“Let’s see how you gonna feel after the workout!”
Said the woman I know in the gym.
To which I thought, well it’s all only up from there!
YOUR HEALTHY FLYWHEEL
In behavioral science they call it priming, or the primacy principle.
“The ‘primacy principle’ refers to the primacy effect, a cognitive bias where the first information or experiences encountered have a greater influence on later impressions and memories than subsequent information.”
Health coaches noticed long ago, it's an often used strategy: morning workouts and your first meal have an outsized effect on everything you do the rest of the day (and often week). So get this one right!
You exercise, you eat a solid breakfast… you feel good about yourself, your thinking sharpens, you make better choices, and you end up doing better overall, which makes tomorrow more likely to be stellar, too.
The wheel collapses on itself and keeps on turning.
That’s why, even if my afternoon performance might be “better” on paper - I still train in the morning. My thinking and doing are better afterward.
That’s why I also ask clients to start the day with one key habit that gets the wheel turning.
AMAZON’S FLYWHEEL
I’m finishing Jim Collins’s short monograph Turning the Flywheel (an idea he introduced in Good to Great). Jim Collins and Jeff Bezos actually met in 2001, post dot-com bust, and worked through Amazon’s flywheel on a whiteboard: lower prices → more customer visits → more sellers → broader selection → better experience → lower cost structure → even lower prices. Feed any part of the loop and it accelerates the whole thing.
Now I’m thinking about the same. What’s my business flywheel?
It’s easier to think in linear terms: do X, then Y follows. Full stop.
Then you figure out a new X for the next result.
But most viral, compounding things don’t work like that. They’re engines - perpetual motion fed by its own momentum.
Facebook did it early: get people to sign up and invite friends. Friends invite more friends. Everyone feels the pull to join, and on and on and on it goes... (still turning)
The book shows examples in education (attracting great teachers and giving kids great results), festivals, and more. And it applies to your health just as well.
Health flywheel:
Go to the gym → get the right breakfast → feel good the whole day → get compliments and build community (feed motivation) → sleep well so you wake up fresh for the workout… and the wheel keeps on turning.
Over to you, dear reader,
How can you build your flywheels in health, relationships, career, and business, so once they’re on, they just keep on turning?