Optimizing for a Better Life
[Music]
my journey
began with that question
how can i maximize my performance
while living this healthy
happy balanced life
i discovered i was asking the wrong
question
at hintsa performance our mission is to
help people live better lives and
consequently
perform better the company was actually
originally founded by my father dr
akinsa
about 20 years ago
my father was an orthopedic surgeon
fascinated by the capacity and the
adaptability
of the human mind and body
he was also a little bit crazy
about sports
he originally developed the hensa
philosophy in ethiopia
where our family lived in the 1990s
my father worked there as a missionary
doctor
but during our time there he also got to
work with
elite athletes long distance runners
for those of you who didn’t guess that
he worked with some of the best runners
in the world including hilah gabriel
celestia
he got to watch these runners train
he actually went training with them once
apparently he didn’t last that long
he watched him prepare for races win a
lot of races
but also face some setbacks
around the athens olympics hylo was
having issues with his
achilles tendon and it turned out he had
to be operated
so he flew to finland with my father
now my father was rarely nervous
but that was a pretty
high-stakes achilles tendon
what haila told him that day
stayed with my father for a really
really long time
he said doctor don’t worry
it’s just running
host her for a second one of the best
long distance runners of all time
about to get into an operation tells the
surgeon
doctor chill out it’s just running
running was hailey’s passion but his
identity
and his life was much much more than
that
based on his experiences in africa my
father developed a model that he would
then adapt to other sports
most notably formula one
to date hinsa drivers have won
a total of 14 driver championships
and 96 of the podium places in the past
five seasons
in finland we call that an okay result
we’ve learned something in sports
but today most of our clients
come from very very different
backgrounds
musicians politicians entrepreneurs
business professionals thousands of them
they come to us with that same question
how can i maximize my performance
while you know not sacrificing
everything
else
my father would tell them
optimize don’t maximize
many of us live unconsciously or
consciously in a way where we try and
maximize
every single area of our lives
we have demanding jobs and
it’s getting harder and harder
our work is more fragmented and more
fast paced than ever
an average office worker is interrupted
every 11 minutes
we check our smartphones every 6 minutes
and then after a long day at work we
come back home
and we want to be the parents or the
partners
or like the people that
our families and loved ones deserve
in our free time we run marathons
or do triathlons or crossfit
we climb mountains we play in a band
we study japanese or chinese or
python
we build our professional brand on
linkedin and
then we do these ted talks that’s by the
way
all stuff i’ve done
it doesn’t take you an expert to tell
that this
is unsustainable
when november morning about seven years
ago
my world went black i was
running down the stairs when i fainted
i rolled down the staircase woke up at
the bottom of it
with my head bleeding my first reaction
oh my god where’s my laptop
i realized i needed help
i was working for a global management
consultancy at the time and
you know what i actually loved my job it
was exciting
it was fun it took me to crazy places i
got to work with really cool people and
solve
super complex problems
the downside was that i was sleeping on
average
four to six hours per night on work days
and you know desperate to recover it
over the weekend
i would you know run marathons before
now my exercise consisted from you know
running from one airport terminal to the
other with my luggage
my diet was the contents of a minibar
i did a thorough benchmarking study and
found out snickers bars was the best
there was
that’s not an ad by the way nothing paid
there
i wasn’t feeling super well
in fact i wasn’t really feeling much at
all
this is me nine months after my burnout
i’m running in the desert i have
12 kilos in my back and 250 kilometers
to go
it was my first ultramarathon
i finished but
more incredibly i was back at work
with the same employer working full-time
and i was really really happy
so what changed i wasn’t aware of using
any hints
methodologies but i did call my father
and we had a chat
he introduced me to the model
that he called circle of better life
it’s a holistic model of human health
and well-being
consisting of six elements in the outer
circle
physical activity which is more than
just
exercise it’s your daily activity
nutrition which is
well always individual but
there are certain basic rules which if
we
all of eight would probably be feeling
much much better
sleep and recovery is as much about the
nighttime
recovery as it is about the daytime
recovery
and i think i’m not wrong to say that
there seems to be a little bit of an
epidemic
around that element
biomechanics is a guy that looks like
he’s doing yoga
it’s actually linked to one of the
leading causes of absenteeism
lower back pains musculoskeletal issues
incredibly important for athletes as
well
mental energy is the element that i
find really interesting it’s
basically our capacity to deal with our
daily life and environment
mental energy is about identifying what
