The Secret to a Life You Love & Why So Few People Look for It

The Health Growth Letters is a weekly publication of tips, frameworks, and lessons to help you build a more balanced life based on faith, health, and wellness. If you’ve been forwarded this email you can subscribe here.

What’s on the agenda:

• Verse: the surprising path to breakthrough

• Lesson: Never stop looking for secrets

A verse I’m thinking about

The surprising path to breakthrough

I did a study through the book of John a few years ago. One of the biggest insights I took from that study was the patterns of Jesus’ miracles.

In almost every case, he asks the people to do something odd or unexpected before revealing the miracle.

When he turned water into wine, he asked them to take the cup and let the party's host taste it. When he heals the official’s son, he is asked to go heal him, but Jesus tells the man to go home alone and see. The lame man waited over 30 years to be the first one to get into the healing water, Jesus tells him to simply try and stand. When Jesus feeds the five thousand, he asks the disciples to 1) collect all the available food before and then ask them 2) to collect the remains.

Jesus could have performed these miracles the way the people wanted, but he didn’t. Instead, he asked them to do something first.

I believe this is because acts of faith beget miracles, and miracles beget bigger faith.

It’s God’s spiritual development growth loop.

What odd things is God calling you to?

I think we often assume that miracles and blessings will come without headwinds and that they’ll come when we expect and how we expect them to, but that’s rarely how God works.

Faith leads to faithful action which leads to the revelation of truth and the experience of miracles.

The majority of blessings in my life have come at the end of faithfully stepping into something God put on my heart. Don’t be afraid to do something you feel called to - it might just be the thing that leads to a breakthrough.

A lesson I’ve learned:
Never stop looking for secrets

I’m in the process of reading Zero to One by Peter Thiel. It’s a book about entrepreneurship, innovation, and building valuable companies. The core idea is that progress comes from creating something entirely new rather than copying existing ideas.

Peter Thiel is the founder of PayPal and Palantir and an early investor in Facebook. He’s a rockstar at building companies.

But as I was going through the Chapter “Secrets” this week, it connected with a truth I’ve discovered about personal growth and purposefully building a life of health & wellness:

The biggest opportunities come from discovering hidden secrets - valuable truths no one else has recognized.

The Decline in the Search for Personal Secrets

Despite opportunities and possibilities becoming nearly endless, in many ways, the golden age feels behind us.

Not so long ago, there was a thing called the “American Dream”, we now know of it as “a good job, a house with a white picket fence, and security”, but it used to be the land of opportunity. A place for artists, explorers, and entrepreneurs alike to come and make their dreams come true.

The American Dream was having a place of undiscovered mystery and opportunity.

We’ve been conditioned to believe that success has a formula: go to school, get a good job, work hard, and retire comfortably. The idea that we can define success for ourselves—or that an entirely different way of living might be possible—rarely crosses our minds.

Few people believe there are “secrets” left to uncover about how to design a life of meaning, joy, and fulfillment.

Discovering Your Own Secrets

There is nothing wrong with the current “American Dream”, but by pursuing it you won’t have an extraordinary life.

Extraordinary lives are not built by following someone else’s blueprint. They emerge when we discover hidden truths about what makes us uniquely come alive. The best businesses are built around secrets that others don’t see. The same applies to life. The happiest people are those who have uncovered their own hidden truths and structured their lives around them.

Thiel asks entrepreneurs: What valuable company is nobody building?

For personal growth, we can tweak this: What incredible life is nobody living?

The answer could be yours, but only if you believe that the secret to it still exists—and you’re willing to go find it.

Building a Life Around Your Secrets

The secret to an amazing life is deeply personal. The secrets you discover about your own life will be different than the ones I’ve discovered for myself, but there are a few buckets that I think are worth exploring:

1. A meaningful spiritual life

   Spiritual practices enhance fulfillment by providing a deeper sense of purpose, emotional well-being, and resilience. Practices like prayer, meditation, and gratitude reduce stress, foster self-discovery, and strengthen relationships. In my own life, my Christian faith has been a massive “secret” to happiness that many find silly or outdated.

2. Family & children

   We live in a world that is slowly moving away from marriage, and even faster from children, but having and building a family continues to be one of the most important factors in happiness and fulfillment. Spending time building a family and being close to the one you have can have a massive impact on your life.

3. Health & wellness based living

   Everyone wants to be fit and healthy, but very few prioritize it. It often calls into a “when I have time, I’ll fit it in” category. But what if building a life around health and wellness is the secret to a meaningful and wonderful life? I’d encourage you to explore this bucket and what that could look like for you

4. Ikigai

   The majority of people chase money and financial freedom. In that pursuit, they get stuck in jobs that they hate, don’t connect with their passions, and don’t really provide any value to the world. Ikigai is a Japanese concept that means “a reason for being”. What if fulfillment and an amazing life aren’t about making money and financial freedom, but about finding ways to do the things you love and provide value to the world?

Some secrets shouldn’t be kept

Look, in a world that tries to condition us to live a life just like everyone else, we need voices that tell people to walk another path.

One of the purposes of my letters is to champion “wellness-based living”. It’s a deep-rooted belief and “secret” that I believe contributes to and is the foundation of an extraordinary life. I want everyone to know about it, and I want to help people live that way.

But what are your secrets? I encourage you to spend time thinking through the “secrets” of your wonderful life and sharing them with those around you. The world needs more change, happiness, and fulfillment.

Surface area of accountability

This week was a refuel week. After weight in at 154.5 last week, I dropped down to 152 later in the week unable to really eat food cuz my stomach was still hurting. Over the weekend I was able to eat and kind of refueled. Today I weighed 154.5 again.

This week working to get protein back up and get back to steady progress 💪