What If 39 Is Only the Beginning?

Life wrote the first 39 years. Now, I take up the pen.

For the past week, I have been doing something surprisingly unfamiliar: measuring the person I normally just live as.

This is part of what I call The Human Experiment: an attempt to deliberately change some of the conditions shaping my body, mind and economic life, and observe what happens when I work on them together rather than separately. Over the next 90 days, I will experiment with the way I eat, train, sleep, meditate, learn, think and organise my environment, while measuring what changes—not only physically, but in the way I think, feel, work and experience my life.

I have been calling this Day Zero. Not because it represents a single day, but because it captures the version of me that exists before I deliberately begin changing those conditions. I wanted to establish that starting point honestly enough that I cannot conveniently rewrite it later.

The first 39 years have already given me an extraordinary amount of data, although most of it was never measured. They contain businesses built, money made and lost, relationships, mistakes, victories, fear, ambition, exhaustion, moments when I felt almost impossible to stop and moments when the weight of everything felt almost impossible to carry. All of those experiences have shaped the biology, behaviour and beliefs of the man beginning this experiment. I cannot rerun those 39 years under controlled conditions, but I can decide that from this point forward, I am going to pay much closer attention to what shapes the next version of me. And I don’t mean simply recording my weight, blood pressure or body fat. I want to capture something much wider: how my body feels, how clearly I think, how I respond to pressure, how much energy I carry into the day, how well I communicate, how content I feel, how effectively I execute what I intend to do, and how all of that interacts with the economic life I am trying to build.

I could measure hundreds of things. I have deliberately chosen not to. For this first 90-day phase, I have selected a small number of areas that I believe are important enough to matter and practical enough to observe consistently: my physical and biological condition, cardiovascular health and recovery, mind and nervous system, lived experience, and economic functioning. Some can be measured reasonably objectively with laboratory tests, devices and physical measurements. Others require something much more difficult: observing myself honestly.

Together, I hope they give me a practical picture of the whole human being rather than an impressive collection of disconnected numbers. What excites me is the possibility of discovering what might happen when those different parts begin moving together. I am starting to look at myself less as a collection of separate problems and more as one connected biological system constantly interacting with the world around me. The brain influences the body; the body continuously feeds information back to the brain. Sleep affects cognition. Stress can alter physiology. Physical condition influences what we are capable of doing, while our work, relationships, environment and economic circumstances can change the state in which that biology operates.

But there is another part that matters to me just as much: direction.

I can become fitter, calmer and more productive. I can think more clearly. I can make more money. But towards what? I don’t want to optimise myself simply for the sake of becoming an efficient machine. I have spent enough of my life understanding mechanisms that produce money. This time, I want to understand the human being operating them.

For the first time, I am not asking only, “What can I achieve?” I am also asking, “What kind of human being do I want to be while achieving it?” That is where these 90 days begin.

Physical & Biological Condition

I started with the easiest part of myself to measure: the body. My physical starting point is 79 kg at 5 ft 8½ in tall, with an estimated body-fat level of 20.6%, a BMI of 26.1 and a waist measurement of approximately 36 inches. These numbers are not particularly exciting by themselves. Their value is that they give me coordinates.

I will continue measuring weight, waist and estimated body fat using consistent methods, supported by photographs taken under reasonably comparable conditions. I am interested in direction rather than reacting to every small fluctuation. My objective isn’t to chase a particular number on a scale. I want to develop a body that is leaner, stronger, fitter and more capable, and then observe whether those changes bring something more valuable with them: better energy, greater physical comfort, better recovery, improved movement and greater confidence in the body carrying me through my life.

But I wanted to know more. So, I went underneath it. I established a biological baseline through an extensive blood screen measuring 57 biomarkers, covering blood health, metabolism, cardiovascular risk, hormones, thyroid function, nutritional status, inflammation, organ function and physical recovery. The overall picture was reassuring, but not perfect—which is precisely what makes it useful.

My blood count, blood-sugar regulation, inflammatory markers and much of my nutritional, hormonal and organ-function profile were within laboratory reference ranges. My cholesterol profile showed room for improvement. Total testosterone was within its laboratory range but towards the lower end, while free testosterone remained comfortably within range. TSH was towards the upper end of its reference range. Creatinine and creatine kinase were elevated, although both have to be understood in context, including my heavy training and creatine supplementation.

