The Key to Long-Term Entrepreneurial Success

Entrepreneurs have many names: hustlers, founders, tech founders, business owners, bosses or moguls are just a few that are commonly used to name the bold. But what does it mean to be an entrepreneur? As seen through the lives of many prominent entrepreneurs, the journey to becoming a successful millionaire or billionaire is not for the faintest of heart. The most basic guidelines of an entrepreneur involves the courage to take on risks and the willingness to live a life of uncertainty. These are the basic qualifications to become the next Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos, moguls of their respective industries who started off their journey like any ordinary citizen, but took a risk and a big step forward toward their dream to be where they are currently standing in society today. Simply stated, an entrepreneur is any individual with a strong passion, a vision, and a dream, who is not afraid to take on the challenges, risks, or obstacles along the way until they reach their goal. 

What comes after the fundamental foundations of an entrepreneur is the creation of a vision. A journey cannot begin without an end goal in sight. Strengthened by ambition and determination, entrepreneurs are the people who are unafraid to take on the financial risks that go in hand with the opening, operating, and managing of a business. They must be fearless of failure and stand strong under stress when taking on the challenges that it may present. To be an entrepreneur means taking on a mission, taking risks and overcoming obstacles to create something new and creating a new self. This mission may take years or even decades and living a life long career of fatigue and anxiety is not for everyone, though we all seek to follow the footsteps of successful entrepreneurs such as Apple’s Steve Jobs, and Microsoft's Bill Gates. They are the prime examples of what a successful entrepreneur looks like, and the prime example of what success looks like in the flesh. Realistically, not everyone reaches that level of success, so we must ask the question, what are the benefits of succumbing to such a life of fear and anxiety? To be like the successful members of society listed above is one reason, but another is freedom. Freedom in all aspects: financial freedom, personal freedom, social freedom, freedom to start a family, the freedom to chase your own goals and the freedom to never again achieve someone else’s dream in a 9-5 career, but rather give yourself the freedom to do anything you want to because you are responsible for yourself. As Sigmund Freud famously said in Civilization and Its Discontents, “Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.”

To achieve the goals of a successful entrepreneur, health is everything. Your performance is based upon your mood, which is based upon your health. To achieve long term success as an entrepreneur, success revolves around the optimization of the mind, body, spirit, and environment, the very embodiment of biohacking. Biohacking serves as an avenue to make you the strongest person you can be, to achieve the highest level of a healthy mind, body, and spirit that results in augmented mood and performance. Health is the pinnacle of success in this area of expertise, and those who learn to optimize their health gains the keys to entrepreneurial success. Every entrepreneur must have 5 qualities: 

- Ability to determine your mission and end goal 

- Ability to always believe in your ideas

- Ability to always work hard

- Ability to be resistant to stress

- Ability to never give up

All of these abilities begin with taking control of the high level of resources in the body and using them to optimize your strengths and strengthen your weaknesses. Overtime, diseases and long term fatigue may threaten to undermine your achievements and weaken your spirit, and as entrepreneurs it is essential to always be strong and resilient and never give up. As time passes, biohacking helps you to be persistent in your goals, and resistant to any diseases of the mind and body, fatigue, anxiety, or stress that may come your way to impede your journey to success. 

On this long journey, challenges will always present themselves when taking on the burdens of business, obstacles will stand in the way, adversaries will be met, and it may come to a point where the mind becomes a self inflicted prison of mentality that one must break through to climb over the tallest of obstacles. The build up of burden battering down is bound to take a heavy toll on a person’s wellbeing, mentality, body, and mind creating the high likelihood of burning out the body and mind. Burnout has serious health consequences that can be devastating in the long term effects on the physical body. Accompanied by the potential for chronic stress and the constant anxiety over financial burdens coupled with constant fatigue is all part of the years long journey to achieving freedom and independence from societal norms. Similar to a rechargeable battery, biohacking helps to renew human capabilities and revitalize the spirit, jolting us with renewed confidence and energy. It is what we do to combat these negative and detrimental effects that is important. Success is not given, it is earned, through time and the ability to jump over endless hurdles in order to reach that final destination. 

