The Art of the Personal Fly-WheelHow to use flywheels and back-of-the-envelope calculations to engineer your career
Legend has it that in 2001, Jeff Bezos sketched a simple idea on a cocktail napkin. It wasn't a 50-page business plan or a complex financial model. It was a simple drawing of a virtuous cycle with just four elements: Sellers, Selection, Customer Experience, and Traffic. Lowering prices improved the customer experience, which drove more traffic, which attracted more sellers, which increased selection, which allowed for even lower prices.
The concept of a flywheel is simple: if one element gets better, it helps the entire cycle spin faster. Notice there are no details or plans. Its power was to focus on the few things that actually mattered. It captures a strategy, one that drove a multi-trillion dollar company. All on a cocktail napkin. This same principle was at play when we were scaling Amazon's massive technical systems. To scale a massive software system, the solution isn’t to create a more intricate system with more features. The solution is always to get back to basics. We had to zoom in on the core components and ask, "What are the 3-5 variables that are truly driving performance?" For each component we can dive into details (and there are a lot of details and complexity) but at the end of the day the top level picture cannot be complicated. Depending on the system, we’d focus on core metrics like latency, availability/resilience, and cost per request. Nail those and your system will scale. We fall into this trap in our own careers. We create elaborate plans and expend a lot of energy, and wonder why we aren’t seeing results. But we're focusing on the wrong things. The key is to simplify the top level to its bare essentials. In this article, I’ll teach you two powerful tools we used at Amazon to avoid this trap: the back-of-the-envelope calculation and the flywheel. 1. Why Plans FailHaving plans feel productive but they give us a false sense of control and security. The problem is that they shatter the moment they make contact with reality. You say to yourself that if you workout three times a week you’ll get in shape but you didn’t wake up on time today. You have a plan to get promoted but then a re-org happens and you are moved to a new team. You finally feel like things are going well then your manager decides to leave. Plans are brittle because they are a prediction of a single path in a future that is inherently unpredictable. The world is dynamic and ever-changing. They are a fixed train track when you need an all-terrain vehicle. The plan becomes useless the moment you encounter the first obstacle. When these plans fail, we often go too far in the other direction. We abandon planning altogether. We become completely reactive, going from one urgent fire to the next. We tell ourselves, "Why even think about the future when all your plans go south?" This is just as dangerous. It trades the illusion of control for a state of constant chaos. The way out of this trap isn't a more resilient plan, at least not in the conventional sense, but a simpler approach. I have realized that it’s much more effective to replace the rigidity of a plan with the clarity of a strategic target. A strategic target is a high-level objective that guides your decisions and allows for tactical flexibility. It answers "Where am I going?" without dictating every turn. Jeff Bezos didn’t have a grand plan for every step, but he had a clear strategic target: growth. Actionable Advice Instead of developing a plan for your career, establish a single, strategic target. Ask yourself: "What is the one thing I want to be true about my career in five years?" It should be a state of being. For example, "I want to be a recognized expert in my field," "I want to be leading a high-impact team," or "I want to be in a role where I can directly influence business growth." Once you have that single target, you can start building a simple framework to guide your daily decisions. 2. From Target to Framework: Find Your BucketsOnce you have a strategic target, the next step is not to create a to-do list. It’s to brainstorm possibilities and then find the underlying themes. This is how you build a simple, robust framework—your personal flywheel. You move from a single target to the 3-5 core categories of work that will get you there. Let's imagine a hypothetical brainstorming session for Amazon's growth. The strategic target is clear: Growth. The brainstormed list of actions might look like this: lower prices, get more books, sell CDs, sell electronics, make the website faster, improve search results, offer free shipping, get more sellers on the platform, improve our warehouse efficiency, send marketing emails, get press coverage, open up our platform to other merchants... This list is overwhelming. But if you step back, you can group these actions into a few core buckets. "Lower prices," "faster website," and "free shipping" all fall into the bucket of Customer Experience. "Marketing emails" and "press coverage" are all about driving Traffic. "Get more books," "sell CDs," and "sell electronics" are about Selection. And "get more sellers on the platform" is its own unique category: Sellers. The chaotic list simplifies into the four components of the Amazon flywheel. I imagine Jeff did something similar in his head when he created Amazon’s flywheel. Let's do the same for a common career target: "become a recognized expert in my field." The brainstormed list might be: write articles, give conference talks, start a podcast, mentor junior colleagues, build a strong social media presence, answer questions on Reddit, contribute to open source, write a book, create a course, network with other experts... Again, we can group these. "Write articles," "start a podcast," "write a book," and "create a course" are all forms of Content Creation. "Mentor junior colleagues," "contribute to open source," and "answer questions on Reddit" are all Community Contribution. And "give conference talks," "build a social media presence," and "network with other experts" are about building a Public Presence. These three buckets are the flywheel. They are the simple, durable categories of work that, if you consistently invest in them, will move you toward your target and reinforce each other. Actionable Advice Take your strategic target from Part 1. Set a timer for 15 minutes and brainstorm every possible action you could take to move toward it. Don't filter, just write. After 15 minutes, look at your list and group the items into 3-5 logical categories. Give each category a simple name. These are the core components of your personal flywheel. LLMs are a great tool for helping with the bucketization and bucket naming. For example, if your target is "Get promoted to Senior Software Developer," your brainstorm might include: fix more bugs, write a design doc, lead a small project, mentor an intern, present at a team meeting, learn a new programming language, improve team documentation. You could then group these into three buckets:
3. Finding and Updating Your Goldilocks ZoneNow that you have your core buckets, you can filter your ideas to decide what to do now. The key is to focus on the actions that are in the "Goldilocks Zone"—not too big, not too small, but just right. A good rule of thumb is to focus on things that are within an order of magnitude of your current abilities.
A dangerous career mistake is to keep operating on an old definition of the Goldilocks Zone after you've leveled up. When I was a new software engineer at Amazon, there was a senior engineer on my team I deeply admired. He showed me the ropes and I did everything he said, even if I thought it was outside of my perceived abilities. He was a big part of my promotions from junior to senior engineer, something I achieved in three years. Fifteen years later, I was a Principal Engineer, but he was still a senior engineer. He was still a really effective employee, but he didn’t have the same drive to grow as I did. That’s totally fine, he wasn’t interested in career growth like I was, but something to be on the lookout for if you are interested in that growth. What got you here won’t get you there.
If you’ve selected one item from each of the categories, congratulations, you’ve developed a great plan to reach your strategic target. It’s a simple, focused, and resilient guide for what to do next. If your plan gets disrupted, that’s totally ok, all you have to do is reevaluate your personal flywheel. ConclusionThese tools—the back-of-the-envelope calculation, the personal flywheel—aren't just for building trillion-dollar companies. They are for building a career with intention. You can use them just with a piece of paper, a pen, and a little thinking time. So find your napkin, sketch your flywheel, and get to work. Enjoyed this week's newsletter? Give it a ❤️ so I know to write similar ones in the future. Leave a comment, I try to respond to every one. A Life Engineered will always be a free publication, but if you’d like to support it, we’d be honored if you upgraded your subscription. Paid subscribers get the full experience, including access to the archives.
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