I am deliberately resisting the temptation to turn individual biomarkers into stories. A blood result is a measurement taken at a particular moment under particular conditions. What becomes interesting is the pattern that develops when relevant measurements are repeated and considered alongside what else is changing. Ultimately, I want more than prettier laboratory results. Do I wake with more energy? Does my body recover better? Does my digestion improve? Do I feel lighter and stronger? Does my body interfere with my thinking less? Does inhabiting it simply become a better experience? That is how I want to judge biological improvement: the measurements should move in a favourable direction, but so should the experience of living in the body they describe.

Cardiovascular Health, Sleep & Recovery

The next layer is largely invisible. The heart is more than something I want to reduce to a number. It responds to movement, rest, sleep and stress, but also to moments of fear, excitement, connection and love. Much of that biological conversation happens quietly beneath our immediate awareness. I want to start listening to it.

My nervous system continues operating while I am negotiating, exercising, sleeping, worrying, recovering or simply sitting quietly. I therefore wanted a way of observing some of that activity without turning my entire day into an examination. For this I am using a screenless wearable continuously and a validated upper-arm blood-pressure monitor under controlled resting conditions.

After wearing the device consistently for approximately a week, I now have enough information to begin forming an initial picture of my cardiovascular activity, recovery and sleep. So far, my resting heart rate has averaged approximately 60 beats per minute, while my sleep has averaged around 6 hours and 44 minutes per night. Another measurement I have started following is heart rate variability, or HRV, which has averaged approximately 64 milliseconds. I also monitored my blood pressure and resting pulse at home over five days using an upper-arm blood-pressure monitor. Measurements were generally taken twice per session, approximately one minute apart, while seated and at rest. Across the completed morning and evening sessions, I collected 20 individual measurements.

Those readings produced an overall average blood pressure of approximately 101/64 mmHg, with an average resting pulse of approximately 59 beats per minute. Individual measurements showed normal day-to-day and morning-to-evening variation, with blood pressure generally remaining towards the lower end of the normal range. My lowest session average was approximately 94/58 mmHg, while subsequent readings largely clustered around 100–107 mmHg systolic and 60–67 mmHg diastolic. These measurements are not intended as a medical diagnosis. Their purpose is to establish a practical cardiovascular starting point for The Human Experiment, allowing future changes in blood pressure and resting heart rate to be compared with a documented beginning as my training, nutrition, sleep, recovery and wider lifestyle evolve.

What interests me isn’t simply producing a lower resting heart rate, a different HRV or sleeping for a particular number of hours. I want to know whether my cardiovascular system becomes more capable of meeting demand and recovering from it. More importantly, I want to observe what happens when the demands of my life remain real, but the biological state meeting those demands begins to change. Will I feel calmer, more energetic, more resilient and better able to handle the life I have chosen to live?

The machines will tell me one version of the story. I want to see whether the human being eventually tells the same one.

Measuring What Machines Cannot

This may eventually become the most important part of the experiment. A blood test can tell me something about glucose, inflammation or hormones. A wearable can estimate my sleep and HRV. A blood-pressure monitor can give me a snapshot of how my cardiovascular system is behaving at that moment. None of them can tell me whether I am happy, whether I feel content with my life, whether I can hold my concentration, whether something unpleasant continues living inside me hours after the event has ended, whether I can turn thought into action, whether I can explain an idea clearly, or whether the economic life I am building actually feels aligned with the human being living it.

So I created a separate Day Zero Biological Economic Alignment Assessment specifically for the things machines cannot adequately measure. The full assessment contains considerably more information than I am sharing here. It examines my physical experience, nervous-system state, cognition, communication, happiness and contentment, economic functioning, environment, relationships, knowledge, areas of perceived misalignment and my own predictions about what I hope might change.

But then subjective measurement creates an obvious problem: what does 6/10 actually mean? If I call myself a six today and another six three months from now, how do I know I am describing approximately the same state?

I therefore developed a standardised 1–10 measurement protocol, giving the numbers defined meanings rather than choosing them intuitively each time. At the lower end are states that are seriously poor, disruptive or dysfunctional. Around the middle is a state in which I am functioning, but with substantial room for improvement. As the numbers rise, the state becomes increasingly strong, stable and desirable. Ten is not human perfection. It represents the best realistic state I can presently recognise within that particular area.

That doesn’t magically transform happiness into a laboratory measurement. It isn’t supposed to. It simply gives subjective experience a consistent language.

