5 lessons from the world's most ambitious rooms

Introduction

Throughout 2025, I had the opportunity to sit in some of the most ambitious rooms in the world. Hackathons, conferences, and mansion parties. London, Amsterdam, and San Francisco. Rooms of engineers, entrepreneurs, investors - visionaries with a drive to better the world.

It was the people who impressed me the most in these rooms. The quality of mindset and behaviour of individuals stood out more than anything material. So, on reflection, what did I learn? What characterises people who are proactively working towards creating change? What behaviours do they exhibit? And most importantly, how do people interact in these environments? Here are 5 key lessons I took from being in some of the world’s most ambitious rooms.

1. Storytelling Always Comes First

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” Muriel Rukeyser

The Outer Story

Storytelling is humanity’s most ancient practice. We tell stories every day without knowing, whether it’s introducing yourself to someone new, telling your friends or family about your day, or describing a dream. Whereas mathematics might be the language of the universe, stories are the language of human beings. The uncomfortable truth to the rationally-minded is that the fundamental driving force of human beings is emotion, not reason. Good story tellers tap into emotions, garner support and bring the story into reality through action.

Stories are so fundamental - they were the first intergenerational knowledge transfer mechanism. Polynesian sailors would navigate the Pacific using stars, understanding their movements through stories told over generations, not calculations. In the case of the Polynesian sailor, there was no sextant, nor was there a need for one. The Polynesian sailor knew how to navigate the Pacific because they were told the same set of memorable, relatable, compelling stories throughout their lives.

Stories upon which a group of people agree are very powerful. Famously, many Japanese people believe that you have to eat KFC on Christmas Day. KFC built this story into the Japanese cultural narrative via their 1974 “Kentucky for Christmas” marketing campaign. Effective storytelling also goes beyond business marketing. The nation-state is essentially one collective national story - “we are the same because we are British”. Going one step further, religion is a collective intranational story - “we are the same because we are Christian”. Stories have the power to unify or divide billions, and when you’re selling a business, you’re trying to unify people behind your idea. You are selling a story about how you create value. This is why storytelling always comes first.

In the world’s most ambitious rooms, those who gathered the most support behind them were shameless in telling a compelling story that made you want to be part of the journey. These great story tellers were able to get the right people on board: customers, investors, co-founders and employees.

The Inner Story

Storytelling is not limited to what you output to others. In the world’s most ambitious rooms, people have a high level of self-belief both in themselves and their capability to deliver. The source of this self-belief often comes from a combination of having delivered before and having had positive encouragement from those around them. There is a fine balance between arrogance and a healthy self-belief. Those who excel in these environments have practised walking that line.

The story that you tell yourself is at least as important as the story you tell to others. In the world’s most ambitious rooms, people have a self-story that is overflowing with self-conviction. Self-belief, manifestation, and visualisation techniques have become ever more popular - all are techniques that subtly change your self-story.

Modern psychology tells us that our self-story plays a key role in how we come across to other people. Our self-story also shapes how we navigate successes or failures. In the end, it’s not about what happens to us, but the actions we take in response to things external to us.

Ask yourself this - would you follow someone who didn’t believe in the story they’re telling?

Actionables

1. How to Tell Better Stories to Others

Telling better stories to others ultimately comes down to knowing your audience and being flexible enough to adjust (sometimes in real-time) your story to keep them engaged. There are certain approaches you can take to telling better stories, such as being aware of story archetypes or the pyramid principle.

Keeping things simple, slow and clear ensures your audience can follow the story at a manageable pace. Often, people feel they have so much to contextualise that the core story is obfuscated by the context. When people feel they have a lot to say, they usually speak too fast, and the audience gets lost. Boil it down to the essentials, and let people ask questions after. As with anything, good storytelling requires practice, reflection and time.

2. How to tell Better Stories to Yourself

In the same way that telling better stories to others comes down to knowing your audience, altering your own self-narrative comes down to, and helps contribute towards understanding yourself. Much has been said in modern psychology about developing a healthy self-story and how this impacts your life downstream. Rewriting your own self-story helps heal trauma in the most extreme cases.

Take ownership of your own story, consider and challenge the narratives you tell yourself, and write a compelling self-story. Doing this will also help improve your own self-awareness and help you communicate your own story with conviction. Andrew Huberman has some great resources on self-narrative. Be radically honest with yourself about which story archetypes you are prone to telling yourself. Practice telling your own self-story through a compelling story archetype and reflect on how it feels.

2. Media has Hype, Individuals Have Convictions.

In the midst of hype, reflect deeply on your values.