gives you energy and what drains your
energy
and coming up with strategies to manage
your energy throughout the day
finally there’s general health which is
basically the outcome of your decisions
of the choices that you make
in all of those other elements it’s
interconnected
if one of the parts is of balance the
system breaks down
it doesn’t function optimally
in the middle you have the core
the core is what drives you
it’s what you’re really optimizing for
it also had the biggest impact on my
recovery
my father broke down a core into three
questions
do you know who you are do you know what
you want
and are you in control of your life
really hard questions
what are the things that you value in
life
who are the people that you value
are you living your life spending your
time and your energy according to those
values
what are your long-term goals i mean
you’re
working really hard climbing up that
ladder but
was that even the latter that you meant
to climb
maybe you wanted to build your own
and then finally who controls your life
what are the things in your life that
you can and on the other hand
cannot impact
i returned to work with a different
agenda
i was reminded of the reasons i joined
that company in the first place
and i was more aware of the things i was
no longer willing to compromise
i also had a key realization
better life leads to better performance
it’s not something you try and maintain
or achieve on the side
it’s the foundation for sustainable high
performance
now the science behind this is actually
really really interesting
for decades we’ve known that athlete
performance
is closely linked to their training load
to their recovery
nowadays we’re actually able to measure
the impact
of your work style and your lifestyle on
your cognitive performance
we can see the impact of your sleep of
your physical activity
of how you structure your day how you
switch off
on your creativity on your ability to
solve complex problems
on critical thinking on collaboration
connecting with other people emotional
intelligence empathy
all of these are unique human skills and
those unique human skills are becoming
increasingly important
as our lives and our work changes
optimizing for a better life begins by
identifying
the gaps that you have across those
elements identifying the biggest levers
for a change
setting yourself some goals identifying
your boundaries
but ultimately it is about small things
done consistently well
it’s about your daily habits
and optimizing an environment to support
those habits
we all know that one person who seems to
have everything under control
in reality the people who seem to have
the best self-control
actually deployed the least
instead they modify their environment to
avoid having to make self-control
decisions in the first place
can be small things like you know having
that water bottle next to you
or getting your gym gear ready for the
morning
for me personally it was about sleep i
mentioned earlier i was sleeping on
average four to six hours per night
now i would of course like you to think
that that was because i was working so
hard
the truth is i was stuck on social media
all my friends were asleep when i got
home from work so i would you know
stalk them on facebook nowadays
it’s netflix i get back home from work
and i’d like to watch an episode or show
to relax and detach i watch the show
and you know by the end of it in the
bottom right hand corner
there is that little thing that says
next episode starts
in three two one
and suddenly you lost two hours of sleep
and there’s also that you know skip
intro to make it even easier
i’m gonna let you in a little secret it
is
possible to turn off
autoplay
and if you’re like me you delete the app
and you encrypt your passwords
sustainable change is about modifying
your environment
creating an environment to support
change making the
good decisions a little bit easier to do
and the bad decisions a little bit
harder to do
that being said progress is never linear
eight percent of the people actually
achieve their new year’s resolutions
why life happens
and hence that we talk about four modes
in the normal mode
we try and make the right decision most
of the time
however sometimes we’re on mission
it can be a tight deadline or a project
for the parents of young children it can
be a baby
in mission mode what we do is we define
the minimum we’re not willing to
compromise
and we implement hacks to stay afloat
if you can’t get eight hours of sleep
take a power nap
if you can’t get to the gym get off the
bus a few steps earlier
and walk to rest
the important thing to remember is that
your mission mode
should not become your normal mode
and it should be always followed by
recovery
our brains and our bodies need daily
recovery it’s when our muscles grow
but it’s also when our brains
consolidate memories
create connections come up with new
ideas
idle time is not waste of time
finally there is renewal
renewal is moments like these it’s when
you step back
it’s when you reflect on those harder
questions
what are you really optimizing for and
are you headed in the right direction
better life leads to better performance
it’s not something you maintain on the
side it’s the foundation
for sustainable high performance
it’s the outcome of the small things
done consistently well
and that being said none of us is
perfect
but like my father used to say we can
all try to be
a little bit better one day at a time
thank you