Work/Life Flywheel: Harness the work revolution and reimagine your career without fear

by Ollie Henderson

Overview

**Business Book Awards 2024 Finalist**

“The system you need to make bold changes in your career”
Daniel H. Pink

We’re experiencing a work revolution, with an unprecedented opportunity to reimagine how, when, and where we do what we do. Now is the perfect time to take more control over your work/life and maybe even finally take the leap into going it alone, whether by starting your own business or turning your passion into a career.

Ollie Henderson shares the lessons he’s learned by interviewing entrepreneurs, business leaders, and world-renowned experts on his chart-topping podcast Future Work/Life. Forget work/life balance, the secret to navigating a career transition today is to create a flywheel that aligns all parts of your work and life and harness small wins to help build the momentum you need to succeed.

• Take control of your long-term future using a proven step-by-step process
• Develop the confidence to transform your career by focusing on becoming an expert in your niche
• Adopt a creative and experimental approach to your work/life that delivers consistent, measurable results
• Cultivate a network of global collaborators to support your transition and generate new opportunities

Experienced founder and CEO Ollie Henderson pivoted his career while juggling the pleasures and pressures of raising a young family. He believes work/life balance is a myth. Rather than seeing career and personal life as two opposing forces, Ollie argues that the secret is to design an integrated approach that allows them to work in harmony.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781788603515
Publisher:	Practical Inspiration Publishing
Publication date:	01/17/2023
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

Experienced founder and CEO, Ollie Henderson, pivoted his career while raising a young family. He believes work/life balance is a myth. Rather than seeing career and personal life as two opposing forces, Ollie argues that the secret is to design an integrated approach that allows them to work in harmony.
Author location: London, UK

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Each chapter will include two short case studies, and end with practical exercises and a further reading list.

Contents

Foreword

Preface

After his career pivot collided with a global pandemic, Ollie Henderson spent 18 months on a mission to redesign his work/life.

The insights he gained, including speaking to entrepreneurs, business leaders, and world-renowned experts on his successful careers podcast, led to him rejecting the idea of work/life balance.

The result is a new approach that builds on the lessons of legendary companies to give readers the tools to navigate their own career transitions effectively.

PART 1: The power of the flywheel

1. Forget work/life balance. You need a flywheel
   

• Rapid changes in the workplace mean many more now understand they need to adapt and evolve to stay ahead within companies or by ‘going it alone’.
• Increased digital connectivity has opened up new opportunities but can cause overwhelm as we struggle to focus on the important things.
• We need to align career and personal life, so they work in harmony.
• The Work/Life Flywheel provides the tools to create an ever-evolving process that works to your rhythms, helps you identify your intrinsic motivations, and is compassionate towards the non-linearity of your life.

2. How Amazon became an unstoppable force

• Introducing Jim Collins’s flywheel framework.
• How businesses of different types have benefitted from the ‘flywheel effect’, whether inadvertently or by design.
• The importance of constantly experimenting and evolving.

3. Why the flywheel will work for you

• Interconnected components of the flywheel feed into each other, creating complementary benefits and building momentum.
• Establishing the right mindset creates the right conditions for creativity and problem-solving.
• Building the right connections allows you to generate the feedback you need to learn, which leads to breakthroughs.
• The breakthroughs help validate or improve your thinking, which feeds into a positive mindset of progress and purpose.

PART 2: Building your flywheel

4. Mindset: Are you ready for this?

• Understanding what drives you and what’s motivating your desire for more autonomy.
• How creating more Flow in your life will increase a feeling of purpose, improve productivity and drive performance.
• Why establishing a positive and proactive approach to your physical, mental and financial health is critical to your career development.
• The role of curiosity and opening your mind to new experiences.

5. Creativity: The robots are coming

• The world of work is changing – you’d better get creative if you want a long, successful career.
• Creativity is not just art or playing music, but applies to how we design companies, create cures to disease and solve disputes.
• Explore where creativity contributes to flow, particularly the skills/challenge balance and working at our edge.
• Growth of creator and passion economy, including the 1000 True Fans and 100 True Fans models, and the power of ‘niching down’.
• Developing a new approach to how you manage your time that optimises for creativity.

