My Five Year Plan — Part One

Last Friday, I was catching up on emails and a newsletter caught my eye.

Nikhil Krishnan’s Out of Pocket is an impeccably written healthcare column. In the latest issue, he publicly shares his long-term vision.

While it’s best practice to write transparently, few writers have fully pulled back the curtain on what their step-by-step game plan really looks like.

Put simply, Nikhil’s end goal is to be the “on-boarding system for people that aren’t in healthcare, want to go deeper into it, and continue to level up.”

Since launching The Proof, my long-term vision has slowly morphed into a similar goal: to become the on-boarding system for folks that don’t have their wellness habits in check, want to dive deeper into them, and continue to level up.

Two parts of Nikhil’s game plan immediately stood out to me, primarily because they’re identical to mine. In this essay, I’ll dive into the first.

Building the Foundation

When I moved to San Francisco in late May of 2018, I had no clue how to live, work, or socialize as an adult. Despite this fact, I was thrown into a 12-hour workday and expected to perform at the highest level. More importantly, I was also competing with every other junior VC in the Valley for the same outcome.

After a year of trial and error, I locked down a framework of flexible habits that allow me to execute consistently at a high level.

I developed a set of guardrails around sleep, diet, exercise, community, and mindfulness that I rely on to keep me healthy, happy, and sane.

Habits are important when life gets tough.

You don’t improve your daily routine for the warm summer months, when it’s easy to jump out of bed for a morning jog in the breezy June air.

You upgrade your habits for the times when you’re treading water with work and putting out fires all afternoon. So, when life gets rough around the edges, you can fall back and coast on your guardrails.

Launching a Wellness Course

Nikhil lays out his plan to build a 3-day intensive course around Out of Pocket.

"You can think of these as mini-bootcamps to learn how healthcare works, in conjunction with experts to talk through a specific part of healthcare,” he adds.

Similarly, the next phase of The Proof is a bootcamp-style course where folks can upgrade their core wellness habits paired with rapid feedback and expert advice.

Over the past few months, I keep returning to this question:

What does a high-performance wellness curriculum for elite knowledge workers look like in a digital age?

Upgrading Your Software

To put it bluntly, I’m building exactly what I wish existed when I was 22 — fresh out of college, alone in a new city, and barely keeping up with a new job.

I needed a bootcamp to upgrade my core operating system. However, I quickly realized that I couldn’t improve my wellness habits alone.

I needed a tribe, accountability, and a heightened pace to execute against.

Now, of course, you can find ways to fix insomnia on Google, improve your weight lifting routine on YouTube, or find a digital community of sorts on Reddit.

But will you put in the time to do that? Will those habits stick? Will you have a tribe to hold you accountable when life gets tough?

The answers to these questions are probably ‘no’. They were for me.

At the end of the day, I’m chasing a sense of clarity. A sense of coherence.

I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since San Francisco — and I want to share what I’ve learned with every other 22 year old that’s facing the same challenges.

If this happens to strike a nerve with you, let me know.

I’m definitely going to need some help.