Chapter 4: Circumstantial Tribes
I want to show you something from the 9am call.
We'd just finished the objects exercise. Creatine, chai, Stanley, weightlifting belt, lacrosse ball. The whole room had experienced, firsthand, how objects land differently depending on who's looking.
Everyone was kind of buzzing. There were laughs in the chat. People were tagging each other. Someone wrote "this is actually insane" and honestly it was loads of fun -- one of those moments on the call where you can feel the energy shift and everyone's like, okay, I get it now.
Quick side note -- if you want to work with me, we run these calls during the challenges. Daily calls, every day. I teach a new concept every week. The objects exercise was just one of them. We'd love to have you there.
You can join me here :) - https://www.skool.com/six-figure-creators/about
So then I ran the tribe exercise.
I needed a volunteer.
"Akash. You're up."
80 points. SEEK. Restricted hours.
Akash was an international student, who now coaches Aussie Migrants how to get a job. From Nepal to Australia. He'd filled out the exercise -- three tribes, one for each type.
"Okay, so walk us through them. Chosen, circumstantial, place. Just the tribe itself."
"University -- for chosen."
"Yep. Uni in Australia. What's the circumstantial one?"
"Circumstantial will be migrant."
"Cool. And place?"
"Tassie. And then also... I was in Sydney for a bit."
"Alright. Now give me words. One word for each, something only someone inside that world would know."
And he just went.
For chosen: 80 points. PY -- professional year. ACS.
For circumstantial: SEEK. Restricted hours. Local experience.
For place: Auburn. Harris Park.
I put those words on the screen.
Nine words. Nothing else.
"How many of these words did you understand? Put a number in the chat."
Lee put zero.
Patrick got three.
Most people were somewhere in between.
Then I asked Akash directly.
"If you were back at uni, searching for a job, and you saw these nine words -- nothing else. Just those words. Would you know exactly what that is and what it means?"
"Yeah."
"Completely."
Because here's the thing about those nine words.
If you're an international student in Australia -- if you've been through the migration process, if you've sat on SEEK at 11pm scrolling through job listings knowing they're going to say "local experience required," if you've calculated your hours against the 40-hours-per-fortnight restriction on your student visa, if you know that 80 points is the number you need for the skilled migration invitation but you practically need 90-plus to actually get one -- those nine words don't just describe your life.
They are your life.
80 points. That's the floor on Australia's skilled migration points system. You need 65 to be eligible but you need 80 or 90-plus to realistically get invited. International students obsess over this number. They calculate it, recalculate it, lie awake running the maths on what combination of qualifications and experience and age gets them over the line.
PY -- professional year. A 44 to 52-week structured program for international graduates in accounting, IT, engineering. Awards you 5 extra migration points. It's popular because when you're short on points, 5 is everything.
ACS -- the Australian Computer Society. The skills assessment body for IT professionals seeking migration. If you're in IT and trying to get your skills recognised, ACS is the gatekeeper.
SEEK. Australia's largest job search platform. The dominant job board. Every international student knows SEEK the way every Australian knows Bunnings.
Restricted hours. Student visa -- Subclass 500 -- limits you to 40 hours per fortnight during semester. Effectively 20 hours a week. Unlimited during breaks. Every international student has done the mental maths on this.
Local experience. The Catch-22 that drives people insane. Can't get local experience without a local job. Can't get a local job without local experience. It's one of the most documented barriers international graduates face. You see it in every rejection email. "We're looking for candidates with local experience." You're standing in Australia. You live here. You study here. But you don't have "local experience."
And the best one in that list? Holy shit.
Harris Park.
Harris Park is Little India. Adjacent to Parramatta in Western Sydney. Wigram Street -- dense with Indian restaurants, grocery stores, sari shops. It's a genuine cultural hub for the Indian and South Asian diaspora. And here's the thing -- Nepal and India are different countries, but in the Australian migration experience, there's real overlap. The communities intersect. The suburbs intersect. The chai culture intersects.
When I said "Harris Park" to Akash, he lit up.
Because that's where you go. You're in Auburn or Parramatta, you're studying, you're trying to figure out this country, and you end up in Harris Park getting a takeaway chai, driving to your mate's house, running the numbers on permanent residency in your head.
And I actually know Harris Park. My wife Tanisha is Indian.
We've walked through Little India together, just the two of us, browsing the shops on Wigram Street. We got takeaway chai there. We went to an Indian supermarket and spent way too long in the spice aisle.
