Thinking in Flywheels: You Already Have One
Right now, as you read this, your life is already running on flywheels.
Not someday…today.
Your health is a flywheel.
Your marriage or key relationships are a flywheel.
Your leadership, your culture, your business, your money, your spiritual life.
Every area already has a pattern of choices that is quietly compounding in one direction or the other.
The only question is whether it is compounding for you or against you.
So what exactly is a flywheel, really?
Forget the jargon for a second.
A flywheel is simply this: A small set of actions you repeat, that feed each other, and over time create unstoppable momentum.
That’s true when the actions are healthy.
It’s just as true when they are not.
Once you start to see your life in flywheels, things that used to feel random start to look predictable. You realize:
You’re never really standing still.
Every choice is a small push on some flywheel.
You are always moving toward something, even if you’re not proud of where it’s headed.
The bright side of your flywheel
Take your health.
Maybe your “health flywheel” looks something like this:
You go to bed at a decent time.
Which means you wake up with enough energy to work out.
Which means you feel sharper and more confident at work.
Which makes you less likely to stress eat or drink too much that night.
Which makes you sleep better again.
Small things, looping together, creating momentum.
That’s a flywheel.
Now what about your “leadership flywheel”?
You hold regular one on ones.
So your team feels seen and clear.
So they bring problems to you early, not late.
So you have fewer fires and more proactive wins.
So you have the energy and trust to take bigger swings together.
Again, a flywheel. Quiet, compounding, powerful.
But what about the dark side of the flywheel?
The same principle works in reverse.
Maybe your “health flywheel” is:
You stay up too late scrolling.
You wake up tired, so you skip the workout.
You feel behind all day, so you grab junk food and caffeine.
You feel even worse that night, so you numb out even more.
Or your “leadership flywheel”:
You cancel one on ones when things get busy.
Your team feels ignored and unclear.
Problems get hidden or show up late.
You get frustrated and more controlling.
So they bring you even less truth next time.
Nothing dramatic happened in any single moment.
But the loop is real.
The compounding is real.
And eventually you hit an inflection point, for better…or for worse.
This is what I sometimes call the dark side of the flywheel.
You are still compounding. Just not in the direction you want.
Moving from unconscious to conscious
Most of us run these loops on autopilot.
We feel the results, but we do not see the pattern.
We feel stuck, but we cannot quite explain why.
The goal is not to shame yourself. The goal is to see.
Because once you can see the flywheel, you can start to shape it.
You move from:
“I just keep ending up here somehow”
to
“I see the loop, and I know which small pushes I need to change.”
You move from unconscious habits to conscious design.
Want to go deeper on flywheels?
If this is hitting home, I recorded a full episode of the CARE Movement podcast where I unpack the flywheel principle, talk about the “dark side” of momentum, and share how we used it at Vortex to create something unstoppable.
