Your Health Is Your Company's Greatest Asset

Depending on your social media algorithm poison of choice, you’re either being told you’re lazy if you’re not working 1,000 hours a week, or that you can make millions by working just 15 minutes a week.

Mainstream perspectives on work often swing between the extremes of hustle porn and the fantasy of effortless passive income.

Both are equally toxic and misleading in their own ways, but they raise a real question: What does a healthy work ethic actually look like?

The greatest asset on your company's balance sheet is your health.

There’s advice that, no matter how often older and wiser people offer it, you’re convinced it doesn’t apply to you.

I thought this sort of platitude was for people who lacked passion, willpower, and work ethic.

As with many things, life would humble me. It was 2 years into starting my first company that we hit the 1 million dollar ARR milestone.

I was working around the clock. Sleep deprived, drinking too much, not exercising, and consuming poor nutrition.

As a consequence of these lifestyle decisions, there was an unsurprising decline in my physical and mental health.

This is usually the part where someone tells you to learn from their cautionary tale of burnout. Not me.

I encourage everyone to test their own limits of burnout should they so choose.

You can walk to the edge of the cliff and look down, but don't take a headlong summersault over it.

To avoid that fate, realize there are times to jog and times to sprint. If you want longevity in business, you're going to need to spend more time jogging than sprinting.

That doesn't mean there won't be times to sprint, but you can't do it all the time.

Your health is your company's greatest asset.

Most people have the relative security of a paycheck on a predictable schedule.

They are largely disconnected from the overall health (or the lack thereof) of the organization responsible for paying them.

You enjoy no such luxury or security.

Prolonged psychological stress is a tax paid for by the physical body.

If you are running a small business, with limited resources and employees, the level of stress you carry far exceeds the norm.

It's what you signed up for.

Which is exactly why your health can’t be an afterthought, it has to be a priority. You must consciously invest in it.

When you sacrifice your health as a business owner for perceived short-term gain you will experience a predictable drop in patience, willpower, and cognitive performance.

In other words, you will be worse at running your company.

Life is full of tradeoffs that exchange long-term results and satisfaction for short-term and often temporary gains.

The default founder approach often looks like this:

High Stress + Overwork + Poor Lifestyle Habits = Burnout

This is exacerbated by our culture's worship of figures who sacrifice seemingly everything for their companies.

It's not wrong to want your business to succeed beyond your wildest dreams. I know I do.

But it's misguided to try and do so at the expense of your family, health, and relationships.

Professional success means very little if you don’t have the health to enjoy it, or the people to share it with.

The solution isn't just trying to work less hours.

According to a Gallup Study small business owners work on average significantly more hours than their non business owning counterparts.

If you want to own or start a business, accept that you’ll probably work harder and longer than the average person.

But that doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice your health.

If I start to sound like your mother, then I apologize in advance, but you need to take a long hard look at your diet, sleep, and exercise.

Give yourself an honest grade on all three.

If, like I was, you’re failing across the board, I’ve heard every excuse. I’ve made every excuse.

My employees need me to answer questions and problem solve with them, and by the time that's finished I still have many hours of my own work to do.

Push your staff to problem solve more independently. Don't do the hard work for them. For routine problems and issues invest in creating standardized SOPs that can be used in place of getting on calls. In the long run you're hiring staff to save you time. If the opposite seems to be true then that's a sign of a deeper issue.

My clients and customers expect me to be available at all times.

Unless your business operates an infrastructure which people's health and safety depend on that is incorrect. What you've actually done by taking those late night calls and answering those weekend emails is create an expectation where your customers think they can have access to you at all times. Business as in life involves a need for boundaries. You'll be surprised how often those calls you've been dreading, to re-establish boundaries with a key customer or client, actually go very well. In the rare cases they don't, then it might be time to do one of the most liberating things in business, which is to fire a shitty customer.

I could go on but you get the idea.

How is it possible to stay on top of your diet, sleep, and exercise?

By leaning into the freedom of not having a boss and taking control of your schedule.

At my last job, I would’ve been fired for taking an hour in the middle of the day to exercise. Now I do it regularly. Not just because I can, but because it helps me manage the stress from work.

As part of owning my own business I work from home. My kitchen happens to be 40 ft from the room I call my office. At some point during the work day I do some basic meal prep for dinner. By relying less on eating out, and no longer using a lack of time as an excuse, I've drastically improved the quality of my diet.

Sleep is still very much a work in progress. I'm prone to late night moments of inspiration, which I typically indulge. But using a sleep tracker and applying better sleep hygiene habits has helped me improve steadily.

Most positive and lasting change happens slowly and incrementally over time. We slowly move towards spending less and saving more. Or eating less unhealthy food and exercising more. The inverse of this is equally true. Attempted positive changes made by a person that are sudden and drastic are rarely lasting or sustainable.

You don't need to start doing CrossFit 7 days a week or try an ambitious diet for the first time.

If you are active by taking the dog on a long walk, or playing pickleball with friends, then make sure you continue to do those things regardless of what's going on at the office.

I'm not a health guru. I share none of what I personally do to better manage my health as prescriptive advice.

But I hope this gets your gears turning about how you can better structure your workday around your health, not in opposition to it.

Because one day, you’ll find yourself competing against a founder who’s not just working hard, but taking care of their health as well. Someone who sees this as the marathon it is. And if you’re still trying to sprint the whole thing, you’ll burn out long before they do.