Flow, Friction, and Flywheels

Sometimes getting more out of life isn’t about putting more into it.

Sometimes it’s about creating more flow, removing friction, and building flywheels that make the things you want easier and easier to do.

We make productivity too complicated.

We think the answer is always: work harder, try harder, have more discipline, wake up earlier, grind.

And look, there are times you need to work hard.

I’ve worked construction most of my adult life. I’m not afraid of hard work.

But there’s a difference between working hard because the work requires it, and working hard because you’ve built a shitty system around yourself.

Sometimes you’re exhausted because you’re climbing a mountain.

Sometimes you’re exhausted because you’re dragging the parking brake.

Those are two different problems.

And that’s where flow, friction, and flywheels come together.

Sharpen the Axe

There’s an old woodsman saying that often gets attributed to Abraham Lincoln, although Lincoln probably never said it.

I love that idea, whoever it came from, because it’s all three concepts in one image.

You could start swinging the dull axe right away.

And technically you’d be working.

You’d be sweating. You’d be tired. You could even feel productive because you’re moving and hitting the tree.

Or you could stop.

Sharpen the axe.

And then every swing after that becomes more effective.

You’re not becoming stronger.

You’re not increasing effort.

You’re reducing friction.

And the time you spent sharpening keeps paying you back on the next swing, and the next, and the next.

That’s a flywheel.

So maybe productivity isn’t always, How can I swing harder?

Sometimes the better question is:

How can I sharpen the axe?

What Is Friction?

I learned a lot about friction from Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, mostly because I’m small.

I’m 5’2”, and when a bigger, stronger guy can move freely, that’s generally not good for me.

So one of the first things I had to learn was how to slow people down.

• Frames
• Grips
• Pressure
• Weight
• Position

Making the other person carry your weight.

Not giving them clean movement.

In BJJ, we sometimes call it "cooking the beans"—wearing them down.

​Alex, who trains at Roger Gracie’s academy in London and visits Meraki when he's competing in Vegas or LA, gave me one of the better pieces of advice I’ve gotten on this.

The way I remember it:

That’s a great strategy when you’re trying to slow down an opponent.

But how often are we doing the exact same thing to ourselves?

How much friction have we unintentionally built into our own lives?

Bad sleep.

Clutter.

No plan.

Too many decisions.

Too many open loops.

Not knowing the next action.

Trying to remember everything.

Keeping emotional bullshit circulating in your head.

Having ten different places where information lives.

Making the good habit hard to start and the bad habit incredibly easy.

Then we tell ourselves:

I need more discipline.

Maybe.

But maybe you don’t need more discipline.

Maybe you need less friction.

Thinking on Paper

One of the biggest flywheels in my life is thinking on paper.

I’ve been doing it for decades in different forms—journaling, writing notes, working off blueprints, marking up drawings, creating roadmaps.

Breaking a problem down.

Writing out what I want.

Where I’m going.

How I’ll get there.

What challenges I might hit.

What my options are if Plan A fails.

For me, thinking on paper creates clarity.

And clarity reduces friction.

Something that feels overwhelming in my head can look surprisingly manageable once it’s on the page.

In my head the problem is:

Everything is fucked.

On paper it becomes questions.

• What exactly is wrong?
• What do I know?
• What don’t I know?
• What am I assuming?
• What can I do next?
• What can wait?
• What’s outside my control?
• What are three possible options?

Now I have something to work with.

The emotion isn’t necessarily gone, and the problem isn’t necessarily solved.

But I’ve created space.

And space creates flow.

So there’s a flywheel:

Thinking on paper → clarity → better decisions → easier action → feedback → more clarity.

Around and around it goes.

Getting Shit Out of My Head

Writing does something else, too.

It gets mental and emotional clutter out of my head—the thoughts I don’t need to solve, just need to stop carrying.

I can journal about them.

Write them down.

Look at them.

Sometimes I realize they’re stupid.

Sometimes I realize they’re important.

Sometimes I realize there’s nothing I can do today.

But once they’re somewhere I trust, my brain can let go.

This idea became important to me through Getting Things Done.​

One of the core lessons I took from it is that your brain isn’t particularly good at being a filing cabinet.

And yet that’s how a lot of us use it.

• Remember this.
• Don’t forget that.
• Call this person.
• Buy that thing.
• What was the name of that place?
• What did I decide about that project?
• Did I ever respond to that?
• Don’t forget Friday.

That’s a lot of little background processes running.

