I ran into an old friend this weekend, and wow! The dude has gotten into serious shape.

He’s been working out five days a week for the past year and half, it turns out. Crossfit. And he looks great—trim, lean, and muscular. Reader, if you walked past my friend on the street, you’d think to yourself, “I bet that guy works out 5 days a week.”

Our level of physical fitness is obvious. We get a daily report when we look in the mirror each morning, and we’re either where we want to be or not. We’re forced to confront our status daily.

But there are other areas of fitness, too, and they’re much easier to ignore. Wouldn’t it be nice if our status in these areas was as obvious as the state of our physical health?

  • Emotional fitness
  • Mental fitness
  • Financial fitness
  • Spiritual fitness

It’s easy to neglect our bodies, but it’s far easier to neglect the above areas. And while we can’t be focused on everything at once—it’s not realistic to “work out five days a week” in all of these areas—we can maintain a respectable baseline.

If we’re mentally flabby, if we haven’t cracked a book in years, it might be time to put on our mental running shoes and go for a jog down Nonfiction St. If we haven’t thought about our retirement savings since the previous decade, it’s probably time to step on the financial scale and confront reality.

“Out of sight, out of mind,” as the saying goes. For the careless, yes.

But you’re not careless.