Two weeks ago I told you I'm the experiment rather than the case study. Here's the first honest report on that: I haven't started.
The plan exists. Eight benchmarks, written down. Bodyweight and waist, resting heart rate, a 5K, a 2,000-meter row, squat and deadlift for five, max pull-ups, push-ups in two minutes. Test them, publish them, retest in ninety days. I've had that list for a week and I have not tested a single number on it.
I travel next week, which makes it harder still.
Worth being precise about why, because the reason isn't time. Last week I ran a client review, taught a negotiation session, sat down with my wife to go through our finances, and took my daughter to her first taekwondo class. All of that happened. None of it was easier to fit than forty-five minutes with a barbell and a stopwatch.
Every one of those things had somebody waiting on it. A client. A team. My wife. A four-year-old in a uniform that's too big for her.
The baseline has nobody.
Last week I wrote about the question I skipped for years, which is who is waiting on me. I wrote it as a management failure, about the colleague stuck on a decision I hadn't made. It didn't occur to me until this week that I'm running the same failure on myself, and it's harder to catch, because there's no Sunday scan that surfaces work nobody is waiting for.
Here's the tell. There is one health-related thing on my calendar that is definitely happening, and it's bloodwork. Not because I want it more than I want the baseline. Because it's an appointment. Someone else holds the slot, the time is fixed, and not showing up costs me something in front of another person.
That's the whole difference. Same intention, same priority, same week. One of them has a counterparty and one of them doesn't.
I think this is why so much of the work that matters most to a person is the work that slides. Strategy that isn't due. The document you've been meaning to write. The thing you'd build if you had a quarter free. None of it is blocked by capacity. It's blocked by having no one on the other end.
Discipline is the usual answer and it isn't a bad one. It's just expensive, and it has to be spent fresh every week. Manufacturing a counterparty costs you once.
What I'm doing about it
The September 29 issue will have the eight numbers in it.
Not the good version of the numbers. The ones I get. I've been carrying a back that's been talking to me since spring and a training history that's real but nowhere near where I want it, and I expect at least two of those eight to land somewhere I'd rather not print. They'll go in anyway, because a baseline you take once you're ready isn't a baseline. It's a result you arranged.
Publishing that date is the counterparty. You are.
There's a second project running alongside this one, a structured dig into the protein industry where I get to use the part of my background nobody else writing about protein has. That gets its own issue once I've done the reading rather than the announcing.
Try this week
Take the thing you've been meaning to start, the one with no deadline attached to it, and give it a counterparty.
Book it as a session with someone. Tell one person a date out loud. Put it in front of a group who'll notice if it doesn't arrive. The mechanism matters less than the fact that somebody other than you is now holding the other end.
Then notice how differently you treat it by Wednesday.
What's one advantage you could compound from here?
Hit reply and tell me. I read everything, and what you send shapes what I write next.
— Austin
Austin Stevenson is Chief Revenue Officer at ACT LAB and a co-founder of Vertosa. He writes Compound Advantage on his own time.