Your brain can do it.

But that’s not what it’s best at.

I’d rather have my brain doing problem solving, sense making, creating, connecting ideas, asking better questions, noticing opportunities, building IP, imagining possibilities—

than trying to remember where I saved a fucking note.

Build a Brain Outside Your Brain

I’ve experimented with a lot of ways to do this.

At one point I used Obsidian.​

Now I’ve gone farther with my own operating system built around ChatGPT and Google Drive.

The details of my system aren’t the point of this article.

The point is:

I want to remember as little as possible.

Not because I want to become stupid.

Because I want to use my memory and thinking capacity for better things.

If something matters, I want to put it somewhere trusted and know I can get it back when I need it.

That’s the GTD idea of a trusted system.

And the important word is trusted.

If I write something down but don’t believe I’ll ever find it again, my brain won’t let it go.

If I put it in a system and still have to remember to check the system every five minutes, that hasn’t solved anything.

The system has to be good enough that I can actually forget.

That’s something I’ve been working toward with my OS, and I call it:

Persistence without prominence.

Something can deserve to survive without deserving my attention today.

The system remembers.

I think.

And when I need it, the information comes back.

That’s a flywheel.

1. Every time I trust the system more, I carry less.
2. The less I carry, the more bandwidth I have.
3. The more bandwidth I have, the better I think.
4. The better I think, the better systems I build.

Around and around.

Maybe There’s a Maslow Thing Here

There’s probably a similarity to Maslow’s hierarchy here.

I’m not claiming this is literally his model.

But if you’re constantly dealing with the bottom of the pyramid, you have less bandwidth for the top.

If you’re exhausted…

• worried about money…
• sleep deprived…
• reacting to chaos…
• trying to remember thirty loose ends…
• putting out fires…
• dealing with unresolved emotional shit…

how much creative capacity do you actually have left?

We sometimes treat creativity, insight, strategic thinking, and self-actualization as if they’re purely personality traits.

Maybe some of them are also capacity problems.

Maybe genius needs room.

If the cognitive floor is covered with boxes, it’s hard to dance.

Sleep Is a Flywheel

Sleep is another huge one for me, and it seems ridiculously obvious—after the fact.

Growing up in Hawaii, the bars closed at four in the morning.

And for me, sometimes four in the morning wasn’t the end of the night.

You’d leave the club.

Go eat.

Hang out.

Sometimes I was getting home and going to bed around six or seven in the morning.

Alcohol.

Nightlife.

Drama.

Stupid choices.

Stupid mistakes.

The funny thing is, I don’t miss any of it.

I really don’t.

These days I often wake up at three or four in the morning.

By nine, I can have several hours of work done while a lot of people are barely starting their day.

I’m not saying everyone should wake up at three.

That would be stupid advice.

This works for me.

The point is that sleeping earlier creates the conditions that make my life easier.

It’s arranging circumstances around my reality instead of fighting myself.

I Did This Even in Construction

I used a version of this even when I was working as an electrician.

I’d get up early enough to put thirty minutes or an hour into my own important work before I had to leave for the job.

Why?

Because I knew what the other end of the day looked like.

There were plenty of days I’d come home physically exhausted, mentally drained, beat up, done.

If I waited until after work to do the thing that mattered to me, there was a good chance it wasn’t happening.

So instead of fighting myself at six o’clock at night, I changed the conditions.

Do it before work.

Reduce friction.

And that created another flywheel.

• Get to bed earlier.
• Wake up earlier.
• Quiet house.
• Few interruptions.
• Do important work.
• Make progress.
• Feel better.
• Less guilt.
• Less stress.
• Better sleep.
• Repeat.

Sleep → energy → focus → progress → lower stress → better sleep.

Flywheel.

Bad Flywheels Exist Too

Obviously these things run in the other direction as well.

• Stay out late.
• Drink.
• Sleep badly.
• Wake up late.
• Feel like shit.
• Make worse decisions.
• Don’t exercise.
• Don’t work on the important thing.
• Feel behind.
• Stress increases.
• Stay up later because now you want some time for yourself.
• Sleep badly.
• Repeat.

That’s also a flywheel—just spinning the wrong way.

Maybe that’s the difference between a virtuous cycle and a vicious cycle.

The mechanism doesn’t care whether it’s helping you.

Systems compound.

Keystone Habits as Flywheels

This makes me think differently about keystone habits.​

Some habits produce one isolated result.

Others change everything around them.

