Ecosystem allies, startup community members, and friends support one another by encouraging their art. This does not have to be transactional. It can be showing up, a kind note, an unplanned phone call, or just a click to signal support.
What happens when we feel less local engagement with our art and it has us feeling disheartened? This has us questioning relationships within the local startup community, choosing to be more private, and almost tired of caring. People are busy, sure, but after sacrificing so much to generously build community, our energy feels taken for granted.
Leaders who have made a ruckus beyond their local community often experience this “idealization of the distant”. People think the best can only come from far away, right? Sure, always import knowledge, but local goodness remains… until it doesn’t.
Oddly, for the same reason we’re not feeling local love, our growing, but more distant networks appreciate our real skills, creative art, and are willing to invest in spending premium human time together. This drives attention to where true fans remain thirsty.
At the same time, locally, after all that’s been built, been sacrificed, people/environments change and over time, we can feel really under appreciated, even disrespected. The proximity value of leveraging local leaders is clear and so much good impact will always remain, but egotistical, mental anguish remains.
This devolved state may rhyme with burnout and may intensify during transitional times, but it’s not stagnant nor is it all bad. We don’t stand still. We stay wild. We revisit our fitness and creative practice. We remain grateful for good times shared. We live well and still ship art, but how can we reinvent local relationships with fellow leaders who were cool, but now feel like metric-meeting, transient disappointments?
Perhaps answers lie within the art of quitting the right things at the right time, but when it’s people we’re quitting, the related emotions impact how we treat others throughout the network. This creates suffering, delusions, and consumes personal bandwidth. If we’re going to remain generous, is it unrealistic to demand a local response? Not every time, but at least once in awhile, especially when someone is experiencing another summit within their body of work! If so, people’s topophilia (love of place) fades and the genuine heart of a startup community ends up fractured and hardened.
10/16/26 – Asked Seth Godin
