Some of the most powerful health investments do not look like workouts, supplements, or routines. They look like people. Specifically, people who see the world in ways that quietly dismantle your certainty.
Adria is, in many ways, an enigma to me.
She has an unshakable confidence, a deeply nuanced appreciation for right and wrong, and a presence so steady it co regulates everyone around her. What fascinates me endlessly is that even when I try to anticipate how she will respond, I am almost never close.
She has a practicality paired with reverence for simple, profound things. An ability to sit with discomfort, soak in it, and remain completely unshaken. She values perspective. She never rushes to conclusions. And she consistently offers points of view so far outside the conventional that it can feel surreal.
The Nail
About eight years ago, I attended a professional workshop. At one point, the presenter played the now well known YouTube video It’s Not About the Nail.
I laughed hard. So did the room. I had been coaching and personal training for close to thirteen years at that point, and the video perfectly captured a familiar frustration. We nodded. We chuckled. We felt seen.
Excited, I could not wait to show Adria.
I did not text her the link. I wanted to watch her reaction in real time. She has always been my litmus test.
The video played. She watched silently. Intently. The camera panned back to the nail.
No laugh. No smirk. No hint of amusement.
I was genuinely confused.
How did you not find that funny?
She paused, then asked one simple question.
How did the nail get there?
I froze.
What the Room Never Asked
For years, I had repeated the Thoreau quote about striking at the root instead of hacking at the leaves. Versions of it appear in nearly every workshop I have ever attended, across disciplines and industries.
And yet, in that room filled with experienced professionals, not one of us asked the most important question.
How did the nail get there?
In that moment, everything shifted. The problem was not the nail. The problem was the environment that allowed it to exist in the first place.
Yes, you can pull the nail out. But without understanding how it got there, what stops it from returning?
When I watched the video initially, the laughter felt affirming. It validated a shared frustration. And that is precisely where the danger lives.
Rooms filled with people who share similar perspectives can feel clarifying. They can also quietly reinforce blind spots.
Sometimes the most important insight comes not from the loudest agreement, but from the person who never laughs.
The Investment Named
The real investment here was not the video.
It was proximity to someone whose way of seeing the world fundamentally differs from my own.
This is a core principle inside Health401k®. Health does not only emerge from better behaviors. It emerges from environments that change how we interpret problems in the first place.
Surrounding yourself with people who interrupt your certainty is one of the most underleveraged health investments available to us.
Why This Is a Multidimensional Health Investment
Receiving perspective from someone like Adria crosses multiple dimensions of health at once.
- intellectual: Learning to ask different first questions. Expanding how problems are framed before solutions are applied.
- social: Being in relationship with someone whose emotional intelligence and empathy operate at a different altitude.
- emotional: Letting go of the urge to fix problems you think you already understand.
- environmental: Choosing relational environments that challenge your worldview instead of reinforcing it.
This kind of investment does not require money, optimization, or perfect execution. It requires humility. And proximity.
Turning the Lens Back to You
Most of us spend our time in rooms where our thinking is affirmed. Where our laughter is mirrored. Where our frustrations are validated.
But health rarely expands in echo chambers.
It expands when someone asks a question you never considered. When someone pauses instead of reacting. When someone sees roots where you only see symptoms.
Who in your life sees the world through a lens you cannot access on your own?
And how often do you place yourself close enough to let it change you?
That is not a personality trait. It is a portfolio allocation.
See Adria’s internal framework applied to a real client’s struggles in
Part 2.
Ryan Travis Woods