Excerpts from SMA's message at SuperDuperCon, November 11, 2024

Every month I meet with new and old team members from all levels, and they always ask me for simple advice that I can give them about their lives and careers. I’ve thought long and hard about what really matters and I’ve never been able to give the right answer until now.

I’ve been asking myself: what is the core issue of life? Then it dawned on me: after reading several books, I read one called Good Energy and I connected health and business.

The book talks about how ALL our ailments, from a toothache to brain cancer, comes from one source: what we put into our bodies and how we convert that to energy (metabolism). You don’t lose energy because you age, you lose energy because you lose muscle and metabolism. Get it back or better don’t lose it to begin with.

The book gives you six simple principles of Good Energy eating:

1. Our bodies are built entirely of food (we don’t arise from thin air, we arise from food)
2. Match what you eat with what your 37 trillion cells need (eat high-quality, unprocessed food)
3. Food is how you communicate with your body (foods are the messages we choose to send to motivate and tell our cells what to do)
4. Food cravings mean your cells are confused (stick to unprocessed food and your cravings will disappear quickly)
5. Ignore diets and focus on unprocessed food (unprocessed, clean, natural food is always the right diet for you)
6. Eat mindfully and find awe in food (slow down, take your time, and enjoy every bite in appreciation of the magic of food)

And five “check engine” alerts for your own body:

1. Glucose (sugar is the worst kind of Bad Energy)
2. The size of your waistline (excess energy going to places it shouldn’t)
3. Cholesterol
4. Triglycerides (too much sugar, refined carbs, and/or alcohol)
5. Blood pressure (most lethal but also the most preventable)

So what we eat either gives us Good Energy or Bad Energy. What you eat is what gives you good or bad energy. It’s how you communicate with your body. You are telling your body how to behave by the things you put in it (here, eat this pizza and tell your glucose to go up). Think of your body like a car, which performs differently depending on what kind of fuel you use. It needs to be regularly maintained and you’ve got your “check engine” alerts. We never put diesel in car that uses unleaded, but we don’t think twice about putting processed junk in our own bodies. We need Good Energy.

When I used to play golf, I noticed that when I would play with people much better than me, my game would improve. The same thing applies to your mind. When you have positive people around you, they influence you to optimize your system. The minute you have a bad system it affects your mind, mood, and ability to perform, and it slowly chips away at your health.

Understanding your body is not that difficult for as long as you learn how to connect the dots. Understand the most important things about your health, your life, your family, and your work—and understand how they all connect.

And then coincidentally, as I was reading the book, I stumbled across this quote!

“The hallmark of expertise is no longer how much you know. It's how well you synthesize. Information scarcity rewarded knowledge acquisition. Information abundance requires pattern recognition. It's not enough to collect facts. The future belongs to those who connect dots.” –Adam Grant

So to connect the dots and summarize, here are eight learnings that worked for me.

1. Be grateful every morning.

The minute you’re grateful for what you have, no matter what, you start off your day with a full tank of high-octane gasoline—with Good Energy. And you infect the people around you with this Good Energy.

2. Health is often the core of all problems.

Good health is where it all starts. “You are what you eat” may sound basic, but it’s foundational. The healthier we are, the better we lead. Health impacts mood, focus, and productivity—when you feel good, you have the energy and clarity to handle challenges and make better decisions.

3. You are what you eat.

Our ailments come from one source: what we put into our bodies and how we convert that to energy (metabolism). So it’s not just what we eat but how we convert that food into either Good or Bad Energy. If we have good eating, sleeping, and moving patterns, then we turn our food into Good Energy.

4. You have control of your life.

This is one of the best pieces of advice I can give to anyone. Building good habits that bring out the best in us, including understanding our own health, learning how it works, and recognizing what it needs puts everything under our control.

5. Free yourself from fear.

A lot of that is what you eat, because you feel better, your mind is clearer, you push yourself more. This gives you the confidence to keep going until you start influencing other people at home or at work. And like a circle, it all comes back to you.

6. Surround yourself with positive people.

Being around positive people influences you to optimize your system. They feed your Good Energy in the same way that negative people feed your Bad Energy. It’s all under your control.

7. Always solve the core of the problem

A good leader has to be able to filter through a lot of information and identify what truly matters. We need to simplify everything and get to the core of a problem to see the solution clearly, even when it's in the middle of a complex mess of information.

8. Connect the dots.

Think of the dots as the few things that really matter in a problem that will help resolve all if not most of the issues you face at home and at work. This includes mental and emotional problems.

Connect the dots and take charge of your life!

Watch SMA's entire message below: