Stay Healthy Or Pay The Price

We provide many ways to become a better developer.  One of the best ways to do hits over the long run is to stay healthy.  Big things like cancer and chronic disease can disrupt your career.  However, smaller things like the flu or seasonal cold can also knock you out for days or weeks.  That unplanned "time off" can cause a sizeable setback.  Likewise, it can derail time-critical plans and cause missed opportunities.

There is a cost to doing healthy things.  It takes time to exercise and eat well.  Regular rest is often seen as directly opposed to the high octane lives of the driven.  While less sleep and focusing on your projects can be useful in the short term, that will catch up to you.  You effectively roll the dice when you skip over healthy habits to hit that deadline.  That can be an effective way to squeeze every minute out of your day.  On the other hand, it can lead to a "surprise" illness that takes out days or even years of your life.  A healthy body is much more likely to shrug aside illness of all sorts and avoid chronic issues.

We have natural alerts to help us stay healthy.  Our bodies will slow, grow tired, or send pain signals when we fail to care for them.  Those signals are warning signs that often can help us change course long before things become unmanageable.  It makes no sense for us to spend so much time looking for signs that a project is going off track and ignore our lives doing the same.  If you need more motivation to stay healthy, then look at the articles that link it to wealth, such as this one.

If you like this season, you will probably like Scott Adams' book, "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life."