Health Is Wealth

For most of my working life, I treated my health as something that would take care of itself. The last few weeks have reminded me that it doesn't.

Injured again

For the past few weeks I've had Achilles tendonitis, and it has killed my jogging. Something I did without thinking is now off the table until it heals.

This isn't new for me. I have a history of getting injured, often and at random. I used to have costochondritis, which thankfully has been gone for a year now. Before that went away, and now with my Achilles, I've been reminded how quickly a body that feels fine can stop cooperating.

When you're healthy, you don't notice your health. You only notice it when something breaks.

What a few bad nights cost me

Injuries aren't the only reminder. Recently I had a few days of bad sleep, and each one wrecked my productivity for the whole day.

Not for an hour or a morning. The whole day. That's what caught my attention. I can push through a lot, but I can't push through being tired. The work still gets done, but slower and worse, and it's harder to think clearly about anything that matters.

If a few nights of poor sleep can do that, it tells me my output depends on my health much more than I was willing to admit.

Health is worth more than wealth

Put all of this together and I've come to appreciate my health in a way I didn't before.

Great health is far more important than wealth. I know that sounds obvious. Most people would agree with it if you asked. But agreeing with something and living by it are two different things, and for a long time I wasn't living by it.

I'll be honest: I had no problem sacrificing my health for wealth. If the choice was between the work and taking care of myself, the work usually won. I told myself that was just the price of building something.

That is now changing.

Money can't give you back a healthy body. When your health goes, it takes your energy, your focus and your ability to do the work that built the wealth in the first place. Trading one for the other was never the good deal I thought it was.

A decision, not a default

The biggest shift for me is how I think about health. It's becoming a more important decision, and it's one I have to keep making every day.

Health isn't something you can stay passive about. You don't get to set it once and forget it. Every day there are choices that either build it up or wear it down, and if you aren't choosing deliberately, you're choosing by default. For years my default was to let it slide.

I'm treating it as an active decision now, the same way I'd treat any other important part of running my life or my businesses.

What you monitor, you improve

One thing I've learned from business applies directly here: monitoring matters.

What you monitor gets your focus. And once something has your focus, you start finding opportunities to improve it. When you don't measure something, it's easy to assume it's fine. When you do, the gaps show up, and so do the fixes.

That's true for revenue, and it's just as true for sleep, injuries and how your body is holding up. If I'm serious about health being a daily decision, I have to pay attention to it with the same discipline I'd give to anything else I care about.

Where I've landed

A sore Achilles and a few bad nights aren't dramatic events. But they were enough to make me look honestly at how I've been prioritizing things.

I used to be willing to give up health to build wealth. I'm not anymore. Great health comes first. It's something I have to choose, every day, and keep an eye on so I can keep getting better at it.