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Not living as healthy a life as possible can lead to more than just physical challenges. The fiscal results can add more problems to your life—but some are avoidable. Here are three bad health habits and how they can affect your financial health and that of your business.

Smoking: Quitting smoking is considered one of the hardest endeavors to take on (and science backs this notion.) Besides the fact that a pack of cigarettes can cost you up to $17, the American Cancer Society reports that tobacco-related healthcare costs are more than $130 billion and the direct healthcare cost for those who smoke cigarettes is about $35 per pack. (So, let’s say you smoke only a pack per day. That’s more than $13,000 per year.)

Recent Wallet Hub research also indicates that smokers can lose up to $5,932 per year in income, and more than $156 billion is lost in productivity due to premature death and exposure to secondhand smoke. In some states, health insurance premiums are higher for smokers—up to 50% higher than those who do not smoke.

The American Cancer Society and healthcare professionals cite options for quitting including counseling, nicotine-replacement therapy, and prescription drugs. Smokers are also advised to seek help from a licensed medical professional or to take advantage of cessation programs covered by insurance.

Overworking: There are several health-related effects of overworking and researchers have found that the resulting stress can lead to depression, heavy drinking, impaired sleep, diabetes, and other conditions and illnesses. It can also lead to a loss in productivity, which is quite counterproductive. The domino effect: absences at work, appointments, and business meetings, which then leads to a breakdown in your reputation and credibility as a leader. If you’re missing a meeting that could have netted you that lucrative partnership, that’s money lost to your business. And even if you show up, you won’t be at your best—yet again risking the loss of money-making opportunities.

Productivity experts suggest working in 60-to 90-minute intervals throughout the day, and to manage your time in a way that promotes a healthy balance between professional and personal time. Prioritizing deadlines, being prompt for meetings, and avoiding distractions are all ways you can avoid unnecessary midnight oil-burning sessions.

Skipping Doctor’s Appointments: No-show rates for doctor’s appointments can range from 5% to 55%. Not scheduling routine exams, especially for conditions and diseases that disproportionately affect black women and men or people of a certain age range, can mean missed diagnosis and exposure to health challenges that could have been avoided or treated earlier.

The CDC indicates that getting the right health services, screenings, and treatments, help your chances for living a longer, healthier life, and catching things early can help to avoid the healthcare and insurance costs that you could face if a condition is not detected early enough, gets worse, or leads to a more serious one. It’s definitely less expensive to go to the doctor regularly than to avoid it for years and end up having an extended stay in a hospital or high costs of a lifetime of prescription drugs or medical treatments.

Editor’s Note: This article originally published on July 2, 2016 

The post Entrepreneurs: Here Are 3 Ways Bad Health Habits Can Cut Into Your Bottom Line appeared first on Black Enterprise.

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It’s not inconceivable that two friends would find a reason to work together, or would even come up with a business idea together. You may have become friends because you work in the same or adjacent industries. And, since you do have the same interests and passions, you likely chat about these, and spark ideas. You see businesses started by friends all of the time. But there’s one thing I know every friend-business-duo will tell you: working with your friend changes the friendship forever. It just does. Your friendship won’t be the exception. I’ve worked with friends several times, and even I know this to be true. Now, to be clear, I have friends who started as colleagues, and we developed a friendship after. That’s easier. There’s always that foundation of a professional relationship, and the friendship was just the cherry on top. But, starting as friends and becoming business partners is very different. Here’s what to prepare for when working with a friend.

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If you don’t have to, then don’t

I mean it. Only do this thing with this friend if this is literally the only person with whom you can do this thing. If you could pull it off, just as well, with a pure work acquaintance, go in that direction. Good friends are hard to come by and I promise you now, your friendship will not be the same after working together.

Let me start off by saying that, no matter what you’ve heard I am the night is not “The Black Dahlia Story”. I am the Night is based on the memoir of Fauna Hodel One Day She’ll Darken: The Mysterious Beginnings of Fauna Hodel, in which she wrote about finding her identity and her family amidst scandal, tragedy, and bigotry. Although her story is tangentially connected to the Dahlia murder, Hodel’s is its own intriguing slice of old Hollywood noir, complete with the shadowy characters, randy reporter, and odd underbelly that is slowly revealed as each episode in the miniseries is laid out.

