How I Work 12-Hour Days Without Burnout (And Get Stronger)

Is it possible for a founder to become more fit and more strong while starting a startup? I actually believe it is. And in this video I'm going to go over my steps and my principles and my methodology and thought processes for why health is actually the engine that builds wealth, why it should be the number one thing you focus on as a founder. And then everything else comes from that productivity, being a great leader, attracting the right opportunities, and then how do you exactly action on this day to day some of my systems. First off, health is the engine that drives wealth. Health is really all you have when you're not healthy, when you're sick, you got to take the day off, right? So think about 365 days out of the year and that's a lot of hours in the year. If you're working eight hours a day, even on weekends, more likely, if you're startup founder, you're probably working 10 to 12 hours a day, right? That gets up to the 2,400, 3,000 plus hours that you can be productive and on per day for your work, moving your dreams forward. So I think about the hours that you have in a day and every single minute that you spend should be ideally productive. You've maximized your attention, your energy, your focus to do the thing, whether it's building more pipeline, creating content to assist with that, going through and closing sales, or doing outreach to build pipeline, or actually designing, building the product, getting customers on your advisory board, figuring out your pricing, doing engineering work, actually shipping code. And then another thing startup founders may have to do is actually go and keep a warm bench of investors. So keeping great relationships with investors in case you need to fundraise to get your Runway, to get Lyft. So there's all these things that you have to do, and all these things require 100% of you to get a better result. What I mean by that is you've probably had times where you're kind of doing coding, you're kind of designing, you're trying to kind of make content, and then you feel like you're on fire or you're feeling like trash or somewhere in between. So when I say that all those minutes in the hours that make up your months and years to cumulatively move towards your dreams, succeeding, when I say you want 100% maximal productivity output from that, I mean that you're actually focused when you're there and you actually do the thing, not just like, oh, I did 10 hours of work, but did you drive outcomes during the 10 hours of work? What was your output in the 10 hours of work you did, you take somebody that's highly productive, very healthy, and they're going to have a much higher output when they sit down for 10 hours versus somebody that is groggy, is depressed, has high anxiety, their sleep is imbalanced. That's just for sure true. And that's because in my first startup I was kind of that way. I still took care of my physical fitness, but my sleep wasn't great. And because of that I felt like some days my 10 hours of work, 12 hours of work, was super productive. And then I would sustain that for a little bit, peak performance, and then it would slowly drop and I'd kind of burn out and become depressed and anxious. If that sounds like you, I have a solution. The solution is keep high performance sustainable. And I'm going to show you exactly how I think about that. So there are three ways that I think about getting even more fit, more strong, more healthy, and mentally clear. So that when you actually put your hands on the keyboard or do whatever you need to do to move your startup forward in all the capacities you need to, the roles you play, exercising, the different skills you need to exercise, how do you show up in those moments and give 100% maximal attention, energy and therefore output? I've been bootstrapping an AI startup on the side of a demanding day job as a chief product architect at a big tech company where I'm responsible for transformation initiatives spanning 1600 or more engineers. To be AI native, to be able to change out our architecture for a big monorepo, those are very hard problems. And every day I'm working probably 12 hours. I'll also side note this. If you have a family, if you have more obligations than I do, like, for example, I'm single, I don't have a family, but I do have my mom, dad and brother, and for my brother, act as a caregiver. And I've been sending checks home to my family since I was 18. So I have a bit of different obligations and responsibilities and everybody's constraints are gonna be different. I don't want to deny that. I just wanna acknowledge like my situation and my constraints and then maybe you could take some of these principles and might work for you. So understanding that we have constraints, understanding that we have limited time, we have limited attention and energy, then to me it's like, okay, if I wanna be super healthy and maximize kind of my level of peace, contentedness, happiness as I enter work, then there's a lot of science that actually shows that how regulated you are and how mentally clear you are is a function of your metabolic health. And your metabolic health and mitochondrial efficiency actually helps you be more mentally clear. That's sort of the TLDR. But go read the book Brain Energy by Dr. Christopher Palmer on that. I also cite the book How Emotions Are Made. Because as a CEO, as an entrepreneur, as a startup founder, you're going through a roller coaster all the time because you're always pushing yourself, you're doing new stuff, you're stepping out of your comfort zone all the time. So then it's easy to burn out. I've seen lots of founders that are depressed. I used to be very depressed myself. Just going through the roller coaster is hard. Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett from the book How Emotions Are Made talks about how actually the best way to solve that problem is to increase the ability you have to emotionally regulate. So the TLDR is if you want to be mentally clear, if you as a founder want to be fit, you want to get stronger, you want to be as happy and healthy as possible, you want to have maximal attention energy applied to the task at hand, whether it's building pipeline, making content, leading the team, aligning the team towards the goal, getting more customers, building the damn product, designing the product, all those things that then it's a function of three things. How good is your sleep, your diet, and your exercise, and how good your sleep, diet and exercise are. Determine how good your metabolic efficiency is and how good your mitochondrial efficiency is so that your brain can process energy effectively and that actually ties into how well you can regulate. There's this term that I've sort of made up with friends, which is called napathy. You know about hangry? Everybody knows what hanger is. If you haven't eaten in a while and you're feeling annoyed or frustrated, maybe a little angry, maybe hangry, you go eat and then you make decisions and you're probably more patient. So think about your sleep as very core. You will have more patience when you have slept well. That's what I've learned in life. Huge hack that I wish younger Robert, younger me knew about sooner. But the better your sleep is and the more consistent your sleep is. Sleeping at the same time within 30 minutes, waking up at the same time within 30 minutes, getting higher, restorative sleep, tracking it with a wearable like Whoop or like Garmin, you're going to be more steady and your ability to emotionally regulate will be higher. So your ability to gain mental clarity will just be maximal at all times. When that's locked down, then you got to lock down your diet, then you got to lock down your exercise. So my number one step, and there are three steps to being a founder that actually gets customers and gets revenue and builds their startup up while they're building themselves up, being more fit, stronger, healthier as time goes on. That's what you want, right? That's kind of the dream. And I've learned in the second go around with a tech startup, my first tech startup, I didn't, I learned my lesson. Second tech startup learning now with epistemic me, I've learned number one step, think in systems. Just like your business. You could work on the business or in your business, so you could work on your health, or you're just inside your health doing day to day. You know, you're on the edge of your seat trying to figure out, oh, I'm just going with the flow with my calendar. That's where you kind of want to like take a step back and realize, oh wait, my health is the output of inputs, just like your pipeline is the output of inputs. Do you make content? How much cold outreach do you do on LinkedIn or email campaigns? Right? That is what gives you the output of good pipeline. The output of good product is input of true fans and ideal customer profile, like ICPs, avatars, Personas, talking to you, giving you input, dogfooding your own product. The more you do those inputs, the better the output, the better the product, the better the design, the more stable the architecture, all those things, right? So think in systems. So the number one thing is systemize your health. Meaning every week I know which days I'm doing cardio or doing lifting or doing rock climbing. So I run, I climb, I lift weights to support running and climbing. And I set goals for my climbing and my running just like I set goals for entrepreneurship. So one of my goals for climbing is get to V10 climbing. So climb a boulder. That's V10. So I have a couple boulders that I'm trying to put down at the gym that are V10 on boards so they, they don't go away. Could do a whole nother video on climbing. But just real quick, that's a goal. Running. I'm trying to run a hundred mile unsupported race on my own in the mountains in about 10 months or nine months. And so the output is I want to reach those goals. The input is I have to be very systematic in how I do that. So I plan week by week, what days will I be climbing or running or doing strength Training or mobility work. And I also dial in things, so it's systemized. I also dial in things like diet and sleep. These are simple things, but it's harder in practice. So just as an entrepreneur, think about, you're systemizing your content creation, you're systemizing the way you do software development, life cycle, you're systemizing the way that you build pipeline. So think about this. You, you're just systemizing your health goals. You want to be healthier, you want to be more fit, you want to have better cardio, you want to be stronger. Set goals, work backwards from the goals. Plan days where you have input towards those goals. So I know which days I'm going to be exercising and doing what kind of exercise. So when I enter the chaotic week or the chaotic day, I already know. I just follow the plan. That's it. I just got to follow the plan. So take the time to plan. Another thing towards thinking in systems is make it easy to make the right choice. So meaning for diet, I actually find this to be the hardest thing for people. It is way easier at the end of the day to fucking like look at your fridge, be like, I don't really want to cook. I had a bad startup day. It's a roller coaster. It's always a roller coaster. So I'm just going to doordash fucking pizza or hamburgers or something. Bad choices, that's those inputs. The likelihood of you making bad inputs increases. The likelihood of the output being that you get fatter, you get more obese, your cardio gets out of whack. Over time you get weaker, over time you lose all your strength gains. So systemizing everything related to health means systemizing and making it easier, reducing friction to make easy choices. So for me, I, I tend to love potato chips and like ice cream and like super salty, super sugary kind of foods like candy and stuff like that. When I'm super stressed, startup life, really fucking stressful. So I am likely to make bad choices all the time if I didn't just systemize my health and my diet. So in my fridge I have lots of substitutes for those things. So there are things like lentil chips, there are snacks. I have like falafels that are really good for me that hit the savory craving or things that I have. Like, I love fruit a lot, so blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, pluots are actually my jam. Love them. Apples with nut butter, amazing. And that really hits the sweet side. So when I'm like really craving things from Being stressed. I instead of hitting doordash or going to local liquor store or whatever and just buying shitty food for me, I just go to my fridge and I make it easy to make the