Someone comes up to you and asks how things are at work. How is the job going? How is business? You say things are good. You probably mean the job is stable, things are moving, nobody is on your case. This is what the phrase means in practice. Three words that stand in for a life status report.
Over the past month I have been wrestling with this question: does doing well at work make you someone who is running their life well? And are these two the same thing? What I have come to realize is that they are not, and the majority of people will never notice the difference between the two.
The word business does not only refer to a company with an incorporation filing and a revenue model. Business is the word we use for the ongoing enterprise of a life. Mind your business. Handle your business. That second usage is the one I care about here. Whether you own your own business, are a salaried employee, a freelancer, or anything in between, you are running something. That something is your life. You are the operator of your own life, and the question worth asking is whether you are running that operation well.
The Metrics We Inherited
We have been trained to evaluate our performance using instruments designed for machines and institutions. Productivity. Output. Promotions. Raises. Performance reviews. These measure the efficiency of a system. What they do not measure is the condition of the person running that system.
Research published in the Journal of Business Venturing Insights in 2024 found that physical health issues undermine a person's performance more than mental health issues do, which inverts the usual assumption (Chandler et al., 2024). We talk endlessly about burnout and anxiety, and far less about what happens when the person doing the work is physically deteriorating in ways they have normalized. Performance degrades. Judgment gets worse. Options narrow. The person is the primary asset, and that asset requires consistent maintenance.
This is the key reframe: your health is not a personal matter that exists alongside your career. How you maintain your health determines how well everything else runs, including your work.
Sleep Is Not Recovery. It Is Operations.
Research from the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research found that sleep deprivation reduces regional cerebral metabolism within the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain most responsible for higher-order cognitive processes including judgment and decision making (Killgore, 2006). This is where you read a situation accurately, communicate clearly, solve problems under pressure, and handle your emotions.
A 2024 workplace wellness study found that three in four employees report that work stress affects their sleep, with the figure rising to nine in ten among employees in unhealthy work environments (Mental Health America, 2024). A lot of people read this and think their job is the problem. I am encouraging you to read it differently, because you are not a victim and you have ownership over your own life. Most of us have accepted a baseline level of cognitive impairment as the normal condition of being a working adult. We have collectively agreed to run our most important cognitive hardware at partial capacity and call it hustle, dedication, or just being busy.
Those who sleep well operate at a functionally higher level than those who do not, and the research is unambiguous about which one makes better decisions.
Your Body Is Not a Side Project
Your body is the vehicle that allows you to do good business in the enterprise of life. Research published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that physical exercise impacts cognitive abilities and positive emotional states, directly influencing how people perform in goal-directed behavior (Liu et al., 2022). A 2024 meta-analysis in Communications Psychology, pulling from 113 different studies, found that exercise produces measurable improvements in working memory and inhibitory control (McIntyre et al., 2024).
A lot of ambitious people treat the gym as something they will return to when things calm down. They wait for business to get good before they invest in the body that actually runs the business. This logic is backwards, and the data is obvious. Taking care of your body is a cognitive and operational advantage that will show up in your work whether or not you realize it.
The Relationships That Predict Everything
The Harvard Study of Adult Development tracked participants across nearly 80 years and found that close relationships are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genetic makeup. People who were most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80 (Waldinger and Schulz, 2023). Eight decades of data. The longest study of its kind. And none of it points to professional achievement as the defining variable. None of it is about income, title, or recognition. It is about the quality of your relationships, measured by emotional warmth, trust, and support. Loneliness, by contrast, poses health risks comparable to smoking on a nightly basis.
If you have made it this far, I want to push you to ask yourself this: how does your work treat your relationships? Does it release you and give you back at the end of the day? Do you get to be present with the people who matter, or does work follow you into every room, every dinner, every weekend? Work that destroys your relationships is not good work or good business. It is actively extracting value from the most irreplaceable part of your life. That is a bad trade, even if you get the raise.
Running It Well
Here is what I am proposing. In order to run your life well, to be able to say business is good and actually mean it, that word has to carry its full weight.
Good means you are sleeping consistently. Good means you are taking care of your body. Good means you are present when you arrive. Good means the people who matter to you are not quietly paying the cost of your ambition, your anxiety, or your inability to disconnect. Good means your health is not something you are planning to address later. Good means you smile and actually mean it.
This is what elite looks like from the inside. Disregard the title. Disregard the number. A person who is running all of it well, at the same time, with clear intention. The business of your life, operated as if you actually mean to keep it running.
That is good business.
The minds we pulled from this week:
Chandler, J. A., et al. (2024). The significance of entrepreneurs' physical health for venture distress and exit. Journal of Business Venturing Insights, 22.
Killgore, W. D. S. (2006). Impaired decision making following 49 h of sleep deprivation. Sleep, 29(8), 1099-1105.
Liu, D., Han, S., and Zhou, C. (2022). The influence of physical exercise frequency and intensity on individual entrepreneurial behavior. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(19), 12383.
McIntyre, E., et al. (2024). A systematic review and Bayesian meta-analysis: Acute exercise on cognition in young adults. Communications Psychology, 2, 80.
Mental Health America. (2024). 2024 workplace wellness research. mhanational.org
Waldinger, R. J., and Schulz, M. S. (2023). The good life: Lessons from the world's longest scientific study of happiness. Simon and Schuster.
