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🌱 The “helpful hierarchy” for level 5 people

🌱 The “helpful hierarchy” for level 5 people

Most helpful people. Public speaking. External validation.

Mitchell Cohen
February 16, 2025

Hola friends. Here’s your 3 insights in 3 minutes to live a more connected, excited, and intentional life.

👨‍🏫 Public Speaking & Feedback

I’ve been guest lecturing for a few years now, but recently updated my LinkedIn.

Funny how things come together.

Btw, this isn’t something I get paid for.

I do it because it’s literally fun for me to compress ideas, public speak, help people with things I wish I learned earlier, and get feedback along the way.

Feedback from students on my talk each semester

I think of this as “interest stacking.”

Stacking multiple things I’m interested in — all into one commitment (in this case guest lecturing twice a year at UT.) My stack includes:

Public speaking & in person events
Writing & communicating ideas
Giving back (to the students + university donates to Feed My Starving Children in exchange for my lecturing)
Getting feedback on what is most helpful for people
Seeing people take action (last semester one student landed an internship from my talk)

What is your interest stack?

🤲 Helpful Hierarchy

This week I did another guest lecture and will be adding this segment to future ones after seeing so many faces light up around the class.

TLDR; You know those people in a group project that suck to work with? Yeah, well they don’t go away. They end up getting jobs and they still aren’t fun to work with. Don’t be that person.

Instead, use this “Helpful Hierarchy.”

If you’re climbing, you want to be and work with level 5 people.

If you’re hiring, you want to hire level 5 teammates.

Check out this article by 3x founder Daniel Debow for more on this.

🔍 Collecting Data

My friend Akash is a finance professor (among many other things) and a great writer.

I love it when I learn something that actively reshapes my opinion on the subject WHILE reading it.

That’s exactly what happened when I read his Case for External Validation.

Quick summary:

“Society tells us to generate confidence and self-worth internally, and to not rely on external validation. But external validation is like a price signal from the market--we may have an asset which is very valuable, but we have no idea of its worth without information from an external source.”

So if our default self-assessment is often negative, maybe get a second opinion.

“For those of us that have a hard time thinking positively about ourselves or struggle with self-doubt, it’s critical to get a ‘second opinion’ about the situation or about ourselves. If our default self-assessment is negative, then it’s a terrible idea to rely exclusively on that.”

The market decides the “correct” price for assets through price discovery.

“When another person praises us, that’s the equivalent of a buyer coming along and saying ‘hey investor, you own an undervalued asset and I might like to buy it.’ When you take your personal asset out in the market, you might be surprised at how high the market is willing to bid for it.

The bottom line: when other people tell you that you are good at something, take them seriously.”

Check out his short essay here, it’s excellent.

Salud,
Mitchell