The Spokes of the Wheel Life Audit
Audit life as a wheel of equally-tensioned spokes so a win in business never hides a structural failure elsewhere.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 88%
Laird Hamilton treats a life as a wheel whose spokes are business, health, relationships, fatherhood and self-conduct. The test is not whether any one spoke is excellent but whether every spoke is tensioned, because a wheel with one perfect spoke and giant holes elsewhere does not turn. He applies this directly to his own portfolio: Laird Superfood going public and then having its stock crushed is one spoke, and he explicitly refuses to let its state define him because his family is healthy and he is healthy. He frames life itself, not business, as the real competition, calling business and sport 'games' by comparison. In the episode he applies the same audit to drinking, to his marriage after a 2001 divorce filing, and to which endorsements he will and will not accept.
Origin
Grew out of Hamilton's career in niche sports where no single platform could support him, forcing him and his wife Gabby to build several income and identity sources at once rather than one.
Core principles
- 01No spoke is optional; the wheel is judged by its weakest one.
- 02Business is one spoke, not the axle.
- 03A loose spoke names itself if you are honest about it.
- 04Life is the real competition; the others are games.
- 05Refinement is continuous, never a finished state.
How to run it
- 1
Enumerate your spokes
Write out every domain the wheel actually rides on: business, health, marriage, children, personal conduct, community. Do not collapse them into 'work' and 'life'.
Pro tip Include the spokes you would rather not score, such as drinking or how you conduct yourself when nobody is watching.
- 2
Score each spoke against its own standard
Assess each spoke on whether it is holding tension, not on whether it compares well to somebody else's. Hamilton is explicit that using other people as your reference is where trouble starts.
Watch out Do not let a spectacular business spoke inflate the score on the others.
- 3
Name the loose spoke honestly
Identify the one spoke that is failing and say what it is without euphemism. Hamilton's own examples in the episode are drinking and the rocky periods in his marriage.
Pro tip Honesty with yourself is the gate; the work cannot start before the naming does.
- 4
Work one spoke at a time
Pick the loose spoke and work only on it until it holds, then move to the next. Hamilton describes this as elimination, one item at a time, and as polishing the stone.
Watch out Attacking every spoke at once produces no measurable change in any of them.
- 5
Re-audit when a single spoke starts winning
Treat outsized success or outsized crisis in one domain as the trigger to re-run the whole audit, exactly as Hamilton did through the IPO and the subsequent stock collapse.
Pro tip A crisis in one spoke is the cheapest possible reminder to check the others.
In the wild
Laird Superfood went public at roughly a $400 million market cap on about $40 million a year of sales, then the stock was crushed and the company changed CEOs. Hamilton audits the situation against the whole wheel rather than the ticker: his family is healthy, he is healthy, and the experience of the IPO itself is retained. He says he would not change a bit of it and would not go back and undo going public.
→ He stayed operationally engaged with the brand, communicating with it multiple times a week, without the stock price destabilising his health, marriage or conduct.
Hamilton describes wine, specifically Pinot Noir, as one of two habits he picked up over twenty years, and describes his own tendency toward excess. Rather than treating it as a lifestyle detail he classified it as a loose spoke: something he did not have real power over, and therefore something to refine.
→ Fifteen years sober at the time of the episode, with the drinking spoke closed and the refinement process moved on to other items.
Common mistakes
Treating business as the axle rather than a spoke
Making the company the organising centre of the wheel means every wobble in revenue or share price transmits directly into health, marriage and conduct. Hamilton's framing is that business gets to be nice and tight, and that is all it gets to be.
Scoring your spokes against other people instead of your own barriers
Hamilton says there will always be someone who can outdo you and someone you can outdo, so comparison produces no usable signal. The audit only works if each spoke is measured against your own barrier and whether you are lifting it.
Auditing without then working one spoke at a time
Naming five weak spokes and attempting all five produces no visible movement in any of them, which then discredits the audit itself. The method requires isolating one and finishing it.
Is it for you?
Best for
Operators and athletes whose scoreboard is one-dimensional and who are tempted to over-index on the metric they are already winning at.
Not ideal for
People in a genuine short-term survival sprint where a single spoke has to carry everything for a defined period.
From the transcript
“The greatest competition is life.”
“That's why I said when I talk about the spoke I go, yeah, business that's one spoke make sure it's nice and tight good cool.”
“But if you're all there, then you got these giant holes in the other spot.”
From the episode
Laird Hamilton: The Big Wave Surfer Who Built a +$10 Million Business Empire
Laird Hamilton