6. Experimentation: Testing, testing

• Thinking about yourself as a scientist, testing out your ways of being creative – writing, creating videos, problem-solving, generating new business ideas – in different environments, and approaching different tasks.
• Get over your imposter syndrome, and don’t be afraid to fail - that’s part of the process.
• Too much thinking and not enough action results in no progress – use technology but most importantly, people to test out ideas and get feedback.
• Measure what matters – creating clear, ambitious goals is essential to validate your ideas.

7. Connections: Network effects

• Increased connectivity means we don’t need to limit people we work with to those in our locale. So, how do you cultivate your global network?
• As we focus on our niche, how do you identify the people that can help us progress?
• Digitisation has led to more fractured lives, so giving is as important as receiving in building connections.
• Feedback through social platforms achieves quantitative scale in our testing; discussing it with someone provides qualitative feedback.
• Using content creation to nurture relationships.
• Networking for introverts and how to create teams of other like-minded, independent workers.

8. Learning: Positive education

• We’re going to be living a lot longer, and you need to be prepared to keep learning and reskilling.
• Monetising your skills in entirely new ways is vital, as human creativity and attention become the most precious resource of the 21st century.
• Alternatives to formal education and taking responsibility for your own career development.
• Creating mastermind groups.
• Think about macro and micro-learning– what are the global trends that you need to be aware of; what areas of focus give you unique insights.

9. Breakthroughs: Work less, achieve more

• The value of small wins to gain momentum in your flywheel.
• What to do when the process doesn’t go to plan and how to feed that learning into establishing the right mindset to ‘go again.’
• Countering burnout and the feeling that you’re on a treadmill, not a flywheel.
• Measuring progress and how it relates to purpose.
• Macro-breakthroughs vs micro breakthroughs – how to use each of them to build momentum.
• The importance of reflective moments to the evolution of your flywheel.

PART 3: Propelling you forward

10. Work-in-progress

• We’ve been around the flywheel once, but this is just the start.
• How to iterate and evolve each stage of the process.
• Why a vital part of the process is adapting and sharing your experiences with your new community of co-collaborators.
• Trusting the process and how to get over self-doubt.

Acknowledgements

Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Creating new opportunities requires fresh thinking. With the Work/ Life Flywheel model, Ollie Henderson gives you the system you need to make bold changes in your career and the motivation to share your ideas with the world.
Daniel H. Pink, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Power of Regret, When, and Drive

We all know that the old three-stage life course of full-time education, full-time work and full-time retirement is not fit for purpose. But we also know that to make the changes to a more flexible and adaptive multi-stage life, we need to be bold and courageous. In this inspiring book, Henderson shows the foundations for this courage and shares the stories of those who have created momentum and energy in their working life.
Lynda Gratton, author of Redesigning Work, Professor of Management Practice at London Business School

Ollie is an important and empathetic voice in the conversation around the future of work. His book will help us all navigate a better way to work and live.
Annie Auerbach, author of FLEX, Reinventing Work for a Smarter and Happier Life

Work and leisure have become a false dichotomy. As Ollie Henderson shows using the superb Flywheel metaphor, done right, each can make you better at the other.
Rory Sutherland, Vice-Chairman of Ogilvy, author of Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense

Ollie’s excellent book will show you the practical techniques of reimagining your life and career and reveals how much better things could be for you, if you can adopt his hard-earned wisdom.
Damian Hughes, host of The High Performance podcast and author of High Performance and Liquid Thinker

Ollie Henderson gives you the tools to create a legendary career by embracing being different, harnessing your creativity and building a system to share your ideas. Forget chasing work/life balance and build a Work/Life Flywheel instead.
Christopher Lochhead, 11 x #1 bestselling author of Category Pirates, Play Bigger and Niche Down

Work/Life Flywheel puts to bed the notion that our work-life balance is an either/or trade off: the two move in tandem, and this book helps us find that binding rhythm.
Will Page, author of Tarzan Economics and former Chief Economist of Spotify

