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- Week 44 - It's an async world, baby, and it's okay 😏
Week 44 - It's an async world, baby, and it's okay 😏
Yurii Lazaruk
January 11, 2026
Hey my friend, it’s been a little bit of a pause 😲 I have no idea how it happened, but the last edition of Friendworking was a month ago, which means that time does fly fast, huh 😏
Okay, I know why it happened. Almost every person I proposed to discuss some business stuff, or just have a friendly coffee chat during the last few weeks of December, told me that they’ll be out till the second week of January, so I decided to finally take a break myself, and just be present and spend some quality time with my family!
And it was very nice, we’ve been making and eating some nice food, going to a cinema, exploring a city, and even learning some interesting stuff with a guide, sledding down a hill (yes, we’ve finally had a nice winter with a lot of snow 🥳), talking a lot, and sometimes even doing totally nothing, and just chilling at home 😊
So I feel fully rested and ready to rock 2026 🤘😎🥳
When I opened my LinkedIn (btw, I’ve just reached 10K followers, so now I’m officially a micro-influencer 🥳😎), WhatsApp, and email, first, I was overwhelmed by the number of messages to answer, still, the best thing was that when I answered them (and some of the messages were 3 weeks old), folks just continued conversations like nothing happened, it felt like they’ve just messaged me 10 minutes ago, not 3 weeks ago!
Sometimes I feel super awkward answering a few-day-old message because of, “Oh, they might think I’m ghosting them”, so usually I procrastinate and let them sync for a week or even longer 😅
Still, this experience taught me that we’re living in an async world, and it’s totally okay to keep the conversation going any time you pick it up. Because if it’s your humans, they won’t even notice the delay (or at least won’t tell you that they’ve noticed it 😁), and if they’re not, well, there are around 8.3 billion people in the world, so I bet you’ll find some people you’ll click with 😉
tl;dr: Nowadays, it’s totally okay to keep the async conversation going, and answering a message 3 weeks later is better than “forgetting” about it!
During this month break, I was reading many different books and newsletters, and listening to podcasts, and there are 2 words that I kept seeing and hearing over and over again: “story” and “storytelling”.
Look, stories connect all humanity: all the religious books, like the Bible or the Quran, are based on stories, all the news, movies, books, podcasts, and basically all the content we consume are stories. The main difference between great and mediocre content is how interesting the story is, and how engagingly it is told.
People are connected by stories. Moreover, they remember those stories because of the emotions they sparked. So, if you want to build great human connections, you need to master 2 sides of stories: storytelling and, as I call it, storyhelping 🤓
I bet I don’t need to explain what storytelling is, you definitely know it! Still, this week, during the Humans of Business podcast episode conversation, Jan Keck told me about The Moth podcast, which consists of human stories told live and without notes, to standing-room-only crowds. So go check it out to learn how to tell your stories 😉
Storyhelping is actually helping people tell their stories (trust me, not everyone is good at it) by closely listening to what they, and asking follow-up questions to help people craft compelling and interesting stories out of their experiences. And storyhelping you can only practice by being curious and genuinely interested in the people you’re talking to!
Still, here is an interesting practice for you to learn (and maybe even try) called “36 Questions for Increasing Closeness”, so go check it out! 🤩
tl;dr: To build lasting human connections, you need to remember and be remembered by others, and that’s why you must master storytelling and storyhelping skills!
On another note, in December, I took the list of all the participants of Between Two Watercoolers meetups and added them to my Substack, and it was just 4% unsubscription rate with a 250% increase in post reads. Maybe I should do the same here with Friendworking, who knows 😏🤓😁
So yeah, that’s it for this week, and if you have any questions, thoughts, ideas, or personal examples of how to build better human connections, please answer this email, or connect with me on LinkedIn, and let’s talk 🤗🤓
💡 What influenced me this week 💡
Thoughts of the week (actually last 4 weeks 😅):
“When something sounds crazy, you don’t judge it negatively.” - Alison Wood Brooks, DOAC podcast
“We are all so hungry for validation that even a ridiculous validation feels amazing.” - Alison Wood Brooks, DOAC podcast
“Your brain memorizes through retrieval, not reading. Every time you fill in a blacked-out word, you force retrieval. The more you retrieve, the stronger the memory.” - Alex Hormozi’s newsletter
“Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.” - Victor Borge, The Economist
“The free thinking of one age is the common sense of the next.” - Matthew Arnold, The Economist
“If you can articulate someone's pain better than they can, they will believe you have the ability to solve it. Focus on their pain, not your pitch.” - Alex Hormozi’s newsletter
“It’s a good thing to be laughed at. It’s better than to be ignored.” - Harold Macmillan, The Economist
“Write it in your heart that every day is the best day of the year.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Economist
“It is only afterward that a new idea seems reasonable.” - Isaac Asimov, The Economist
“People don’t judge the merits of your path. They judge how well it aligns with theirs.” - Sahil Bloom’s newsletter
“Opportunity only looks like opportunity looking backwards. Today it looks like risk.” - Alex Hormozi’s newsletter
“You're not just selling your service - you're eliminating their biggest fear AFTER buying it.” - Alex Hormozi’s newsletter
“You can't beat someone who has already decided they will do whatever it takes for as long as it takes. And that person might as well be you.” - Alex Hormozi’s newsletter
“Success is often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.” - Coco Chanel, The Economist
“The final experience outweighs the overall experience. Like cheap ice cream in Ikea.” - Nudge podcast
“Pronoia - the opposite of paranoia. The suspicion that the universe is secretly conspiring to help you. Assume every setback is the universe trying to teach you a lesson, and every setback will make you wiser. It doesn’t matter whether the universe is actually trying to help you; believing it makes it work.” - The Prism blog
Song of the week:
Book and quotes of the week:
“If we want computers to maximize social benefits, it’s a bad idea to reward them for maximizing user engagement.”
“The first lesson that every algorithm should learn is that it might make mistakes. Baby algorithms should learn to doubt themselves, to signal uncertainty, and to obey the precautionary principle.”
“Novel technology often leads to historical disasters, not because the technology is inherently bad, but because it takes time for humans to learn how to use it wisely.”
Tools that I use with referrals:
Descript - for anything around podcasting and video editing
Beehiiv - for a newsletter (that’s what you receive 😅)
Text Blaze - to access message templates with shortcuts (like “/ty”)
Exali - promo “FROMYURII” - indemnity insurance for independent experts in Europe
Scripe - to write better posts on LinkedIn
Manus - for building complex systems and projects
Daily actions:
tell 1 person what I’m thankful to them for
read a self-development book/listen to a professional podcast for 15 minutes
make a valuable post/comment on LinkedIn
tag 15 people in my connections database
connect with 30 interesting people on LinkedIn
invite 5 people to join the 👋Friendworking newsletter
Weekly actions:
transcribe one new episode of the Creator Spotlight and Personal IPO (bi-weekly) podcasts, learn something from them, and connect with guests on LinkedIn
transcribe two new DOAC videos, and learn one thing from them
connect 2 people who I believe need to be connected
ask 30 people about what they want to learn about Community ROI.
If you have any thoughts, ideas, or questions, please 👇
And if you’d like to walk The Road To $1M+ Freelance Business with me 👇
See you next week! 👋
