“Exercise Your Mind”: What Modern Knowledge Workers Can Learn from a 19th-Century Prussian Bodybuilder

This is Eugen Sandow.

He was a pioneering strongman and entrepreneur whose innovations form much of the foundation of today's $87B fitness industry.

Sandow (born Friedrich Müller in pre-unified Germany) had an incredible life.

He organized the first bodybuilding competition in 1901, which he judged along with Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

In front of 20,000 people, he wrestled a lion in San Francisco—and won.

While on a trip to India in 1905, he met yogis and incorporated their techniques into his fitness routines. His syncretic experimentation is the basis for modern yoga-as-fitness.

He was a "fitness influencer" over a century before Instagram. Sandow's fans sent him thousands of handwritten letters. His autobiography,?Strength and How to Obtain It, includes a healthy sampling of those letters. Though stylistically different than posts you might read on an internet forum, these letters are eerily similar in content: from words of gratitude for the life-changing impact of his exercise routines to specific requests for expertise.

I came across Sandow a few years back while perusing the Reddit community /r/fitness. One user asked:

What does a highly trained NON-steroid body look like? With all the celebrities doing it 'naturally' but most likely supplementing to get their physique, I'm not sure what a clean result would look like. Anyone have any examples to separate Hollywood fiction from realistic fact?

Another user pointed out that chemists didn't synthesize exogenous testosterone until 1935, so we can be confident that Sandow achieved his strength with neither protein nor pre-workout powders, let alone the hard stuff.

This piqued my interest. The man was able to achieve what so many 21st-century fitness gurus promise and help other hopeful strongmen (and women) do the same. Per his wild popularity, commercial success, and the results contained in private letters from students and admirers—many of whom sent Sandow black-and-white photographs and columnated physique measures in a familiar before-and-after format—what he prescribed seemed to work. Moreover, his pupils achieved their results without expensive machinery, chemical enhancements, or any dazzling variety of fitness products such as those now hawked to us through late-night infomercials and social media advertisements.

I read his autobiography cover-to-cover and was surprised to find that, despite my initial skepticism, it contained sound wisdom. His observations and prescriptions are relevant not only to fitness fanatics curious about the movement's early days but also to modern knowledge workers who want to achieve peak cognitive performance.

Here's what I learned:

1. Exercise your mind.
2. Be moderate in all things.
3. Newer is not necessarily better.
4. Take cold baths. ??
5. To level up, work with an instructor.

Exercise your mind.

These are the opening lines of?Strength and How to Obtain It?(the emphasis is mine):

Hundreds of letters reach me daily, asking, "Can I become strong?" Yes, you can all become strong?if you have the will and use it in the right direction. But, in the first place,?you must learn to exercise your mind. This first of all lessons in physical training is of the utmost importance. For on it the whole of my system depends.

If physical exercise alone and unaided could achieve the desired end, then would every one who, like the breaker of stones, has to use his muscles to earn his daily bread, become, in a popular acceptation of the term, 'a strong man.'?The breaker of stones, however, never uses his mind.?He has to get through a given amount of work, and his method is purely mechanical. Though he may use his muscles in hard work every day of the year it is unlikely that his strength will ever materially increase.

Exercise, indeed, without using the mind in conjunction with it, is of no use.?It is the brain which develops the muscles.?Physical exercise must be commenced by degrees, first bringing into play one muscle, then two, then three, and so on, being careful all the time to put the mind into every movement.

How often have you opened your laptop and become an informational "breaker of stones," tapping away on your keyboard against the textured auditory background of an infinite Spotify playlist (or the parasocial stimulation of podcast discourse), wading through a backlog of inane messages and semi-routinized tasks with the help of SaaS?

Ask yourself, "When was the last time I put real effort and thought into writing an email? Or invested more than five minutes into crafting a meeting agenda? Or gave my complete and unbroken attention to a colleague during a weekly Zoom one-on-one? Or really?listened?to a prospect, identifying gaps between content and micro-expressions, mining insights from the emotional content of the conversation and all that was left unsaid?"

