Guest Post by Manfred

Book Author and Founder of fitness startup 4legsfitness.com

Happiness is health plus freedom (Scott Adams)

I am a big fan of Scott Adams, the inventor of the Dilbert cartoon. In his excellent book “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big,” he talks a lot about happiness. Happiness is of course very complex and hard to define. It means different things for different people. But Scott captured the essence when in his book he described the formula as happiness equals health plus freedom.

If you think about this, it makes a lot of sense. Essentially health and freedom are our most important goods. They are the basis on which everything else builds on. If you are not healthy or if you are not free, nothing else matters and you cannot achieve happiness. In this article, I explain how I leverage the connection between the two to constantly maximise my happiness and what role the publication of a successful book can play in all of this.

Here’s the interview that Manfred had with Jyotsna inside Author Success Stories.

The health and freedom symbiosis

I am constantly and intensely working on both. Everything I do somehow contributes to either improving my health or my freedom to maximise my happiness. Thankfully, in my case, both are strongly connected and driven by my passion. This passion is fitness, sports, and in general living a healthy lifestyle. For more than a decade, I have been researching and experimenting with many aspects of fitness. I wanted to learn what fitness is. I wanted to optimize my life to become fitter, healthier, and also more athletic. I wanted to find ways to incorporate habits into my life that make it easy to pursue a fitness-oriented lifestyle without being a full-time sports professional. And now I want to share this with everyone.

Based on the gained experience and knowledge I created the 4 Legs of Fitness model. A solid basis of fitness needs to cover four essential areas: strength, cardio, nutrition, and recovery. Like a chair becomes unstable or unusable if its four legs are not balanced, the same happens with our health and fitness. This model is the foundation on which I built my whole business 4legsfitness.com. Everything I do — in business and in private — is based on that model. I follow this myself every day, which helps me to maintain levels of superior health.

At the same time, I am constantly working on increasing my personal freedom. Freedom has many dimensions, like what you do, where you do it, or how you do it. A very important aspect of freedom is financial freedom. That means not having to work for someone else or in other words trading my time and energy for money. The fact that most of us are financially dependent can be seen as unfortunate or fortunate: unfortunate because in our world — in our society money has such an important status that this printed paper makes us dependent. On the other hand, it is also fortunate because financial freedom can be engineered. Financial freedom in turn massively contributes to our general freedom and with this to happiness.

I am not completely financially free yet. I still have a day job. But I have my expenses in check and I have a good mix of investments and passive income. In 2022, I will be financially free. In my life, the 4 Legs of Fitness model and the business that I am building around it is the connector that makes the symbiosis between health and freedom work.

How does publishing a book fit into all of this?

I described and published the principles of my 4 Legs of Fitness model in the book “From Healthy to Athletic: How to Master the 4 Ingredients to Superior Fitness.” This went on to become a bestseller. This book is of incredible value to my business and, in fact, my life. It massively contributed to supporting the lifestyle that I have and that I am constantly refining.

To be more precise, the book serves various purposes. The first is the obvious one that generates passive income for me without doing anything. There are, however, two other aspects that are way more effective.

The book represents a highly valuable marketing channel for me that drives visitors to my website, some of which eventually convert into customers. This was my strategy right from the beginning, which is why I set the book price relatively low. I knew I could generate more revenue from cross-selling as compared to direct book sales. The details, by the way, you never know upfront, but requires a lot of experimenting. This is where Jyotsna and her team helped me a lot. We changed the pricing a lot to learn from the effects and constantly refined it.

The final purpose is probably the strongest at least from an idealistic standpoint: publishing my book which eventually became a bestseller adds credibility to all I do. All my offers and health and fitness programs are based on the principles of the 4 Legs of Fitness as described in the book. My customers as well as my partners know and appreciate that.

Why it makes sense to work with people who know what they are doing

My time is very limited — like everyone else’s. It is way more effective in outsourcing tasks to people who are experts in their field. Yes, it costs you money but at the end of the day, you win a lot of time that you can use to do the things you are good at and where you can add value or grow. Initially, I wanted to publish the book entirely myself. But very early on I noticed I needed help. My first cover designs looked embarrassingly horrible.

I got in touch with Jyotsna and her team at Happy Self Publishing. Today for me it’s absolutely clear that I would have never achieved a bestseller without their help. There is so much more to publishing a best-selling book than only great content. You also need to have a great design, appealing title, and know when to run which campaigns. Achieving the status of an international fitness bestseller still today gives me and my business the required awareness and credibility.

What’s next?

I have many big projects planned — of course, all in line with the two fundamental ingredients of happiness: health and freedom. One of those projects will be another book in which I want to broaden my approach from fitness to a holistic life concept. The foundation of this is true and solid values that make us a better person and are proven to be beneficial in maintaining interpersonal harmony. I have the concept in mind and will start fleshing out the details by the end of the year. And I have no doubt in my mind to work with Happy Self Publishing as a trusted partner and achieve another bestseller. In the meantime, I am carrying on happily with my healthy lifestyle, doing lots of sports, and further growthing 4legsfitness.com.

About Manfred and 4legsfitness.com

Manfred is an Indepreneur and the founder of the fitness startup 4legsfitness.com. He is a health and fitness enthusiast, certified instructor and sports nutritionist, multi-sport athlete, and overall happy person. He loves to lift heavy things, read, learn, constantly grow, share, and help make the world a healthier place.

He invented the 4 Legs of Fitness model which he published in the bestseller “From Healthy to Athletic: How to Master the 4 Ingredients to Superior Fitness.” He offers this also as seminars. His most popular health and fitness program is QuarantineFit.Life based on that model.

Find Manfred on 4legsfitness.com, Instagram, or contact him directly.