YOUR HEALTH = YOUR BUSINESS

What are you thinking about right now? Wondering if this read is going to be a load of garbage, or an invigorating nine minutes that change your views of the next 50 years? I bet your not thinking about breathing, hearing, or digesting that apple you just ate (I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt). Small chance your focusing on making your heart beat or organizing a coalition of immune cells to take out a foreign invader (that’d be totally awesome if you were). This very second, your focusing on processing these very words, one after another, while everything else is running in the background. Standard operations are moving along while you concentrate on the valuable task at hand, whether that’s preforming life-saving surgery, watching Netflix, or maybe your reading a super-dope blog post. Without all that background functionality we would all cease to exist, these operations are mission-critical, and while working in harmony, we don’t blink an eye (we do, but don’t think about it), but if (or when) a key system fails it’s all hands on deck.

In the business world, organizations place these day-to-day operations in the accounting category of “Keeping the Lights On”, and allocate a (usually significant) amount of company resources (and budget) to these mundane tasks. They’re all the non-sexy activities that we take for granted, but if the day comes where you can’t  go to the bathroom, shit gets real..literally. When you think about it, these systems are running 24/7/365, from the day we’re born to the day we exhale that final breath. Being in the technology field,  I’ve seen business-critical servers running for 10+ years (according to customers) and have dropped my jaw in amazement (mostly in stupidity), the thought of mission-critical systems running 40, 50, 60…100 years is simply insane. But that’s exactly whats going on with our bodies, we’re literally In Business!

The Business

Umm Our Life

Mission Statement

• Be Happy
• Be Healthy
• Enjoy it
• Live & Love it Up
• MAXIMIZE Everyday!

Customers

This is the group that you strive to bring value to, and just as in real business, your customer-base can change as you transform and appeal/penetrate different markets. The main customers that you serve are totally up to you, they are what drives you each and every day – loved ones, a special cause, possibly a group-  but there’s one consistent customer that you’ll have for life…You! Yep, you’ll be drinking your own Kool-Aid, whether you like it or not.  That three  pound mushy membrane -that is allowing you to process this sentence right now- is an O.G. and has been riding with you from Day-One.  A long-term customer that can fill your life with riches and joy,  or make each day feel like an uphill march.  Keep this lifer happy and you’ll have a successful book of business, no matter what else happens, simple as that.

Employees

One of the keys to a truly successful organization are happy employees. They are your front line, interacting with the customers, and as we all know – without happy customers the business struggles. Your employees are the trillions of cells that carry out the daily work of “Keeping the Lights On”.  Similar to employees in a business, cells tend to come and go every couple of years. Depending on the department,  they may have a shorter or longer tenure. The key is to promote a culture that make employees want to stay, an environment they will enjoy with opportunity for healthy growth. The cells in your body have a natural life-cycle, specified for the role that they’re in. If there happens to be a bad apple in the bunch they can be terminated and normal operations continue. It’s when the environment becomes toxic that things can turn sideways, rumors begin to spread, and operations begin to be disrupted. In the worst cases, cancers are formed.

Leadership

In steps the leadership team, the main objective? Create an environment for employee success and customer satisfaction.  Your management team are your vital organs, your immune, endocrine and circulatory systems. And leading the pack…..Why You, Of-Course!  A sense of trust between leadership and employees within your organization is critical,  they were hired for a reason (or adapted over thousands of years of evolution),  your job as CEO is to put your team in a Position to Win! Enable them with the tools they need to be successful, tools that make their tasks of maintaining day-to-day operations the least stressful as possible. You need to be continuously servicing them, so they can be providing the very best for your customers.   It truly is an inverted pyramid, your employees are at the top and you sit way down, supporting the organization at the bottom.

The CEO

YOU!

In case you forgot

Partners

Oh Yeah, we have partners! We are a host for trillions of microorganisms (known in the scientific community as our Microbiome), so right there you have a substantial partner community. Your microbes are key to working with employees and leadership to optimize day-to-day operations (especially in the gut), these valued partners provide so much, including:

• Aiding Digestion
• Regulating Mood
• Preventing Disease

And these little guys Love Fiber as much as Dewey Loves Sugar!

Organizational Goals

So what are your goals as “CEO of Your Life” and how the hell do you reach them? Great question right! At the very highest level, I see them as the following:

Sustain and Optimize Life

If you are not sustaining, that means your heart is not pumping and business operations cease to exist.  The business has suffocated, the employees have all clocked out, and looters run rampant through your stores. Once everything of value has been taken, the doors at HQ get nailed shut one final time. Get it? So our goal as CEO is to:

1. Keep Operations Running! – As long as humanly possible
2. Form a Long-Term Business Strategy! – And pivot as new information becomes available
3. Optimize & Re-Optimize!

If you don’t keep a Big Picture vision in mind, and get caught up in day-to-day operations you may very-well  miss key signals that change is needed. A failure to adjust your strategy today may not affect tomorrow but it can definitely (and unexpectedly) hit you 5, 10, 20 years down the line. Drastically impacting your 50, 60, 70 year plan.

Keep the End In Mind – Reverse Engineer to your Goal

In order to accomplish any of your life ambitions we’ve established that it’s critical to keep your body’s operations going, pretty straight forward, right?  Any significant ambition typically means you’ll need some time to “get after it”.  Unfortunately, disregard for a long-term health strategy is too much of a commonplace in today’s western society, and the lack of long-term vision usually becomes multiplied by day-to-day neglect, damaging habits(smoking and drinking), unhealthy diets(high in processed foods), lack of exercise, etc… Failure of establishing a strategy that incorporates daily maintenance of your systems may not change much in the short-term(other than your waistline), but it’s setting you up for mission critical failures down the road. Years of letting your complex systems run without any TLC put you in a poor statistical category, one accompanied by daily medication, frequent doctor visits, and an increased rate of physical and mental deterioration.

What you do today very much positions you for the future, keep that in mind because you ARE running a Business! And although you can’t control everything you can certainly increase your chances for success. Why do you think so many successful business leaders take on exercise and healthy diets?  One day it clicks, they realize that what they’re so good at in the corporate world (Strategy and Operations) directly translates to their health, well-being and longevity. They understand that under the covers it’s a business, and -just like real business- to be successful they need to have a strategy. Using the most up-to-date information (all available on the internet) they formulate a business plan to keep their body running at an optimal level.

Run your business like your life depends on it, because frankly…It Does.

Build a strategy that optimizes your body’s operations, in the short-term and the long. Yes, there will be new science, medical advancements, and techniques that arise along the way. Process the information and adapt (if need be), there’s no reason All Of Us shouldn’t be planning for a 100 year lifespan. We have the research at our fingertips, outlining what needs to be done, focus on these three pillars:

• Exercise – 30 minutes a day
• Diet – Based on Plants and free of processed food
• Sleep – 7 hours (Recharge the workforce)

The fact of the matter is, the majority of Americans are neglecting their health in their twenties, thirties and forties; leading them to sickness (and in many cases, early store closings) in their fifties, sixties, and seventies. Strategy people! This is the most important business that you’ll run in your life…because it is your life. Enjoy it, Live & Love It Up, Be Happy and MAXIMIZE Everyday! Start small, one software update at at time, funny thing is, you’ll feel better in the short-term and statistically put yourself in a position to be healthier over the long-run.

It’s your business, you make the decisions, your the CEO, the buck stops with you. The resources are available, build a strategy, treat your employees like they’re family and nurture your customers to make’ em lifers.  Adversity doesn’t follow a schedule, and it certainly doesn’t care where you are in life, so take ownership and…

Put Yourself in a Position to Win