Without undistracted (and right-sized) exertion, like those frustrated fans who sought written words of counsel from Sandow, your performance at work will plateau.

In the long run, a preference for quality work products will yield better outcomes than a preference for the quantity of work products delivered. However, in this new work-from-home world of remote teams, it's more challenging than ever to direct your willpower on the basis of?quality, thereby investing your brainpower into well-made information assets that yield compounding value. Distractions abound. It has become ever more tempting to prioritize urgent but unimportant tasks, their completion aided by charismatic software that simulates the feeling of flow.

This is a trap.

Like the gym rat who chugs a glass of neon pre-workout, turns the music pumping through his Airpods to 11, and spends an hour halfheartedly going through the motions of an exercise routine, the knowledge worker who avoids grueling discomfort by consistently prioritizing familiar tasks—tasks that give the worker a short-lived sense of relief—will soon find herself in a state of stagnation. Box-ticking, divorced from strategic considerations, requires energy but is unlikely to yield movement in the correct direction. It is even possible that individual performance might?decline?as repetitive dopaminergic loops lose their motivational power.

Pretty soon, problems pile up and progress slows.

When the ethos of quantity over quality—of more over better—infects company culture, vanity metrics begin to pilfer attention from key results; work becomes performative.

To avoid this trap (at the gym and work), one should cultivate what meditation instructors call a "beginner's mind," a recent label for a perennial aspiration (see, for example,?Mark 10:15).

Sandow writes, "For the beginner the most difficult part of my system is so fully to concentrate his mind on his muscles as to get them absolutely under control."

If you avoid the routinization trap, attenuate digital distractions, embrace discomfort, focus on that which is vital, cultivate a beginner's mind, and commit to prioritizing quality over quantity by exerting your will—as Sandow says, "in the right direction"—you will grow stronger, in both your physical and cognitive efforts.

Be moderate in all things.

What was the dietary secret to Sandow's success?

Was he a paleo progenitor? A plant-based zealot? A carnivorous muscle man who declared a ketogenic holy war against simple carbohydrates?

He was none of these.

Sandow explains:

It may be useful to remark that?no particular form of diet was adopted. I ate and drank in the ordinary way. It may be said at once that I have no belief in special diet. There is no better guide to good living than moderation.?Be moderate in all things, and you need fear no interruption in gaining strength by my system of training.

This is contrary to contemporary counsel regarding food—really, our obsession with dieting—which assumes that there is some magical, precise formula by which you may summon your desired physique.

Sandow believed no such thing, and the soundness of his approach is self-evident.

What did he know that we don't? Or, instead, what was he able to perceive that we do not?

We've put much faith in heuristics, frameworks, and shortcuts in our hyper-digitized, hyper-distracted world. (In my opinion, this trend pre-dates personal computation and is closely related to the?rise of the PMC.) Regarding food, dietary guidelines have morphed into ideologies—in the case of the paleo and vegan crowds, religions even.

You see this in business as well. There now exist entire cottage industries dedicated to winning over converts to a particular managerial cargo cult: be it SAFe, EoS, OKRs, or some other acronym picked from the management framework cornucopia.

In contrast to advocacy for complicated systems that include lexica, rituals, and clergy, Sandow's advice is simple: "be moderate."

This advice is time-tested:?Temperance?is one of the four classical virtues.

Managers, VC-backed founders, and knowledge workers of all stripes should meditate on Sandow's imperative. You slowly lose the forest for the trees when you become overly fixated on doing things a certain way. Once a particular method's formal description (be it a dietary regimen or a management framework's implementation sequence) becomes untethered from the original "spirit" of that method (its?essence, its?raison d’être), that recipe—once a catalyst for progress—transforms into an obstacle that hinders your pursuit of long-term goals.

So, how does one prevent what was a growth factor in one context from becoming a limiting factor in another?

Again, "be moderate."

