Optimizing These 4 Areas Of Your Life Will Make You A More Effective Entrepreneur, Professional, And Human Being
Almost exactly one year ago, I left my company.
The acquisition process started several years ago, and all throughout it I prioritized the demands of being a founder ahead of every single other aspect of my life. I sacrificed my relationship. I stopped going to the gym and gained a ton of weight. I stopped eating lunch altogether, and most dinners were spent drinking cocktails under the veil of “networking.”
My entire life had become focused around my company, and truthfully, I lost sight of myself in the process.
Over the past 12 months, now that I’m on the other side, I have been trying to optimize myself again: as a person, yes, but also as a professional and a founder. My previous venture certainly won’t be my last, so as an entrepreneur with a successful exit, the question becomes: how can I be more successful next time around? With an asterisk next to the word “successful,” also meaning: balanced, happy, fulfilled, healthy.
Already, I have found there are four pillars of my life that, if optimized by even only a modest percentage, exponentially impact how effective I am in everything I do. How I work. How peaceful and happy I am on a daily basis. How healthy I feel. And whether or not I feel like I’m “chasing” an end result versus enjoying the journey.
I’ve learned these are the same four areas most people ignore in their lives.
They don’t sleep enough. They don’t exercise. They aren’t eating food that makes sense for their individual journey. And they don’t meditate, or even take time to themselves each day to just sit and relax.
So over the past 12 months, my journey has been focused on mastering these four disciplines, with the intention of bringing me back to a place of balance, but also setting me up for success moving forward.
I call this “understanding your avatar.” Here’s how (and why) you should be thinking about these things too:
1. Exercise
I decided to dive in head-first here and start training for an Iron Man.
My intention here was to see how a rigorous training regime impacted all aspects of who I am as a person. But truthfully, I do not see this as just a “physical” pursuit. To me, this is a mental exercise facilitated through the physical body — with the long-term assumption that if I can learn to have the mental fortitude to train and endure an Iron Man triathlon, then building my next company should be much more manageable.
And the reason is because, every morning when I wake up, my body is telling me, “You’re sore. You don’t need to go workout. You should just sleep in. Take a day off. Stop.”
So what this is teaching me is how to hear those thoughts, acknowledge them, and then make a different choice. Instead, I’m the one telling my body and my mind, “No, we said we were going to do this, so that’s what we’re going to do.”
And that’s a universal skill.
2. Meditation
I have an active meditation practice every single day.
While meditation has always been something I’ve believed in the value of, it was also one of the first things to go when I was running a company. It became incredibly difficult to find time to “quiet my mind” when work began the moment my eyes opened in the morning. And, as anyone who meditates knows, once you fall out of practice, negative results start to compound onto themselves. It becomes harder and harder to meditate. You start beating yourself up for not meditating. Until eventually, you forget the value of meditating altogether.
I actually went on my first silent meditation retreat last year, called a Vipassana — and I only made it four days. I gave up and went home. For those that don’t know, a Vipassana is a deep immersion retreat that lasts for 10 days, and involves 10 hours of meditation per day. It’s not for the faint of heart (or mind), and very much showed me the work I still have to do in order to master this pillar of my life.
But the reason I want to invest so much time and energy in this pillar is because I know first-hand what it’s like to try to maintain a regular meditation schedule while building a company. It’s not easy. So my hope is that by taking the time right now to hone this skill further, I can effectively enter that state of meditation more easily and regularly once the demands of running a company get added back into the mix.
3. Food
Name a diet, and I’ve probably tried it.
Over the past year, I’ve tried the ketogenic diet. The Paleo diet. Eating vegan. Eating fewer grains. And with every diet I tried, I was constantly asking the question, “Which of these is most effective for me?”
During my journey, for example, I was on the Keto diet and went to probably ten different nutritionists, PhDs, and so on. And there was one guy I found who prescribes diet advice based on your lipid blood profile. So, he pulls a sample of your blood, sends it to a lab, and then determines what you should eat based on your blood work. Of everyone I’ve talked to, I’ve found this to be the most effective way of learning what it is you, as an individual, need to be eating in order to be healthy.
Because the truth is, most of us don’t treat food as fuel. We treat food as a pleasure source, or hobby, or even a way of illustrating social status and wealth. But at its core, that’s not what food is intended to be. Food is fuel, period. So if you aren’t treating food with that intention, then that’s an entire pillar of your life working against you — opposed to fueling you.
4. Sleep
I track my sleep using an Oura ring.
And what I’m really paying attention to is how the above three areas of my life affect my sleep. I look for patterns that line up with training days, or days I meditate longer (or shorter) than normal. I pay attention to the nights I sleep more, but get less “effective” sleep (meaning I wake up groggy or tired), or nights where I might sleep less but wake up feeling energized. And my ultimate goal here is to learn what it is my mind, body, and spirit need in order to juggle the challenges of life.
I believe few people truly realize the massive impact of sleep on daily performance.
Something I’d like to do differently with my next venture is incentivize employees to get more sleep. Instead of rewarding people based on their work, or how many hours they put in, I’d like to help everyone track their sleep and reward them for taking care of themselves. Why? Because nobody does great work when they’re sleep deprived. So by staying well rested, what that shows is a desire and a commitment to taking care of themselves so they can be a more effective asset to the team.
Each of these pillars of life I’ve defined and spent that past 12 months working on has its own needs, routines, and points of friction. But understanding where your own life needs improvement — understanding your avatar — is the only way to truly fulfill your potential and life a life of balance.
