YOU, Inc and the Business of Biohacking with Luis Arauz (Chicago Biohacking Recap)

Chicago Biohacking’s own Luis Arauz led the meetup this month with an introduction to biohacking and an analogy between running a business and managing your own biological state.

If you’re new to biohacking and have experience with business or finance, this is a good video for you. I’ve added my notes and painstakingly detailed drawings below.

Biohacking.

That’s so weird-sounding. What is it? If it’s hacking my biology, that sounds complicated, scary, and the opposite of fun.

Biohacking is actually quite simple. It’s just you trying to be better today than you were yesterday. That’s the goal. The strategy to achieve that goal is systems-thinking.

You are one big system. There are inputs to your system (like your food, environment, fitness, etc) and there are outputs (like your health and performance). If you tweak one of the inputs, the outputs might change.

That’s what biohackers do. They change what they put into their system and observe the effect it has on their outputs.

Luis elegantly explains it with an analogy — running a business.

When running a business, your aim is to increase profits. Here’s the formula:

To increase profit, you can either increase your revenues or decrease your expenses.

If your expenses are GREATER than your revenues, then you are losing money. Stay at a loss for too long and you run out of money entirely. That’s when the business shuts down. Womp womp.

To prevent this, every business measures its revenues and expenses and then tries to improve those numbers.

You work in the same way.

Let’s imagine you are running a new business called YOU, Inc. You’re CEO. Woohoo!

In this business, here are your metrics:

Your Energy = Revenue
Your Inflammation = Expenses
Your Performance = Profit

As CEO, your job is to increase profits. What do you do?

First and foremost, you start measuring these things!! Like Peter Drucker famously said: What gets measured gets managed.

But how do you measure them?

You use personal accounting/analytics tools, like those discussed in the Quantified Self community. If you’re not comfortable doing it yourself, hire an accountant or data analyst (ie. doctor or health coach) to help you. Here’s a beginner’s guide to Quantified Self that includes a list of tools to get you started.

Then the question becomes, what do I improve?

Just like any business, you can use the data to guide your focus. If there are obvious problems, start there.

YOU, Inc is a large company with many departments. Each department is its own system with its own inputs and outputs. As you work to increase the company performance, you will begin to dip into more and more of these departments, determine their KPIs (key performance indicators, aka the data that matters), and then make changes to improve that data.

Keep at it for long enough and there’s no doubt that YOU, Inc will be a massive success :-)

Running this business is called biohacking. And you, as CEO, are a biohacker.

Tada! Welcome to the club.