In the world of social media, it can be difficult to distinguish between what is genuinely exciting versus what other people want you to be excited about. Meta wants people to be excited about the metaverse, presenting it as the ‘future of connection’. Silicon Valley more generally wants you to be excited about AI. However, for many, this is noise. Noise that is broadcast on radios, screens and platforms the world over. This noise is currently fuelling US GDP figures, hence one must ask: who gains by broadcasting this noise?

Individuals will tell you a different story to the current media hype, even in places where the hype is happening. In the depths of a San Francisco mansion party, I was not discussing LLMs; rather, I was listening to people discuss biosciences, African entrepreneurship and power systems. People had convictions in domains they knew deeply, not the current hype broadcasts. My goal during these interactions was to find out what interested the person I was speaking to deeply. “What drives you?” “What made you choose this?” Both questions that led to people’s eyes lighting up and them becoming excited, because they could finally talk about the topic they care about deeply.

People in the world’s most ambitious rooms have well-developed opinions, thoughts, and ideas. Most of the time, these ideas came from a period of either strife, deep reflection or thorough understanding of a topic. They had understood what mattered to them, why it mattered, and were able to combine their lived experience and understanding to deploy something valuable to others.

Actionables:

1. Develop Your Filter, Own Your Conviction

Developing your filter comes down to a combination of self-awareness and knowledge. What are your values? What matters to you and why? What can you do about it now? What could you do about it in the future? How might you get to the point of being able to be proactive about what matters to you? You are the expert in your own lived experience.

Use your lived experience to determine what you have conviction in. This becomes your filter. When you have clear answers to such questions, as well as the questions that arise downstream, you develop a noise filter. It then becomes easier to communicate your own convictions with confidence and clarity.

You need a strong and reliable filter to find the signal in noise. Aim to get to a point where you can be in a room full of people hyping about one topic, and you can work on that thing in which you have absolute conviction. The best rooms are not the ones in which everyone is excited about the same thing, but where everyone truly believes in their own idea. Lead in your own ideas, and others will follow.

3. Location is a Proxy for Luck

‘Lady luck favours those who try’ - being in the right place makes the right time come sooner.

So-called “lucky” encounters arise from being in the right place at the right time. Many who attribute success to luck forget the role of choosing to be in a location where lucky encounters are more likely. The right place is often to do with being around the right people. So who are the right people for you? Again, this comes down to understanding yourself and what you value.

How do you get in the right place, with the right people, at the right time? You can increase your chances by choosing large ‘attractor’ cities - places where ambitious people go, and putting yourself in situations that expose you to what matters to you. If you’re interested in machine learning and you meet a world-class artist, then although it may be an interesting and pleasant experience, it is less likely to lead to something related to your interest. In the end, luck only carries meaning if it is relevant to what you’re interested in bringing into the world.

Since the dawn of time, people have gravitated toward those who are similar to themselves. The mission to find who these people are for you is a worthwhile one, and where relevant, ‘lucky’ encounters are more likely to happen. So think about what matters to you, think about where there will be other people for whom the same things matter. Place yourself in these

Actionables

1. Find and Commit to a Place

The best possible place to be includes a strong, encouraging, in-person community that convenes in locations that are based on your interests. If your thing is AI, then Silicon Valley is a no-brainer. If your thing is robotics, then you might choose Zurich. If your thing is fintech, then you might choose London or New York. Go where people are pursuing the things you also want to pursue.

Finding the right place can be difficult, however. You may assume based on everything you know that Place A is the best for finding the right people. You go there, and you realise it’s not what you expected. This is also part of the process of finding the right place. Give yourself a minimum time commitment, a year, for example, and re-evaluate.

2. Find and Form Communities

Once you’ve found your way to the place, place yourself as close to the centre of the ‘pinball machine of people’ that you can. Find the events that are being put on, go to the clubs they frequent, or learn where they learn. Engage, be present, put yourself out there. This way, you increase your chance of lucky encounters occurring.

If these things don’t exist where you currently are, challenge yourself as much as possible to find them. Prioritise in-person meetups where possible, and use the community platforms such as Discord to supplement where needed.

Finally, form your own community centred around the specific topic you’re interested in. You then get to become ‘the exciting events host’ rather than attending them.

4. Learning to Have Conversations With the Right People Can Teach you More Than a Course.

Deep listening unlocks more than doors.

Deep listening is a practice in which you read more than just the words the other person is telling you. If you see listening as a social nicety or as a task, you should re-evaluate. People who have convictions can teach you a lot, as mentioned above. However, training your mind to dig deeper than what someone presents gives you the ability to turn each conversation into a learning opportunity.

There are Three Learning Opportunities per Interaction.

Learning from Conversations - The Surface Level

The first opportunity lies in the surface level of what the other person is saying. Take note of how they are presenting themselves, what narrative they are conveying. This level gives you insight on how to dig deeper into their own interests, as well as how you might communicate your interests to them. For the loud and outgoing types, you might challenge them through good questioning and spelling out your own convictions. For the quiet and timid, you might spend some more time listening for that thing that gets them going.

