The Flywheel

In Jim Collins book Good to Great he introduces the idea of the flywheel: 

"Picture a huge heavy flywheel, a massive metal disc mounted horizontally on an axel, about thirty feet in diameter, two feet thick and weighing about 5000 pounds. Now imagine that your task is to get the flywheel rotating on the axel as fast and long as possible. Pushing with great effort you get the flywheel to inch forward moving almost imperceptibly at first, you keep pushing and after two or three hours of persistent effort you get the flywheel to complete one entire turn. But you don't stop, you keep pushing and the flywheel begins to move a bit faster and with continued effort you move it around a second rotation. You keep pushing, in an intelligent, consistent direction. Three turns, four, five, six, the flywheel builds up speed, seven, eight, you keep pushing, nine, ten, it builds momentum, 11, 12, moving faster and faster with each turn, 20, 30, 50, 100! Then at some point breakthrough. The momentum of the thing kicks in your favor, hurling the flywheel forward turn, after turn. Whoooosh! It's own heavy weight working for you. You're pushing no harder then during the first rotation but the flywheel goes faster and faster and faster still. Each turn of the flywheel builds upon the work done earlier, compounding your investment of effort 1,000 times faster, then 10,000 then 100,000 the huge heavy disc flies forward with almost unstoppable momentum."

This is a powerful statement of how our finances actually work. Unfortunately for some of us, we have been pushing the flywheel in the exact wrong direction we want it to go. By building up debt and wasting money, the flywheel may be spinning so fast in the wrong direction it's hard to picture it stopping, much less spinning the other way.

So what can we do to get it turning the right way? 

1. Stop borrowing money! You can't make much progress if you continue to push in the wrong direction.

2. Get help. Sometimes you can't reverse the flywheel by yourself. Reach out to someone you trust and ask them to help you get your finances under control. Also read all the material you can about how to handle money.

3. Don't give up! It is going to take consistently smart decisions with your money to get you out of the mess. As long as you keep pushing everyday things will start to move in your favor.

4. Invest in assets. Once you get everything under control and are out of debt, invest money so that you can make more without doing more work. (This is what really gets the flywheel going fast in the right direction).

5. Enjoy. Once the momentum of your smart decisions builds it will be easy to maintain, so you can sit back, relax and enjoy.

--A Future Millionaire