Tomo Marjanovic
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Today, I’m writing to you from my personal office. This is an important place to me, a refuge from my stressful week. Everything around me in this office has meaning. Behind my head, there’s a custom piece of art, a mixture between an American $100 bill and a 100,000 Kuna note from Croatia. This way, both Benjamin Franklin and King Tomislav can look down at me as I work. To my right, I have a bronze, plumed helmet of Sparta. Next to that is my MAHA hat. In front of me, I have a chess board handmade in Egypt. Beside that, one of my most cherished possessions is a ballistic level 3 helmet and tactical knife, which was carried and worn by a SEAL Team 6 member, ‘The Operator’, who took part in the raid against Bin Laden. This is a personal gift to me from my friend, Nawfal Filali.
I’ve surrounded myself with the mementos of great men and their achievements, and this serves to remind me of the privilege of stress when times get stressful.
My friends, I almost couldn’t bring myself to sit down and write this newsletter for you, because I was so fixated on the busyness of this week. In my upcoming book, Operation Optimal, I explain the difference between good stress (eustress) and bad stress (distress). Today, I was falling into the bad. It was only when I forced myself to sit down and reflect therapeutically that I realized this key insight: It’s my privilege to be stressed.
This is all stress that I signed up for. It’s all stress that makes me money or makes me more successful or makes me more of the person that I’m trying to become. There is no light without dark, and there is no success without stress. Isn’t this true for so many things in life?
We all love the idea of being in shape, but it’s hard to get in shape!
The cost seems steep:
Eat perfect
Exercise
Do your cardio
Don’t skip leg day!
No alcohol
Get your six-eight hours of sleep
It can be easy to overfocus on the costs of success so much that we lose sight of the success itself. That was me until I forced myself to reframe my mind. I always start writing this newsletter by asking myself a simply question: Where am I?
Well, today I’m in my awesome office above my awesome clinic next to my awesome private club and right down the road from my awesome house. I’m going on an awesome flight to Dubai in two days. What’s the famous saying?
“You don’t have problems, just more work to do.”
Be grateful for your stress, because it’s a privilege to have it. My friends, I’m saying this as much to myself as to you. I need to hear this myself! I wrote this in my own words just recently:
I asked God for strength, and God gave me difficulties to make me strong.
I asked for wisdom, and God gave me problems to solve.
I asked for courage, and God gave me dangers to overcome.
I asked for love, and God gave me troubled people to help.
My prayers were answered.
In a few days, I will be taking another trip to the UAE. I’ll be putting the last things in place for getting Aspire Rejuvenation Dubai up and running – setting up the security deposit, getting the official tenancy contract from the landlord, having our shareholder agreements translated, signed, and notarized by the Ministry of Health, and then finalizing my Emirates ID and official residency for the UAE.
It’s a lot of logistical stuff, but it’s all very exciting. Aspire Rejuvenation in Dubai is finally becoming real. I got the idea for this when I first visited in November of 2019, where I was attending a medical conference. Back then, I was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and Aspire hadn’t even made a buck yet. Now, I’m giving keynote speeches, becoming a resident, and opening new clinics. It’s literally a dream come true.
That’s what six years of relentless hard work looks like.
When I look at my years of hard work in this frame of reflection, all the negativity becomes positive. Tony Robbins taught me this. Reframe what you’re looking at. You can either look at it from the frame and the scope of a negative thing, or you can frame it and look at it in a scope of positive and uplifting thing.
The key is your scope.
New Technology Revealed: Hormone Thermometer
MIT’s new precision gene editing tool could transform medicine
In health and optimization news, this one’s wild. We’ve been talking about biomarker tracking for a while, and now there’s this new device from Eli Health called the “hormone thermometer.” It’s the world’s first instant at-home hormone monitor. You use a saliva test with a smartphone app, and within twenty minutes it gives you real-time cortisol readings, no lab visits, no blood draws. You can literally track how stress, sleep, exercise, and diet affect your hormone balance day to day (though only with cortisol). The app even interprets results and gives personalized recommendations.
Now, for hormones like testosterone, estradiol, and progesterone, blood tests are still the gold standard. That’s the most accurate way we have right now. Maybe that’ll change in the future, but as of today, that’s still the benchmark.
That said, for cortisol, this tech is awesome. I’m honestly mad Eli Health made it before I did, because it’s so cool. We already give clients salivary kits to measure cortisol throughout the day, morning, afternoon, and night, since cortisol naturally follows a rhythm. It’s supposed to spike when you wake up, dip midday, and drop again before bed. That rhythm matters. This new device just makes it way easier to track and understand it in real time.
I don’t know the full science behind Eli’s system yet, but it’s exactly the kind of thing we’ve been talking about when it comes to wellness tech and optimization apps. Imagine if AI gets involved, if it could instantly interpret your cortisol data and tell you, “Here’s what’s going on, here’s how to fix it.” Instant feedback like that? That’s next-level.
And where does it go from here? Eventually, we might be testing other hormones the same way, or even organ function. Imagine a wearable that checks your kidney or liver function just by syncing with your app. That’s where the future of medicine is headed: instant diagnostics.
Eli Health might have a bit more money than we do (that’s a joke, of course they do!), they might be Big Pharma, but this time they’re pushing things in the right direction. That’s rare! Whether they continue to use breakthroughs like this in the right way or not remains to be seen. But this is a glimpse of what’s coming for the industry. I’ve been saying for years that this kind of tech was inevitable, and it’s finally here.
In this week’s podcast, I sit down with Michael Morelli. We met for the first time and get real about peptides, FDA roadblocks, and the wave of misinformation online. We swap origin stories, from addiction and restart into building Fit Script and clinics, and lay out a simple, data-driven path to feeling great inside and out.
One of the quotes that stands out to me from this podcast is: “If you do not build this life with maximum effort, you are disrespecting your very creation. You disrespect God by not working on being as capable as possible.”
We talk about how we can respect the gifts and talents that God has given us by making use of them to our utmost. This is an episode you won’t want to miss, and you can check it out at the link above.
Your challenge this week is to take 10 to 15 minutes and reframe something that’s been stressing you out. Whatever it is, work, family, business, health, ask yourself: how is this a privilege?
We focus so much on the cost of success that we forget its value. The pressure, long hours, and responsibility aren’t punishments. They’re proof that you’re in the game. Stress means you’re doing something that matters. It’s not a burden, it’s a sign of growth.
Sit somewhere quiet, grab a notebook, and write down the top three things stressing you out. Then, next to each one, write how that stress represents progress. Maybe your schedule’s full because people depend on you. Maybe your body’s sore because you’re pushing yourself to get better. Maybe your business is demanding because it’s expanding.
When you start viewing stress as privilege, everything changes. You stop asking “Why me?” and start saying “Thank you.” The right kind of stress, the kind that builds, not breaks, makes you stronger, sharper, and more capable.
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