Body · 5 episodes
Energy Management for entrepreneurs
Every guest who touches this topic arrives at the same conclusion from a different direction: energy, not time or intelligence, is the entrepreneur's real operating budget. Ashley Black talks about it in terms of protecting your calm state and reverse-engineering your schedule around it. Dr. Mao Shing Ni talks about it in terms of mitochondria, inflammation, and qi. Dandapani talks about it in terms of where your awareness goes and who gets a 'return on energy.' Different vocabularies, same claim: you can run out of this resource long before you run out of hours or ideas.
Where they diverge is on mechanism. Ni and Dr. Catharine Arnston locate energy problems in the body first — inflammation, mitochondrial fuel, toxin load — and treat mindset as downstream of physiology. Mel McSher and Dandapani locate it in attention and alignment first — decision-making style, where awareness gets hijacked — and treat the body as downstream of that. Nobody in these conversations thinks willpower or hustle is the answer; several explicitly reject the 'kill yourself for your business' model as unsustainable and unnecessary.
There's also a recurring warning about leaking energy rather than just generating more of it: toxic clients, bad systems, unprocessed emotional patterns, and performing a business persona instead of showing up as yourself all quietly drain the tank. Plugging those holes, more than any supplement or morning routine, is what several guests say actually moves the needle.
What holds across every conversation
- •Before adding energy-boosting habits, find and plug the leaks first: toxic clients, bad systems, unprocessed emotional patterns.
- •When a decision or conflict feels unsolvable, deliberately change your state before acting — don't try to fix it from the same place it was created.
- •Ask a 'return on energy' question before giving anyone your time: what will this cost you and what do you actually get back.
- •Treat inflammation and chronic low-grade physical stress as a direct energy tax, not a separate health issue from your business performance.
- •Practice focus on existing daily moments (a conversation, a routine task) rather than waiting for a dedicated meditation practice to build the skill.
- •Reject the assumption that exhaustion is required for success — several founders explicitly built profitable businesses while refusing to run themselves into the ground.
Energy as the entrepreneur's true currency
The core reframe: capital and intelligence matter, but energy is what actually gets spent every day running a business.
“Yeah. First of all, if you think about it, if you're out there building a business, you're scaling up, you're doing everything you can. Ultimately, yes, you have a company, you have people that are doing the work, but you're the leader. And leaders spend a lot of energy driving their vision and realization of their vision. So a lot of people think like their greatest assets, it's intelligence, which is true. Their capital, yes, and strategy, no question. But really, your true currency is energy.”
Secrets of Energy and Longevity with Dr. Mao Shing Ni · 15:35· listen →
“So if someone comes up to you and says, I want an hour of your time or 2 hours of your time, the question should be, show me a deck. What are you going to do with my energy? What's my ROE, my return on energy?”
Dandapani: Training Focus and Awareness as an Entrepreneur · 35:54· listen →
“Money is energy. It's everywhere. Everybody can be as rich as they wanna be. That is kind of the easy part.”
When Necessity Breeds Invention with Ashley Black · 39:16· listen →
Solving problems from a different state
You can't fix a problem from the same emotional place it was created in — several guests describe deliberately shifting state before acting.
“You have to jump, you have to elevate, right? The whole idea is to solve the problem from a place that it wasn't created.”
When Necessity Breeds Invention with Ashley Black · 31:23· listen →
“I think the key is to separate your character that you play in your business on a daily basis from who you truly are. And not only who you truly are, but then who's the observer of that soul.”
When Necessity Breeds Invention with Ashley Black · 14:17· listen →
“That negativity that happens, the self-degrading, you know, thoughts that come in, those are the very highly destructive. If you're angry at yourself, if you're, you talk down to yourself, it's the worst thing you can do. It's like, what would your mentor and what would your loved ones tell you? They would, you know, if you fell off a bike trying to learn how to ride the bike and they say you're stupid, you probably never want to ride that bike again.”
Secrets of Energy and Longevity with Dr. Mao Shing Ni · 27:39· listen →
The physiology underneath the hustle
Inflammation, toxins, and cellular fuel are treated as literal energy drains, not metaphors, with concrete daily interventions.
“If you have inflammation in your body, you are consuming so much energy. I look at inflammation like a car sitting at an intersection. You've got your foot pedal to the metal. And then so you're revving up to 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 RPMs, but you're not going anywhere. You're just burning fuel. That's what inflammation does.”