right choices, the right inputs to get the output of healthier meat. Another one on sleep. So this one is something that I learned this year in working with Brian Johnson's team and being closer to his community. In Don't Die, I've really learned that I have known nothing, I've been a young padawan about sleep and that sleep is actually so important and that's what keeps you steady so that you could steer the team the right way amidst the chaos of startup life, especially if you're a founder. So good sleep, having consistent bedtimes and having that on your calendar where one hour before bed screens are off, harsh lights are off. I actually even rewired my home like this is a light that turns red amber right at my wind down time. And I have a calendar reminder and an email notification hit me on my phone, my laptop when it is 10 minutes before my wind down routine and my wind down routine. This is very personal to everybody but my wind down routine is consistent screens off the that's non negotiable. Don't use screens in the bedroom. That teaches your brain that oh I crave light in the bedroom. The bedroom is not for sleeping. When you're in your bed, don't doom scroll. That's gonna just keep you up at night. You're just feeding bad things. Those are bad inputs, right? So make it easy to make the right choice. So set yourself up for success by determining a wind down routine, determining a target bedtime, determining a target wake up time. Set calendar notifications and email notifications to prepare you for those things. Set an alarm every day so you're waking up at the right time, at least within 30 minutes. So your circadian rhythm is actually healthy and that will compound in interest towards better sleep consistency and efficacy and better health and ultimately better mental clarity like we said, because metabolic health tied to sleep, diet and exercise is tied to better mental clarity and your brain's ability to process energy effectively and then regulate your emotions. Dr. Christopher Palmer's work and then Dr. Lisa Feldman Baird's work highly, highly recommend their work. So those are some of the ways I think in systems when it comes to sleep, diet and exercise, just systematically make it easy and low friction for you as the user to make the right choices for your sleep, your diet, your exercise. You don't want to be in a position door Dashing, terrible food for yourself. You don't want to be in a position doom scrolling at the end of the night when you really should be winding down to go to sleep. And you don't want to be missing the gym. So this is the second step, which is make your most important meeting. Your most important meeting is not stand up or not an investor meeting or whatever. It's actually the meeting you have. That's a contract with yourself to hit the fucking gym. Why? I think about this and everybody's got different things that motivate them. But I want to have kids in the future. And for my kids in the future, I want to be an active dad. I want to be able to play ball with them if they want, or take them rock climbing or take them up mountains or go backpacking or go camping with them or whatever. And from what I've learned of longevity, the choices you make daily, your micro choices daily, your daily habits, those are the inputs that make up the output on whether that dream can be true. So if I want to be an active dad, well, if I keep doordashing stuff, if I don't sleep on time, there are risks to my brain health. I can have a higher risk of dementia, Alzheimer's, I get to have a higher risk for heart problems, heart disease, diabetes, all these things if I just am not making the right choices. So in my head, what really motivates me to make my most important meeting the gym is that I actually equate it to the most important meeting in my head because the more times that I make those meetings, the higher the fidelity of my dreams to be an active dad with my future kids. So that really motivates me to make good choices in the face of the temptations of the bad choices, especially when you're stressed in startup life, I totally get it. It is way easier to give in to temptation of like, you know, savory salty salt and vinegar chips. That's like my guilty pleasure or ice cream or whatever your temptations might be or doom scrolling at night or whatever. When you've had a long day, you had zero time to yourself. You just want like quick dope meat hits. So I just think that all those inputs I have taken a step back and realized that doesn't feed the dream of being an active, healthy dad in the future for as long as possible. So for me, I literally block off time for the gym. Like during my weekly planning, I block off time for the gym. If I have to make a meeting when I'm at the gym or Doing a workout. I'll take a meeting. When I'm doing zone two cardio running, that's okay. So I found ways to sort of synergize that. That's like chill running. I'm not breathing hard, so I'll take business calls during my chill runs. Another thing I'll do is because I rock climb a lot of bouldering and rock climbing. If nobody's, if people are not familiar with this, is that you'll sit there and you'll rest. You'll probably rest if you're. Especially if you're doing a big session where you're projecting at your limit, your physical and mental limit, you're gonna be resting maybe five to 10 minutes, maybe you're stretching out during that. But I've made it normal for me to take a meeting like that, especially if it's like a one kind of coaching a teammate sort of meeting. That's easier. You have to build up, you know, a good relationship, a good rapport with whoever you're meeting with. But I'll collapse meetings like that into my gym time. That's not ideal. I'll say that's not ideal. What's ideal is that gym time is 100% focused to the task at hand, which is working out, running, climbing, et cetera. But that's something that I've made as a compromise where, okay, I'm, I'm okay not going 1000% at one of these, but I need to make progress in both. Number two, tip. Make your most important meeting, which is the contract with yourself for your future healthier self hit the gym. And every week, ideally every month, I actually use ChatGPT to plan out my workouts for the next year. And then I made it create an ICS file. If anybody's interested, drop a comment in to chat and I'll. I'll