A year ago I bought a Whoop. Then a Garmin. Then I started a course of GLP-1 therapy under a doctor I trust. Then I sat for two days with a guide and a substance my younger self would have been embarrassed to ask about. Then I started journaling every morning, briefly, in a way I had previously found insufferable when other people did it.
None of this was a plan. It was a series of small concessions to the fact that I was, by any honest measurement, running myself the way I would have refused to run a company. On instinct. On vibes. On the assumption that because last quarter had gone fine, next quarter would too.
The men I coach run their businesses on dashboards but their bodies and minds on vibes.
I include myself in that, present tense. The point of this essay is not that I have it figured out. The point is what shows up once you start trying to measure.
II.
The first thing you notice when you put a strap on your wrist is how badly you had been lying to yourself about sleep. Not lying with intent, lying by approximation. I would have said, asked by a doctor, that I slept around seven hours a night. The strap says six and change, with a recovery score that thinks I am a much older man on the days after a glass of wine I would not have remembered drinking.
The second thing you notice is the resistance. There is a voice that says, the watch is wrong. The watch is not measuring the right thing. The watch is reductive. The voice is correct, in a narrow way, and completely missing the point. No single instrument is going to give you the truth. The instrument is a prompt. It is a thing that makes you look.
III.
The GLP-1 is the part I expected to be most controversial when I started telling friends about it. In practice nobody much cares. What they want to know is whether it works, and the honest answer is that it works on the thing it is supposed to work on, which is appetite, and that the second-order effects are the interesting part. You lose the food noise. You also lose, for a while, the cheerful little rituals that used food as their excuse. You have to find new ones. Some of mine are better than the ones they replaced. Some I am still working on.
The psychedelic-assisted work was the opposite of what I had imagined. Less revelation, more reconciliation. A long conversation with parts of myself I had been too busy to sit with. I came out of it with no new business ideas. I came out with a clearer sense of which of my existing ones I should drop.
IV.
The AI thing I am sheepish about, because every other operator I know is using a model to draft emails and call it innovation. What I have been doing is different. I spent six months building a private thinking partner. Not for output. For interrogation. I dictate into it after every coaching call, every workout, every conversation with my wife that left me unsettled, every quarterly review. It does not flatter me. It pushes back. It notices patterns I would have lost.
The output of that practice is not insight, exactly. It is shorter feedback loops. The gap between doing a thing and understanding what the thing was about has gone from weeks to days.
V.
So here is what a year of measurement has actually changed. I sleep more. I drink less. I eat in a way that is less performative and more deliberate. I have stopped lying to myself about my energy on Mondays, which means I have stopped scheduling things on Mondays that require me to be at my best. I have ended two professional relationships that the metrics, broadly defined, were telling me to end. I have started one that the metrics could not have predicted and that has been the best thing in my work for a decade.
I would not call any of this transformation. I would call it the slow accumulation of evidence about how I work, treated with the same seriousness I would give to a business I was advising.
VI. The dashboard does not exist by default
This is the part I want you to take with you, if you take nothing else.
You already have, in your business, a dashboard you would not run a week without. You can tell me, today, what your cash position is, what your pipeline looks like, what your best and worst customers cost you, what your team is doing, what your retention curve is doing. Nobody handed you that. You built it, or you paid someone to build it, because you understood that you could not steer without it.
Now answer the same questions about your body. About your mind. About your marriage. About what you actually want the next ten years to look like.
The dashboard for your own organism does not exist by default. The building of it is the work.
What you measure is what changes. Pick the things that matter and start.