Exercise isn’t just exercise.

It can affect energy, sleep, mood, confidence, appetite, discipline, and social connection.

Writing isn’t just writing.

It can affect clarity, planning, emotional regulation, decision-making, problem solving, and creativity.

A weekly review isn’t just a meeting with yourself.

It can catch problems early, clarify priorities, close open loops, reduce anxiety, and prevent ten small mistakes from becoming one expensive disaster.

These are leverage points.

And maybe the defining characteristic of a keystone habit is this:

It makes other good behaviors easier.

That’s basically a flywheel.

Where “Work Smarter” Gets Screwed Up

People say:

Work smarter, not harder.

Okay.

What does that actually mean?

It probably doesn’t mean avoiding hard work.

It means improving the relationship between effort and output.

Same effort.

More useful movement.

Or less effort.

Same result.

A sharp axe.

A good jig.

A better blueprint.

A checklist.

A clear next action.

A cleaner workspace.

A better question.

A prepared meal.

Going to sleep.

Putting the phone in another room.

Knowing exactly where information lives.

All of these things change the amount of friction in the system.

Construction Has This Everywhere

Construction is full of these examples because good planning saves enormous effort later.

• Coordination meetings.
• Blueprints.
• Layout.
• Material staging.

Doing things in the correct sequence.

One construction rule that stuck with me:

1. Get out of the floor.
2. Get out of the wall.
3. Get out of the ceiling.

It means finish the prerequisite work before later trades close access to it.

Because if you don’t, the exact same task becomes dramatically harder and more expensive later.

A wire that would have taken minutes to install while the wall was open might require cutting finished walls, moving other work, patching drywall, repainting, and coordinating multiple trades after everything is closed.

The job didn’t suddenly become more complicated.

We created friction by doing things in the wrong sequence.

Maybe that’s another way to say it:

Good systems remove tomorrow’s friction today.

The Three Questions

Maybe this whole idea comes down to three questions.

Where is the friction?

Where in your life do you repeatedly have to push harder than you think you should?

What feels harder than it needs to be?

Where are you constantly relying on discipline?

Where do you forget things?

Where do you repeatedly get stuck?

Where do you have to redo the same work?

Where is the flow?

Where do things seem naturally easier?

When do you do your best work?

What conditions exist around it?

Time of day?

Location?

Preparation?

People?

Sleep?

Environment?

Clarity?

How can you create more of those conditions deliberately?

What is the flywheel?

What one habit, system, tool, environment, or decision makes several other useful things easier?

Not ten new habits.

One.

What’s the thing that turns the wheel?

Maybe it’s sleep.

Maybe it’s thinking on paper.

Maybe it’s meal prep.

Maybe it’s exercise.

Maybe it’s laying out tomorrow tonight.

Maybe it’s capturing everything into one trusted system.

Maybe it’s putting your gym bag by the front door.

Maybe it’s automatically transferring money into savings.

Maybe it’s a fifteen-minute conversation with your spouse every Friday.

Whatever it is:

What makes the next good thing easier?

And then:

What makes doing it again easier?

That’s the flywheel.

Let the System Carry Some of the Load

Getting more out of life doesn’t necessarily mean putting more into it—at least not the way we normally think.

Sometimes the answer isn’t more hours, more hustle, more pressure, more discipline.

Sometimes the answer is:

Sharpen the axe.

Remove the friction.

Protect the flow.

Build the flywheel.

Then let the system carry some of the load.

Because the goal isn’t to see how hard you can push the boulder for the rest of your life.

The goal is to get the damn thing rolling.

And once it’s rolling…

Don’t keep stepping in front of it.

⚔ The Dojo Drill

Today’s training:

The Fear List

Write down 3 fears you’ve been avoiding.

Take one small action toward one today.

📚 Leader’s Library

​The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama​

Why?

The Art of Happiness keeps returning to a simple idea: beneath our differences in culture, religion, politics, and personality, people share many of the same basic desires—to be happy, to avoid suffering, to feel safe, connected, and understood.

That doesn’t mean we have to agree with everyone.

It means that when we remember the human being underneath the position, it becomes a little easier to respond with curiosity instead of contempt—and a little harder to pass our own hurt forward.

P.S. Know a martial arts gym owner who’s stressed about money or student numbers?

Do them a favor: send them to The Leader's Dōjō, my website where I help owners get more students and keep them longer with simple systems.

One forward from you could change their gym: The Leader's Dōjō​

Chuck