Note, however, that the?moderate way of being?paradoxically requires an additional, ongoing investment of executive attention. You must give yourself regular time to reflect. I recommend one to three hours per week of pure contemplation. Don't write. Don't speak. Just think. During this period of solitude and silence, you might assess the effectiveness of the heuristics you've used to pursue your goals. Ask yourself hard questions and confront cold, hard facts.

Are you getting good results? If not, why not? If so, how? Should you continue on this path? What would have to be true for you to become more confident in your current approach? Do you need to make tweaks? Or develop a bespoke method from first principles?

With a disciplined approach to regular reflection, you will grow in temperance and begin to discover a method tailored to your needs that yields good results. At that point, heuristics lose their luster, and you develop an intuitive sense of how to get stuff done (or what to eat), unencumbered by counterproductive scrupulosity.

Newer is not necessarily better.

Sandow first became interested in physical culture at ten years old:

My father took me with him to Italy, and in the art galleries of Rome and Florence I was struck with admiration for the finely developed forms of the sculptured figures of the athletes of old. I remember asking my father if people were as well developed in these modern times.

He pointed out that they were not…they knew nothing of the modern luxuries of civilization, and, besides their training and exercise, their muscles, in the ordinary course of daily life, were always being brought prominently into play.

It should go without saying that "new" does not equal "better"; however, as knowledge workers, we have come to expect rapid change after decades of steady technological improvement in the world of networked personal computing. "New" and "better" have been somewhat correlated, although total factor productivity has not increased as much?as we might have hoped, a problem that?has puzzled economists for quite a while.

The "athletes of old" that Sandow speaks of were "well developed," at least in part because they lived an era of "might is right," where productivity—and, in some cases, outright survival—was contingent upon physical strength.

In modernity, the means of production were routinized and encoded into machinery, a cost-efficient substitute for human strength. Therefore, physical strength was no longer necessary for survival per se, although, as Sandow knew (and we know, evidenced by the sheer magnitude of the 21st-century fitness industry), it is still good. To become strong, Sandow and his peers had to go beyond the range of proximal economic activity and build strength elsewhere with discipline and rigor.

Similarly, in 2022, many of our most cognitively demanding tasks can be done by computers. However, to stay sharp, one must cultivate discipline and invest unbroken attention into solving problems that are not only vital to the success of the organization but also sufficiently challenging. Without regular exercise, the mind will atrophy. And with the growing avalanche of SaaS software components to which we can (attempt to) delegate cognitive labor, it's entirely possible to slip into a static equilibrium whereby you fulfill the nominal obligations of your role with a repetitive stream of mindless clicking.

Then there's the problem of "productivity software." Many of these tools are like the expensive in-home workout equipment advertised on late-night cable TV. If your goal is truly to increase the quality of your work, assume that the latest digital tool receiving adulation from the Twitterati is most likely a distraction.

Eugen Sandow didn't need a Bowflex. Isaac Newton didn't need a suite of interoperable PKM modules. Dostoevsky didn't use generative AI to achieve his target word count.

Again, instead of optimizing for quantity (of emails sent to prospects, of SEO-optimized blog posts, of—shudder—KLOC), prioritize?quality. Budget?chunks of high-quality attention?you can invest into?exercising your mind?by taking on challenging problems, pushing through discomfort without interruption, and ultimately crafting excellent work products.

Take cold baths.

From Wim Hof to Andrew Huberman , cold water therapy has become a popular staple in high-performance routines recommended by wellness entrepreneurs and credible scientists.

Eugen Sandow was ahead of his time. In 1897, he wrote:

If the pupil is able to exercise the first thing every morning let me advise him, whilst the body is hot with the physical performance, to take a cold bath. It does not matter how much he may be perspiring; the cold bath will prove exceedingly beneficial.

As cold baths are beneficial for aspiring strongmen, so are the metaphorical "cold baths" available to knowledge workers.