And we went to a Holi festival near Harris Park -- on an oval, people throwing colour at each other, stalls everywhere, kids running around covered in pink and green and yellow. Holi is the Hindu spring Festival of Colours. It was amazing. One of those things where you're standing in Western Sydney but you could be anywhere in the world.
So when I'm talking about Harris Park, I'm not just observing Akash's tribe from the outside. I have genuine proximity to it through Tanisha. I've been in those streets. I've tasted the chai. I've had the colour thrown at me.
One suburb name. An entire world of experience packed into it.
Nobody else on that call understood what Harris Park meant.
Cash understood it before I'd finished saying it.
That's a circumstantial tribe.
The difference between chosen and circumstantial
Here's the distinction that matters.
Chosen tribes -- CrossFit, BJJ, Garmin runners -- you entered them by decision. You paid an initiation cost. You chose to be in that world.
Circumstantial tribes are the ones life handed you.
And here's where people get confused. They go, "well, you chose to apply for the visa. So isn't migration a chosen tribe?"
Sure. You chose to apply.
But you didn't choose the experience.
The restricted hours weren't your decision. The "local experience" rejection loop wasn't your decision. The 80-point anxiety that keeps you up at night recalculating -- that wasn't something you signed up for. The SEEK rejection where you hit refresh at 11pm knowing the answer is going to be the same -- nobody chose that.
You chose to walk through the door. The experience that was waiting on the other side -- that was put onto you by circumstances.
Same with parenting. You chose to become a parent -- kind of. But nobody chooses the control crying debate. Nobody chooses the 3am feeds. Nobody chooses the moment at the six-week check where the doctor asks how you're doing and you burst into tears. The experiences happen through the choice. You made one decision and a thousand circumstances arrived that you never requested.
COVID. Nobody chose to go through it the way they went through it. You didn't choose to sit in a stadium at Homebush waiting to get vaccinated. You didn't choose the lockdown. You didn't choose to figure out what to do with your business when everything shut down overnight.
I went with my wife and my brother-in-law to get vaccinated at Qudos Bank Arena at Sydney Olympic Park. The biggest indoor entertainment venue in Australia -- 21,000 seats, normally used for concerts. I'd been to concerts there. Proper concerts. And now I was sitting in a plastic chair in a venue that used to mean music and energy and a night out, getting a needle in my arm, surrounded by strangers doing the same thing.
That's not a choice. That's a circumstance that arrived inside a global event that none of us controlled.
The choice is the door. The circumstance is what's behind it.
And the people who went through the same circumstances -- they don't just share your language.
They share your scars.
That's different.
MSN Messenger
Here's a story.
I'm on the 9am call and we're talking through circumstantial tribes. I'm trying to show the room how collective experiences create tribal recognition. The specific ones that only a certain generation knows.
Sam Parsons is on the call. He's 29.
"Sam, do you remember MSN Messenger?"
"MSN, yeah."
"What do you remember about it?"
"I can't remember much of it, to be honest."
He was a bit young. Fair enough. Sam's 29 -- he was kind of at the tail end of it.
So I went to Alex.
"Alex. MSN Messenger. You remember it?"
"Yeah, big time. I was chronically online on MSN Messenger."
"What's something you remember about it?"
"Sending people nudges. You'd just, like, log on, log off, so that they would get a notification that you were coming on."
"And then you could pretend to be offline even though you're online?"
"Or, like, BRB -- when you were literally walking away from the computer for a second."
"Even though you were expected to be back in ten seconds."
"Yeah."
The room laughed.
Because everyone who was the right age knew exactly what we were talking about.
The nudge -- it shook the entire chat window. You'd just hit someone with a nudge and their whole screen would vibrate. The BRB status. Pretending to be offline so you didn't have to talk to someone. The green dot that meant they were online. Orange meant away. Red meant busy. Grey meant offline -- or "appearing offline," which was its own little social chess move. The custom display names you'd change every day to communicate something to a specific person without saying it directly. The emoticons.
The little song you were playing showing up in your status.
I met my wife on MSN Messenger. We were fifteen.
Sounds insane now. Meeting your future wife on an instant messaging platform in the early 2000s. But that was how it worked then. You'd get connected through a mutual friend's friends list. Someone would say, hey, you should talk to this person. And then you'd just... chat.
Years later we're married with two dogs -- Teddy and Cherry -- and we make each other chai after dinner.
But we started on MSN Messenger. Two fifteen-year-olds.
And the thing is -- when I say that to certain people, there's a recognition that fires immediately. I did that too. Not just "I used that platform." The whole world of it. The specific excitement of a certain person coming online. The way you'd craft your status to communicate something without saying it directly. The nudge as a signal. The green dot that meant everything when you were fifteen.
