My wife and I are in the middle of bringing a wellness experience and destination called Santerra to life. Lately I’ve been in a lot of rooms — with builders, with investors — walking them through slides about who Santerra is for.

One of those slides is about our target market. High net worth and ultra-high net worth individuals. The successful. The movers and shakers. The high achievers.

Here’s a detail I’ve started to realize:

The very people I’m talking to about investing in Santerra are the target market.

So, when I get to that slide, I slow down. Because I know what I’m about to say is likely going to land on sensitive soil.

Here’s what I say:

What we’ve found is that most successful people, on their climb to the mountaintop, had to sacrifice something along the way. And to be honest - it’s usually one or more of three things.

I’m a body, mind, and spirit guy. So, stay with me — because success often asks us to trade one or more of those three things on the way up.

One: a relationship. Someone they cared about who slowly became second place behind ambition and work. A spouse. A kid. A friend who stopped calling because you stopped answering. That’s your relational and spiritual health. And it isn’t a soft, sentimental thing. The longest study ever done on human happiness — Harvard has been tracking the same lives for over 80 years — found the single clearest predictor of who stays healthy and lives long isn’t cholesterol or net worth. It’s the warmth of your relationships. The lonely ones got sick earlier and died younger. The connected ones lived years longer.

…..I don’t mention this part out loud but the key relationship to invest in – as you may have heard in my recent newsletters – is your spouse. If you don’t, in addition to the loneliness factor, net worth usually doesn’t drop in half – it drops by 77%.

Two: purpose. The meaning. The thing you actually wanted to do, way back. For a lot of us, we found success in a lane that wasn’t our first love. Maybe the thing we loved didn’t pay what we thought we needed, so we set it down somewhere on the path up. That’s your mental and emotional health. I met with a friend recently who was struggling. Great money. Happy family. And he was miserable. He started describing his work — how leadership treated people, rules for rules’ sake, no joy or kindness anywhere in it. Everyone there made great money. And everyone there was pretty much miserable too.

It made me think of two quick stories. Martin Luther traveled to Rome expecting the holy city of his dreams — “Holy Rome, I salute thee.” Then he saw how the sausage was made. He left and said: if there is a hell, Rome is built over it. And young David, the shepherd who wrote his own music and had just been told he’d be king one day, got invited into King Saul’s palace — and learned more about what not to do than what to do. Sometimes you get handed your dream room and discover the dream was rotting from the inside.

That ache has an impact. A 25-year sweep of the research found that high-strain jobs — high demand, low control — raise your risk of clinical depression, and a study out of South Australia found a genuinely toxic workplace can triple it. Meanwhile, people with a strong sense of purpose are significantly less likely to die over the same stretch of years than people without one. Meaning isn’t a luxury. Your body keeps score on whether you have it.

Three: health. This one’s last on the list, but almost everyone trades a little of it on the way up. And at some point you’d do anything — trade anything — to get it back. A close friend of mine passed away last week, far too young. He would have given every dollar he had to beat his cancer and get more time with the people he loved.

This one is personal. My dad sacrificed his health on his own climb to the top. He was my inspiration for Santerra — because I watched him find a whole new lease on life when he stepped out of the grind, went to a transformational wellness retreat, and recovered his health. That’s your physical health. And the data is blunt about the cost of overdoing it: the WHO found that long working hours — 55-plus a week — killed an estimated 745,000 people in a single year through stroke and heart disease. The grind isn’t a metaphor. It has a body count.

Now, before you read this as “work is the villain” — it isn’t. Not even close.

We were made to work. My worldview starts in a garden, with a couple who work side by side and find joy in every direction. The blaming and shaming come later, and work gets harder after that — but it’s still good for us.

The data agrees. A Harvard sociologist found that a husband not working full time was 33% more likely to divorce the following year — and that held no matter how much money he made. It wasn’t about the income. It was about the work. And a major review of the evidence put it plainly: work is generally good for your physical and mental health, and being out of it is bad for you.

