Life’s Foundation: Health

Building a high-potential company requires tremendous energy, focus, and stamina.  It is essential to invest in maintaining your health to sustain your ability to keep building your startup.

Why am I writing about health – and how health challenges impact startup founders/CEOs?  Honestly, I have pushed myself to the limit sometimes – and witnessed my peers doing the same. Sometimes, crazy work ethics are celebrated in the startup community, and people push themselves to the brink.  And it is well-demonstrated that exhaustion and stress impact our immune system and make us physically vulnerable, sometimes leading to startling breakdowns.

Reflecting on my decades in startups, I have had team members die suddenly, have a medical crisis at work, end up hospitalized or having emergency surgery for some emergent condition, struggle with mental illnesses, and face any number of personal and/or family health emergencies. Personally, I have faced moments when my body’s ability to keep up was in question, or some health issue reminded me losing our health can just overwhelm everything else. Every time it disrupts the affected person, their family, and their colleagues as they work to recover.  I do not want to imply that every health crisis is something we can anticipate or control.  We can’t.  However, I want to highlight the personal and business costs – and encourage all startup leaders to promote healthy lifestyle choices for yourself and your team to increase the probability that you and your team can be healthy contributors for the duration.

Recently I connected with several other high-potential startup founders/CEOs. We all had personally or knew peers or colleagues who had experienced health setbacks. In our collective experience, the health crisis of a startup leader, family member, or team member creates unexpected demands and distractions for the business as well as for the individuals affected and those around them who must compensate.  The point of all of this is just to emphasize that the consequences of pushing yourself or your team to the breaking point can have major – sometimes catastrophic – costs that likely are much better avoided.

As this group of founders/CEOs were sharing lessons learned on our respective journeys, we all resonated on the importance of intentionally managing and replenishing our energy. As we considered how to be in it for the long-haul (and, make no mistake, building a startup is nearly always a labor of years, very intensive years!), we agreed that it is critical to find ways to replenish our energy and avoid the natural temptations to work too intensively. If we do not find the right level of mental discipline, stress management, and self-care, the consequences can easily be broken relationships, critical mistakes, and burnout. These consequences often manifest physically, and we all knew peers or colleagues who had burned out or were taken off the field for a period of time to recover. And many of us had our own personal experiences with feeling the consequences of pushing too hard.

Of course, I cannot begin to cover the complexity and nuance of maintaining your health in a blog post.  I can only advocate for making it a priority.  And, I can tell you that as this group of founders/CEOs focused on what we could do to make ourselves more effective and successful, we each declared specific, immediately actionable goals we could personally commit to ensure we had the energy to accomplish our goals. As we reviewed our goals for energizing and sustaining ourselves with each other, it quickly became apparent that self-care was a major theme.  Focusing on better nutrition, stress management, exercise, relationships, and rest came up repeatedly as we grappled with how to make sure our health supported our entrepreneurial dreams rather than creating blockers for them. 

At the end of the day, only you can decide where to put your priorities, set your boundaries, and arrange your life to accomplish your goals.  For the record, let me give your encouragement and permission to carve out time and space for healthy practices,