Like a lock and key, biohacking fits perfectly into the grooves of the lock of entrepreneurship that together opens the secrets of success that entrepreneurship seeks to give, and fulfills the purpose of the creation of biohacking. Biohacking solves the riddles of burning out and prevents such disastrous effects from affecting the body, placing a shield between the body and the suffocating coils of burnout. Simply put, biohacking is made for entrepreneurs. It will optimize your performance and allow you to perform at your very best for many years. All in the name of achieving maximized human performance and startup success, when under the burdens of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurs must pay special attention to 10 essential biohacks summarized by Tim Gray, Founder of the Health Optimisation Summit:

 - Optimized Sleep

- Optimized Grounding

- Optimized Hydration (minerals)

- Optimized Oral Health

- Optimized Liver & Digestion

- Optimized Sunlight Exposure / Vitamin D & K

- Optimal Exercise

- Clean and Optimized Diet

- Optimal Oxygen Control (Breathing techniques)

- Intermittent Fasting

The level of personal development of your mind, body, and spirit has a profound influence on your business and the people around you. The aura that emits from your daily life choices to the kind of lifestyle you live all contribute to the success of your startup. 

For expert advice and real world application, we turn to Boomer Anderson, CEO of Decoding Superman, an expert biohacker and self proclaimed “health optimization muse” who works with entrepreneurs all around the world, dedicated to helping them perform their best. Boomer understands the importance of entrepreneurial work and its ability to change the world through the businesses they create and the people they affect. Boomer strongly states that it all comes down to the breakdown of what typical life of an entrepreneur looks like. Oftentimes there is not enough time to accomplish every task, and they dedicate their lives to solve a particular problem or capture a particular opportunity in the world. They are so motivated to the point where they begin to sacrifice important aspects of their life such as health. Biohacking can be implemented in a multitude of ways within their lives to ensure that their environment is one that ultimately serves them rather than hinders them. According to Boomer, he suggests these essential biohacks for everyday practice: 

- Gratitude Journal / Journal - Write down 3 things that you are grateful for every single day or keep a journal for writing down thoughts that float through your mind 

- Limit your inputs - Decrease the amount of inputs you are exposed to every day

- Meditation - Necessary and useful tool to pick up in order to alleviate stress

- Go out into nature - Exposure to nature reduces cortisol that is always high in entrepreneurs

- Proper breathing control - Implementing proper breathing techniques allows you to manipulate your own nervous system

- Sunlight Exposure - Exposure to daily sunlight and Vitamin D is essential for mood control 

- Exercise - Daily movement is important for a healthy lifestyle

- Relaxation - Taking the time to calm down and relax is crucial to prevent stress

Before anything is implemented, Boomer believes that rigorous amounts of upfront measurements and analysis is critical in the beginning. Taking a step back to properly analyze and measure your own unique bodies requires putting on a different set of lenses that allows you to look and think about your bodies differently. Every part of the body is interconnected as a network, while also acting as a line of dominos. If one falls, the rest of the pieces fall that results in the downfall of your body. Taking the time to find that one faulty domino who threatens the rest of the body saves both time and energy and ensures optimal performance. By individually assessing each part of your body, it allows entrepreneurs who are already time constrained to be even more effective by giving them the ability to determine what exactly they should focus on because it is different for every entrepreneur. This allows them to be even more effective and allows them to control their resources more efficiently, allowing for nothing to be wasted and giving them the ability to immediately find a solution for what is negatively affecting them, whether it be nutrition, abundance of stress, lack of exercise, lack of sleep, or any number of factors. The first step begins with self analysis. 

Boomer Anderson will be one of our great speakers at our next BiohackingCongress, Virtual Edition, to share amazing tips and advice on how to biohack for entrepreneurs. Join us on July 17th and ask your questions to our speakers live here https://biohackingcongress.com/Congress/Virtual/071720

Biohacking is the step by step process from measurement, to setting personal health goals, and lastly tracking the results through active changes. Entrepreneurship is no different, from the realization of wanting change in your life, to setting a business goal, to the active process of achieving that goal. Entrepreneurship requires independence, self reliability, mental fortitude, self care, physical and mental strength, and a resilience to succeed and stand strong in the face of adversity and to overcome the struggles that come with the title of entrepreneur. Through the techniques of biohacking, it promotes success and encourages entrepreneurs everywhere to take a chance at finding freedom in life and achieving what was previously unattainable without the cost of their health. While it may be a risk, it may be a worthwhile investment worthy of your time and energy. You never know where it will take you until you take that first step forward.  

Author: Allen Sun

Design: Marina Sagan

Editor: Julia Smila & Mick Safron

References:

TheBioHacker: “Biohacking for Entrepreneurs”

Inc.: “What You Need to Know About Biohacking” 

Raj Singh: How Entrepreneurs Can Biohack their Way to Better Results”

Special thanks for comments to Boomer Anderson and Tim Gray.