Your Body Is the Last Principal

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Health is the principal beneath every other form of wealth. Personal experience with tics, ADHD, sleep loss, stress, and travel reveals the limits of willpower and the way a heavily leveraged body can issue its own margin call. Sleep is reserve cash; exercise, nutrition, medical care, and treatment are long-term investment and risk management. Health also sustains the time and attention we can give to parents, partners, and friends. The goal is not a joyless life of perfect optimization, but a balance that protects against permanent loss so that money, freedom, relationships, and time can still be enjoyed together.

For most of my life, I never really took the line “your health matters” seriously. It sounded like one of those statements that is correct and almost entirely uninformative. Like “cherish your time” or “money cannot buy everything,” everyone already knows it, which is precisely why so few people ever stop to think about it properly.

Especially when we are young, the body works normally most of the time. We stay up for several nights, cross a few time zones, drink, travel back to back, and still manage to get up and work the next morning. It becomes easy to mistake health for a default setting, something that will always be there like air or water. Career, investing, money, travel, love, friendship—those seem like the things that actually require planning and pursuit.

Lately, though, I have begun to think the opposite may be true.

Health is the “1” in front of everything else. Wealth, career, freedom, travel, mansions, private jets—even romantic love, family, and friendship—are only the zeros that follow it. Without that 1, no matter how many zeros accumulate, they are remarkably difficult to convert into quality of life.

I have felt this especially clearly in recent weeks.

I have a tic disorder. When I am doing well, it may be little more than background noise, barely noticeable within the rest of my life. But after too little sleep, too much pressure, jet lag, or a broken routine, the volume suddenly rises. It was especially pronounced on a flight a few days ago. My body carried an intense sense of being beyond my control. I knew I wanted it to stop, yet could not fully make it stop. In that moment, it was hard to think about investing, work, or plans for the future. Even the most ordinary things—enjoying a flight, watching a film, sitting quietly for a few hours—became difficult.

I also have ADHD, which shapes life in a different way: attention that moves quickly, impulsiveness, many thoughts running at once, a mind that finds it difficult to shut down completely. Often, it can even be an advantage. I like researching many things at the same time—investing, technology, products, companies, macroeconomics, AI. My mind is frequently running at high speed, and that state has undoubtedly given me a great deal.

But every advantage carries a cost.

When the brain and body operate under heavy load for long enough, the relationship among sleep, stress, and emotion becomes impossible to miss. One bad night can amplify everything that was previously manageable. Attention scatters further, the body grows more exhausted, and the tics may intensify. The result is an ugly loop: physical discomfort increases psychological pressure, and that pressure makes the body worse.

I used to believe that many problems could be solved through willpower. If I was sleepy, I could push through. If I was tired, I could endure it. Under pressure, I could keep working. A trading loss meant more research; a problem at the company meant finding a solution; a bug meant continuing to revise the code. Human agency matters enormously, and I have never liked attributing my problems to external forces that cannot be changed.

But the body does not entirely obey willpower.

You can force yourself to continue working, but you cannot order your nervous system to return to normal immediately. Caffeine can make you briefly alert, but it cannot recreate the sleep you missed. You can tell yourself not to be anxious, but the body will not stop sending stress signals merely because it has heard the instruction.

In some ways, this is much like investing. Financial capital has principal; the body does too. A trading account that runs at high leverage for years—fully invested every day, holding no cash and carrying no risk budget—may appear to use capital with extraordinary efficiency. But one sufficiently large move is all it takes for something to break.

The body is no different.

Sleep is cash reserve. Exercise is long-term capital expenditure. Nutrition is basic maintenance. Check-ups and treatment are risk management. Chronic sleep deprivation, overwork, constant travel, and sustained pressure are, in essence, forms of ever-rising leverage. Once in a while, of course, none of this is a disaster. The problem is that when nothing goes wrong in the short term, we easily assume the system can run that way forever.

The market does not remind you every day how much risk you are carrying. Neither does the body. Until one day, it suddenly sends you a margin call.

I used to think the greatest purpose of money was to buy optionality. With enough money, you can choose where to live, what work to do, and whom to work with. You can choose economy class or a private jet. You can decide whether to do something you dislike for the salary, or simply refuse. The greatest value of wealth is not the number itself, but the way it brings a person closer to an ideal life.

Now I think there is another layer beneath that logic.

Health is the most fundamental form of optionality.

When your body is well, you can choose to travel, to work through the night, or to go out for a drink. You can ski, dive, run, train, or land after a twenty-hour journey and continue working.

When your body is unwell, many of those choices disappear on their own.

The finest hotel is not comfortable if you cannot sleep. The best restaurant offers little pleasure if you feel too ill to taste the food. The most beautiful place means very little when all you want is to lie down in your room. Add as many zeros as you like to an account balance: if the body torments you every day, the happiness those numbers can buy is sharply limited.

And health does not affect only the person living inside that body.

When we are young, it is easy to think of health as an entirely private matter: it is my body, so I alone bear the consequences. But that is not really true. One person’s physical condition touches everyone who genuinely cares about them.

