Strategy of Breakthrough for Health and Wealth
Just 5 Principles for Remarkable Growth and Renewal
I was having dinner with my daughters' friends, eager in their 20s to find their way in the world. Some are applying for jobs, have just started a job, or are thinking about starting a new business. I asked them what business, and they started explaining it with excitement and hope. I asked them when they were going to start—a long pause. "I am working on a 20-page document detailing how I would do it."
I told them that because I was doing a medical residency and had very little time, I had to build my first business very simply. That was a very great blessing. My time and skills were very constrained and limited. I had never taken a business course in my life, nor any technology or computer science courses. I quit the arts in Grade 8, so I wasn't very creative.
My business plan was just half a page. It was so simple that I could execute it in little time and hyper focus on it.
I envisioned the internet equivalent of the Yellow Pages —a book listing all the types of businesses in a city. I would have to start with just one page of the Yellow Pages to make it easy for me to build. I chose Web Hosting companies because I imagined the large number of companies that would need one to host their online businesses.
I didn't have time to build an app, so I decided to find an existing application I could modify and add to. I found one, Links SQL, and decided to learn the computer language it was written in, as I couldn't afford a programmer. During my time on call as a medical resident, I learned the basics of PERL and started coding a review and rating module for the program. I thought that many other people who bought the app would want this review module. I would offer it for free and, in turn, ask them to add their web hosting company and review it. This is how I would garner hundreds to thousands of reviews, and other people would come to read them. It was a very early version of Yelp (which is an abbreviation of Yellow Pages).
It worked. I got thousands of visitors and eventually advertisers. I then added the next business category: Domain Name Companies. I was generating $25,000 to $30,000 USD per month as a medical resident on a meagre salary of $45,000, with on-call duties twice a week. (I still have a bit of PTSD from my pager, which beeped every time there was an emergency call. I don't check my voicemail and don't like responding quickly to texts and emails as a result.)
I had seen a domain sell for $7.5 million: Business.com in 1999. I thought to myself that my goal was to make enough money so I wouldn't need to practice medicine for financial gain. One domain like that, and it would be more than I could dream of. This was a new type of real estate: virtual real estate of the burgeoning Internet.
This led me down the path of discovering the secret of how domain names became available when they weren't renewed. I discovered a precious way of acquiring valuable domains for as little as $8 in 2000, during the dot-com crash. To achieve this, I stopped working on my first business and focused exclusively on domains. It took a while to figure out the domain name system, but that barrier to entry limited the number of competitors in the race to acquire and register these domain names. An opportunity of a lifetime, for which I put my medical dreams to cure disease on hold... Until now. Thank God. And I am so grateful for each disease I have and for those who are determined to cure their own with my guidance.
I realized that building a business was essentially a process of experimentation guided by a handful of principles and uncovering insights that others had yet to discover.
I had used the scientific method (hypothesis, assumptions, design experiment to test assumptions, gather data, analyze data, conclusion of results to affirm or deny assumptions and hypothesis). It was the only thing that I knew and made sense. I had a specific goal with a specific time frame. I would ponder how to accelerate this goal and its results by constraining time, money, and processes. How can I accomplish this in one day, rather than one month or one year? How can I accomplish this on my own with limited technical skills?
This forced me to be creative and plan 2-3 experiments. I drew out my business model in 3 steps, which I call the Flywheel now.
The book "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries describes this scientific method for building a business beautifully and simply. He advises to "Start small, start now, learn fast."
As I explained how to design their business simply, I thought a newsletter that showcases the five simple principles and the books that describe them would be very powerful for entrepreneurs looking to start a business.
So here it is.
1. Flywheel of Breakthroughs
From Growing Wealth to Health Renewal
Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice and discipline.
Jim Collins
When you get it right, the wheel turns itself.
Jeff Bezos
When Jeff Bezos drove across America from New York in 1994, leaving his cushy Wall Street job, he did not really know which city he would arrive at. Somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. Why? He had a great vision of an online marketplace that sold everything. But that vision was too large to begin with. So he chose to start with one category first. He constrained his vision to just one thing, but also thought about how he could expand it category by category. First, he would need to choose the one that had the most promise and could scale the fastest and easiest.
