Yang Ding-yi: As long as one stays positive and has little rituals of gratitude, time is relative
Yang Ding-yi sleeps just two to four hours per night, but the Taipei TV celebrity and head of a health empire could hardly be in better shape.
After staying up late to work on medical science papers, the 54-year-old usually rises later for two hours of body-building exercise, a topic of his dozens of television appearances. He also starts the day with at least five minutes of saying private thanks to people and to parts of his body for their years of hard work.
These daily habits help Yang lead companies and academic institutions spanning 35,000 employees and thousands more students, from Taiwan and the United States. The customs are part of a broader approach to life that Yang describes as "getting rid of garbage", or retreating from modern pressure to process multiple concepts every second.
That approach fits into a deeper context of alternative health care long popular in Asia.
To run a busy business, the man known in the West as John Young suggests delegating tasks and clear per-project performance metrics for employees instead of keeping track of their hours. Both tricks eliminate time-consuming management duties, he says.
Yang further recommends knowing the ins and outs of one's own body. He needs less sleep than others, for example, and sometimes eats fewer than three meals a day. He takes breaks to walk around instead of firing off another round of e-mails.
"The mind is always senior to the body. The heart is actually more senior than the mind. As long as one stays positive and has little rituals of gratitude, time is relative," he says. "It's quality of time. Business people, when happy, are vigorous and very productive."
Yang, encouraged by his father to start a health care career, began following holistic medicine in the early 1980s as a cancer researcher. That work led him to head up the laboratory of molecular immunology and cell biology at Rockefeller University in the United States.
In 2000, Yang returned to his native Taiwan to promote an Asian-based philosophy that Western medicine works best when paired with alternative health practices long popular in China and India.
His ideas came from research and soccer and judo injuries he suffered as a teenager while growing up in Brazil. Today, among other things, Yang is board chairman of Inteplast Group in the United States, and Taiwan-based Chang Gung Biotechnology and Chang Gung University of Science and Technology.
"Medicine has become way too specialised. We've forgotten the human is a composite of body, mind and spirit. You can't divide it into molecules," Yang says. "These things in my view are completely scientific. I've been pushing that now for the past 20 years."