They are:

1. Making contact with customers on the front lines;
2. Stress-testing toy models (especially financial models) to assess your project's existential risks; and
3. Investing two hours of cross-functional team time quarterly into "uncovering the truth" regarding company performance over the past three months

These exercises may have an effect similar to that of submerging yourself in a tub of ice water: Initial shock and discomfort subside, and you benefit from a level of sobriety and focus that improves your decision-making, both in the moment and once you've exited the tub.

Periodic submersion is a prophylactic against magical thinking (e.g., that rational investors will accept free cash flows discounted into the 22nd century, that fixed costs do not matter, that your team's SaaS toy box is a substitute for sound strategic thinking).

Hope may be a virtue, but it is not a strategy. To stay focused and grounded, it is essential that all knowledge workers—and executives especially—make regular (and sometimes bone-chilling) contact with reality.

Heading to the front

I was extremely fortunate to start my career at Red Bull Media House , where I supported marketing and media teams with measurement tools that helped our most creative employees understand which of their experiments attracted the most attention.

North American HQ, located in beautiful Santa Monica, was not a typical work environment, to say the least: There was a skate ramp in the middle of the office. Celebrity athletes and musicians would stroll past our desks in the middle of the day, often on their way to the "high-performance gym," a space outfitted with expensive technology used by scientists and sports psychologists to help some of the most creative and innovative individuals of our day push the boundaries of human ability (e.g.,?skydive from space).

While the company's leadership intentionally made these spectacular (and capital-intensive) investments in marketing, company culture, and so forth, they also understood that it came with a risk of corporate employees becoming somewhat untethered from reality.

Pampered knowledge workers like me participated in an annual tradition called "BOGFO," which stands for "back office goes front office." For five days of the year, we arrived at distribution facilities across Los Angeles County, where we did 10–14-hour ridealongs with the men and women responsible for generating the last-mile revenue that paid our salaries. Each morning, at the crack of dawn, we would hop into Red Bull branded trucks and accompany our colleagues on their routes, helping stock thousands of cans at myriad points-of-sale: from family-owned bodegas in the San Fernando Valley to downtown Los Angeles's hottest nightclubs to gas stations along the PCH, where film industry execs filled up G Wagons on their way home to Malibu.

I found this profoundly sobering for two reasons:

1. I spent most of my days at HQ in the world of the Platonic forms, thinking in abstract terms about "awareness" and "reach" and statistical methods that we could use to link video views to drink consumption. But these exercises only mattered so far as they were useful, and they were useful so far as the flesh-and-blood people with whom I was interacting (e.g., my host, the c-store owners to whom he was selling, the construction worker in the Home Depot checkout line deciding between Red Bull and Monster) were moved to fulfill, demand, and consume ever greater volumes of this psychically charged liquid gold.
2. I had never really considered how much I relied on the arduous work of other people throughout the company—especially our BOGFO hosts—to pay my monthly rent. At one point, while shivering in the refrigerated soft drink section of a 7-Eleven, I worked through some back-of-the-envelope math in an attempt to figure out just how many cans of Red Bull needed to be stocked (every single one by human hands) to cover a three-hour brainstorming session between myself and two software engineers. (Somewhere around 1,000, IIRC.) That meant that for every hour I spent musing about strategy and building wireframes, my host would have to spend at least as much time doing the hard work of moving physical goods. This realization increased my awareness of the great expense of my privileged position and, once I returned, decreased my tolerance for any time wasted back at HQ.

Stress-testing models

A charismatic mission & product vision can be so compelling that company stakeholders forget to list and test their assumptions, kicking the can down the road with rounds of financing and ever-grander claims about the distant future world for which they are laying the foundation.

It takes tremendous talent to summon and harness this kind of energy, but it's equally important to acknowledge that—even in a superabundant world—individuals and teams are constrained, whether by time, money, talent, or (perhaps most importantly) market demand.