Perhaps I understand this more as my parents grow older. As a child, I took their presence for granted. They would always be there. Only later did I slowly realise that they, too, would age and become ill, and that one day they might need us to care for them. Family, in the end, is something very concrete. It is not a grand word. It is whether we can still eat together, whether we can still sit at the same table during the holidays, whether I can accompany my parents to the hospital when they are unwell—and whether, if something happens to me, they will spend the night awake with worry.

So taking care of yourself is not always only for yourself.

At the very least, it can spare the people who love you a little worry.

Love is the same.

When we are young, we talk about love through romance, excitement, travel, and gifts—about going to many places together and seeing many beautiful things. Stretch the horizon across several decades, however, and love inevitably encounters far more practical questions. Who accompanies whom to the hospital? Can you remain patient with each other at your worst? During the busiest period at work, are you still willing to save a little time for the other person? Decades from now, will the two of you still be healthy enough to walk, travel, and eat together?

I used to imagine that once I had enough money, I could live in different cities with the person I loved, travel everywhere, visit our favourite restaurants, and go wherever we wished. Looking at that future now, I can see the premise I had quietly taken for granted: both of us would still have bodies healthy enough to experience those things together.

Money can make a journey comfortable. It can improve the hotel and remove many of life’s small, exhausting pressures.

But money cannot replace the person travelling beside you.

Nor can it guarantee that both of you will have enough time to complete those plans, one by one.

Friendship is no different.

Not long ago, I was talking with friends about whether everyone would become busier with time, and whether marriage and family would make it difficult to say “let’s go” on a whim and suddenly take a trip together, as we can now. No one knows what the future holds. But I increasingly think that being able to sit with friends you have known for years, ten or twenty years from now, share a drink, laugh about the stupid things you once did, and talk about your work and your lives would itself be an extraordinary piece of luck.

That picture, too, depends on health.

A real friendship does not require daily contact, but it does require there to be an “after this.” If we cannot meet this year, we can meet next year. If someone misses this trip, there will be another. If we cannot drink much tonight, we can continue another time.

We always imagine there will be many more chances.

But health and time together determine how long that “later” will last.

Seen this way, health may be more than a personal asset. It is the infrastructure supporting every relationship.

When your body is well, you have the energy to love people, spend time with family, maintain friendships, and carry responsibility. When someone is drained by their body every day, it is often not that they care less about the people around them. They genuinely have no energy left to give.

Health therefore determines not only whether you can enjoy the money you earn, but whether you can truly give your time and attention to the people you value.

That may matter far more than wealth itself.

The irony is that many people begin making money so they can enjoy life later. While young, they trade health for money and tell themselves, “I will rest once I have earned enough.”

By the time they have enough, they may find themselves trading money for health.

Money can solve many problems, but it cannot necessarily buy back a body that has been overdrawn for years.

I increasingly believe that health should be treated as a long-term investment, not a form of consumption. Sleep is not wasted time. Training does not steal hours from work. Seeing a doctor, getting examined, and accepting treatment are not minor errands to be postponed until life becomes less busy.

Like managing a portfolio or a company, they are important entries on the balance sheet of a life. If anything, they deserve a higher priority.

I do not, of course, want to run to the opposite extreme.

I still love travel. I like having a drink, staying up late to talk about something interesting, and working intensely on a project for a long stretch. A life reduced entirely to a health-management programme would lose a great deal of its joy.

The important thing is probably balance.

Freedom has never meant refusing every restraint. It means knowing what is worth paying for, and which costs must never be allowed to compound without limit.

In investing, some losses are acceptable because they are the volatility we accept in pursuit of returns. Other risks, once realised, become permanent loss.

The same is true of the body.

An occasional late night, an occasional drink, or an occasional stretch of work that runs past midnight may be nothing more than volatility.

But ignoring health for years is a genuine risk of permanent impairment.

Of course I hope to make a great deal of money in the future. I hope Rocket Capital does extremely well. I hope I become a better investor and build the life I imagine: going wherever I want, skiing in winter, spending summer by the sea, eating and travelling with the person I love, and occasionally doing nothing at all.

I also hope that many years from now my parents will still be healthy, my friends will still be here, and the person I love will still be beside me. Everyone will be living the life they want, and from time to time we will still gather together.

Perhaps that is what I truly mean by “success.”

Not reaching some particular number in an account, nor acquiring something other people envy. It is having gained enough optionality while still possessing a healthy body, people worth cherishing, and the time and capacity to enjoy them.

Every one of these pictures contains an unspoken premise:

When that time comes, I am comfortable in my own body.

I can sleep normally, exercise normally, sit quietly, and direct my attention toward what I choose, rather than being dragged through each day by my body.

I used to think that time was life’s most important principal.

Now I think I need to add one more thing.

Time and health are the only principal a person can never truly replenish.

Money lost can be earned again. A failed project can be rebuilt. Even after one opportunity passes, another often appears.

But the time our parents spend with us, the years we share with a partner, the days we spend running around with friends while we are still young, and our own bodies are not a game we can restart without limit.

So we should probably be a little kinder to it.

After all, why do we work so hard to make money, invest, build companies, and pursue freedom, if not to spend this one life a little more happily with the people we love?

If we win everything else but lose the body that could have enjoyed it—or no longer have the time and strength to be present for the people who truly matter—then however we calculate the trade, it is difficult to call it a profit.