give you a link to that prompt to give me my running, climbing and strength workouts for the next year that I downloaded to my calendar and I just put it in there and there are notifications now. So it doesn't even take that long nowadays to plan these things with AI tools, but plan it. And even if the plan doesn't go according to plan, like most plans, at least you planned it and you're more likely to do the right inputs to get the right output. Number three. This is actually a very important one that's very underrated, but it's based around this quote. You are the average of the top five people you spend time with. In picking my co founder for this Time around for my startup, I made sure that we were very aligned in values and especially for health because I've seen many co founder pairs or triplets I guess, burn out where one or a couple of them are not taking care of their health, they're not taking care of their physical health. And like we said, physical health directly function of mental health, right? And then your ability to show up maximally to actually execute on the startup task at hand that is hampered by your physical health and your mental health. So you need mental clarity at all times. You want to be high sustaining performance at all times. The inputs to that are good habits to have good health. Remember, because health is the engine that drives wealth. If you are the average of the top five people you spend the most time with and you want good health, then try to be around other people that are getting after it intellectually trying to change the world, passionate about that, but also are healthy as fuck. People that also have big health goals and they also think this way where they systemize their health and they try really hard for that. I'll give a shout out. Like one of my friends that I made this past year through Longevity community is Arno O.J. i'm actually shooting, I've done a podcast with him, go check that out. And he is the youngest managing director of a $1 billion fund that I'm aware of in the Silicon Valley. And this guy runs marathons regularly. This guy like gets after his health, his biological age. His biomarkers are basically world class, like top one percentile for most things, like VO2 max, like whatever it might be for his age range and for being a male. So I hang out with people like that and I actually spend time looking for people like that to hang out with because all he does is worry about the self and he feeds himself new things and new learnings. So when we hang out, it's like we're going to go work out. Like we just recently went climbing together and then we shared ideas and exchanged new hot startup knowledge and stuff like that, how to do AI workflows and just we were able to have great intellectual conversations over a shared hobby. So if all you have is time and you are the average of the top five people you spend time with, well then make sure the top five people you spend time with help you and are conducive towards the healthy inputs that make up the awesome outputs that you want of moving your startup forward while also being a fit and healthy founder that is getting stronger and more fit and healthy over time. So Spend the extra time it takes to surround yourself with high performing, high achieving individuals that are getting after it in every facet of life. They do exist, they're out there and shout out to Brian Johnson's community. I've actually found like a high concentration of people that try really hard at every vector of life, every pillar of self is how I think about it. So your physical health, mental health and emotional health, your spiritual health, community health, your family and relational health, your financial health, your career health, like people that try hard at all of those things and don't compromise, they do exist, they're out there. And if you want to join my community, where a lot of these people are coming to, I'm trying to build a community around people that are super into personal growth and they don't compromise on these things. They try really hard towards all of these pillars of health and they're always trying to become their better self. That last step to, in summary, be around other healthy founders and high performers, high achievers. They do exist and they're very enriching to your life. And when you hang out with them, you could also chat about startup life. So it's like so synergistic, right? And this is part of the systems thing. You got to have inputs that meet the outputs you want. So in summary, how do you get more fit while starting a startup and being a founder that actually gets more revenue, gets more customers, moves the boat forward on the company, while also moving things forward on your own personal health to become stronger, fitter and more mentally clear. Three steps. Number one, think in systems, erase friction to make the right healthy choices day to day around your sleep, your diet, your exercise. Number two, make your most important meeting which is hitting the gym and hitting your workout. And do that by pre planning week to week or month to month or even over the year based on some goal you have. For me, it's I want to climb V10, I want to run 100 miles unsupported. I have dates for when I want to achieve this. Just like people have dates for when they achieve a certain run rate target. So then work backwards from there with AI happy to send you the prompt, drop a comment in the chat and I'll do that. So make your most important meeting, throw it all on the calendar and then day to day, when you're just going through the rush and chaos of startup life, you actually hit that as a meeting. And if you have to collapse some meetings into the gym or workout meeting, where it makes sense but also understand that's a compromise, not perfect. And then the last one. Number three, you are your environment. So be around other healthy, fit founders that are getting the fuck after it and other high performers that are getting after it with every vector or pillar of self and life. Hope that helps. And as I learn more on my own journey to bootstrap my startup and build out my dreams while also trying to become that best dad ever to my future kids and stay active and healthy and mentally clear and emotionally regulated, I'll share more. So yeah, tune in next time. Have a great day.