The Long Game: Leadership Capacity Starts Years Before It Matters

Most leaders only consider longevity after performance begins to slip. By then, small declines in clarity, energy, and endurance have already started to shape outcomes.

Forward-thinking executives recognize that sustained leadership isn’t just about decisions today — it’s about protecting capacity for decades of high-stakes performance.

At Blue Zone Solutions, we partner with senior leaders to anticipate these pressures, model capacity risk, and integrate strategies that preserve decision quality, focus, and resilience over time.

The smartest investment isn’t in processes or tools alone — it’s in your sustained leadership span.

Metamorphosis of a Swede

For most of my career, I lived and worked outside my home country, Sweden.

Fast-paced environments. High expectations. Clear targets. Constant motion. Drive was currency. Results were identity.

So when I moved back to the Nordics seven years ago, I struggled more than I expected.

Everything felt… slow.

Where was the urgency? The hunger? The ambition?

Instead, people could easily leave the business crisis at 4pm to pick up their kids. Personal well-being was prioritized over work. I remember feeling frustrated—almost resentful. As if something essential was missing.

For a long time, I thought this was the problem.

But with time, I’ve come to realize something uncomfortable: I might have been the one who had it wrong.

The non-Nordic way I had embraced for years was efficient, ambitious, and results-driven—but it often ignored the human behind the performance. It rewarded speed, not sustainability. Achievement, not alignment.

The Swedish way still feels slow to me. That hasn’t magically changed.

But it has taught me something far more valuable.

I’ve learned to act from my own inner compass, not from external pressure. To move based on who I am—not what is expected of me. To listen to my heart as much as my mind.

I still struggle with the balance. The mind wants speed. The heart wants presence. And I live somewhere in between.

But I can no longer ignore the wisdom embedded in this Nordic pace.

There is a reason Sweden consistently ranks among the countries with the highest life expectancy in the world. There is intelligence in designing a life—not just a career.

I’m learning to embrace the environment I’m in. To remind myself that life is not waiting at the finish line.

Life is not what happens when we’re 65. The journey itself is the destination.

Life is happening now.

And now matters.

When healthcare became a business

There’s an old saying that almost sounds like a dark joke:

You don’t make money on healthy people.

You don’t make money on dead people.

The real profit lives somewhere in between — with people who are kept just sick enough.

It’s uncomfortable to sit with.

But once you start looking closely, it’s hard to unsee.

Because modern medicine didn’t appear in a vacuum. Behind it is a long economic and historical journey that most of us were never taught — one that gradually turned healing into an industry, and the human body into a marketplace.

In ancient China, doctors were paid to keep people well.

If someone got sick, the payment stopped until health was restored.

Imagine that today.

A flu would mean a pay cut.

Chronic illness would be financially devastating.

Back then, the doctor succeeded when people thrived.

Today, the system succeeds when people don’t.

THE TURNING POINT

The Flexner Report was published in 1910 by Abraham Flexner, commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation and supported by the American Medical Association (AMA).

Flexner’s report called for a standardized, science-based approach to medicine, which emphasized laboratory research, pharmacology, and clinical practice grounded in biology and chemistry.

While the report did help raise educational standards and remove many low-quality or unsafe institutions, it also triggered a massive consolidation of medical power — and an ideological shift that defined “real” medicine narrowly as pharmaceutical and surgical science. Over 75% of medical schools were closed. Funding and legitimacy were redirected exclusively toward institutions aligned with laboratory-based medicine — supported by emerging pharmaceutical and financial interests.

The consequences were profound and long-lasting: 

1) Rise of Pharmaceutical Dominance, leading to a system focused on symptom management rather than root-cause healing.

2) The holistic view of the human being — as body, mind, and spirit — was replaced by a reductionist model treating organs and symptoms in isolation.

You can’t patent a plant, but you CAN patent a synthetic molecule.

Once you see that, the direction medicine took makes economic sense.

In a very short period of time, thousands of years of healing traditions were pushed aside in favor of petroleum-based, patentable drugs.

Not because they were always better —but because they were profitable.

Healthcare doesn’t truly profit from fully healthy humans.

The pharmaceutical industry doesn’t profit from cures.

Our model rewards symptom management, not resolution.

This isn’t about bad doctors or evil scientists.

It’s about structures shaped over more than a century by money, industrial chemistry, education systems, and institutional design.

WHAT HAPPENS NOW?

We are more medicated than ever —and also sicker than ever.

Chronic disease, metabolic dysfunction, autoimmune conditions, mental health struggles.

We have endless pills. But very little healing.

What we need now is fascinatingly simple:

• Real food instead of chemical substitutes

• Nervous systems that actually get to rest

• Bodies that are allowed to move

• Sleep that restores

• Stress that’s addressed, not ignored

• Lives aligned with human biology — not industrial efficiency

Maybe the most revolutionary thing we can do today is return to what was obvious long before modern medicine existed:

Live in a way that supports health —before we need to manage disease.