For those of us who decided to tackle life at 100%, be it personal goals, professional ambitions or just about any other aspiration we might have, there eventually comes the time when we get to feel the added strain of all of our efforts.

It sounds grand to be overly productive, to wake up at 5:00 in the morning and work till 23:00 at night, but the issue with most people I know who adhere to such a strong work ethic, isn’t commitment and it absolutely isn’t motivation, but health.

Imagine you decided, instead of taking the subway or bus to work, you’d be making your daily commute on your bike to save some cash for the things you like. And let’s say, for the sake of this example, your work place isn’t as far away from your home as it is with most people. Let’s say you would only need 20 min of steady biking to get there.

Besides the obvious health perks of riding a bike everyday — the magnificent cardio workout that you get while doing it — think of the money you’d be saving by not having to buy tickets every day. The big question: Could you spend all of the extra funds on what you planned to buy, like a new TV or loads of fresh art supplies?

A problem would eventually arise from your newly found means of cheap and healthy transportation; that bike you got brand-new, but almost never really used, would eventually show signs of wear.

That rusty chain could pop a link due to insufficient maintenance throughout the years, the tires would be in need of replacing much more often than when the thing was parked in the garage or cellar. The brakes might not work properly after a few months and you’d be wise to invest in a good helmet too, regardless of how your bike is doing.

But what if you just left it like it was; no repairs, no maintenance, no helmet, no weird magnetic flappy things to guard your new trousers from being shredded by the front chain ring?

Eventually you’d hurt yourself by crashing down some incline because the brakes didn’t work and break the whole bike. And all that effort for being more healthy and saving up some cash for a new easel would be gone, along with your motivation to fix that mess of a bike and get back on it the next day.

I am currently experiencing such a state, but rather than it being caused by biking, it is because of the changes I have made to my daily routines — and actually setting up said routines, because up until a few months ago I was a lazy frick.

I ate healthily, ran everyday and worked hard on building up my business, yet after 3 months of producing this blog, the newly made podcast and making my art whenever I could from 5:30 till 23:00, when I’d finally drop contently into my bed, I crashed.

And while the old me would have explained away the whole situation as just another failed attempt at getting my life in order, I have been researching health and nutrition and found a myriad of small issues I needed to address, but never did.

But this isn’t a health blog, and neither did I ever want to bore those of you wonderful souls that read my daily blunders with the topic of biking accidents or god forbid me bickering about my health!

My intentions are to remind myself and anyone who had, or is experiencing similar situations in their lives, to just keep on doing the right thing. And even more importantly not to forget the crucial and steadily increasing amount of maintenance we must do for the most significant tool we have as creative entrepreneurs, freelancers or just folks who like to make art — our bodies.

If you’ve been going at it strong, working hard on your business and your creative career, you have to take some of that extra energy you got from finally getting your ass on that treadmill, and some of that extra time you made for work by waking up 2 hours earlier that you needed to, and allocate it to nutrition and health.

Because the art world can be a tough place for emerging talent — even for those who live in places where the markets are flourishing. With strong competition, oversaturated markets, Anish Kapoor buying up our colours and a slowly but steadily approaching recession, the last thing stopping all of us from reaching our dreams should be GERD or some banal autoimmune disease that in most cases could have been cured a long time ago by just sticking to the right nutrition and listening to our bodies.