The secret to being healthy is to make being healthy as easy as possible.

This is my data from my favorite app, Moves. Moves uses your iPhone to track how far you walk, cycle, and run every day. I’m a bit of a cyclist. Back in late May, I rode my bike about 85 miles to Montauk. I love that ride. I do it every year. But it’s a special ride and not part of my daily routine. Speaking of that, I’m the CEO of a startup and my schedule is a bit hectic. Our office is in DUMBO, but I spend much of my day meeting with various people in the city. I’d typically just take the subway and/or walk to my meetings. Moves tells me I walk about 35 to 40 miles a week. And that’s just my natural daily life here in NYC. It’s a walking city. Being healthy is easy. I spent the last week of June and the first week of July traveling to the midwest to speak at conferences and hang out with my family. My walking was less than half of what I do on a daily basis here in NYC. Visiting communities that depends on cars makes health hard. It’s that simple. When I got back from St. Louis around July 10th, my Citibike key arrived in the mail. I’ve been riding my Citibike for the past 2 weeks now and I absolutely love how the city’s infrastructure is making health even easier. Instead of taking the subway or ferry or walking, I’ve now got a bike almost anywhere I am and almost anywhere I want to go and it costs $95 a year. It’s a 20 minute, 2 mile ride here, a 3.1 mile ride there. It’s easy, convenient, awesome— it makes exercise serendipitous. I definitely don’t feel like the coolest kid in the world riding one of those big ass blue citibank-branded bikes, but you’ve got to hand it to citibank for investing and supporting health. It’s sad that a bank saw the value in investing in health and utility, and not a health insurance company or a hospital, but then again, our healthcare system isn’t about promoting health, it’s about profiting off sickness. But that’s another story…

I’m just grateful to live in New York City, the greatest country in the world. We are our own beast. We’re a designed city built on constraints that continues to redesign itself. We’re great because we were built on constraints. We’re a friggin’ island. We’re what happens when humans design something with constraints in mind. The rest of car-dependent America was designed by people given unlimited resources with very little vision for what life, and health, should be. It’s wonderful to see that our leaders are redesigning a city to make health easy. It’s far more valuable than pills and scalpels.