Sean Everett explains why physical health is the foundation for creative and business success. He breaks down four longevity metrics: VO2 max, sleep, leg strength, and resting heart rate. Building these habits over 30 days creates the resilience needed to sustain entrepreneurship as a marathon.
Chapters
Okay, everybody, this is Pillar Zero. We're recording this after the other pillars because we wanted to get you in the mindset of building. That's where a lot of people are thinking first. It's like, how do I rapidly take this thing, get it out to market, yada yada, grow it, get some revenue coming in, get some attention, get some capital, that sort of thing. But we have to focus on foundations first. And the biggest foundation— health is wealth— is our health, literally. And so if you don't already have a good foundation in place, if you're already struggling with your health, you've got to get that in order first. And, um, we're not all lucky enough to just not have health issues. And so when we do develop these health issues, whether it's Short-term cold, flu, you know, midterm maybe COVID, longer-term something more systemic. Unfortunately, we really gotta invest some time, money, and energy in getting that in better shape or finding a way to improve that because only when we get that foundation in place can we start to have some excess energy to do the other stuff. And so, one of the things that we built and we're passionate about is maintaining that health. So, we've done a lot of research in this area. And, into JetPak Ultra, we actually put 4 critical metrics. Those 4 critical metrics actually are highly correlated with longevity and positive health. Those 4 metrics are VO2 max, which is essentially your lung capacity, like how well you can integrate oxygen, breathe in and out, and push that oxygen throughout the body. The other one is sleep, which we've talked about quite a bit with the red lens glasses and everything. It's become more of a struggle as we get older. When we were younger, it was like, heck, I'll sleep till noon and zero problems there. Um, especially important if you're working a lot on the brain and the physical body itself. It does need rest as like a broom to sweep out all the cruft and get back into a into a positive, like, zero state such that you can then, um, go to work and produce some more energy. Um, so that's important. Another one that's really tied to longevity is like leg strength, which is very interesting. So as you age, the musculature that we have actually starts to deteriorate our bone structure as well. But maintaining like legs day— they say don't skip legs day. There's a reason for that. Um, and so running helps partly, and if you can't run, walk or do the bike or maybe swim or something. But then actually like resistance training with weights. And, uh, at least in Western society, it's like all upper body. But, uh, wouldn't you know it, legs day was today. So that got us thinking about this. And, um, it sucks. No, I don't think there's anyone who's like, you know what, Legs day for me is like the most favorite time of the week, but it does— well, I was gonna say it gets easier. It doesn't necessarily get easier, just it keeps sucking. So you just, as, uh, you just gotta enjoy the suck in some ways. Um, so there's a couple other metrics in there which, which are important, and the other one is like your heart rate, your resting heart rate. Specifically, and even like your resting heart rate right before you go to sleep. So the lower the better on resting heart rate, the higher the better on VO2 max, sort of the higher the better on, uh, sleep. But what we've done is we've actually like put boundaries. So it's personalized to your current state, whatever that is. Every day is a new day. So maybe over the last 30 days you were like really good or maybe not so great. And so where you are today is always kind of moving along that longer-term boundary set. So your resting heart rate, like 50s would be great. VO2 max above 50 would be great. That sort of thing. So yeah, health is, is incredibly important. And so for us, that is, that is one of the essences of creating something great. And the other thing about it too, I've found is we can often get too much in our minds and even some of our hearts. And taking that moment, um, to just be with ourselves, either on a walk, a run, a workout— your brain is like— your nervous system is throughout your entire connectome, your entire biologic intelligence. It's not just up here. And so you have muscle memory, and so you're activating your entire brain. and body when you exercise, when you move your body, which means new pathways can form, new connections, new ideas. And so just by taking your focus— a lot of creatives will do this— just by taking your focus off that thing that you've been like grinding on over and over again, you can give your subconscious a little bit of a break. And then that's where the epiphany strikes. So even folks like Einstein would go for a bike ride and kind of let go and Boom! All of a sudden, in the shower, it's like equals mc squared, and then you're off to the races again. So it's always life is like this balance, this interesting balance point. So I think even if all you can do is like stand up once or just move an arm, move a leg, move a finger, just that little bit of movement is really strong. And this is why Apple's Health Kit. Is, is such a good idea. They just focused on movement first, not like to the Olympic athlete extreme. And so really the challenge is you got to build up a habit, and that usually takes about 30 days of repetition on anything. So if you can get past that, like consistent every day, every day, either in the morning, like at a certain time— I do it like after work around 4:30, 5:30, and somewhere in there. It's like I'll just shut off and it's, I'm gonna go for a run, I go for a walk, I'm gonna go lift weights, or maybe a little small breaks during the day. I'll walk my dog, I'll go for a break, I'll like touch grass, get some sunshine, get some light in the eyes. It helps with mood, helps with stress reduction, helps with epiphanies. And you know, if duration really does beat everything in this world, then the key that you need to do is you need to run this marathon. Because it's not a sprint, this business, this creation, this product thing. It is a marathon. Startups are a marathon. Business is a marathon. The game that never ends. It's infinite. So you need to have that foundation and that strength to be able to run the longest marathon possible. Not a day, not a week, not a month, not a year, not a decade, but like 50, 60 decades. Like Warren Buffett, right? Like all his wealth came at the end. Um, and, you know, the first 30 years was kind of a struggle, but for whatever reason, they had good DNA. And him and Charlie are in their upper 90s, and so they got 60, 70 years under their belt focused on, you know, investing and returns as their kind of focus. And so just given a long enough time horizon, then you'll make mistakes, but you'll get better at it. So it's not a, it's not a race, so to speak. It's a marathon, not a sprint. Um, all right, that's it. We just got done working out, so we're in that mindset. And, um, yeah, if you're seeing this, take a minute, go, go invest in yourself, and, and good things will happen. All right, love y'all. Peace.
