The Wheel That Rolls
For most of my adult life I measured myself with a single number. Net worth. Revenue. Ranking. It didn't matter which—what mattered was that there was always a scoreboard, and I always knew where I stood on it. That kind of clarity feels like direction. It isn't. It's just a very convincing substitute.
After I left Wall Street I sat down with a mentor who gave me a deceptively simple assignment. Draw a wheel. Eight spokes—money, body, work, mind, love, play, community, and spirit. Extend each spoke from the hub based on how fulfilled you actually feel in that domain. If you're genuinely satisfied, the spoke reaches the rim. If you're not, it doesn't. Then look at what you've drawn and ask yourself honestly: is this wheel rolling?
Mine wasn't rolling. It wasn't close.
The money spoke reached the rim. Everything else was short—some barely extended beyond the hub at all. My health spoke was an afterthought. Love and community were nonexistent. My mind spoke—mental hygiene, self-awareness, the inner work I'd been successfully avoiding for a decade—may as well have not been on the wheel at all. I was a one-spoke wheel. And that, I realized, is exactly how my life had felt: not rough, not difficult, but fundamentally stuck. You can't roll on one spoke. You can't build a life on one metric either. I just hadn't had a picture of it until that moment.
The wheel does something that a net worth statement or a performance review cannot. It replaces abstraction with a picture. You see, at a glance, why your life feels clunky, lopsided, or caught in a groove it can't escape. The tyranny of the single metric—the one number that tells you you're winning while seven other dimensions of your life quietly collapse—becomes impossible to ignore when it's drawn in front of you.
I had been optimizing for one spoke my entire career. And I had no idea what it had cost me until I saw it.
Around the same time, I stumbled into something I hadn't been looking for. After recertifying in scuba diving on Key Biscayne, my dive master—a former college swimmer — invited me to join a one-mile open-water race. I had no idea what to expect and finished 284th out of 305 swimmers. Forty-three minutes of humbling, saltwater-swallowing effort that felt nothing like the competence I'd spent a decade building on Wall Street.
I signed up for swimming lessons the following week.
What followed was one of the most clarifying periods of my life—not because of the training itself, but because of what the training revealed. Everything I thought I knew about swimming was wrong. Not slightly off. Completely wrong. Fewer strokes, not more. Body mechanics, not brute force. Breathing comfortably instead of fighting the water. The harder I had pushed, the worse I had performed. The discipline I'd applied to my career—more effort, more hours, more output—was actively working against me in the pool.
That lesson did not stay in the water.
I had been running my life on the same fuel cycle for a decade: caffeine and adrenaline to upregulate, alcohol to downregulate, repeat until something breaks. What broke was me. Endurance training introduced a completely different energy system—one that built capacity instead of borrowing against it. Zone 2 work, early mornings, consistent sleep, whole food. The results weren't dramatic at first. But over months, something shifted. My mood stabilized. My focus returned. The ambient noise that had been running in the background of my mind for years began to quiet. I wasn't borrowing energy anymore. I was generating it.
The difference between borrowed energy and renewable energy is everything—and almost nobody talks about it. Adrenaline, caffeine, and alcohol don't create energy. They advance it from your future self and charge interest on the loan. The high performer who runs on these for long enough doesn't burn out dramatically. They just slowly become a lesser version of themselves and stop noticing—which, as I wrote in an earlier post, is the most insidious part. The system that should tell you something is wrong is itself compromised.
Sustainable energy works the opposite way. It compounds. Exercise, sleep, stillness, real nutrition—these don't just make you healthier. They make you sharper, more present, more capable of doing the work that actually matters. The body spoke isn't a nice-to-have. It's the foundation everything else is built on. Get it right and the other spokes become easier to extend. Neglect it and no amount of ambition, strategy, or intelligence will compensate for the drag.
What the wheel taught me—and what the training confirmed—is that balance isn't the goal. Balance implies stasis, and life is not static. What you're after is something more honest: a wheel with enough functional spokes that it can roll through the inevitable seasons when one or two take a hit. A wheel can absorb a weak spoke for a while. It stops when three are broken simultaneously—which is exactly what happened to me, and what I watch happen to high achievers who have been optimizing for one spoke long past the point of diminishing return.
The wheel is not a productivity tool. It's a diagnostic. Draw it every six months and you'll see things a quarterly review will never show you. You'll see which areas of your life you've been quietly abandoning in exchange for altitude on the one spoke that gets measured. You'll see the real cost of the trade you've been making. And—if you're honest about what you're looking at—you'll see exactly where to start.
Not with the spoke that's already at the rim. With the one that barely exists.
That's where the real work is. That's where mine was. And five years after leaving Wall Street—training in the dark before sunrise with a group of endurance athletes who had never heard of the deals I'd spent a decade closing—I found myself earning more, thinking more clearly, and living more fully than I ever had at the height of a career I had nearly destroyed myself building.
The scoreboard had one number on it. The wheel had eight spokes.
The wheel was right.
If this reflection spoke to you, let's continue the conversation →