For a founder to accomplish her mission and manifest her vision, certain things?must be true?(h/t to master strategist Roger Martin ). With that in mind, it is therefore the duty of every knowledge worker, no matter his or her role in the organization, to take responsibility for the strategic considerations at their level of concern, articulate answers to the question of "What must be true?", prioritize contingencies according to the risk of failure introduced to the common objective if they are false, and reduce the uncertainty surrounding those risks with resourceful experimentation.

Founders, for example, can get started with a simple financial model, working backward from a desired end state through a series of critical questions:

1. How much annual net income must you generate to grow into your target valuation? (This may be a function of your ambition or necessitated by your investors' investors' requisite returns.)
2. What are the requisite SGA & R&D fixed costs, including your market salary?
3. How much gross profit would you need to generate to cover SGA & R&D?
4. How much should you expect to spend on marketing to generate marginal gross profits? (A 1:3 ratio is a good benchmark.)
5. What profit margins should you expect to generate from your core offering? (Products, services, and software all yield different margins.)
6. How many units of your core offering must you deliver to cover your fixed costs?
7. What annual growth rate would you need to achieve to hit these revenue targets?

Bonus points for asking, "Why should you expect to generate and maintain any market power at all?" There is a pervasive myth, propagated over the last two decades, that high-margin software businesses are necessarily durable (this myth has, through incredible feats of mental gymnastics, become inclusive of services businesses as well).

Beware! Long-term market power is elusive.

I am sympathetic to the idea that project outcomes are overly predetermined: Reality will or will not be receptive to the capital configuration necessary to manifest your vision. With that in mind, it behooves even (and especially) the most ambitious visionaries to acknowledge, articulate, and respect constraints—constraints one can encode into a coherent model and test before becoming overly committed to a capital-intensive course of action.

Reflecting quarterly

Outsized progress is a function of growth. Growth is a function of learning. Learning necessitates reflection.

When I work with clients to help them get their companies?across the metaphorical foggy river, I spend at least two hours every quarter with the executive team "uncovering the truth" regarding what the company did and did not accomplish in the context of their strategic intent.

By focusing executive attention on probing the gaps between where they wanted to be and where they arrived (note that these gaps might be well beyond their targets, which is both an achievement?and?an opportunity to generate insights!), they surface privileged information that they can invest into the next evolutionary stage of the company's strategy.

These actionable insights don't simply appear; they must be?unearthed. And, like the aforementioned financial modeling exercise, it has the effect of splashing everyone's face with cold water, waking the team up to not only?what must be the case?but, after three months of experimentation,?what is the case.

To level up, work with an instructor.

Sandow worked directly with pupils, many of whom attended his brick-and-mortar school. One of these pupils was Arthur Foulkes, who, in 1899, wrote in correspondence with Sandow:

Your system has certainly done me a lot good and freshened me up…Attending the school obviates three defects in working by yourself:—

(i.) You learn—not merely exercises—but the way to do them.

(ii.) You get an instructor who knows his work, and keeps you at yours.

(iii.) You are stimulated by seeing others working in the same room.

Sandow's strength-building system is simple. So, too, is the process of developing and implementing sound strategy. Team-wide, consistent production of high-quality knowledge work products—all aligned with the chief executives' strategic intent—is critical for company success. This approach requires rigor and discipline, which can be difficult to cultivate in an age of digital distraction.

If you want to learn "not merely exercises—but the way to do them" and keep yourself accountable for improving your technique, I recommend working with an instructor.

Like Sandow during his trip in Italy, I wondered why, despite our various technological advances, 21st-century knowledge workers aren't as focused as we could be; so, I began a long process of developing, testing, and iteratively improving my own methods for building and directing personal attention—all without chemical enhancement, save for a morning cup of coffee—and the collective attention of high-performing teams.

With OKRs and attention management techniques, I now help VC-backed founders, executives, and chiefs-of-staff get hyper-focused, reduce management overhead, and make outsized progress toward their long-term goals.

If you're interested in strengthening your mind, developing a sound strategy, and focusing your team's attention on what is vital for long-term success, consider signing up for a free consultation.

You can book a time for us to chat here.