The Greatest Gift You Can Give Others

Here’s a practical application of second-order thinking in our personal lives: the greatest gift you can offer your loved ones is your own good health.

We often work tirelessly to provide for our families or to pursue our dreams, but in doing so, it’s easy to neglect our well-being. The result is more harm than good since everything is connected.

If you get sick, not only would you be miserable, unproductive, and burnt out (remember trying to work through a bad flu?), it’s painful for your friends and family to watch and extremely time consuming to care for you.

Younger people in particular tend to overlook their health due to their vitality. They lack an alarm system alerting impending long-term consequences. One of my friends was “too busy” firefighting at work every day, so she neglected her oral hygiene until she needed a painful root canal at age 26. Imagine her condition by age 50 or even 70!

Another friend developed back issues from lack of exercise and poor posture hunched over in the office for years. His spine was akin to an 80-year-old at just age 34. He couldn’t move for over a week and required steroid shots just to get out of bed without screaming in excruciating pain. I took him twice to the ER. This too was hard to watch and each hospital visit took out half of my day.

Then there’s my dad who’s never been the paragon of health, being the the frailest among seven siblings and born with a weak lung. Yet he’s outlived most of his family through meticulous care for his body - simple diet, regular check-ups, stress management - making him still very active going onto 80.

He's not only doing this for himself, but also for me and my mom. He acknowledges that if he falls ill, I’ll have take time out from building my career to focus on taking care of him. I’d gladly do it, but he hates feeling like a liability.

This is his own brand of self-reliance and independence. Not in the brazen “my way or the high way” way, but understanding that his actions send ripples across all those connected to him.

Back to our original premise: why is this second order thinking? Because it requires you to understand how you fit into a broader system, think through the “then what happens” scenarios, and gauging whether your actions are actually accomplishing your original purpose.

In this case, it’s the long term enjoyment and progress of our work and the quality of life of our loved ones.

That’s what us system thinkers call a feedback loop. I don’t think I have to draw a mind map to convey it because the idea is very simple, but we miss it all the time.

It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take risks and stretch yourself. It just means injecting an additional layer of thought into how you want to play the long game. Your objective is to win the war, not just the short term battle.

Here’s one question I’ll leave you with:

What’s one small change you can make this week to improve your long-term health and sustainability?

For me that’s having a nonnegotiable work shutdown by 7pm and going for a post-dinner walk with my wife Olivia. This simple routine has done wonders for my happiness, relationship, physical and mental health, which all contribute to sustainable productivity for the long hull.

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