The Infrastructure of Great Work
I believe building something great requires sacrifice. It is not a question of if we have to sacrifice, but what we choose to sacrifice. I used to think that we needed to sacrifice sleep, exercise, time outdoors, and relationships. The logic seemed simple: more hours working meant more progress, more impact, more output. Sacrifice other things, despite the costs.
Over time, what I’ve learned is that I had the equation backwards. Taking care of my health and making time for life outside work wasn’t competing with doing great work… it was enabling it.
A Natural Experiment
This spring, I was helping lead one of the most critical projects of my career: the ComúnPay sprint. We were building financial infrastructure that would process millions of dollars in transactions across hundreds of thousands of users. High stakes, tight timelines, complex technical challenges. During this same period, I trained for and ran a 50K ultramarathon in Crested Butte, Colorado. I trained every day, and was also working long, intense hours.
I expected the training to hurt my performance. I thought I’d fall behind, that I’d be letting the team down by not putting in enough hours. Contrarily, I was actually cited as the most productive and impactful engineer on the project. Throughout this project I:
- Led our Card tokenization + management design and implementation,
- Helped design core money movement flows and abstractions,
- Led design and implementation for all infrastructure and security changes (Cloudflare, Fingerprint, hosting a web-app, SFTP integrations with vendors, and more…),
- Led our integration with Taktile for real-time decisioning,
- Helped build out our standalone remittances project in WhatsApp
- Helped build our first web-native product
- Onboarded and mentored new engineers, while also performing code review across all ongoing workstreams
It would not have been possible to accomplish all of this work without prioritizing my mental and physical health. The days I made time for my personal well-being were the days I was sharpest, clearest, and most effective. If I had sacrificed my fitness routine to work more hours, I wouldn’t have performed better. Without daily exercise, my stress would have compounded instead of being regulated. My sleep would have degraded, taking my cognitive function with it. My decision-making would have suffered from mental fog. My creativity and problem-solving would have disappeared.
All in all, I wasn’t succeeding despite taking care of myself, I was succeeding because of it.
Why This Works
Great work requires sharp decision-making, creative problem-solving, clear prioritization, and sustained focus. All of these degrade with exhaustion, accumulated stress, and mental fog. More hours don’t fix this – they often make it worse.
Daily exercise, meditation, and time outdoors have provided me with:
- mental clarity and cognitive function,
- stress regulation (essential when you’re handling high-pressure decisions),
- better sleep, which directly impacts judgment,
- problem-solving in “diffuse mode” – some of my best architectural insights came during runs, not during hour eleven at my desk, and
- resilience under pressure, built through endurance training
These aren’t luxuries I carved out despite demanding work, they’re infrastructure. They are just as essential as monitoring for production systems. You wouldn’t run critical services without maintenance. Why would you run yourself that way?
The Forcing Function of Boundaries
When you know you need to leave for a training run, you get ruthlessly efficient with your time. No room for low-value meetings, for bikeshedding, for appearing busy. You focus on what actually moves the needle. Boundaries don’t constrain great work, they create the forcing function for it.
What This Means
I’m not prescribing specific activities. Not everyone can or should run ultramarathons. The specifics don’t matter as much as the principle: taking care of yourself isn’t separate from doing great work. It’s the foundation for it.
If you’re grinding yourself to exhaustion and wondering why the work isn’t getting better, maybe the answer isn’t more hours. Maybe it’s stepping back and asking: what actually enables me to do my best work? For me, that answer was counterintuitive. The things I thought were distractions – daily exercise, meditation, time outdoors – turned out to be infrastructure.