26 at 40

Biological age and entrepreneurship.

There's a concept in gerontology called biological age. Your passport says 40. But your body, your lungs, your cardiovascular system, your muscle tissue, they say: you're 26. Or: you're 58. The difference is everything.

Peter Attia writes in Longevity how your biological age is determined by what you've done. Not by the years that have passed. Someone who has smoked for 30 years, sat a lot, eaten poorly and slept poorly, is biologically much older than 40. Someone who has moved for 40 years, eaten well, and slept regularly, is biologically much younger.

This touches something essential about entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is energy-draining. You need to wake up in the morning with the ability to solve new problems. You need to not be so exhausted at night that you can't make good decisions. You need to maintain the ability to push through setbacks over weeks and months.

Many entrepreneurs who start in their early thirties have the biological age of 50. They've spent years in stressful jobs. They've slept poorly. They've neglected their bodies. When they finally start their company, they've already depleted 70 percent of their energy reserves.

I see this reflected in DIP thinking. Designing inclusive production requires not just cleverness. It requires sustainability. It requires that you as designer, as entrepreneur, don't burn out. That you keep thinking. That you keep observing. That you keep experimenting.

If you're biologically twenty years older than your passport says, you don't sustain it long. You choose the easy answer. You doubt faster. You give up sooner.

The question isn't: how old are you? The question is: how many years of energy do you still have for this work? And that depends on everything except your birth date.

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Source: Peter Attia, Longevity (The Penguin Press, 2023)