Mike MichalowiczBusiness Author & Keynote Speaker Empowering Entrepreneurs

Is Your Life in Balance? Try This Exercise!

31 Jul 2026 · 1 min

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1:01

In this short monologue, Mike Michalowicz introduces the "Wheel of Life" self‑assessment tool, a circular diagram divided into slices that represent key life domains such as physical health, family, finances, friendships, and others. He explains how participants rate their satisfaction in each slice, then use the visual gaps to pinpoint under‑nourished areas and deliberately direct energy toward them. Michalowicz frames balance—where the wheel can spin smoothly—as a possible definition of success, contrasting it with the common entrepreneurial focus on financial metrics, illustrated by the example of Kate Spade’s $2.4 billion valuation, which he suggests may not reflect true success if the underlying life balance is missing.

Chapters

There's an exercise I do in some groups I'm in called the Wheel of Life. Have you ever heard of this? I think we did it here for a bit of time. Yeah, I think so. Basically, it's a wheel, a circle, and in the center point, or emanating from the center point, is like these little pizza slices. And so maybe there's 8 slices, and I don't remember what they all were, but one is physical health. Next one is family. Next one, maybe finances, and so forth. Then what you do is you go through each category and you identify where do you feel you are? Because at the end of the day, it's all feeling and interpretation, and then wherever your wheel is short, maybe in friendships, which was one of the categories, then what the wheel teaches us, we gotta start focusing our energy there. The idea of this wheel is that it can only spin when it's balanced. Ah, maybe that is a good definition of success. I think there is this perversion in the way we think about entrepreneurship that Kate Spade was successful and we will say, well, $2.4 billion can't be more successful than that. And the reality is, I don't know if she was successful. She has to define that and maybe it was out of balance.