Work/Life Flywheel offers honest and practical advice from accomplished industry mavens coupled with candid reflections on their real experiences when trying to recreate themselves professionally and personally. A must-read for anyone looking to make bold changes in their career and at home.
Emily Balcetis, author of Clearer, Closer, Better:How Successful People See the World, Associate Professor of Psychology at New York University

Ollie and I have similar stories: burned-out agency owners who started writing online and experienced life-changing results. If this sounds like you too (whether you’re an entrepreneur or a high-achieving, exhausted employee), then you’ll feel right at home reading this book.
Nicolas Cole, 8 x author and captain of Ship 30 for 30

If you want to redefine your life and work relationship, get connected to the wisdom inside Work/Life Flywheel.
Shaun Tomson, Surfing World Champion and author of The Code: The Power of “I Will”

If you want to reimagine what’s possible in the worlds of work and life beyond work, then this book will give your brain, thought processes and imagination a fascinating and exhilarating workout to help you develop fresh thinking about how to create the best future for you.
Cath Bishop, Olympic rowing medallist, former diplomat, leadership coach, and author of The Long Win

In Work/Life Flywheel, Henderson deftly combines decades of wisdom to create a compelling framework for how we think about work and life in today’s complex world. Using insights gleaned from academic research, business leaders, personal anecdotes, and his own life, Henderson provides a conversational and practical approach to stepping out of your routines, creatively considering a new way of approaching work and life, and taking practical steps to make it happen. If you’re ready for change but aren’t sure where to begin, this book is a great place to start!
Alyssa Westring, co-author of Parents Who Lead, Chair of the Department of Management and Entrepreneurship at DePaul University

Ollie Henderson offers a timely and perceptive critique of the neverending pursuit of work/life balance, and suggests a better way to build momentum in our personal and professional lives.
Alex Hutchinson, author of Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance

With the right mindset and systems, you can make positive changes in your career. Ollie Henderson’s Work/Life Flywheel gives you the tools and motivation to develop both, creating the momentum you need to maximise your potential and succeed in the new world of work. Justin Welsh, entrepreneur, investor, and SaaS advisor The world is changing fast, and life can be short – so we might as well start making it meaningful, today. This book provides a superbly pragmatic and useful take on how we can reimagine our career and life. A book worth reading and an approach worth taking.
Dr Christian Busch, bestselling author of The Serendipity Mindset: The Art and Science of Creating Good Luck, and professor, New York University

As people are beginning to reimagine work and reconsider their careers, Work/Life Flywheel is a brilliant resource to help you get started in redesigning your work/life.
Elizabeth Akanbi-Ogabi, author of Side Hustle in Progress

Ollie Henderson’s Work/Life Flywheel offers the practical tools to redesign your work and reimagine the career of your dreams. Whether you’re amid a big pivot or you’re looking for a healthy dose of inspiration to find what your next chapter will hold, the tangible insights and success stories in Work/Life Flywheel will help harness your mindset, spark your creativity, and lead to substantial breakthroughs for harmony and alignment in both your personal and professional life.
Kathrin Hamm, CEO of Bearaby

There isn’t a person out there that hasn’t thought about radically reinventing work and life. What’s been missing is an accessible guidebook to transform desire-to-action, and action-to-outcome. Ollie Henderson’s Work/Life Flywheel sketches out a framework for thinking about transformation, bringing the lessons to life with his own personal journey, along with expert insight from industry figures who have themselves gone on idiosyncratic paths to successful unconventional futures. Fantastic read, and essential for anyone thinking about career change.
Hung Lee, Curator, Recruiting Brainfood

Life is a continuous learning journey with feedback loops along the way to help us reflect and adapt where appropriate. The Work/Life Flywheel is a much-needed read after the world has experienced a pandemic that puts the harmony of our work and personal lives in question.
Andy Ayim MBE, founder of Angel Investing School

Henderson provides clear direction and practical steps to help you find the work/life harmony that you richly deserve. The Flywheel’s 6 building blocks offer an easy to follow guide for your journey.
Marc Effron, author of 8 Steps to High Performance and President of The Talent Strategy Group

Editorial Reviews

Have been following Ollie’s podcast for a while now, so decided to give his new book a try and delighted I did. Many excellent tips which I’ve already started incorporating into my future career and personal goal plans.

From the Publisher