People who were born in the right window -- late eighties, early nineties -- know that world before I finish the sentence. MSN Messenger was active from 1999 to 2013. If you were a teenager in Australia in the early-to-mid 2000s, this was your life. This was how you talked to people. This was how you flirted, how you fought, how you figured out social dynamics before social media existed.
Everyone else thinks it sounds weird.
That's a circumstantial tribe. Born in the right window, this was your world. Born outside it, you have no idea what a nudge is.
Why you didn't choose the best ones
Here's the thing about circumstantial tribes that makes them so fucking powerful as a marketing vehicle.
The depth of the bond is proportional to what was asked of you.
Chosen tribes -- you paid an initiation cost. But you also got to leave. You could stop going to CrossFit. You could stop competing in BJJ. You chose in, you can choose out.
Circumstantial tribes are different because they didn't ask your permission.
When something is put on you -- a redundancy, a visa process, a health event, a season of life you didn't request -- your nervous system doesn't file it under "interest." It files it under identity.
Not who you chose to be.
Who you were forced to become.
And that's where the deepest recognition lives.
My wife and I have been watching Survivor.
2 months ago we went properly in. Eleven seasons in about six weeks. We're watching Season 50 live.
And what I keep thinking about -- watching these tribes form -- is that nobody on Survivor chose their tribe.
You show up. Jeff Probst reads your name off a piece of paper. He assigns you. You're Namu Namu. You're on this tribe now. You're going to sleep on a beach with these specific people, starve with them, compete with them, possibly lose with them and get voted out with them.
You didn't pick them.
But the bonds that form -- especially in the early days, through the first few challenges, through the first vote, through the first real hardship -- those bonds are wild.
Not because they chose each other.
Because they went through something together.
The shared suffering is the thing.
And the circumstantial tribe on LinkedIn works the same way.
When you write content that says I know what it felt like to go through that -- not chosen, not opted into, just placed into -- the recognition is something different. It's not "this person knows my world." It's "this person gets me."
That hits differently.
My brother Dan's kid
My brother Dan's kid August turns one in May.
I've watched Dan navigate the first year of parenthood from close distance -- we live about 2km apart. And the thing that strikes me about it is how fast new parents find each other.
The words that only they know. The specific details that outsiders don't track.
The "rage cage" -- which is what they called the little containment play area in the living room. The night nurse they eventually brought in because they were both destroyed. The sleep schedule. The six-week check. The moment they thought things were improving and then it got worse.
The 3am group chat.
I've heard about the WhatsApp group chats parents have where they're messaging each other at whatever hour because someone's always awake. The baby's up, you're up, and somewhere across Sydney there are four other parents in the same situation, all typing into the same chat at 3am because what else are you going to do.
That chat is one of the most tribal objects I know of.
Nobody is in it because they chose to be.
They're in it because they all ended up in the same impossible season of life at the same time.
And the recognition between new parents is kind of pre-verbal in a way that almost nothing else matches.
You can say "we're in month three" to a new parent and they know exactly what you mean. The specific texture of month three. Where the optimism of the first weeks has run out and the real exhaustion has set in and you're recalculating when it gets easier.
You don't need to explain that.
They lived it.
What the redundancy tribe really is
Here's one from the Niche Scoring Bible.
Redundancy or layoff survivors. Not people who left jobs by choice -- the other kind.
The day the calendar invite appeared that wasn't normal.
You know the one. It's a meeting request that comes in at a weird time, from someone you don't usually meet with, with a title that doesn't tell you much. And your stomach drops before you've consciously processed why.
The box of belongings.
The immediate LinkedIn identity crisis -- the moment you realise your job was a big part of how you described yourself to strangers at parties and now you don't know what to say.
The shame of telling people. Even when it wasn't your fault. Even when the whole company went through it. There's still something that feels like shame.
The recruiter rejection loop. Shit application after shit application.
The financial calculation you run at midnight.
Am I worth what I thought I was?
That question. Right there.
Nobody who hasn't been through redundancy really understands what that question feels like. They can sympathise. But they can't recognise.
The people who have been through it -- when they see content that names that exact thing -- they stop.
Not because the writing is clever.
Because someone finally said the thing out loud.
The difference in trust depth
Here's something I want to be precise about because it's easy to misread this.
Circumstantial tribe recognition creates deeper initial trust than chosen tribe recognition.
Not always better for every situation. Deeper initial trust.
Because when someone else has been through what you've been through -- involuntarily -- there's an implied understanding that you don't have to earn. You've both been in the situation. There's no "do they really get it?" question. They get it. You get it. The conversation starts at a different point.
