Stop Trading Away Your Health
Your personal health should be a top priority, but too many ignore it
Before we start…
I’m on the market looking for my next full-time gig. Many of you reading this have worked with me in the past, so you know what you’re getting. For those who haven’t, I have more than 20 years experience in multiple industries in companies large and small across operations, marketing, sales, product, engineering, strategy (and more). And much of what I believe about being a leader and running a company is found in this blog, so what you see is what you get.
If you have an opening at your company for a leadership role across any of those areas or have a great introduction you think makes sense, I’d love to hear about it. Feel free to email me anytime. And now on with the show…
Stop Trading Away Your Health
This post is going to take a detour from the usual business-focused posts I usually share, but I think it’s an important detour. What’s more, I think that this topic is critical to understand if you’re going to succeed in business over the long term.
Whether you want to hear it or not, your chances of succeeding in your professional life are tied to your personal health. Reread that and take it in. If you’re in crappy health (physically or mentally) you will do worse in business. Period.
If you’re thinking that you’re doing pretty well even though you might not be in the best health, imagine what you’re missing and what you’re trading away. That is to say, if you were in better health, I guarantee you’d be doing even better professionally. And while your professional life may be going well at the expense of your health, you’re literally trading away years of life for that success.
One way to look at this is that you have three dimensions that greatly impact your life: health, money, and time. At any point, you can maximize just two of these. For example, you can spend a lot of time working on your health, but that’ll mean less time working so you’ll make less money. Or you could maximize your health and money, but you probably won’t have time for anything else (i.e., work out and work all the time and you’ll never see your family or friends).
What I’d guess most of my readers do is maximize money and time, but that comes with a cost: you’ll definitely be sacrificing your health. But that can be okay sometimes. There will be times where you’re going to have to go all-in on work. You’ll work super long hours, eat like crap, and never stand up and walk around. That happens sometimes when the big pitch is due or prepping for a board meeting or finalizing the yearly budget. But you can’t do that forever without hurting your health.
So, you need to try to find a balance where you can move in and out of maximizing two of the three dimensions. But what’s even easier is just keeping good health on autopilot. You don’t need to become an Olympian or have six pack (which is a dumb goal anyway). You need to stay healthy to ensure you can do your best in other aspects of your life and to ensure you live a long and healthy life. The key part there being “healthy.” Lots of people live long lives, but they spend the last 15 (or more) years of their life being able to do very few activities. If you want to prevent that, you need to start today (ideally, 10 years ago, but too late for that).
What I’m not going to do now is give you a diet and fitness plan. I will share what I do and what I see from the science, but I’ll also link you to some experts. Again, we’re not trying to become professional athletes…we’re maximizing health for the purpose of our life. That is, we’re going to be healthy so we can be better at life and enjoy it more. And if you are healthy, I guarantee this will be a welcome side effect. One additional side effect of exercise I should mention is mental health. If you suffer from depression or anxiety, I guarantee both will be improved by exercise. There’s a ton of clinical data backing this up.
Here are the basic things you need to do and they aren’t insane (stolen from the programming I do follow here):
Get 7+ hours of sleep per night
Drink 50% of your bodyweight (in pounds) in ounces of water
Eat 2 (or more) healthy meals a day
10+ minutes of light aerobic work per day (take the dog on a walk)
Get some sun exposure
Try to fast for around 12 hours a day (stop eating at night and sleep…that’s close to 12 already)
Those should be every day activities. On top of this, we’re going to actually exercise. Again, I’m not going to write your programming for you and I’m going to grossly oversimplify things. What I will say that is in order to get actually healthy and fit, you’re going to need to dedicate at least 4-6 hours a week to it. That’s really not very much. You can go way beyond this and, good news, there’s not really a dose-response curve to worry about…exercise more and for the average human, you’ll continue to get more and more benefits.
So, what should those 4-6 hours look like? You need to include a mix of strength training and cardiovascular conditioning. Both of these are critical to both the length and quality of your life. Exercise is basically the fountain of youth. It is the wonder drug that people have tried to find forever and it’s been right there in front of us. There’s no magical pill, but there is a simple, magical formula: left heavy stuff and move.
I personally do all of my fitness work at home in my garage. I built up a great garage gym piece by piece during COVID and have continued to use it. It’s freezing cold in the winter and really hot in the summer, but it’s great. You get some extra mental toughness built into the programming. I follow programming specifically designed for people working out in their garage, but you could do it comfortably in a gym as well. I can’t recommend the programming of Garage Gym Athlete enough. I’m easily the most fit and strongest I’ve been in my life by following this programming for several years.
But the gist is simple…follow a mix of strength training and Zone 2 aerobic conditioning (more here on what that is from probably the only fitness “influencer” I pay attention to…Peter Attia). You need to find something that works for you.
So, stop reading blog posts (I can say that now since you’re done with this one) and get out there. I guarantee that you’ll improve every aspect of your life by adding in fitness. Your work will be better, you’ll be able to keep up with your kids, and you’ll benefit from a longer and healthier life.
PS: if you’re in the Cincy area and ever want to get together for a workout, I’m always game…and I’m happy to meet you at an indoor location. You don’t have to freeze with me in my garage.
Before you go…
If you find your company stuck with lots of inefficient manual processes, there is a better way. My company Obvify connects the disconnected. We turn spreadsheets, databases, CRMs, and random software tools into custom, integrated web applications. The goal is to eliminate half the time, cost, and aggravation from your manual processes all while making your team more productive (and a bit happier). And if you ever need insights or assistance with business process automation or improvement, just give me a shout. Always happy to help. You can schedule a free initial call where I promise to give more free advice than selling things.
And if you just want to make a new connection, I’m happy to do that with any reader. Schedule a time here or just connect on LinkedIn.
Impressive setup. Being exposed to cold is supposedly healthy too!