The Centenarian Olympics

Doctor Peter Attia, author of Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity, has a simple but powerful approach to helping his patients get the most of their final decades.

Instead of focusing on lab results or workout plans, he begins at the end. He asks his patients to imagine the final decade of their life and select the activities they still want to be capable of doing.

Examples might include:

• Picking up their grandchildren

• Carrying groceries up a flight of stairs

• Running through an airport to catch a flight

• Getting up off the floor unassisted

These aren’t abstract health goals but functional outcomes.

From there, Attia works backward.

Picking up a two-year-old grandchild?

That’s similar to a 30-pound goblet squat.

If you’re 60 and that’s important to you at 80, then what must be true today?

Probably that you can comfortably squat more than that now, say 50 pounds for example to account for aging, injuries, and the fact that progress is never linear.

The insight is simple but profound:

For your future to exist as you want, what needs to be true today?

This same logic applies to building a business.

Whatever the vision for your business might be, what needs to be true now for your vision to come to fruition?

The following are five practices to help you prepare for the business future you imagine.

The Five Practices

1: Be Patient With Outcomes

Be impatient with effort but patient with results.

Results always takes longer than you think.

• Hiring

• Product development

• Sales cycles

• Product market fit

• Obtaining financing

Our forecasts are not only optimistic but overly precise.

We plan as if:

• Product timelines will never overrun

• Our target customers will be easy to find

• Investors will show up before we need them

None of that is true.

Backward thinking forces you to add a buffer.

If you want, for example:

• $5 million in revenue in three years

• Removed from personally running the day-to-day operations within the year

• To raise growth capital in six months

Double your efforts but think through what you would do if anyone of them took six months or more longer to achieve?

What would need to be true then?

2: Behave As If

If you need to purchase equipment or hire employees, you can raise capital to fund it. Buy now, pay later.

If your future business requires a certain level of leadership behavior from you, the full payment is due today.

If you want:

• A business that runs without you? Stop being the bottleneck now.

• Better customers? Improve your offering to your current customers.

• A strong culture? Enforce high standards immediately.

This isn’t fake-it-till-you-make-it.

It’s identity alignment.

You must adopt the behaviors of the business you’re becoming and not the one you are today.

3: Do Things That Don’t Scale

The clear vision you have for your business likely won’t turn out exactly as you see it. Even if it the outcome is similar, the path to get there can vary widely.

You often won’t know what to scale or double down on in your business.

So don’t.

Early on, the job isn’t efficiency but learning.

It might look like:

• High-touch onboarding

• Manual workflows

• Founder-led sales

• Custom solutions

These aren’t inefficiencies but information gathering.

They let you discover:

• What customers actually value

• Where leverage exists in your business

• Which problems are worth solving

You don’t pour concrete until you know where the road should go.

Spend more time upfront finding the path.

4: Scale Only When It’s Painful Not To

Scaling too early is one of the most expensive mistakes a business owner can make.

In my first startup, we made that mistake. Before launching our video game, we built out a large customer support function and locked in server capacity designed to handle millions of concurrent players.

The launch flopped.

Tens of thousands of dollars were spent supporting demand that never arrived.

The lesson wasn’t about poor forecasting. It was about building from anticipation instead of evidence.

You don’t scale based on excitement.

You scale when not scaling hurts.

When:

• Manual processes are breaking under volume

• Quality degrades without added structure

• Opportunities are consistently missed due to real constraints

Pain is the signal.

In our case, we could have spun up servers within hours of a successful launch. We could have pulled non-technical staff into customer support temporarily if demand overwhelmed us.

None of that would have been elegant but it would have been reversible.

Instead, we optimized for a future that hadn’t earned its way into existence yet.

It should have been painful first.

Instead, it was painful last.

5: Upgrade Your Talent First

Former Alabama coaching legend Nick Saban once shared his first real coaching lesson.

As a high school quarterback and play caller in the state championship game, his team was down on the goal line with one play left. Saban called a timeout, hoping his coach would call the final play for him.

Instead, his coach said: You have two all-state players. Just make sure one of them gets the ball.

The lesson wasn’t about the play.

It was about the players.

The same is true in business.

Your first investment should be in people.

The people you hire today determine:

• Decision quality

• Speed

• Standards

• What “normal” looks like inside the company

Strong talent raises the floor.

Great talent raises the ceiling.

And upgrading talent doesn’t always mean hiring.

It can also mean investing in the people you already have through coaching, clearer expectations, better tools, or simply putting them in roles that match where the business is going, not where it’s been.

If your future business requires higher-level thinking, leadership, or execution, then one thing must be true:

Your team has to begin performing at that level today.

The Next Step

You likely already have a picture of where you want your business to go.

If not, borrow Dr. Attia’s approach.

Begin at the end.

Ask yourself what your business must be able to do in its future form. What functions run smoothly? What decisions no longer require you? What activities feel effortless instead of fragile?

Then work backward and ask:

What must be true today for that future to exist?

Those answers are your training plan.

Use the five practices as your guide:

• Be patient with outcomes

• Adopt the behaviors early

• Learn before you scale

• Let pain signal growth

• Upgrade talent ahead of need

Do that consistently, and the future you’re imagining stops being aspirational and becomes inevitable.

My goal with The Leap is to provide you each Saturday with the knowledge, tools and lessons learned to help you get started and keep going toward building your future. 

Whether you are making the leap to startups, solo-entrepreneurship, freelancing, side hustles or other creative ventures, the tools and strategies to succeed in each are similar.