Are we really taking care of the fundamentals, day in and day out?

I recently listened to an episode of the Rich Roll Podcast about the whole wellness and biohacking movement. Rich Roll is an exceptional athlete himself — someone who knows what he is talking about when it comes to peak performance. The tone, accordingly, wasn't mocking but almost worried, close to a warning: much of that movement has a single purpose, which is to separate you from your money. A measurable effect on performance, by contrast, is the rare exception. If anything, the opposite.

Ice baths, red light, saunas, the foam roller, twelve-step morning routines timed to the minute — all of it eats time. And time, as we know, is what we have least of. Every hour that goes into an elaborate wellness routine is an hour that doesn't go into what actually moves the needle: the fundamentals.

Take preparing for an Ironman. The lever that really counts is zone 2 training — hours upon hours of mind-numbingly boring base work. Not the hour on the foam roller afterwards. Some of the wellness gadgets may well add a little something, I won't dispute that. But there are no shortcuts: without the hours of base training, even the most elaborate scaffolding around it gets you nowhere. The question worth asking is always the same: does this have a real, measurable effect on performance — or does it just feel good to be doing something?

A look at the very top

A good reality check: what do the best in the world actually do? What does an Olympian's day really look like — training, nutrition and everything else?

Very few of them are hooked on biohacking gadgets. Most spend the bulk of their time on the fundamentals. And here is the interesting part: professional athletes, of all people, are the ones who would have the time and the means to try every wellness gadget on the market. They still don't — or only at the margins. They would rather invest the time where it actually pays off.

That is the moral of the story: the better someone is in their field, the more strictly they stick to the fundamentals. Not the other way round.

The sales version of the biohacking trap

In business — and in sales especially — it plays out much the same way. In the end one unshakeable truth applies: nothing has happened until something has been sold. Which means every resource and every activity has to pay into exactly that goal. Everything else is nice to have, or simply a distraction.

And yet in sales we love to put off the things with the biggest impact, which are often the most uncomfortable ones too — the classic “eat the frog”. Rather than call the customer, we give that particularly fancy email one more pass. Rather than seek out the conversation that might get awkward, we optimise the pitch deck for the fifth time, try out a new CRM feature or polish the social media presence. All things that feel productive — and rarely the things that actually bring the deal closer.

It is the biohacking equivalent in business: activity instead of productivity.

Why this happens

Day to day, under pressure, you drift almost automatically away from the strenuous fundamentals and towards whatever feels more pleasant in the moment. That isn't a matter of poor discipline but of energy budget: the customer call takes an effort of will, the email doesn't. So you do the email.

And that is where the real problem sits: comfort activity and impact activity are rarely the same thing. The more stressed or stretched you are, the further you drift towards comfort.

What leadership is for

Which is why one of the central jobs of management is to steer the focus back to the fundamentals again and again — and I mean genuinely again and again. Not mention it once at the kickoff meeting and hope it sticks, but make it routine, keep it visible and measurable. Don't count the polished emails, count the conversations held. Don't ask what the deck looks like, ask who got called today.

At the same time, that means leadership shouldn't crank up the stress and pressure on people any further than necessary. Everyone has a limited capacity to carry stress, and it should be spent on the work with the customer — in the conversation, in the sale, where it achieves something. Not internally, inside the team, through unnecessary pressure from above.

Otherwise exactly what happens in the wellness business happens here: plenty of activity, plenty of equipment, plenty of good feeling, and hardly any effect on what actually counts.

Good question…

Are we really taking care of the fundamentals, day in and day out? Not: have we ticked them off once. But: are we genuinely staying with them, day after day? Or have we long since become more occupied — in sport as in business — with everything around the work than with what actually makes the difference?