And then I imposed one more rule on myself: I have to be brutally honest. There is no point in publishing an experiment about myself and then protecting myself from the findings. If I am embarrassed by an answer, that is information. If I don’t know the answer, that is information. If the number is painfully low, that is information too.

I am not publishing every answer from the assessment here. There are many more. I am sharing a selection that I believe gives an honest picture of Day Zero. And some of them surprised me.

The Nervous System, Mind & Communication

I don’t want a life without pressure. I still want to build companies, create wealth, learn relentlessly and pursue difficult things, and I can’t imagine a life built around those ambitions without pressure being part of it. What I want is a different relationship with pressure.

At Day Zero, I scored general calmness at 4/10, my ability to remain composed under genuine pressure at 4/10, my ability to recover after a stressful event at 4/10, and my ability to deliberately relax at 4/10. The numbers are interesting. My written answer was more revealing. When I asked myself what most easily disturbs my internal state, I wrote that I am confused. I know what I want, but I don’t always know how to get there. I described something inside me as tired from continually trying and searching for the route forward—not defeated, but tired and confused.

I recognise that man. For much of my adult life, movement has been my natural response to uncertainty. Build something. Solve something. Make money. Learn something. Fight something. Find the next route. It has taken me longer to become curious about the biological state from which all that movement originates.

Over these 90 days, meditation, deliberate reading and learning, mental exercises, sleep, physical training, routines, environmental changes and relevant knowledge will therefore become interventions. I want to see whether I can become calmer without becoming softer in my ambitions; whether I can bring intensity to the moments that require it and let it go when they are over.

Then there is cognition. My starting scores include 5/10 for mental clarity, 4/10 for sustained concentration, 4/10 for resistance to distraction and only 3/10 for my ability to move from thinking into action. Communication is another part of myself I wanted to examine more closely. I began giving myself a simple exercise: choose different subjects, speak about each of them for two minutes without preparation, then watch myself back and consider how successfully I had turned what was in my mind into words another person could understand.

What surprised me was that even with subjects I know intimately—money being perhaps the best example—knowing what I wanted to say did not necessarily mean I could communicate it with the clarity and precision I expected from myself. Looking at these exercises alongside my wider experience of how I communicate, I rated my ability to accurately transfer what is in my mind into another person’s mind at just 3/10.

There seems to be a gap between what I know, what I think and what I can express. I find that gap fascinating because, if I can learn to close it, perhaps improving communication is not simply about finding better words. Perhaps it is also about developing a clearer and better-organised mind behind them. Communication also leaves evidence. Months from now, I can record myself again, run similar exercises and compare the two versions. If my thinking becomes clearer and better organised, perhaps I will be able to hear that change in the way I speak.

Lived Experience

This is where the experiment becomes deeply personal. I can improve my blood markers. I can become physically impressive. I can sleep perfectly. I can become more productive. I can make considerably more money. And I can still fail at something fundamental if I don’t enjoy being the person experiencing any of it. I know something about that contradiction. I have spent years chasing money, building businesses, losing things, rebuilding them, pursuing knowledge and living through extraordinary uncertainty. At different moments, I have had reasons to feel powerful and reasons to feel completely exhausted by life. One of the things those experiences have taught me is that what exists around you and what exists inside you do not always move together.

You can have something and still feel empty. You can lose something and somehow feel peaceful. What we have in life and how we experience life are not always the same thing.

That is why happiness, contentment, peacefulness, meaning and enjoyment of life belong in my experiment. And this is where some of my Day Zero answers become difficult to publish.

I scored general happiness at 2/10, contentment at 2/10, peacefulness at 4/10, sense of meaning at 2/10 and enjoyment of life at 4/10. Yet I scored satisfaction with the person I am becoming at 6/10 and excitement about the future at 5/10.

I find that contradiction beautiful in a strange way.

I believe in the man I am becoming more than I currently enjoy being the man I am.

Perhaps that single sentence tells me more about Day Zero than many of the measurements combined. Even more revealingly, when the assessment asked what I expected happiness and contentment to become, I couldn’t properly answer it. I know I want something better, but I don’t yet have the vocabulary to describe exactly what “better” feels like. For once, I don’t want to manufacture an answer. Maybe part of these 90 days is discovering what the question actually means.

Economic Functioning

This is where the experiment returns to the subject that has occupied an enormous part of my life: money. Economic functioning, to me, is much broader than income. Every day I allocate scarce resources: time, attention, energy, knowledge, relationships, money and opportunity.