The show should be one on your binge list. It centers the black community in a way that no other Hollywood noir film has without being labeled “a black movie”. I Am the Night also approaches Hodel’s identity like an American Horror Story-adjacent mystery that makes it hard to remember that the whole thing is based on a true story.

Following Fauna

The center of the story is Fauna Hodel, played by India Eisley. She is from a small town in Southern Nevada that feels like a Mississippi town. We are introduced to her and her life in Episode 1, a young black girl raised in a black community in the 1950s. She is the light skinned one of the group, has plenty of friends, and is very much at home in her life with her mother Jimmy Lee, played by Golden Brooks. One day, Fauna finds information that leads her to believe she is adopted and may not be black. Jimmy Lee confirms that she has a white mom but is biracial and that’s all Jimmy Lee will reveal.

Fauna is eager to find her roots, so she reaches out to a man who ends up being the most dangerous person she could contact. He is a suspected murder — the man who may have committed the infamous Black Dahlia murder and several others. He is also her grandfather, George Hodel. Fauna launches headlong into her search, leaving Las Vegas for Los Angeles where leaning on the black family who raised her for support and eventually having to turn to them for protection as well when things get hairy.

Chris Pine enters the narrative as Jay, a burned-out alcoholic reporter who is hellbent on chasing the Black Dahlia murders and others that are being attributed to another killer. He’s sloppy and unshaven (and still looks amazing, by the way) and turns out to be Fauna’s best hope for finding out about her family.  He also ends up being the only person to save her from herself when she forgoes Jimmy Lee’s advice and that of the rest of the family and starts mingling with the Hodel clan. The only way to get to the truth is to find her mother.

(This happened in Episode 5. Are you still standing after hearing the tea that Mama Hodel spilled? I just about choked on my actual tea and had to rewind to be sure I heard the story right! How many of you had church-fan yourselves to keep from passing out because it was so shocking? I did. Find me on Twitter to discuss.)

Race and Old Hollywood

Black people are usually a part of the scenery when it comes to Old Hollywood noir films. They are the help, the caregivers, the sidekicks, and others who appear in the film as tools to serve the white leads. I Am the Night centers the black community by making them central Fauna’s story. They are her family, her friends, her lovers, her people. The show gives us so many nuanced examples of blackness in the 1950s by following Fauna to school where she is chided for being light-skinned, with a boy she likes and having to assure them that she is black and so is her boyfriend isn’t arrested, and even in Jimmy Lee’s hanging out in the backyard with the neighbors after work. All of this in the first episode, but it isn’t isolated.

In fact, when Fauna does go see her white family, it’s a foreign world. Not only does she discover the racial disparities, but the class differences are also glaringly uncomfortable as well. She begins to see just how impoverished her upbringing really was. Fauna is also able to see where her “home” really is, and how that definition clashes with her expectations and her ultimate findings. The parallels between the two worlds is another thing to note while watching. The difference in all factors into the ultimate question of Fauna’s true identity and the one person she wants to be.

Jenkins and Her Priorities in I Am the Night

I got to talk to the creator and director of the first episode, Patty Jenkins about the centering of identity and blackness in a story that has been told too many times over. Jenkins said the struggle with identity is what drew her to the story, so it had to be the focus. She also insisted that she was not going to set out to tell another Black Dahlia story. We’ve seen it too many times. Although the horrible mystery is related to Fauna’s story, her search for who she is and deciding what she wanted to be after that search is the point of the story. She overturns some pretty treacherous things in her search, but always falls back on the blackness she was raised in for support and comfort. This too ultimately matters to the identity the girl ends up taking on. Laying out what made up that identity, no matter how bizarre, terrible, or hateful it may be was Jenkins priority here.

The way the story weaves all of the elements together is not difficult to follow. In fact, the way each piece in the mystery unfolds will have audiences on the edge of their seats anticipating the next revelation. The story is full of dirty details of rich and famous with a teenage girl caught in the middle opening all the doors and leading everything out into the open. I also have to commend Jenkins for keeping Pine and his character on the periphery until their part of the story surfaces. It would be easy to feature him everywhere, but then the story would not be about the girl.

I Am the Night is Fauna’s story, and there is never any doubt about that.

I Am the Night season finale is Sunday, March 3 on TNT. You can binge the show on the TNT app and On Demand.