The 80/20 Of Living A 1% Life

Note: This is AI-generated based on the video. Watch the video itself for full details.

A few years back, a boss of mine gave me an exercise that completely changed my life, not my business, my life.

He gave me a day off, a full paid workday, to do nothing except map out what my ideal life looked like. Every area. Health, wealth, career, family, marriage, spirituality, social. Write down where you are now and where you want to be, then figure out what it’s going to take to close that gap.

I’ve never forgotten that day.

And I’ve never stopped doing the exercise. I do it with my clients now. I give it to my employees. I tell them the same thing my boss told me: take the day, do the work, and be honest with yourself.

Here’s what I’ve found after doing this for years and watching hundreds of other people go through it: most people build their business first and hope it gives them the life they want later. It never does. You end up with revenue and resentment, money and a deep sense that something’s still missing.

The move is to decide what you want your life to look like first. Then reverse-engineer everything else around that vision.

So that’s what this is. The 80/20 of each major area of life. What actually drives results. What to focus on when time and energy are finite, which they always are.

Health: Function Over Appearance

When I say health, I mean how your body actually functions. I mean how it performs, not what it looks like.

The 80/20 here is almost embarrassingly simple, but most people ignore it because they’re chasing complexity.

Sleep first. Every serious biohacker in the world will tell you this. You don’t need 40 supplements. You need better sleep. Full stop.

Move your body daily. This doesn’t mean a gym, it means movement. Walking, hiking, strength training, chasing your kids around the yard — whatever you’ll actually do and whatever fits your life. Just move.

Eat real food. I don’t mean a specific diet, I mean real food. If the ingredient list has one ingredient, you’re good. If it needs a label to explain what’s in it, be skeptical. Every diet that has ever worked — keto, carnivore, high-carb, low-carb, all of them — works by getting people to eat less garbage. That’s the whole secret. Calories in versus calories out is a law of thermodynamics, not a preference.

And then the one most entrepreneurs forget: reduce your stress. We’re probably one of the most chronically stressed professions on earth. Stress does to your body what most diseases do, just slower and quieter. It’s right up there with sleep in terms of how much it matters, and if you can only fix two things in your health, those two will move results more than anything else combined, because everything downstream — your energy, your focus, your decision-making — gets better when you’re sleeping and not running on cortisol all day.

Wealth: Know Your Number

The first thing I tell every entrepreneur about wealth is this: know your number. Know what you actually need to walk away, and know why that’s your number.

So many founders just keep chasing. Get to $5M and suddenly they need $10M. Get to $10M and suddenly they need $50M. And I’m not saying chasing money is bad. If it’s genuinely fun for you, great. But if you’re chasing a number you’ve never consciously chosen, you’re going to be running forever with no finish line.

Figure out your number. Then build toward that.

Focus on active income, not investing. I learned this the hard way. When money started coming in fast at Peak Biome, I decided I was suddenly an expert investor. I was not. I lost a significant amount of money learning that lesson. The place where I generate the best returns is in building and advising businesses. That’s where my edge is. When I have excess capital, it goes into safe, boring, reliable vehicles. Not maximize-the-return vehicles. Peace-of-mind vehicles.

Keep debt to a minimum. This one depends on your risk tolerance, and I’ll be upfront that mine has shifted as I’ve gotten older. Mathematically, you can sometimes get a better return elsewhere than what you’re paying on a mortgage. I know that. But what I’ve learned is that for me personally, peace of mind is a top-three value in my life. I will leave money on the table to have it. Know where you stand on that spectrum and make decisions accordingly.

Don’t lose money. Warren Buffett said it best. Rule one: don’t lose money. Rule two: see rule one. If you’re choosing between a 25% return with real risk and a 10% return that’s essentially guaranteed, the math usually favors the boring one. When you lose a chunk, it takes years to replace it. The gains only keep building when they don’t get interrupted.

And finally: spend your money on what matters to you. For me that’s experiences. I live in my dream house. I genuinely love it. But I’m not a car guy. I don’t care about things. Experiences with my family, travel, memories with my kids — that’s where I put the discretionary money. But I’m not projecting that onto you. If you’re a car guy, be a car guy. If material things make you happy, spend on material things. The point is to spend consciously, on what matters to you, not on what you think you’re supposed to want.

Career: Three Things That Actually Matter

Focus. This is the one that kills most entrepreneurs, myself included for years. We have squirrel brains. We get excited about seventeen things at once and execute on none of them properly. You have to learn to lock the squirrel down. One thing. Finish it. Then move.

Understand your math. I hear “I’m not a numbers person” constantly, and I’ll say the same thing I always say: you’re going to have to become one. With AI making marketing more and more of a commodity, the moat that’s left is understanding your economics. Knowing what actually drives profit in your business. Being able to look at a P&L and know what move to make next. That skill is worth more now than it has ever been, and it’s only going to become more valuable as AI flattens every other advantage.

Build your self-awareness and emotional intelligence. This one surprises people coming from me, because I’m a pretty goofy guy on the surface. But I believe building self-awareness is one of the top character skills a human can develop. Full stop. As a leader, if you can’t see your own biases, if you can’t catch yourself before you react emotionally in a way you’ll regret, you’ll make bad decisions and you’ll be a bad leader. Meditation, therapy, good books on emotional intelligence — whatever works for you. It pays off for the rest of your life, and it keeps paying.

