Physical Wellness

I am a morning person. Always have been. I am out the door before the rest of the house wakes up, not because I have to be, but because that is when the world is quiet and that is one of my favorite things about running.

Most mornings I am out the door before the rest of the house wakes up. Because I know what happens if I don’t. The day fills up. The window closes. And the version of me who shows up for everything else… the work, the family, life — is a worse version than the one who got the run in.

So when researchers at the University of Sydney published a study analyzing nearly 60,000 people and concluded that tiny, combined improvements in sleep, movement, and nutrition could add a year or more to your life, I did not find it surprising.

The headline finding is this: you do not need to overhaul your life. Adding roughly five more minutes of sleep, two more minutes of exercise, and half a serving of vegetables each day, all three together, was enough to move the needle meaningfully on longevity. What made it resonate for me was the combination effect. To get the same benefit from exercise alone, you would need an extra 22 minutes a day. Small changes across three areas outperform a big change in one.

The researchers called it SPAN: Sleep, Physical Activity, and Nutrition. Their point was not that any single element is enough. It is that there is a unique connection between them. They work together in a way that none of them can replicate alone. Much like the four pillars.

This is not a message about optimization. The run you actually take at 5:45 a.m. is worth more than the perfect training plan you never start. The extra handful of vegetables is worth more than the supplement stack you researched for three hours. Small things you do consistently. Over time. That is what the data actually says.

Mental Wellness

I am not a big tennis fan, but I do know Roger Federer. Someone who has won nearly 80 percent of his singles matches. One of the greatest records in the history of professional tennis.

He also won only about 54 percent of the points he played.

This video recently popped up in my feed as I had been research graduation speeches lately. He addressed Dartmouth in 2024 and it is worth every minute of your time. Federer used that number to make an argument we should all hear. The margin between elite and ordinary is not domination. It is how quickly you let go, learn, and move on.

He said it plainly: in tennis, you have about 20 seconds between points. What separates the best players is not talent or fitness or even tactics. It is what they do with those 20 seconds. The ones who carry the last point into the next one, who drag frustration or overconfidence forward, lose that point before it even starts. The ones who learn to reset, quickly, give themselves a real chance.

This doesn’t work just in tennis or sports…it is a framework for life.

Most of us are not losing points in a Grand Slam final. We are losing a deal we thought we had. A job opportunity. A decision that did not land the way we hoped. A season of life that did not go according to plan. The losses are different but the question is the same: how long are you going to stand there holding it?

Federer’s answer is that the people who navigate hard things well are not the ones who avoid failure. They are the ones who accept it quickly, adjust, and walk back to the baseline ready to play the next point.

You will not win them all. No one does. Not even him.

The question is what you do in the 20 seconds after.

Financial Wellness

The Wall Street Journal ran a piece this week that aligned with all the recent headlines.

How Working in America Became So Joyless.

The story uses Dell charging employees for once-free office coffee as a symbol of something much bigger. A slow, cumulative stripping away of small human pleasures in the name of efficiency. Fewer perks. Bigger team loads. Closer monitoring. More pressure to prove value in the age of AI. And the result, according to workers across industries, is that office life has become something to endure rather than something we might enjoy or perhaps even invest in.

And it resonated for me…someone who spent 20+ years in the corporate environment.

Fifteen of those years were inside one of the best organizations in the financial services industry. Smart people. Mission-driven work. Real impact. And still, somewhere along the way, the experience of work started to feel more transactional and less human. More output-focused and less meaning-focused. More about demonstrating value and less about creating it.

That is not unique to any one company. It is a pattern. And the WSJ piece argues it is getting worse.

And when you dig into research you find people do not primarily leave jobs for money. They leave because they do not feel seen, because the work stopped meaning something, because the environment wore them down over time. Companies are cutting the coffee and wondering why the culture is gone.

But this is not just a leadership problem. It is a personal one too.

If you are spending the majority of your waking hours somewhere that is draining you, that is not a minor inconvenience. That is a quality of life issue. It shows up in your health, your relationships, your presence at home. Back to that 11% percent impacting your full life.

Work should not be joyless. If it is, that is worth paying attention to.

Spiritual Wellness

I have spent a lot of time in nature over the course of my life. The Cuyahoga River and CVNP at dawn. The trails throughout the west. The mountains. The desert. The beaches of Hawaii. Each one does something different to you. Each one has a way of making the things that feel so urgent less so.

And we again found this on our last few weeks in Hawaii. We were out on a boat off the coast of Hawaii, searching for sperm whales. The 12,000 that make the journey there every winter. And then they were there. Breaching. Moving through the water with a slow, deliberate movement. We watched them surface and disappear and surface again.

And then they dropped the mic in the water. We could hear them communicate — a language scientists are only beginning to decode. And their voices carry underwater for up to a thousand miles. 1,000 miles! A whale off the coast of one island can be in conversation with a whale it will never see, across an ocean that dwarfs anything we can actually hold in our minds.

I stood on that boat and felt very small. Not just in comparison to the size of that mammal in the water, but in the way that is actually good for you.

Research from the University of Wisconsin confirms something people who spend time in nature have always known: that encounters with the natural world activate something in us that is hard to name and harder to replace. The researchers describe it as the soul’s encounter with something larger than itself. A sense of connection that deepens both spirituality and wellbeing in ways that no indoor practice fully replicates.

I believe that. It is something I have gotten from nature over 20 years. We spend so much of our lives operating as if we are the main event. As if the inbox and the meeting and the quarterly number are what the world is organized around. And then you go stand somewhere big enough: the valley, the mountains, the open ocean and the world reminds you that it was here long before you arrived and will be here long after.

For me it is a freeing thought. And one that I want to pass along. Go find something bigger than yourself this week. It does not have to be a whale with a fin the size of a car in your driveway. It just has to be something that makes you remember how large the world actually is.

And In The End

From all of us at The 9:03 Collective: thanks for reading. Keep showing up. Stay curious. And never forget that the clock is running, so make it count.

If you’ve been enjoying Four Pillar Friday, the best way to support is simple: share it with a friend, forward it to someone who might need it, or subscribe if you haven’t already. The more people we reach, the more conversations we can spark about living with intention.

Until next week—keep building your moments.

The Journey Team & The 9:03