The Creator Flywheel LESSSon

All habits operate on a loop. The looping is what makes habits compound, for better or for worse. We’ve already discussed how customer/client/other-people’s habits compound, it’s only right we turn it around on ourselves.

It’s especially important in business, because how else are we going to keep coming up with things to say about the work we do that actually keeps the lights on? If you’ve ever felt like “I’m just repeating myself” this post will both agree with you and help focus the Creator Flywheel habit-loop so you’re regularly coming up with new ideas that push your results in the right direction.

Just like the Consumer Flywheel, in its simplest form, the Creator loop consists of an external event - what I call a muse, and a moment of curiosity where that muse captures our attention. Then comes a decision to experience what we found - that, this time, we’ll call creativity, and, finally, a habit, where we embrace what just happened and go off looking for another spark.

We’ll dive deeper into the Creator Flywheel here, to see how it pushes the Consumer Flywheel. When it’s unhealthy, we’ll troubleshoot the problems (like when you can’t find the muse or can’t build a habit, usually). And when it’s healthy, we’ll see how the act of knowing where and when to look for the next idea becomes the most essential detail.

Oh, and if it’s not obvious: the critical difference between the Consumer Flywheel and the Creator Flywheel is perspective. The Consumer Flywheel sees the experience with a brand through the consumer’s frame of reference. The Creator Flywheel sees the act of creativity from the brand’s point of view. They’re the same stages, just with a different highlighter on the question, “Who is this happening to?”

The Creator Flywheel, in each of its stages, looks like this:

• Muse: “Something’s bugging me / interesting enough that I can’t ignore it.”

• Curiosity: “What is this really? Who is it for? How could this work?” The questions and research, notes, conversations.

• Creativity: starting with a reflection, and resulting in actually making the thing, delivering the service, having the call, recording the episode, or shipping the work.

• Habit: how you close the loop and set up the next cycle. Postmortems, small wins, calendar blocks, SOPs that make it easier to find the muse again.

• Repeat: as you return to find the muse, you build a process so the loop can spin faster via tighter feedback loops, better inputs, clearer priorities.

Think about The Beatles. The song “I Feel Fine” came from a riff John Lennon couldn’t stop playing. The magical, muse-like appearance of it in his hands was enough for the rest of the band to get curious, and ask what it was. They then suggested he go off to turn it into a song, which he - very creatively - did.

After a first draft, John and Ringo drilled in to get the feel right, and then the band began to record it. An accidental guitar placement resulted in the now famous feedback at the beginning of the song. It was alarming and different and unplanned. They loved it, decided to keep it, and the final cut was born, out of habit.

In the great tradition of musical artistry, they turned around and repeated a similar process many, many more times.

LESSS inside the Creator Flywheel

Each emotional transformation has its place in a Creator Flywheel too. It may feel odd, to layer this over the consumer perspective, but keep in mind there is no consumption without creation. In practice, it’s usually easier to see the consumer perspective first, hence why we’re laying it out this way. The Creator Flywheel is what people want to jump into, but below, as you read this, you’ll hopefully understand why now you’re really ready for it.

Creator Flywheel: Logical

• Muse: “There’s a question or pattern here I don’t fully understand yet.”

• Curiosity: Research, outlining, talking to people, testing hypotheses.

• Creativity: Turning insight into explanations, frameworks, tools, or processes.

• Habit: Regular synthesis time, notes systems, templates, and review cycles.

• Repeat: Each pass sharpens your ability to see structure in chaos, so you go looking for bigger or subtler or available puzzles to solve.

Creator Flywheel: Emotional

• Muse: “I’m feeling something so strongly I need to make something about it.”

• Curiosity: “What is this feeling really about? Who else feels this? What form or medium would convey it best?”

• Creativity: Making work that expresses and channels the emotion (posts, episodes, offers, client conversations - medium and domain specific!).

• Habit: Rituals that protect emotional space and recovery so you don’t deaden your sense of feeling, while enabling you to want to start over.

• Repeat: As you see emotional resonance with the right people, you trust your instincts more and return to this lane faster.

Creator Flywheel: Secure

• Muse: “Something about my business or practice doesn’t feel stable enough,” or “There is a threat here I am sensing.”

• Curiosity: Auditing risks, bottlenecks, worst-case scenarios, weak agreements, to note the sensed gaps.

• Creativity: Designing safeguards: better contracts, buffers, automations, ops, boundaries - that close the gaps.

