Finding Balance

In the last few years, I've been on my Captain Planet shit, dedicating my time and energy to better the world. Unfortunately, I've been doing so while neglecting my health to the point that I risked my own world falling apart. Throughout my life, I've incurred many injuries playing high-impact sports (like football, rugby, boxing, parkour, snowboarding etc); I've diminished my overall health with poor diet and nutrition; and I've ignored lingering issues despite having excellent health insurance. Instead of working on my own health issues, I was more invested in helping billions of people around the world by committing my career to fixing humanity's grandest challenges; many of which my family experienced firsthand, including homelessness, food insecurity, civil war, and much more. It's ironic now that my ability to achieve my ambitious goals is being hindered by my physical and mental health. Fuck my life, I needed to find a better balance…

An unsustainable approach

My own family was once homeless in Nigeria, and I almost died multiple times due to an array of social, economic, and environmental issues that we encountered there. Fast forward to 2018, while working at Twitter, I spent all my free time exploring how I could leverage my unique skills and interests to address humanity's grandest challenges. I was particularly obsessed with the overarching obstacle of combatting our interconnected web of social, economic, and environmental issues, while balancing the contradictions, tradeoffs, and synergies across them.

In July of 2020, motivated by this civilizational quest, I quit my job to go work for the UN. I turned in my badge and gun (laptop) a week after being promoted, and at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, the George Floyd protests, and an unprecedented unemployment crisis. Admittedly, this wasn't the greatest self-preservation instinct, but I couldn't NOT do it.

Since then, I've been 'climbing this mountain' and it's come at great sacrifice for my mind and body. Fortunately, I've now reached a milestone on this mountain where I'm well positioned to address global issues at scale, however, I'm now being limited by the health issues that I've been ignoring on the way up here. Turns out, I've been taking an unsustainable approach to purse sustainability. Fucking ironic.

Prioritizing personal longevity

Funny enough, as a former athlete, I'm quite big into health and fitness, however without a sports team or fitness program, I lacked the consistency to do my physical therapy and take my meds. As I've come to find, I've been spending all my intrinsic motivation 'budget' on my career goals, such that I had little left over to prioritize my health. With that epiphany, I'm finally drawing a line in the sand to prioritize my health, so I can improve my overall quality of life and longevity, and thus ensuring I can keep pursing this journey for as long as I can. As it urns out, for a weirdo like me, bettering the lives of others is an excellent source of extrinsic motivation to take care of myself.

In recent weeks, I've gotten various evaluations across all my health areas and have developed strategies to address the issues I've uncovered. From now on, I'll be getting out of bed to sustain my health program first, before working on anything else. This is me putting on my oxygen mask before helping others; and I think we can all benefit from doing that.

Inspiring others

Here on my personal site and across the web, I'll be sharing some of my health issues, as well as my goals, strategies, and ongoing progress across each of them. I’m sharing all this for 3 reasons:

1. To get your support, feedback, and accountability - that sweet, extrinsic motivation I desperately need.

2. To illustrate the parallels and connections between the human body and our environment, and

3. To inspire others to pursue global sustainability and do so within personal longevity

Despite how challenging it is, this journey is a marathon not a sprint, and no one should have to kill themselves today to safeguard tomorrow; take it from me. The only way we can achieve our sustainability is working together as teams and communities - indeed, it's the only way to ensure our longevity in these unprecedented times.

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