He chose to start with building the world's largest bookstore. Bookstores were limited by their physical stores; they had to have multiple locations and hold a large amount of inventory. How could he strategically leverage these weaknesses using the Internet?
He found the biggest distributor of books in Portland. But there weren't many programmers there. Programmers were plentiful in San Francisco (Silicon Valley) and Seattle, largely due to Microsoft. Seattle was just a short 3 hour truck drive away. He decided Seattle would be home to his new business Cadabra.com, like magic. But people thought the name sounded too much like Cadaver so he thought switched to Relentless.com and registered the domain that still points to the name of what we know as Amazon.com. Named as a metaphor for the great Amazon jungle and river, and also because, like Steve Jobs, he liked that it started with the letter 'A', which would list it at the top of the page, in business directories like the Yellow Pages.
He sketched his business model on a napkin, after hearing a talk by Jim Collins, who wrote a book called 'Good to Great' describing the Flywheel Principle as the relentless growth of a business due to consistent small pushes in one direction that pushed each step like a gear and with each rotation of the Flywheel, would grow larger and larger.
He later added Prime membership (more convenience, faster checkout)
He thought about the question: "What three things will never change?" as the Internet changes almost everything. This question becomes even more pertinent in the age of AI, a more exponential force.
The power of the Flywheel is in its power of increasing momentum, linking cause and effect into a virtuous loop.
This not only applies to business, but to almost everything that you wish to improve or grow. It may be the most powerful concept you can train yourself to think and apply to what you do.
I’ve applied this Flywheel concept to health, as the CAST Flywheel, in honour of the cast that protects the body to allow it to heal itself.
For each step in the Flywheel, assign it an objective and the desired result or goal. This is called the OKR. O is Objective, and KR is Key Result. This is what the brilliant John Doerr talks to the entrepreneurs he invested in. Doerr was a giant in the Venture Capital world in Silicon Valley, funding Intel and learning this method from the founder and CEO of Intel, Andy Grove, who describes it in his brilliant book "Only the Paranoid Survive." Doerr went on to mentor two young Stanford Ph.D students who dreamed of creating a great company by building a simple search interface. Google implemented the OKR system as it was simple and scalable as the company grew. This concept is described in the book "Measure What Matters" by Doerr, who states, "We must measure what matters most."
2. 80/20 Principle
The Fractal Law of Leverage
The aim of sociology, as of every science, is to discover laws of phenomena and apply them to practical problems.
Vilfredo Pareto
Few things really matter — but those that do matter enormously.
Richard Koch
80/20 isn’t just a rule. It’s the law of cause and effect in everything you do.
Perry Marshall
In 1896, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto noticed something unique: 20% of the pea pods in his garden produced 80% of the peas. He found this same pattern in wealth: 20% of people held 80% of the land.
Richard Koch then expanded on this in his book, "The 80/20 Principle," a brilliant application of the 80/20 principle.
80/20 Truth:
20% inputs or cause gives you 80% outputs / effect:
20% of 100 tasks account for 80% of the results.
Focus on the 20% and neglect the 80% that yield only 20% of the results.
Perry Marshall then described, in his simple yet remarkably insightful book, "80/20 Sales & Marketing," how there is an 80/20 principle within each 80/20 principle. This is known as a fractal pattern. 80/20 was fractal! A breakthrough insight that could powerfully leverage the 80/20 Principle.
Fractal Truth:
80/20 repeats forever
20% of 20% (4%) creates 64% of the results.
20% of 4% (0.8%) creates 51% of the impact.
Key Learning:
A few inputs always drive most of the output — and the pattern keeps repeating.
Your job is to identify the high-leverage nodes and amplify their impact.
Business Example:
20% of your products create 80% of the profit.
20% of your clients generate 80% of your referrals.
Focus on those and build your Flywheel around them.
Health Example:
Approximately 20% of your lifestyle habits account for 80% of your overall vitality.
Diet is the core 20% giving you 80% health. Remove obstacles and friction here — your health accelerates quickly.
The remaining 20% of your health comes from sleep, fasting (rest from eating), movement, and gratitude.
3. The Golden Domino
The Tipping Point of Transformation
What’s the ONE Thing you can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?
Extraordinary results are directly determined by how narrow you can make your focus.