But here's the nuance.
Not all circumstances are equal.
Some circumstantial experiences are light. Normal circumstances. Everyone's been tired. Everyone's had a bad week. Everyone's experienced traffic or a delayed flight or a difficult client. Those are technically circumstantial -- shared experiences you didn't choose -- but they don't create tribal depth because they don't require anything of you. They're not transformative. They didn't change how you see the world.
The circumstantial tribe experiences that actually work for LinkedIn recognition are the specific ones. The ones that required something of you. Created a before and after. Produced a population with specific language.
Three things in common.
One: they required something of you. You had to adapt. You had to change. You had to figure something out that you didn't expect to figure out.
Two: they created a clear before and after. There's a version of you that didn't know what you now know. A version that hadn't been through the 80-point calculation, or the 3am feeds, or the calendar invite that wasn't normal.
Three: they produce a specific population with specific language. Not everyone went through it. The people who did can find each other. The words exist. The objects exist. The shared references fire.
"I had a stressful month" fails all three.
"My H-1B lottery didn't clear" passes all three.
"I got laid off in the 2023 tech wave" passes all three.
"Month three with a newborn" passes all three.
The specific circumstance is the test.
The professional version
Most people reading this are thinking about their clients.
And here's where it gets interesting.
Your ideal client is in a circumstance right now.
Not just a job title. Not just an industry. An actual set of circumstances that they didn't fully choose and that are shaping how they see the world.
The mortgage broker who just had their volume cut in half because rates spiked.
The accountant navigating their first tax season alone after leaving a firm -- which sounds like a chosen thing but is accompanied by a full circumstantial identity shift that nobody warned them about.
The recruiter who built their whole business on the tech sector hiring boom and then watched it collapse overnight.
The executive who just got told their role is being restructured away.
Each of these is a circumstance. Not just a category. A world. With specific objects, specific fears, specific 3am thoughts, specific things they Google that nobody else Googles.
When you write content that names that world accurately -- when you say the words that make them think how the fuck do you know about that -- the trust that comes from that is a different kind of trust.
Not "this person knows my industry."
This person knows what I'm going through right now.
That's the one.
Your exercise
Same structure as the chosen tribe exercise.
Write down every circumstantial tribe you've been through personally. Experiences that were put on you, not chosen by you. Migration. Redundancy. A health event. A loss. A season of life that arrived without your permission.
Go back further as well. The generational ones. The childhood-era ones. What were the shared collective experiences of your generation, your cohort, your city, your family?
Now write down every circumstantial tribe your ideal client is likely in right now.
What season of life are they in? What happened to them recently -- professionally, personally -- that they didn't request?
For each one, write ten words or objects that only people inside that circumstance would know. Not the category name. The insider language. Not "redundancy" -- the specific words that only the redundancy tribe would use. Not "new parent" -- the specific objects and phrases that only month-three parents would know.
Run each word through the tests.
Would someone actually say this about themselves?
Would the word fire in a tribe member's head before they'd consciously processed it?
Does that make sense?
The words that pass -- those are your circumstantial vocabulary assets.
Sitting in your experience. You just haven't been putting them in your content.
One more thing
Chosen tribes can be left.
Circumstantial tribes you carry.
Even if you're not in that season of life anymore -- even if the visa came through, or the redundancy led to something better, or the baby is sleeping through the night now -- you still know what it was. The language is still in you.
That's why circumstantial tribes work even when you're writing from the other side of the experience.
And I want to come back to Akash here. Because Akash is the proof of this.
Akash went through the migration experience. Nepal to Australia. The points system, the restricted hours, SEEK, the "local experience" rejection loop -- all of it. He lived it. And now he sells to people who are going through it right now.
A couple of weeks after the call, Akash wrote a LinkedIn post using this concept. Tribal positioning. Circumstantial language. The words from inside the experience.
He got 90 inbound connection requests from his exact ICP.
Ninety.
From one post.
He's been booking meetings left, right, and centre since.
That's not fucking theory. That's someone who went through a specific circumstance, wrote from inside it, and watched the recognition event happen at scale.
Akash doesn't have to be currently navigating a student visa to write about the 80-point calculation. He did it. It's in him. He knows what SEEK at 11pm feels like. He knows what "local experience required" does to your chest. He knows what Harris Park means before anyone finishes saying it.
The circumstance happened to him.
And that means he can write from inside it forever.
90 inbound connection requests proves it works.
Chapter Five is about a different kind of recognition.
Not what you went through.
Where you're from.
Next: Chapter Five -- Place Tribes