Learning from Conversations - The Action-behaviour Level

The second lies in their actions & behaviours. How are they carrying themselves in your conversation? How are they carrying themselves in conversations with others? If the other person is demonstrating closed body language, they are withholding something of themselves (sometimes for good reason). Learning to adapt your conversation based on body language is somewhat of an art form, and something best improved through practice.

Learning from Conversations - The Conviction Level

The third lies in their conviction. A person’s convictions, well-formed or not, can be extremely revealing. There is the surface-level content, which is more than likely something you know far less about than they do. This is a direct and obvious learning opportunity, so tap into your curiosity and try to understand their conviction from their perspective. These types of conversations can open your mind to opportunities and ideas that you previously may not have even considered. It is always worth trying to get to learn about someone’s convictions. The deeper learning opportunity here is how the other person communicates the conviction - and this is where you can begin to understand how well-formed it is. Do they have a deep understanding of the topic, or are they just speaking convincingly? Again, this can be hard to decipher, but learning to tune the BS radar is a skill.

Finally, reflect on these interactions. Consider how these interactions made you feel. What behaviours could you adopt? What behaviours worked well, and what behaviours didn’t?

Learning about people in this way gives you an understanding of the individuals you interact with. It gives you a sense of how you are different from others, and how you are the same. I also believe it’s important to learn about others in a way that is accepting - they are figuring out life in much the same way that you are. You may notice things that you are uncomfortable with, and find ways in which you simply do not align with the other person. This is also ok.

Actionables

1. Tap into Your Curiosity

Make it your mission to find what it is that makes a person tick, and then get them to delve deep into that topic, and try to follow. Ask clarifying questions, try to understand them, their perspective, and why it drives them.

Why did they follow the hard path? Why did they go against the grain? How did they come across this concept they’re obsessed with? Become comfortable asking these questions, and you’ll not only understand people better but form deeper connections as a result.

People often focus on how they come across to others when in conversation. This behaviour is completely natural, especially when you’re interacting with a group of people you don’t know. While most people fall into this trap, you can tap into your curiosity and really get to know someone.

2. Be Authentic

Authenticity in this context means sharing your honest thoughts on the matter at hand. When sharing a thought that is not well formed, then share it with a degree of openness to being wrong - let go of your ego.

Similarly, if you’re not convinced by what someone is saying after they have explained it fully, then don’t be. It doesn’t mean to become confrontational, but rather having a strong enough sense of self that you’re able to listen to an opinion, try to understand it fully, and not take it as ground truth. It is then your judgment to make as to whether or not to challenge them.

5. Depth Over Breadth When Networking.

In the long term, high-quality, slow-growth beats low-quality, high-growth.

People remember you not for how cool or important you came across, but how you made them feel. I came across situations where halfway through a conversation, the person I would be talking with would see someone else who they wanted to talk to and cut off our conversation to go speak to them. I didn’t consider them as someone I’d go back to for conversation or otherwise. A strong, trustworthy and collaborative group of 10 outweighs the capabilities of a group of loosely associated 100. Pick the 10 wisely. Find those who align with you, bring them together, and form tight groups.

Actionables

1. Focus on People

Anyone can become a people person. Vanessa Van Edwards has some great advice on becoming a people person. Ditch the ‘introvert/extrovert’ framework - you will find groups who energise you and others who drain you. You have the agency to choose who you invest your time with. You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with. The point is to go out and find these people, because it’s the single best time investment you can make.

Your network is unique, and will not be the same as anyone else’s. Your network is also fluid and is subject to constant change. On some level, you need to be comfortable with this level of uncertainty and change.

2. Facilitate Connections

From a pure network science perspective, you’re aiming for a dense social network because a dense network transmits information effectively and is more resilient. That doesn’t necessarily mean a few people, but rather a well-connected network. Check this post to understand the difference between dense and sparse networks. How do you create a dense network? By fostering connections between people. Find ways to get people together - host events, dinners, do things that bring people together.

Bonus - How do I get into The World’s Most Ambitious Rooms?

The running theme in this post is people who are solving problems. You can pay to get into these rooms, but failing at the interpersonal component will make sure you will not be coming back. There are also many rooms in the world full of people complaining about problems, but not doing much to solve them. I know which rooms I’d rather be in.

I am interested in solving large-scale problems, and I want to know how people are approaching them. It was this fundamental curiosity which led me to these rooms. I wasn’t chasing money or status - my interest is in seeing pressing problems resolved. I’m also curious about technology, the future, and where the world is heading. It was these fundamental curiosities that led me to some of the most exciting, talent-dense rooms the world has to offer.