Gary Keller
The Tipping Point of Transformation
At Domino Day 2009 in the Netherlands, the first domino toppled 4,491,863 other dominos. The key was alignment; each domino was perfectly spaced to transmit its falling momentum, creating a chain reaction.
In business, this "Golden Domino" is the one domino that triggers all the rest. The Golden Domino is the one thing that a 20% domino gives you 80% results.
For Amazon, it was cash flow velocity that resulted from receiving payments from its customers 45 days before it had to pay its book publishers, creating a large cash float that it could use to grow its business.
Gary Keller, in his book 'The One Thing', illustrates a masterful concept that builds upon the Domino effect, where the first domino knocks down a second domino that is 50% taller, creating even more momentum.
If you start with just a 2-inch domino, how many dominoes do you need to knock down to reach the height of the Eiffel Tower, or Mount Everest or even to the Moon?
Any guesses?
Eiffel tower - just 23 dominos
Mount Everest - just 27 dominos
The Moon - just 31 domino
This is the power of compounding, exponential growth.
The One Thing book is asking you to focus on this one Golden Domino that can knock down a series of larger dominos that you determine.
In health, my one thing looks like this:
My Golden Domino was to stabilize and stop plaque growth. Accomplished.
My 2nd domino was to reverse plaques and regress them back to nothing. I already reversed plaques in my neck carotid arteries in 3 months. I hope to accomplish this within 18 to 30 months.
My 3rd domino was to accelerate this reversal by adding strategic fasting and HIIT exercise. I am hoping 12 months to 24 months.
My 4th domino is to figure out how to reverse calcified plaque, which is deemed impossible. May the Lord give me wisdom to do so, amaze the world, and help a lot of people. I am researching decalcification and reverse cholesterol transport.
My 5th domino - which I deem much easier than Domino 4 - is to adopt a whole food diet, eating the foods I love (seafood, pizza, ice cream, burgers, hot dogs) that nourish my blood vessels and eyes and help prevent disease. I've researched this extensively in the past. It works well when there is no disease, but with my specific conditions, I need to target my diet to reverse the disease. Once reversed, I can maintain my wholesome health.
4. The Theory of Constraints
The Bottleneck Determines the Speed
The goal is not to make money. The goal is to increase throughput while simultaneously reducing inventory and operating expense.
Eliyahu Goldratt
In the 1980s, an Israeli, descended from a long lineage of Rabbis, decided to apply the principles of physics to business. Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt wrote The Goal, a business novel that described how a group of young Boy Scouts, tied together, was constrained by the slowest one, and how this one constraint slowed productivity in the factories. He later showed that this also applied to organizations. In fact, it applies to anything that involves a process.
Goldratt taught that every system has one primary constraint — the slowest step that limits the entire process.
Improve that one bottleneck, and the whole system flows faster.
Then, remove the biggest constraint, as a faster flow reveals the next constraint. Think about and conceptualize each constraint in succession, and design a plan to remove each of these constraints, optimizing for global system constraints, rather than local optimization.
Examples:
In a manufacturing plant, the bottleneck might be a single slow machine.
In a business, it might be cash flow, decision-making, or the founder's time.
In terms of your health, it may be due to inflammation, insulin resistance, or sleep disturbances.
Key Learning:
You don't need to fix everything.
You need to fix the one thing that is the biggest constraint and limits the flow of everything else.
Application:
In the body, the constraint is usually due to metabolic bottlenecks, such as impaired circulation or mitochondrial fatigue. Remove it through fasting, nitric oxide foods, and oxygenation, and the system accelerates.
Just as Amazon freed cash flow by getting paid before paying vendors, your body can free energy flow by burning stored fat before refueling.
Of the many books written by Eli Goldratt, the one I really enjoyed and put in my Top 5 books is "The Choice." He wrote it in the last months as he was dying from cancer. It's his swan song to the world, but because his first book, "The Goal," is a Top 150 bestseller of the modern era, The Choice has fallen into the shadows.
5. Time & Money Constraint Exercise
The Catalyst of Innovation
When you have no money and no time, you cannot help but be creative and innovate.
