How a triple bypass mid-Ironman training forced a complete life audit
Craig Hersch had done three full Ironman triathlons and nine half Ironmans. He was 55, finishing in the top quarter of his age group, and training for another full race when he couldn't breathe in the pool one afternoon. He drove himself home, showered, ate a piece of rotisserie chicken, and let his wife drive him to the hospital. A heart cath later, his cardiologist, a friend, looked at him and said, "You need a triple bypass. You need it now."
"You could have knocked me over with a feather," Craig told Ben. "I thought I was this badass. I thought I was invincible. I really thought I was immortal, even though I deal in estate planning and I'm dealing with death all the time." The irony wasn't lost on either of them: Craig had spent 36 years helping wealthy clients plan for their own mortality while quietly believing the rules didn't apply to him.
What high-performing entrepreneurs get wrong about stress and heart disease
Craig is Ashkenazi Jewish, a population with a genetic predisposition to cardiovascular disease, but he's clear that stress was a co-conspirator. He'd had a nuclear stress test six months before surgery and been cleared. No one had done a calcium score. The blockages built quietly while he was logging Ironman training miles and running a 100-year-old law firm as senior partner.
The post-surgery changes were structural, not just philosophical. He bought a home in Asheville, North Carolina. He shed administrative responsibilities. He started operating almost entirely inside what Strategic Coach calls his unique ability. "The Craig after is probably a little bit more laid-back. He doesn't worry too much about things he can't control." His wife Patty, for her part, leaned over just before he went under for surgery, their 30th wedding anniversary, the day they were supposed to fly to Croatia, and whispered: "You will go through no amount of trouble to avoid buying me a nice anniversary gift."
Growing up with nothing, and how necessity built an entrepreneur
Craig's father was an artist who was pushed into business by his parents and spent decades doing work he didn't love. Craig watched that up close and decided early he wasn't going to repeat it. His parents dropped him at the University of Florida dorm steps when he was 18, his dad shook his hand and asked if he'd be okay, and Craig said yes, while privately wondering how he was going to pull it off.
What followed was a masterclass in resourceful entrepreneurship. As the fraternity's football ticket chairman, Craig bribed the women at the ticket office with coffee and donuts for better seats, invited sororities to sit with them knowing half wouldn't show, and sold the surplus tickets from a bagel shop on University Avenue, seated, reading a newspaper, negotiating quietly, to avoid scalping laws. He worked his way up to assistant deli manager at Publix while simultaneously carrying 22 semester hours of law and master's accounting classes. When the dean of the law school spotted him behind the deli counter and called him in, Craig told him plainly: "If you want to give me more scholarship money, I'm working because I need to. I can't pay my rent."
EQ over IQ, why the C student built the best practice in the class
Craig graduated law school in 1989 alongside a classmate he calls Mike, a C student who married his college sweetheart, moved to Atlanta, and became the undisputed go-to attorney for liquor licenses in the city. His law firm's lobby features a fully stocked premium bar with a bartender. Craig calls him probably the most financially successful person in their entire graduating class.
"The straight-A students work for the B students when they get out," Craig said. His argument isn't that intelligence doesn't matter, it's that the ability to read people, create value, and make others feel understood runs the room. He connects this directly to his own childhood: raised by a narcissistic father, he learned early to read emotional states as a survival skill. That same skill became his greatest professional asset. And on AI: "AI is another tool, just like Excel is. The really successful people are the ones that know how to relate to people."
From anger-driven ambition to simha, the long road to communal joy
Craig is honest that his early drive came from anger, jealousy at fraternity brothers with new cars, resentment at wearing Toughskins while other kids had Levi's, a burning need to prove that his father's story wasn't his story. He compares it to Michael Jordan manufacturing rage to defeat the Detroit Pistons. It worked. It also, he believes, contributed to the arterial buildup that put him on the operating table.
The evolution toward something more sustainable took until his mid-40s, accelerated by fatherhood, his wife's warm Brooklyn family, and the writings of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. The concept that landed hardest was simha, the Hebrew word for joy that appears at weddings and bar mitzvahs. "A simha can't happen unless it's shared with other people. Happiness can be personal. It can be selfish. And it's fleeting." Craig and Patty have a standing rule at every event with a band or DJ: dance the whole night. He admits he's a terrible dancer. They do it anyway.
The advice Craig would give his 22-year-old self, and every entrepreneur in the room
"Calm down. Let life come to you. It's all going to work out." Craig frames it the way Phil Jackson framed it for Jordan: stop forcing the game, trust what you've built, and let the results arrive. He pairs this with Dan Sullivan's R-Factor question, if we're sitting here three years from today looking back, what has to happen for you to feel good about your progress?, and a single non-negotiable: protect your confidence. Lose that, and nothing else holds.
He finally made it to Croatia five years after his surgery. He was 60 years old, swimming in the Adriatic, when he spotted teenagers jumping off a 30-foot cliff. His wife screamed at him not to. His friends egged him on and then refused to join him. He climbed up barefoot, looked down at what felt like 90 feet, and jumped, landing a forward somersault, feet first. "That's definitely nonconformist. I want to win. Not going to do it any other person's way. I'm going to do it my way."
