Building a Solid Foundation
For the past ~year I’ve finally gotten back to health. I’m one of those people that needs a reason to be healthy. With company #1, one of the worst decisions was to short-term trade off my health to try to fit in sprints (really gambles) that I thought would help make the company work. It wasn’t super thought through - it was just small justifications “I can go out and drink tonight at this event because I might meet someone important“ that turned into habits.
Well, kinda obviously, long term that doesn’t really help you be successful. For me it turned into:
Eating like crap
Having a pot of coffee a day and wondering why I was anxious (it’s gotta be just startup CEO stress, right, right???)
Drinking several times a week, and wayyyy too much
Stopping working out
Neglecting my mental health to try to show up for other people like employees and investors
Not only was this bad for my health, but it was bad for my work. You can’t make (many) good decisions when you’re living like that, and it is much much harder to build great things, which is what I love to do. In the moment I thought all of the other things were my problems, but one of the main problems is that I didn’t have a solid foundation to solve all of the other things from. Life was driving and I gave up my control to try to cope with the company stress.
About a month ago I was talking with Daniel about his health and routines, and one thing that stood out to me is that for anything health related, he asks himself “if I do this right now, will it pay back and more today?“
If you can get three things — diet, exercise, and mental health — you make 3-5x better decisions and do better work. You’re still going to get things wrong, but your hit rate of right to wrong goes way up, which is important. Instead of saying “I need to do xyz and make it a chore“ I’ve started asking myself: ff I do this quick health thing today will I make better deals and decisions? Manage employees better? The answer is almost always yes, and it compounds. The ROI over a single day is worth it, but even over a week, month, year you get consistently better gains.
Different people have different ways to justify being healthy, but both now and in the past this is the one that has always worked the best for me.