In partnership with
This is killing more 7 figure businesses than the economy is…
Bryan Johnson spends $2M a year and 6 hours a day trying to reverse aging. Most business owners spend more on their car insurance than their body. Guess which one is treating health like the asset it actually is.
Same biology. Different operating decision.
Think Big Minute #18
(These pictures are 4 years old… the story behind them is something I ca repost if there’s interest)
Bryan Johnson sold Braintree to PayPal for $800M in 2013. He now runs a protocol called Blueprint. 100+ supplements daily, full bloodwork every quarter, MRIs, bone density scans, sleep tracking down to the minute. Every metric public.
Most people think he’s insane.
His epigenetic age reportedly runs about 5 years younger than his calendar age. His sleep score has been near 100 for years.
You don’t have to copy him to get the point.
The point is the math.
Tim Cook is up at 4am, in the gym before most of his executives wake up.
Jeff Bezos has said he protects 8 hours of sleep over almost any meeting. He runs Amazon and Blue Origin on it.
Jamie Dimon publicly said sleep and exercise are non-negotiable inputs to running JPMorgan.
LeBron James reportedly spends $1.5M a year on his body. Still in the league at 41 in a sport where the average career ends before 30.
Tom Brady built his entire late career around recovery infrastructure most professional teams hadn’t even heard of in 2010. Played until 45.
Kobe Bryant trained at 4am because by 8am, by his own description, the gap on the rest of the league was already untouchable for that day.
The people running the highest stakes operations in the world treat their body as part of the operation.
The average business owner treats it as the thing that gets sacrificed for the operation.
Wrong frame.
Health isn’t the cost of doing business.
Health is the leverage point in the business.
Matthew Walker at Berkeley has published study after study showing that under 6 hours of sleep cuts cognitive performance by roughly 30%. Same brain. Same person. Just running on less sleep.
The military bans pilots from flying after 17 hours awake because performance maps to legal intoxication. They didn’t ban it because they hate productivity. They banned it because the data was unambiguous.
The version of you sleeping 6 hours, eating like a teenager, skipping every workout for a quarter is not the same operator as the version sleeping 8, eating clean, training 4x a week.
It’s not 5% different. It’s not 10% different. The research keeps landing in the 20 to 40% range on cognition, decision quality, mood regulation, risk tolerance.
You’re making 30% worse decisions and don’t know it.
Because the broken version of you doesn’t feel broken. It feels normal.
That’s the trap.
I don’t drink. Haven’t in 20 years. That’s not a brag, it’s a baseline. But I’ve still run Legiit through stretches where I was sleeping 5 hours, eating whatever, training inconsistently, and telling myself the workload required it.
The decisions I made in those stretches are decisions I had to spend the next quarter unwinding.
I’ve also run it from the other side. Sleep tracked. Workouts non-negotiable. Food clean.
Same business. Same problems on the desk. Different operator showing up to solve them.
I’m not Bryan Johnson. I’m not running an epigenetic protocol. I’m just operating somewhere on a spectrum that most owners refuse to even look at.
Here’s why business owners specifically are bad at this.
Most of us came up grinding. The story we sell ourselves is that the grind is what got us here. Less sleep. More hours. Whatever it took.
That wires your brain to think effort equals output.
Up to a point it does.
Past that point, effort starts costing you decisions. And decisions are what actually run the business.
A 7 figure business doesn’t fail because the owner worked too few hours. It fails because the owner made 3 or 4 bad calls in a row that a sharper version of them wouldn’t have made.
Those bad calls almost always trace back to a tired, fried, undertrained operator.
The grind worked at year 2.
It’s killing you at year 8.
Stop treating your body like a cost.
Treat it like the asset that runs every other asset.
…Think Big
Here’s your lifeline.
Another headline. Another client pays late. The next 10 days shift. You open your bank app before walking into the office.
The hits just keep coming right now.
And as the leader, you’re the one absorbing all of them.
But survival doesn’t come from holding tighter alone.
The Small Business Survivor Guide gives you 83 practical ways to cut costs, stabilize cash flow, and navigate economic pressure with confidence.
Because in times like these, stability isn’t luck. It’s strategy.
And the leaders who stay standing are the ones who prepare for what’s next.
The AI Playbook for Video Teams That Can't Slow Down
Wistia's new AI Video Marketing Trends report shows how marketers are using AI to move faster, improve quality, and extend the life of every video. See how leading teams are driving results without adding more work.
Are You Ready to Actually Retire?
Knowing when to retire means knowing what it costs, how long your money needs to last, and where the income comes from. When to Retire: A Quick and Easy Planning Guide helps investors with $1,000,000 or more work through all of it.