The Wheel of Life
The Wheel of Life<br>June 19, 2026
There’s this Personal Development concept I’ve long appreciated, called The Wheel of Life.
The simple idea
We sometimes ask ourselves “how’s my life going?”
Or someone else asks us “how’s life?”
But this can be tough to truly answer, because “life” includes so many different things.
Maybe our work is going well, but our health… not so much.
Or we’ve been having a lot of fun in our free time, but ignoring some deep family issues.
(These are just examples.)
So The Wheel of Life is a framework, to break down “Our Life” into these 8 categories:
Career
Finances
Health
Family & Friends
Love & Romance
Personal Growth
Fun & Recreation
Physical Environment
(* variations exist, this is my favorite)
The idea is if you can take care of all 8 categories, life will be great.
And sadly, neglecting any of them usually isn’t worth it. In the long run.
Regular Check-ins
So for the last decade or so, I will occasionally (~6 months) go through them as a check-in, trying to rate my own life’s quality of each category on a scale of 0 worst to 10 best possible.
Decimals allowed too, like “8.65”.
Often helpfully facilitated by a friend or partner. It’s very meaningful to take turns answering each. And listen & learn from each other’s answers.
We can even write down our answers, and see trends over time.
Each check-in is like a snapshot. Over time building a fuller window into how things seem to be going.
It’s quite nice to see clearly written down: “Ok, category X is struggling the most.” Helps clarify what deserves extra attention.
And then, hopefully, a few months later, see that it’s improved.
“What would it take to move this from a 7 to an 8?”
Another very helpful move is to explicitly ask what’s needed and/or what actions are possible to improve a category’s score from $CURRENT_VALUE to $CURRENT_VALUE_PLUS_ONE?
If you can write a quick note about that, it can be surprisingly insightful and delightful to come back to find these reminders, months or years later.
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