How’s your engine running?

A few years into my solopreneur life, I quietly moved health from fourth to first on my list of values. Not because it mattered more than family, or kindness, or the work itself — but because everything else stops working when health stops working.

If I get sick, I can’t show up for my family the way I want to. I can’t stay focused, or curious, or patient. I can’t keep doing the podcast, the writing, the conversations. The whole thing falls apart if my body falls apart.

In a world that feels more uncertain by the year, I’ve come to think health is one of the most underrated forms of resilience. Quiet infrastructure. The thing nobody notices until it breaks.

For me, the practice is running. Not racing. Not Strava. Just a short loop, most mornings, with a pair of trainers and the same coach’s voice in my ears. This is about running. This is not about running. It’s the steadiest thing in my week, and it has stayed steady through every part of the journey that wasn’t — the layoff, the year my father got sick, the years the world shut down.

The reason I keep coming back to this isn’t personal. It’s what I see, again and again, in the people I sit across from on the podcast — in climate work, in social entrepreneurship, in the supporting professions where the work is mostly invisible until the person doing it disappears.

Brilliant, passionate people worked completely into the ground. Bodies that won’t listen. Minds too tired to think straight. Months and sometimes years to come back. And the difference for solopreneurs and supporters is that there is no one underneath us when we go down. We are the work. Without us, it stops.