Secrets of Energy and Longevity with Dr. Mao Shing Ni · 17:22· listen →
“And so every day you're pumping and producing more. So at some point you find yourself like, why am I like 10 pounds overweight? I've got this big belly in my stomach and I feel nervous all the time and I can't settle down. Well, you just basically over the last year, you've been taking 10 milligrams of prednisone or 20 milligrams of prednisone every day.”
Secrets of Energy and Longevity with Dr. Mao Shing Ni · 30:14· listen →
“You'll notice that your resting heart rate— it's measurable— your resting heart rate will drop by about 10 points after doing 2, 3 minutes of this breathing, which is like amazing if you think about it. It's faster than taking a Xanax.”
Secrets of Energy and Longevity with Dr. Mao Shing Ni · 33:53· listen →
“The way I describe it is it's like giving your body a shower from the inside. You take a shower on the outside every morning. Chlorella will pull all the garbage that you've interacted with in the air, your food, your cosmetics, and pull it out.”
Energy, Nutrition, and the Science of Spirulina and Chlor... · 25:21· listen →
“It is the most nutrient-dense food in the world. NASA feeds it to the astronauts. We have a quote from them saying 1 gram of algae has the same nutrition as 1,000 grams of fruits and vegetables. So 1 to 1,000.”
Energy, Nutrition, and the Science of Spirulina and Chlor... · 18:40· listen →
Rejecting the burnout-as-badge model
More than one guest explicitly pushes back on the idea that grinding yourself down is a prerequisite for success.
“The whole idea of literally killing yourself for your business, to me, just never made sense. And I had a lot of guilt about that at first. So I'm thinking, geez, you know, am I really optimized as an entrepreneur because I'm not willing to do that?”
Mental and Emotional Profitability in Entrepreneurship wi... · 21:28· listen →
“I really subscribed to that mentality of just find the experts, you know, copy and paste, you want to hit this goal by you know this date, this goal six figures, yada yada yada, right? A lot of those tactical traditional milestones, and I fully subscribed to that.”
Mental and Emotional Profitability in Entrepreneurship wi... · 3:20· listen →
“Even if you think it does, which I thought it did, it always gets you, right? It always bites you in the butt. And I didn't really understand how I could shift it back into something that was mine.”
Mental and Emotional Profitability in Entrepreneurship wi... · 4:59· listen →
Attention as a trainable energy channel
Where awareness goes determines how energy gets spent — and Dandapani argues this is a practiced skill, not a personality trait.
“So ultimately, the goal is not to control the mind, but rather to control where awareness goes within the mind. And the critical thing to understand is that any given point in time, either your environment, which are the things and people around you, that's what I define environment as, can dictate where your ball of light goes. Or if you had enough control over your own awareness, you can choose where it goes.”
Dandapani: Training Focus and Awareness as an Entrepreneur · 0:40· listen →
“But if I can't focus, I can't be present. And if I can't be present in those experiences, then all those experiences I worked so hard to earn are wasted ultimately. I just don't experience them fully. Then I go through life having some sort of very empty experiences.”
Dandapani: Training Focus and Awareness as an Entrepreneur · 6:56· listen →
“If I'm talking to you and I want to be fully present, I want to hear what you have to say. I want to experience not only what you have to say, your energy, your presence of you being there. That matters to me. And that's why I learned to focus.”
Dandapani: Training Focus and Awareness as an Entrepreneur · 46:11· listen →
Protecting energy from outside demands
Guests treat other people's requests for your time as a real cost, and describe how they filter, ration, and decide what deserves access.
“So there's a lot that goes into really preserving that energy when I'm not, quote unquote, out in public.”
When Necessity Breeds Invention with Ashley Black · 10:09· listen →
“So if someone comes up to you and says, I want an hour of your time or 2 hours of your time, the question should be, show me a deck. What are you going to do with my energy? What's my ROE, my return on energy?”
Dandapani: Training Focus and Awareness as an Entrepreneur · 35:54· listen →
“It's those hallways that we try to push past, right? We just want to get to that next door or get to that next piece of information when really that is a point for you to celebrate, to recalibrate, to really go, okay, now what do I know to be true?”
Mental and Emotional Profitability in Entrepreneurship wi... · 40:40· listen →
The companion guide
Reading about energy management is one thing. Changing it is another.