Spirituality: Relax, Release, Question

I’ve been on a spiritual path for decades. Ayahuasca, meditation, energy work, non-duality — I’ve explored a lot of it. I’m not going to tell you what to believe. That’s not the point.

The practical 80/20 here comes down to three things.

Feel your emotions fully instead of pushing them down. Most of us, especially men of a certain generation, were taught to suppress. Don’t show it, push it down. That’s one of the most damaging things you can do for your mental and emotional health. When an emotion comes up, go into it. Find where it lives in your body. Give it a shape, a color, a weight. Surrender into it instead of fighting it. Let it move through you. That’s what it’s trying to do. This is what Michael Singer calls relax and release, and it’s done more for me than almost anything else on this list.

Question everything. Whatever you believe, ask yourself why you believe it. What if that weren’t true? What would that mean? I grew up Protestant. Over twenty years of questioning, I’ve arrived somewhere completely different. Not better or worse than where I started. Just more mine. The only way to find your own truth is to question the beliefs you inherited from other people.

Understand that emotional intelligence and belief flexibility go hand in hand. The more extreme someone’s beliefs are, the less likely they are to question them. The more emotionally intelligent someone is, the more they can hold nuance and update their worldview when new information arrives — and the less they need everything to be black and white. That’s a skill. Build it.

Family: Presence, Traditions, Character

Presence beats time. One hour with your kids without your phone destroys five hours with your phone on the table. When you’re with your children, put the phone in a different room. Not face down in front of you. A different room. Be there.

Create traditions. We have dinner together as a family almost every night. Every Sunday at three o’clock we do game day. Sunday nights are movie nights. These aren’t accidents, they’re structures we built intentionally. Whatever fits your family’s life, create structures that force connection to happen. If you don’t build it in, it won’t happen.

Focus on character over skills. This is the one I feel most strongly about as a parent. Skills can be learned at any age. Character has a window. Teach them to be kind, to be self-aware, to handle situations that don’t go their way with grace, to have the right relationship with money. These are the things that’ll determine the quality of their entire life. Schools won’t teach it well enough. That’s on you.

Marriage: Get This One Right

My wife and I have been together for 21 years. I think I’m a 10 out of 10 husband. I’m not naturally gifted at it. I put real effort into it, the same way I put effort into anything I want to be good at.

Love them fully, exactly as they are right now. This was the single biggest shift in our marriage. I spent years trying to nudge her to be slightly different in various ways, the way most people do. One day I stopped. I made a decision to love her unconditionally, exactly as she is, without an agenda to change anything. The relationship changed almost immediately. If you want your spouse to be different, you change. They’ll usually follow. If they don’t, you’ll have clarity about what that means.

Get happier making them happy than making yourself happy. This sounds like a cliché until you experience it. When I give my wife a gift and watch her open it, I’m more excited than I am receiving anything myself. By a long shot. That’s not something I was born with. It’s something I cultivated. Work on it.

Have great sex. I know that’s blunt, but it matters enormously and people treat it like a taboo. Sex is emotionally bonding. The oxytocin response is real and well-documented. When couples are having good, frequent sex, they’re generally happier with each other. When they’re not, tension builds. It’s not complicated. Explore it. Keep putting effort into it. The couples whose sex life improves over the years are the ones treating it the same way they treat anything they want to be good at: with intention and investment.

When she asks you to do something, do it then. Simple, but it changed things for us. Our brains, especially male entrepreneur brains, have seventeen things running at once. Whatever she just asked you to do will be gone from your memory within seconds, even if you genuinely meant to do it. The only fix that worked for me was to stop what I was doing, do the thing immediately, and then go back. You won’t forget what you were doing. You will forget what she asked.

Social: Energy Management

Make time for your social life and put it in your calendar. If you don’t plan it, it won’t happen. If nobody in your friend group is planning it, you become the planner. Simple.

Be strict about who you let in. Our energy as entrepreneurs is finite and precious. Time vampires and energy drains need to go. This doesn’t have to be dramatic. It can be a gentle falling away. But protect your energy like you protect your profit margins, because they’re related. Chronically drained people make worse decisions.

Mix up your friend types. This one surprises people. Don’t only hang out with other entrepreneurs. Hang out with people who aren’t in business, people who see the world differently than you do, people who have built completely different lives. Life is about accumulating perspective, and if everyone in your circle is the same type of person with the same worldview, you’re cutting yourself short. The variety is the point.

The Common Thread

Every single area above runs on the same logic I use in business.

Where you put your time and energy is where you get results. Time is finite. Energy is finite. So you apply the 80/20 and you find the few things in each area of life that generate the most output per unit of input.

Find the constraint. Remove the constraint. Repeat.

In business, that’s how you build profit. In life, that’s how you build a life that feels like yours.

Most people build the business first and hope the life follows. Do the exercise. Map out what you want across every area of your life. Then build the business to support that, not the other way around.

That’s the 80/20 of living a 1% life.