Dr. Kevin Ham
In 1957, Walt Disney faced bankruptcy while trying to finish Sleeping Beauty, a project upon which he had bet his entire company. So he imposed extreme time limits, forcing creative breakthroughs. This extreme time constraint became creativity.
In Business:
When Bezos needed cash flow early, he couldn't wait 90 days for supplier payments.
He made a rule: receive cash from customers immediately, pay suppliers 40 days later.
That time constraint turned into Amazon's cash flow flywheel.
Elon Musk applies this exercise by devising a 5-step algorithm, which is essentially a combination of the 80/20 principle and constraints.
Question all requirements and remove the ones that don't make sense. Base it on first principles, rather than tradition or habit.
Delete what's unnecessary: Remove the steps, processes, people or tasks until you are required to add 10% back (cheaper)
Simplify & Optimize: Improve the quality (better)
Accelerate cycle time: Speed it up (faster)
Automate it (easier)
In Health:
Time constraints force the body to innovate too — it's called fasting.
When deprived of calories, your body turns on autophagy, recycling damaged cells and regenerating new ones.
Key Learning:
When you compress time, inefficiencies are revealed.
When you compress assumptions, you discover the truth.
Ask yourself:
"If I had to achieve this in 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, what would I do differently?"
Try to plan and design an experiment that takes longer than 3 months. The smaller the time constraint, the better, as you will learn a lot before you make big mistakes.
Do this for each constraint (time, money, resources), starting with the extreme time constraint: If I had to achieve this in 1 day, what would I do?
Now do the same with money, even if you have enough money.
Now do the same with resources, even if you already have enough.
If I had to do it myself, how would I do it?
If I only had one other person, how would we do it?
Think of all the innovations by small teams, like the Wright Brothers, Einstein.
Larger teams often spend more money, take longer, and have poorer results.
The Flywheel of 5 Principles
What if you made these five key principles a flywheel in every essential facet of your life?
Dr. Kevin Ham
This is what nature does: it flywheels every aspect of itself to grow wild —bacteria, viruses, plants, and creatures all flywheel life. Humans, in their drive for growth, can wreak havoc on the Flywheel of life, instead turning a virtuous flywheel of life into a vicious cycle of death.
As we transform the nature of light, air, water, food, and rest into things that are convenient, cheap, and fast. Using these very principles, we create systemic disease within ourselves and the natural world around us. Who will win? Mankind has set in motion the Flywheel of disease and destruction.
But we can reverse disease and destruction if we turn back to nature and the powers that lie dormant and hidden in nature and in us. This is the deep, hidden mystery that lies locked within us. Unlock it and leverage it and let the first golden domino within you start to create and innovate.
Reflection
Just a handful of powerful principles set up as dominos can change the world.
Dr. Kevin Ham
Above is the Flywheel of Flywheel Principles. This is the power of principles. They span industries across business and life. Just as there are only 12 notes for all music, 3 primary colours that make up all colours, and just a handful of principles for you to practice and apply to every facet of your life, starting from thought to plan to action, leveraging your mind can result in great outcomes. At first, it is hardly visible as you knock down the first golden two-inch domino, but as each larger domino falls, flywheeling stronger and larger and gaining momentum, it becomes self-propelling.
This is the power of momentum and the power of life.
These invisible principles power all of life.
Newton discovered its simple formulas. F=ma describes the formula for all Forces.
Einstein discovered the power of energy. e=mc2, describing energy proportional to mass and the speed of light, a constant 3 with 8 zeros m/s.
What simple formula will you unlock in your mind as you think, plan and execute your thought experiments in health and wealth?
The same laws that built Amazon can rebuild a body.
The same constraints that stall a company can stall cancer cells.
And the same 80/20 fractals that create wealth can rejuvenate health.
Your job is to design your flywheel, remove the bottleneck, and tip the golden domino.
Ease the Heartache of Loved Ones
Please forward my newsletter to your friends and family and ask them to sign up.
I’d love to help a lot of people prevent, reverse, heal and ease the suffering of disease.
Life-Changing Question
What flywheel can you design for your health or wealth in one day?
It should fit on one sheet of paper, preferably on half the paper.
And how can you start executing it in one day?
Appendix:
Books That Power the Flywheel of Breakthroughs
Next week—
The Power of Fasting (Part III)
Fasting to stress cancer
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