John’s companion guide turns what these conversations cover into something you can actually work through.
More moments worth hearing
Everything else these conversations turned up on this subject.
“You the entrepreneur, you keep putting the pieces together all by yourself. Maybe you get a third of the way and now you say, hey, how about come and help me now? They still look at the mess. They can see a little bit but nope, they're too busy. Nope.”
Energy, Nutrition, and the Science of Spirulina and Chlor... · 15:13
“In a cancer cell or a senescent cell, the blue pigment, when it's absorbed into the mitochondria, sees that it's in a cancer cell and goes, I'm onto you. And instead of the Ferrari helping move that, move the electrons across, it ejects this thing called cytochrome c, which triggers something called caspases, which triggers something called apoptosis, which is healthy cell death.”
Energy, Nutrition, and the Science of Spirulina and Chlor... · 36:28
“If someone's stolen your parking spot anywhere, you can't get into your parking spot. It doesn't matter how many signs you put up, but they're there. You gotta get the tow truck or the police to get them out so that you can park in. So, chlorella is the tow truck.”
Energy, Nutrition, and the Science of Spirulina and Chlor... · 43:39
“You can get rid of almost all your other supplements. Not all. But your multivitamin, you don't need that. Please stop taking fish oil. Where do you think the fish get the omega-3 from?”
Energy, Nutrition, and the Science of Spirulina and Chlor... · 46:50
“And I go, no, if it's my legacy, then I want a bronze statue of me in the middle of the garden, looking like a great explorer that I've built all this, created, and everyone to know that this is what I've done.”
Dandapani: Training Focus and Awareness as an Entrepreneur · 16:54
“It's more of setting that intention, going into space and just stepping in and relaxing and trusting yourself, trusting the conversation and knowing that the right people in that moment will always come find you.”
Mental and Emotional Profitability in Entrepreneurship wi... · 6:32
“So that isn't in alignment with quote unquote manifestation is that, oh, I'm going to set this intent and I'm going to initiate it. And you know, for some people that's just initiating it with a certain word or a certain practice or what have you. And then it's going to magically work. Well, unless you are a manifester and you're doing it in a way that isn't aligned with your design as a manifester.”
Mental and Emotional Profitability in Entrepreneurship wi... · 32:03
“So what I love about Human Design, and also to take away, not even to dissect the tools that are inside of it, but the tools that are also available, like DiSC, StrengthsFinders, you know, Enneagram, all those things, you can see all of those results layer up. I kind of picture it as, you know, the personality tests that I just mentioned are kind of like the top of the iceberg, whereas Human Design is the bottom of the iceberg.”
Mental and Emotional Profitability in Entrepreneurship wi... · 35:35
“So imagine a childhood of spinal taps, you know, having your blood drawn. I remember like doing splits in the hallway being like, I don't need my blood taken.”
When Necessity Breeds Invention with Ashley Black · 2:13
“Did I want to come back? And I was like, no, like this, this is amazing, this feeling. And I heard voices that told me that I needed to go back, that I had children and that I had a purpose.”
When Necessity Breeds Invention with Ashley Black · 4:11
“There is a point, not every entrepreneur gets there, but there is a point where the entrepreneur goes, I've done everything that I think I'm good at, and now it's time for somebody else to take the business and run with it. And I'm at that point.”
When Necessity Breeds Invention with Ashley Black · 21:47
Every episode on energy management
5 conversations, oldest to newest.
Energy, Nutrition, and the Science of Spirulina and Chlor...
Spirulina delivers complete amino-acid protein and B vitamins that feed mitochondria, producing steady energy without the crash of stimulants.
Dandapani: Training Focus and Awareness as an Entrepreneur
Awareness, not the mind itself, is what moves, and entrepreneurs can train it to stay anchored in a chosen 'home' area instead of reacting to their environment.
Mental and Emotional Profitability in Entrepreneurship wi...
Entrepreneurs should prioritize mental and emotional profitability before financial goals, or financial success becomes unsustainable and leads to burnout.
Secrets of Energy and Longevity with Dr. Mao Shing Ni
Energy, not time or intelligence, is the entrepreneur's true currency, produced through mitochondrial ATP, regulated by the nervous system, and channeled as qi in Chinese medicine.
When Necessity Breeds Invention with Ashley Black
Ashley Black's chronic childhood illness and a near-fatal infection directly led her to invent the Fascia Blaster and build a $200 million company.