I’m serious.

New blossoms

Here are some quick updates from me:

• A new baby is coming! It's coming in October, and we are very excited. We just crossed the line for the second quarter, so I feel safer sharing it publicly. When you live with 2 dogs and 2 daughters, it's rare to have moments to think about how it's going. But as a family, we are prepared to be prepared!
• I am participating again in Write of Passage, a quality writing cohort-based course in English. Being a foreigner is hard, but carrying the weight is easy when you encounter a community that is very kind, supportive, engaged, and positive. We need more kindness and more positive people in the world.
• I published a couple of essays, that you may find interesting.
  • In Find Your Villain, learn your mission, I shared how I figured out my purpose, by observing and learning from my relationship with my villain—yes, a villain, like the ones from Disney movies or video games.
  • In When do you give up on waiting for someone? A leaders’ dilemma, I wrote about a bad experience I had with one member of my team many years ago that revealed that it was up to me to decide how much to push with someone who was not committed and how important is to take the right time to establish rules and clear expectations when managing someone.

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Something worth sharing from my weekly readings:

• "If two people should know each other – and I know them both – then it’s my fundamental duty to connect them." Khe Hy is a productivity leader who focuses on teaching people to focus on $10k activities, which is the value of an hour spent on them that creates the building blocks for a more valuable future. Here, he tells how he considers creating a purposeful link between like-minded people is a duty. https://radreads.co/mututally-beneficial-intro/​
• "What’s preventing you from coming up with spiky points of view? Fear. If you share your spiky point of view, people could disagree with you. Or you could end up being wrong. Or your spiky point of view doesn’t cover a random edge case, and your audience misinterprets what you’re saying." - Wes Kao is the cofounder of Maven, an ed-tech company, and shares insight from her corporate life. In this essay, she coined the phrase "Spiky Point of View," which I found pretty interesting, and it led me to write both articles I shared. https://www.weskao.com/blog/spiky-point-of-view-lets-get-a-little-controversial​

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That’s it!

Tell me if something stood out to you.

I’m curious about everything, for example:

• good leadership
• beautiful things that happened
• healthy productivity tricks
• parenting suggestions
• discoveries that would change the world
• unknown facts about you that everyone should know about

See you next week,

Matteo

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