Week 75 - Who Helped You Get Here? 🤗

Author

Yurii Lazaruk
August 30, 2026

Hey my friend, this is the very first section of the "Friendworking" book, and here I'm inviting you to look into your individual achievements to think: are they really individual?

Or maybe there is a chain of humans behind them who helped you make it happen? And if we remove those people from your life, would you be the same you that you're right now? 😏

So let's look behind and notice amazing humans we already have in our lives! And, of course, share with me your stories and feedback :)

Part 1 Chapter Section1: Who Helped You Get Here?

Think about something you're genuinely proud of. It might be your career, a business you built, a job you landed, a difficult project you somehow managed to pull off, or simply the person you've become along the way.

Pick one thing and ask yourself a slightly uncomfortable question:

Did I really do it myself?

Throughout my whole entrepreneurial journey, 99.9% of the projects I worked on came through word of mouth.

And when I look closely at some of the biggest things that happened in my professional life, I can almost always trace them back to another human.

One of the best examples happened when the war in Ukraine started:

I lost all my sources of income and was kinda desperate, so I reached out to David Spinks, co-founder of the CMX community. I described my situation, told him about my community-building experience (even though I didn't have the fancy titles to prove it, only actual practice), and asked if he could help me.

David basically said, “Sure,” and made a post on Facebook.

From my side, it looked like something super simple that might have taken him a minute to make (I have no idea how simple it actually was for him), but that post changed my professional life.

Steve Garguillo from Cultivators saw it, invited me for a call, trusted me, and eventually brought me into my first-ever international community project where I worked and learned a ton from an amazing community builder, Lisa.

Then Beth McIntyre offered me another project, an audit for CMX itself.

Suddenly, because of David, I had my first two international community consulting projects. And once I could share those experiences, getting the next projects became much easier.

Both opportunities happened because someone believed someone who believed me.

But even that story didn’t actually start with David. So let's go a little further back.

I was curious about community building and started googling (yes, we still googled back then) for something useful. That’s how I found Rosie Sherry and her Rosieland newsletter, which led me to David's community podcast. Through the podcast, I learned from David and dozens of other amazing humans, found the CMX community, and eventually I connected with David himself.

Of course, I wasn't sitting there googling community building and thinking, “Great, this will eventually get me my first international consulting project!”

I just wanted to learn more about community building.

But if I trace the chain backwards now, it looks like this:

Curiosity → Rosie → David's podcast → CMXcommunity → David → Facebook post → Steve and Beth → my first international community projects.

How the hell could I have planned that?

I couldn't.

If you think about it, we have a funny way of describing success. We say my career, my business, my client, my project, my achievement… as if there were no other humans involved

But the more I look back at my own journey, the harder it’s to find a meaningful achievement with only me inside it. It was always someone else, and usually multiple people.

No matter how amazing an expert you are, at some point you're going to need other people. You can do tons of things yourself, and now, with automation and AI, probably more than ever. But eventually you'll reach something you simply can't get to alone.

And I don't mean only clients, jobs, or money. Sometimes another human can simply make one annoying part of your everyday life dramatically better.

For three years, I delegated my accounting to someone who did the job, but every time I asked a question, I felt like I was harassing them. Instead of just answering (or telling me that answers cost extra), they made me feel stupid and uncomfortable every time I asked something.

Then, through someone I randomly met at an event, I got introduced to another accountant, and my professional life became so much better.

My new accountant explained how I could get part of my VAT back and save money, helped me deal with tax questions from the government, and answered so many of my questions that I eventually became knowledgeable enough to do much of the accounting myself.

I don't, obviously. They're professionals, they're amazing, and I'd much rather let them do it.

But I wasn't looking for an accountant at that event, and the fun part is that someone else I’ve randomly connected with before had invited me there.

So if I follow this chain, it again looks like this:

Someone I knew → event invite → random meeting → intro to an accountant → less stress (and fewer grey hairs) + more knowledge + saved money.

One human connection improved a part of my life I wasn't even trying to fix that day.

And once I started looking at my life this way, I suddenly saw these chains everywhere:

Viktor was the first person who answered when I created a thread on an SEO forum suggesting we meet in real life in Kyiv. He said, “If you need any help or a speaker, I'm ready.” That random forum meetup became SEO Club (my first-ever community-building experience), and somehow we kept doing it together for ten years.