• Habit: Periodic “risk sweeps,” dashboards, and checklists that keep you from drifting back into the previously experienced fragility.

• Repeat: As you see fewer fires and more calm, you’re more willing to keep investing in security cycles.

Creator Flywheel: Status-Sexy

• Muse: “The people I respect seem to be doing something I’m not.”

• Curiosity: “What are they really doing differently? What game are they playing? Am I late if I just start now?”

• Creativity: Experimenting with formats, collaborations, and positioning that raise perceived status with the right medium and domain, and most critically - for the right audience.

• Habit: Guardrails against pure vanity: metrics you actually care about, knowing “why” checks off well before chasing shiny objects.

• Repeat: As you see that certain “status” moves actually deepen your lane (not just inflate ego), you reuse that pattern.

Healthy Creator Flywheels by relationship type

We see these Creator Flywheels in way more categories than the traditional creative roles. Everywhere there is content, storytelling, and sales - you will find this flywheel. Let’s walk through how Enterprise B2C, Enterprise B2B, Boutique B2C, and Boutique B2B structure their habit loops. What you’ll notice is how we’re describing your behavior as the creator/operator instead of the customer’s. On our side, the labels are traps - patterns of behavior that quietly pull us off our own Creator Flywheel. Understanding both sides is the key to knowing why your audience shows up - or why they disappear, or never seem to stick around.

Enterprise B2C: what a healthy Creator Flywheel looks like

• Muse: Data and patterns at scale: “Lots of people keep getting stuck/feeling X at this moment.”

• Curiosity: Systematic discovery: user research, A/B tests, cohort analyses, frontline conversations, and lots of listening to testimonials and complaints.

• Creativity: Shipping improvements, campaigns, and stories that can be rolled out broadly and repeatedly.

• Habit: Cadenced experimentation (weekly/monthly sprints), retro meetings, and decision logs that keep you from chasing chaos.

The key danger Enterprise B2C companies have to watch out for is the Novelty Drift Trap. It happens when creators start over-indexing on novel projects or pet ideas that don’t map onto their main Consumer Flywheel. It’s as easy to become seduced by over-personalization and one-off features, or to get lost in noisy feedback that doesn’t lead to another reproducible outcome, no matter how desirable it may be.

Enterprise B2B: what a healthy Creator Flywheel looks like

• Muse: “Teams inside big organizations keep wrestling with this same ugly process or outcome.”

• Curiosity: Deep discovery with champions and skeptics, mapping real workflows and incentives across roles and responsibilities.

• Creativity: Designing not just what to build/sell, but how to implement, train, and govern it.

• Habit: Playbooks for discovery, implementation, and expansion; internal storytelling rituals around wins and failures.

• Repeat: Each deployment teaches you more about the org’s reality, and your creative energy goes into refining repeatable motions, not constantly inventing from scratch.

Enterprise B2B companies have to be wary of what I’ll call the Institution–Individual Drift Trap. Drift too far toward the institution and you lose the ideas and nuance of real people doing the work. Drift too far toward star individuals and you quietly become a boutique shop in enterprise clothing, undermining the power of the whole.

Boutique B2C: what a healthy Creator Flywheel looks like

• Muse: “That’s a specific kind of person / moment I can serve intensely well.”

• Curiosity: Hanging out where those people actually are, listening to their real stories and language.

• Creativity: Crafting concentrated, memorable experiences: a show, a product, a service that feels made “just for us,” that all parties want to tell others about, like it’s a secret they just can’t keep.

• Habit: Capacity rules and creative rhythms that protect intensity (e.g., limited launches, seasonal menus, episodic projects, all with your secret sharing element fully embodied).

• Repeat: The more you see people tell stories about your work, the more you double down on that narrow band instead of broadening for its own sake.

Boutique B2C trouble arises when growth and scaling potential sets in, what I call the Algorithmic Dilution Trap. Boutique creators definitionally resist allowing all sorts of algorithmic reach to hijack their Creator Flywheel, and pull them towards generic, over-produced work. Scaling output beyond what your own creative energy and quality bar can support is a natural and healthy boundary that needs to be discovered and protected.

Boutique B2B: what a healthy Creator Flywheel looks like

• Muse: “There’s a weird, specific problem I love fixing for a certain type of client.”

• Curiosity: Slow, careful discovery: long calls, digging through docs, studying prior cases.

• Creativity: Designing bespoke engagements, frameworks, and interventions that actually fit this client’s shape.