The quality of those allocations eventually becomes the economic life I experience. My Day Zero assessment therefore looks at focused work, execution, commercial creativity, decision-making, handling uncertainty, control over time, progress towards long-term goals, my relationship with money and whether my work actually aligns with the life I want. Again, I haven’t given myself flattering scores. Focused work is 4/10. Execution is 3/10. Control over my time is 3/10. Satisfaction with my current economic direction is 2/10, and alignment between my work and the life I actually want is 2/10. This interests me enormously because every economic decision begins with a human being, and that human being is never operating independently of his biological state. I make decisions with however much sleep I had the night before, with whatever level of energy I have that day and with a nervous system that may be calm or under pressure. My thinking can be clear or distracted, my confidence can rise or fall, and I inevitably carry something of yesterday with me while anticipating what might happen tomorrow. And from within that constantly changing biological state, I make decisions about money, work, risk, opportunity and the future. That relationship—the way our biology influences our economic behaviour, and the way our economic lives shape our biology in return—is at the heart of what I mean by Biological Economics.

What happens to my execution if my sleep improves? What happens to decision-making if I become calmer? What happens to concentration when my body is more comfortable? What happens to commercial creativity when my mind has less noise?

And the arrow runs in the opposite direction too. What happens biologically if I gain greater control over my time? What happens to sleep when economic uncertainty reduces? What happens to my nervous system if my work increasingly resembles the life I actually want?

I don’t want to assume the answers. I want to watch.

How I Will Run the First 90 Days

For something that measures quite a lot, I want the actual experiment to remain surprisingly simple.The wearable can collect information continuously without demanding my attention. Blood pressure can be measured under standardised conditions at home. Weight, waist and estimated body composition can be checked consistently. Photographs can preserve visible changes. Relevant blood markers can be repeated at appropriate intervals rather than tested obsessively.

I will repeat the subjective assessment

using exactly the same questions and scoring system, allowing me to compare Day Zero with the person I become at the end of the 90 days. And I will change the conditions: nutrition, physical training, cardiovascular conditioning, meditation, sleep, mental exercises, routines, environment and relevant knowledge.

Not everything at once merely for the sake of doing more, and not with the assumption that everything I try will work. I want to observe. If something improves, I want to understand what moved with it. If something deteriorates, I want to notice that too. If something I strongly believed turns out to be wrong, perhaps that will be one of the most valuable findings of the entire experiment.

Because this isn’t supposed to prove me right. It is supposed to teach me something.

Day Zero

There is one belief underneath all of this that I am particularly interested in putting under pressure. I don’t think the different parts of a human being operate independently. Change the body and perhaps the mind responds. Change the mind and perhaps the body follows. Change both and perhaps behaviour changes. Change behaviour and perhaps economic outcomes change. Change the economic environment and perhaps biology responds again.

And perhaps, when enough of the important parts begin moving in the same direction, some things we have spent years trying to repair individually begin changing as consequences of the larger system becoming better aligned. Perhaps. I genuinely don’t know.

And increasingly, I like saying that.

I have spent much of my life wanting answers. Business rewards answers. Money rewards answers. Courtrooms demand answers. People often expect certainty from the person standing in front of them. But curiosity requires enough humility to leave a space where the answer hasn’t arrived yet. That is where I am standing now. I now have a version of myself preserved at Day Zero—in blood, numbers, photographs, recordings, measurements, scores and words. And perhaps for the first time, I can step outside myself for a moment and look at that man as the starting point of the experiment.

I know something about his body and his biology. I know how he sleeps and how his cardiovascular system behaves. I know how he describes his mind, his work, his happiness and his ambitions. I even know something about what it feels like for him to wake up and experience being himself. And I have been honest enough to record what he—and I—still don’t know. For the next 90 days, that man becomes my reference point. I am going to change the conditions deliberately and see who comes out on the other side.

Perhaps I will become leaner. Perhaps some biomarkers will improve. Perhaps I will sleep better, think more clearly, communicate more precisely and execute more consistently.

But what I am hoping to discover is something larger.

I want to know whether I can become more ambitious and more peaceful. More capable and more content. Economically stronger without asking my biology to continuously pay the price for it.

And perhaps, when I return to Day Zero, I will discover that the most important changes were not the ones I originally knew how to measure.

Thank you for taking the time to read. I hope our paths cross again.

Hasitha Rodrigo