Then there was Sales Hero, the first-ever conference for sales professionals in Ukraine. I had never organized anything remotely like a 700-person conference (but somehow I decided it was a good idea to create one). Oleg supported this crazy idea and even did things I hated doing myself, like calling partners and participants who hadn't bought tickets, while Alex and his marketing team ran the paid advertising without charging us for their work.

When I moved countries, my colleague Ella connected me with Dominika at Venture Café and told me to join their meetings. Through those meetings, I've since met hundreds of amazing humans and delivered dozens of speeches.

Zsike, author of Thinkbait, taught me that in the age of AI, it's still important to show up as the real you and write the way you actually think. And that became another reason why I'm showing up as genuine, real me instead of some perfectly polished (read plain) AI version.

And then there is my wife, who sometimes tells me things I really don't like to hear. I've even argued with her about those things many times, only to realize later that, well... she was right.

So now, even when I don't like what I hear, I try not to become defensive (it’s still hard sometimes). Instead, I try to actually hear what she's telling me and ask myself, “Okay, what can I do with this?”

None of these people did the work for me, of course. But remove them from the story, and you start getting a very different Yurii.

And I bet the same is true for you.

Maybe you think you don't have much of a network because you don't have thousands of LinkedIn connections or hundreds of people in some carefully organized CRM.

But forget the word network for a second and think about humans instead.

Who taught you something you still use, recommended you for a job, introduced you to somebody important, or gave you a chance even though, on paper, you might not have looked like the obvious person for it?

Who challenged you, gave you feedback you didn't enjoy hearing, or simply told you, “You should talk to this person”?

If you actually start looking for these stories (and I bet you have dozens of them), your supposedly individual journey will suddenly become much more crowded.

And once you see all those humans behind your achievements, there is no way to unsee them.

tl;dr: Very few achievements are truly individual. Look behind the things you're proud of, and you'll probably find humans who taught you, trusted you, introduced you, challenged you, or simply opened a door. So before building a bigger network, notice how much your existing one has already shaped your life.

💡 What influenced me this week 💡

Thoughts of the week:

  • “There's a certain level of inconvenience that's an important part of the human experience.” - Sahil Bloom’s newsletter

  • “Just because you can afford to remove some inconvenience from your life, doesn't mean you have to. You can always choose to do certain things the hard way.” - Sahil Bloom’s newsletter

  • “I thought, ‘what sort of content would brands picture themselves in?’ I was tagging brands in certain videos. For a high-yield savings account that I was using, I tagged the bank, and they actually reached out. So that was like one fairly effective way to get some attention there.” - Imran Muntaz, The Creator Spotlight newsletter

  • “When we look at and compare ourselves to others, we obsess over the narrow, easily-visible factors of their lives.” - Sahil Bloom’s newsletter

  • “IKEA Effect: You place significantly more value on things you put effort into creating.” - Sahil Bloom’s newsletter

  • “Reach was always a proxy for what brands actually wanted, a specific person's recommendation reaching people who trusted them.” - The Creator Spotlight newsletter

  • “The community of supporters you build inside the organization is just as important as the community of customers and partners you are building outside the organization.” - Community Field Notes newsletter

  • “Digital relationships have to be built and maintained, and that there is craft in doing it well.” - Community Field Notes newsletter

  • “A member who only ever opens the digest is participating just as much as the person posting three times a week. Treating them differently is how programs end up serving ten percent of their audience while quietly assuming the other ninety percent weren’t that interested to begin with.” - The Community Code

  • “Teams often reach out to hire Dan early on, but he redirects them to his free launch-and-grow guide first, and to come back in a year with harder problems. If something isn't clear, he'll rewrite the guide. Clients show up anyway, usually already convinced.” - Creator Spotlight newsletter

  • “What do we have access to that nobody else does? How do we build a product around that instead of around our existing content?” - Creator Spotlight newsletter

Song of the week:

Book and quotes of the week:

“Such discoveries (disruptive ones) often come by watching how people use products, rather than by listening to what they say.”

“An opportunity that excites a small organization isn’t big enough to be interesting to a very large one”

“The location of the most powerful factors that define the capabilities and disabilities of organizations migrates over time —from resources toward visible, conscious processes and values, and then toward culture”

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

  • 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 10 people in my connections database

  • connect with 30 interesting people on LinkedIn

Weekly actions:

If you have any thoughts, ideas, or questions, please 👇

And if you’d like to have more 👋 Friendworking in your life 👇

See you next week! 👋