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
- 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
