Back in May, I accepted an inivitation to attend a 4-day retreat for early-stage founders called Grove. The entire program leading up to the retreat was very mysterious - they didn't tell us much beforehand and even prohibited us from carpooling down together to avoid forming early cliques.

But I was excited nontheless. I knew a few people that had done it before, and they all spoke very highly of it.

Starting a company can be lonely, and I've always wanted a good founder peer group that would understand what I'm going through. I had that in a few friends, but I was excited to join a whole community of people like myself.

The entire drive down to Santa Cruz I was picturing who my new best friends were going to be. Needless to say I had extremely high hopes about the retreat which I learned later was not the case for everyone.

And yet it somehow still exceeded my expectations. I realized a ton of things about myself. We all wrote our goals for the retreat on big sheets of paper and stuck them on the walls of the main session room. I updated my goals every night.

By the last day, everyone was wondering the same thing: "How can I stay close to this group and not lose touch?"

I was particularly worried about this because it seemed like a recurring theme in my life. What I used to chalk up to as "living in the moment" is something I now recognize as a huge growth edge. I first noticed this in high school when I was ok going on for weeks without calling my family. And now the same thing is happening with friends, and I often wonder how I can prevent myself from letting things fizzle out.

After the retreat, I stepped up to organize within our group chat. I created a Slack, organized meetups in SF, and even planned our reunion that we are gong to do Jan 2026. And I didn't realize it at the time, but people really gave me credit for this.

In our last structured session as a group, many gave me kudos for keeping the group together. And I was more surprised than anything to hear this. How did I go from someone who always lost touch with people to someone that is bringing us together?

And that's when I realized what it was. And it was something that I picked up during the retreat.

True listening is curiosity. It's the belief that others might have something really interesting to say. Realizing this helped me unlock ways of communicating and connecting. And as a result, new levels of influence with people I'm close to.

But even beyond that - for me lasting connection is built on the belief that these people enrich your life. In this case, I realized that there's not a lot of people that make me a better person from just being around them. And so I want to be around them more.

It's that simple.

The recognition was nice, but I realized in that moment I wasn't doing it for that. I was doing it because of my selfish desire to become a better person and just realizing that I had found it already.