Colin Darretta

Colin is the CEO and Co-Founder of Innovation Department, a holding company building the next generation of wellness brands that matter. Their first two brands, WellPath and Finn, sell hundreds of thousands of products a year.

On his morning routine.

I’ve conditioned myself to wake up between 5.30 and 6:00 AM without the help of an alarm — though I do have the Philips alarm that simulates the rising sun as an emergency measure set for 6:15. 

The first thing I do is make some decaf coffee, put on my AirPods, and listen to an audiobook while I go about brushing my teeth, washing my face and all the other standard “get yourself together” stuff.

After that, I’ll prep my smoothie and fire up Duolingo on my laptop to go through some french lessons as a brain stretch, followed by physically stretching. 

Then I do my journaling, jotting down my wins from the preceding days, three life affirmations, three gratitude items, and my three personal and professional goals that will make each day a success.

Clearly, I like things in threes. 

Then, I’ll drink my smoothie, which is arguably the most important part of my morning routine,  and head off to the gym.

On his supplement regimen.

Right now, I take around 25 to 30 pills a day. 

My non-negotiables that I suggest for anybody is a great probiotic - I use Seed, a high-quality krill oil, and liquid Vitamin D. For anyone interested in longevity I suggest NMN or NAD+. On top of that for hormone optimization I do liquid boron, stinging nettle extract, and DIM. 

For those who are just getting into wellness, it’s important to remember that supplementation is all predicated on first having a great diet.

The easiest level up for most people is to turn an oftentimes unhealthy breakfast into a smoothie, considering that making a good breakfast is one of the hardest things to do. 

Most cereals are terrible for you. Bagels are worse. Waffles and pancakes are effectively deserts. 

Instead, for a quick upgrade, you can make a smoothie with some frozen veggies and fruits like broccoli, spinach, and blueberries and throw in a scoop of a high-quality vegan meal replacement powder like the one we make at WellPath or Ka’chava’s which is terrific as well.

On sustaining discipline.

I don’t think we should live our lives without any sort of vice.

Certain vices can lead to the sort of pleasure that is probably a net positive in our lives, so I believe everyone should have a vice or two, but it’s important to be measured and earn your bad behavior.

Everyone’s going to have that one thing that might not add value to their health and wellbeing, but it still brings you a source of joy.

Taking pleasure seriously is important.

Be it getting a bit drunk upon occasion, having an active social life, or playing video games for 10 hours straight once every few months, no one should feel terribly guilty about that when done in real moderation. That is, provided that you are spending the other 90% of your life diligently.

Truly, having an occasional outlet for a little bit of bad behavior shouldn’t be something you punish yourself over. 

In fact, my wanting to justify my few vices makes me more diligent in every other aspect of my life. The way that I maintain my health is through routine and creating good habits. The key to habit-building is breaking new behaviors down into their component pieces.

It’s far easier to build and sustain good habits so long as you’re not trying to create a bunch of them all at the same time.

I’ve focused on stacking small habits on top of one another over the course of many years, so now my days feel jarring if I break my routine. Ultimately it means I spend the majority of my day conforming to a specific program of exercise, diet, and work. This is what helps me rationalize the occasions when I want to break my routine and go out and have five glasses of mezcal with friends.

On maintaining friendships.

When I started at Goldman right out of college, there was this perception that you had your colleagues and your friends, but the two could never be the same.

There are so many successful people in the world of finance who lived two separate lives and it worked for them, but it wasn’t for me.

I’m fortunate that I work every day with some of my best friends and have found many opportunities to invest in and advise others. If you’re able to work with your friends it makes every day immensely more pleasurable.

I try to be pretty consistent about who I am with the people I work with as well as my friends outside the office.

One of the reasons I’ve loved being an entrepreneur is the opportunity to help create a culture where that’s commonplace. I never want anybody to feel like who they are at the office is not representative of who they are outside of it. 

Broadly, I generally try to surround myself with people who accept me for the fact that I do contain what might otherwise be considered contradictory aspects to my personality. I’m an entrepreneur who likes to alternate between reading finance and fantasy, loves going to Burning Man and investment conferences, is curious about a bunch of industries from e-commerce, SaaS to cybersecurity.

None of these things need to be mutually exclusive, though sometimes societally we’re led to believe that they must be.

On protecting relationships.

This is something I try to continuously improve on.

This might seem a little absurd, but I have a list of around 25 people that I want to spend more quality time with.

I track when I last saw them and when I last spoke to them. Texting doesn’t count. By using this format, not a month goes by without me not speaking to at least a few of them.

Even though it doesn’t count as an official conversation in my tracking sheet, I do try to touch almost everyone each month at least via email or text. 

Unless you make a conscious effort to talk to that close tribe, it’s just not going to happen. You need to be proactive.

A mistake I made was letting my ambitions get the better of me and not putting enough time into the personal relationships that I had cultivated. The more success I’ve been fortunate to have the more I have realized that those personal relationships will ultimately be the source of some of the greatest joy in my life, generally more so than simply hitting that next metric milestone. 

You have to be intentional with relationships and not let them take second fiddle to everything else in your life.

On winding down at night.

Living and working in my apartment has made the distinction between work and everything else much more fluid. 

I’ll usually start shutting off from work between 7 and 8 PM. If I’m not going out to dinner with someone, I’m usually in bed by 9:30 at the latest.

That gives me an hour and a half before bed to decompress, either by making some dinner, watching a documentary, reading, or pretty much anything that pulls my mind away from the myriad work issues that otherwise will run wild.  Sometimes I’ll do an evening workout though never within two hours of bed.

I try to really focus on unwinding by the time 8.30 comes around because I have a hard time sleeping if my mind is hyperactive.

My biggest solve is fiction, either fantasy or sci-fi. Something totally speculative and with no obvious tether that’ll drag me back into thinking about work.

On the sleep side, I’m really focused on improving my sleep quality. I gamify the whole process with my Oura ring and have incorporated many of Matthew Walker’s sleep tips from Why We Sleep. 

The best things I’ve found are a warm shower 30 minutes before bed, using a hardback book for reading rather than a kindle, using an Ooler generally to cool my mattress down to around 67 degrees, using white noise to drown out the New York pandemonium and taking two pills of ZMA about an hour before bed.