• Habit: A pipeline rhythm (conversations, follow-ups, scoping) and engagement cadence that respects your limited bandwidth.

• Repeat: Each successful project becomes both a case study and a pattern you spot faster next time, even as you keep tailoring.

Boutique B2B’s primary risk is falling into what could be called the Industrialization Trap. With a high level of flexibility and a wide range of knowledge that lets you insert yourself into typically thorny, larger-team problem sets, it can be tempting to chase short-term compensation, ego (especially around how many clients you take on), or both - usually resulting in too broad a mandate. The key is to resist industrializing your boutique, despite the often industrialized customers you serve. Evidence of scale for a successful Boutique B2B business shows up in profits and time horizon, not headcount or client count.

Common Creator Flywheel failure modes

We’ve all heard the expression, “The customer is always right,” and the counters from the Henry Ford’s ("You can have any color you want, as long as it's black") and Steve Jobs ("People don't know what they want until you show it to them"). This used to drive me crazy until I realized you could figure out which expressions apply where, based on the Consumer and Creator Flywheels.

Start by remembering that both Ford and Apple were running Enterprise B2C enterprises. Limiting choices and respecting your role in discovery, as a creator and curator of mass-produced products (no boutique here!), means these were flywheel-protection rules.

Any color you want so long as it’s black falls apart if you’re a boutique. It would be the antithesis of your flywheel. Likewise, demanding you know the answer before the customer would never take hold in an Enterprise B2B flywheel. Scaled solutions based on feedback loops across organizations can’t be built around one visionary’s personal taste in that way. These examples are everywhere.

When I think about business missteps I’ve first-hand witnessed, it’s usually because somebody in leadership is misapplying one of these concepts (oh, the damage biographies and autobiographies can create if you don’t understand how to frame these ideas inside your own flywheel!).

Imagine reading Jobs’ biography and using it to inform your art gallery. That’s a Boutique Creator Flywheel levering Enterprise expectations. Conversely, imagine if Jobs fell into an Enterprise B2B trap, and wanted to exclusively deliver fleet solutions a la Microsoft or Google? These are the risks of spinning the wrong Creator Flywheel for the relationship with Consumers you actually have.

This is why you can't just copy business icons. You have to understand your flywheel first. We all have to opt into an emotional transformation and then figure out the framing, for our customers and ourselves, as creators, so we can spin our ideas up and out.

Once you know which Consumer and Creator Flywheels you’re running, the basic “Where am I stuck?” troubleshooting guide reduces to this:

• Muse hoarding (always collecting ideas, never acting).

• Curiosity looping (research forever, no creativity).

• Creativity spurts with no Habit (burnout, inconsistency).

• Habit with no fresh Muse (stale, derivative work).

Combining (and not confusing) the Creator and Consumer Flywheels

The Consumer Flywheel tells us how consumers’ habits spin when what we are serving delights them.​

The Creator Flywheel tells us how our habits can drive that delight, on purpose.​

Together, these perspectives are how we find alignment between what we offer and what is experienced, both at delivery and over time.​

The goal is to keep forcing the conversation back to the original idea: there is an emotional transformation, and therefore motivation, behind every decision humans make.

First, we have to understand whether any given transformation is mostly logical, emotional, secure, or status-boosting-sexy. Then we can zoom out to see what relationship types we are forming (Enterprise or Boutique, B2B or B2C). Finally, we can sketch our Consumer and Creator Flywheels to establish and re‑establish the transformative process that lets results compound into the future.​

You may not see it right away. You may not get the execution dead to rights right away. But through iterations, you can start to unlock what’s enabling and what’s error‑inducing in your process - or in the process of any other entity you want to study, steal from, or avoid at all costs.​

The hope is that you can take these ideas, as others have, and use them not just to strategize what you’re doing and why with your brands and businesses, but also to communicate that focus across your relationships, teams, and organizations. Your shared “why are we doing this?” can become clearer for everyone involved.​

Nobody likes to repeat themselves, especially if they feel like no-one is listening. I believe this is an antidote to that feeling. This entire idea is my version of the good reason and way to repeat yourself. By that I mean, very intentionally, that I believe this is the socially and humanely good way to build brands that actually help people out. It’s the good version of doing good work, for good people, on purpose - and if you’ve made it this far, I already know that you’re oriented toward delivering work of that quality to the world, and let me thank you for it.

We’re in this together.