How to build your Career Flywheel - a thread:

A typical worker's salary will top out at 110% of where they started, and do so around age 45.

From 45-65 they have a sustained plateau.

You can think of this as two phases - the Growth Phase and the Harvesting Phase.

The Career Flywheel has two goals:

1) Make the make the slope of the Growth Phase as steep as possible. This makes your plateau much more lucrative.

2) Ideally avoid the plateau altogether. Create so much momentum that your ascent just continues.

Why do you need a flywheel?

Most people think of their careers like an income statement. I get paid X for Y hours.

Flywheel thinking is more like a balance sheet, where you're accumulating "career assets". The assets compound over time, creating momentum.

How do you do this?

I see four major flywheels you can build.

- Mastery
- Network
- Brand
- Wealth

The first three help maximize your ascent.

Mastery is foundational. It's the process of becoming top 1% at what you do.

There are bunch of ways to do this:

- Reading
- Taking good notes
- Getting reps
- Working for free
- Creating a self-study curriculum.

You need mastery for any of the others to work.

Network: The most exciting opportunities come from people you know. If people know you, like you and know what you're capable of, worlds of opportunity open up.

The key: be obscenely helpful. Help people get jobs, make intros, give advice. Give more than you think.

Brand: As you pursue mastery, talk about it.

Talk about what you're learning in the process. Help others accomplish what you've accomplished.

Start building a platform - website, email list, etc. Start a podcast. Speak.

Mastery makes you an expert. Brand lets others know.

Last is Wealth.

Most people live off their laurels. They get complacent. They stop learning. They continue to lean on old relationships.

The key to busting out of the plateau is to reinvest your wealth instead, back into the other three flywheels.

What does that look like? For Mastery:

- Go to more expensive conferences
- Hire an assistant to free up time for pursuing mastery
- Invest in better gear
- Acquire skills that require unique access (leaning on your network)

For Network:

- Set goals for higher level folks you want to know.
- Create a travel budget to see them.
- Use resources to help in ways that might have been too expensive before.
- Create a "books to give to people" budget.

For Brand:

- Hire someone to help create content at scale.
- Submit speaker proposals, even if you pay to go.
- Level up your website.
- Better cards.
- Better clothes.

The Flywheel takes some time to get going. But as you build momentum it goes faster and faster.

Start with mastery. Begin to cultivate a better network. As you get better, begin to create a brand. Reinvest wealth back into your career.

Be patient. This is a career long process.