Genetics Are Not Your Destiny

My family tree has Alzheimer's and Parkinson's on one side and diabetes on both. For a long time, I treated that like a weather forecast: something coming that I couldn't do much about (aside from fearing it). Turns out I had the analogy backward.

Genetics contributes about 20-30% to your health outcomes. The rest is epigenetics: how your environment and your choices influence which genes actually express themselves. It's 4 major factors: sleep, food, movement, and environment. That reframing changed everything for me. I'm not running from a diagnosis. I'm building a system that makes the worst-case scenario less likely and the best-case scenario more likely. My bloodwork shifted. My body composition changed. It even showed up in my hair (my hair-lady noticed it first, and now I'm discovering products for the curly-headed folk that I've become). The choices compounded in ways I didn't expect, mostly in the positive, but certainly in response to controls.

Most executives treat health reactively: run until something breaks, then figure out the fix. You run a company proactively because by the time a problem is obvious, it's already expensive. Your body works the same way (duh!).

The Dallas C-suite is starting to get it. D Magazine ran a piece last month on executives here who have shifted from annual physicals to continuous monitoring: cardiometabolic tracking, sleep, cognition. Their physicians describe it not as ruling out disease, but as helping you perform. That's the right frame. This isn't about living forever. It's about leading well for as long as you're doing it, and not leaving performance on the table because you never built the system.