Moving forward, the composition of our attendees would boil down to two simple questions: Do the people we want to invite do innovative work in the world? Are they kind, open-minded people with a true desire to grow?

Instead of shelling out money to pay for transportation, we built a parade into the itinerary to try to disguise the ten-minute walk to dinner.

meaningful.” And that, I realized, is what the members of the Summit community have in common: the insatiable desire to create and connect so that we can make an impact on ourselves and on generations to come.

Start with the people in your circle and spiral out from there through referrals. It had worked in his knife-selling and nightclub-promoting days. If you grow your audience organically through the people you already know, you can build meaningful relationships that will do your networking for you.

In the early days of Summit, to help push ourselves past our comfort zones, we’d rattle off a punchy one-liner to each other: “If you’re not scared, it won’t make the movie.” It was our way of pressuring each other to lean into discomfort and go big.

As the age-old adage goes: “You never fail until you stop trying.”

What was the point of selling the company only to hit a payday and lose what we loved doing? Bands sold albums, not their bands. We were in it for the long haul.

Momentum is a powerful tool. It creates feelings of excitement, it compounds trust, and it instills a sense of urgency. When people can feel the energy of something building upon itself, they want to be a part of it.

Elliott doubled back to Joel Holland. But instead of asking him to fully commit, he posed a different question, one that would later become the bedrock of Summit Series’s strategy for growth: Elliott asked him if there was anybody else he knew who might like to come.