So work isn’t the enemy. The imbalance is. Good work, meaningful work - in its right place, heals. Work that swallows the other three — the relationship, the meaning, the body — is the thing that costs us.

Here’s the picture I keep coming back to.

Imagine I wheel a few briefcases of cash up to the front of the room and slide them over to you. Take it. Now — what do you want to do next?

A lot of us spent relationships, meaning, and health to get those briefcases. And then we spend the briefcases trying to buy all of it back. The trouble is, you can buy a lot of things. You cannot buy back the time.

Each of us starts life with a bank account of time. The Psalmist guessed at the balance three thousand years ago: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten” — seventy years, maybe eighty if you’re strong.

Seventy years is about 36.8 million minutes. Here’s roughly where they go:

•       Sleep — about a third of it. ~12 million minutes.

•       Meals — close to 10%.

•       Work — from age 22 to 65, eight hours a day, five days a week: around 14–15% of your whole life.

•       The bathroom — a couple percent. (More than you’d like.)

•       Vacation — for most people, a rounding error. Less than one tenth of one percent.

Add up the rest and you’re left with maybe 40% — call it 14 million minutes — of awake, unspoken-for life. That’s the part you actually get to spend. That’s where the relationship lives. The meaning. The walks, the dinners, the healing.

That number is my kryptonite and my fuel. It’s the thing I’m most afraid of wasting.

I’m not writing this from a mountaintop, looking down. I’m writing it as someone still doing the math on his own life. So before you close this, chew on these two honest questions:

What good thing did you sacrifice to get where you are today? Name it. The relationship, the purpose, or the health. Don’t act like its nothing.

And what will you regret if you stay on the exact path you’re on right now?

Here’s what I’ve seen, and it’s the whole reason Santerra will exist: when someone steps out of the grind and into a quiet space for even a few days — learns a few new habits, unlearns some old ones — they go back into their life different. Renewed. Equipped to repair a relationship they thought was gone, to find meaning again, and to have the health to actually live the life they built.

The climb gave you the briefcases. The good life is in spending them well — and in the minutes you’ve still got left.

-Jared

P.S. - My wife Baddie Crocker has a beautiful newsletter where she shares her perspectives on tending the land, recipes, women’s health and more.

I write this newsletter each week because I feel my best when my body, mind and soul are all healthy. I want the same for you. If you feel like you’ve seen something valuable here, please do me a favor and forward this newsletter to a friend or let me know what you think by replying to this email or texting me - (310) 879-8441

P.S. - This newsletter does not provide medical advice. The content, such as graphics, images, text, and all other materials, is provided for reference and educational purposes only. The content is not meant to be complete or exhaustive or to be applicable to any specific individual's medical condition.

Here are links to things that have helped me improve my health:

Whoop - Track your HRV and REM Sleep

Function Health - Optimize Your Health via 160+ BioMarkers

•       Killewald, A. (2016). “Money, Work, and Marital Stability.” American Sociological Review, 81(4), 696–719. (summary via TIME)

•       Zagorsky, J.L. (2005). “Marriage and divorce’s impact on wealth.” Journal of Sociology, 41(4), 406–424. Divorce reduces personal wealth by an average of 77%. (Ohio State University summary)

•       Waddell, G. & Burton, A.K. (2006). Is Work Good for Your Health and Well-being? UK Dept. for Work and Pensions. (executive summary)

•       Harvard Study of Adult Development / Waldinger, R. (Harvard Gazette overview)

•       Madsen, I.E.H. et al. (2017). “Job strain as a risk factor for clinical depression.” Psychological Medicine. (PubMed)

•       University of South Australia (2021). Psychosocial safety climate and depression risk. (EurekAlert release)

•       Alimujiang, A. et al. (2019). “Life Purpose and Mortality Among US Adults Older Than 50 Years.” JAMA Network Open. (PMC full text)

•       Pega, F. et al. (2021). WHO/ILO Joint Estimates: long working hours, heart disease & stroke. (WHO news release)

•       Psalm 90:10. (Bible Gateway)