For most of my career I've had the same job, even when the title said something different.
I sit between people who know things and people who need to use them.
Social scientist by training and an operator by trade. I build businesses, I sell things, I take something complicated and make it understandable, useful, and commercially viable. And somehow I've spent fifteen years surrounded by PhDs. Chemists. Microbiologists. Formulators. Engineers. Some of the smartest and frankly some of the strangest people I've ever met.
I've built labs with them. Bought labs. Sold highly technical services alongside them. Sat in conversations where I understood maybe 60% of the science when it started, and kept asking questions until I could explain it back to a customer, an investor, or a sales team in plain English.
That 60% used to embarrass me. I thought the goal was to eventually get to 100. Be the smartest person in the room on the science itself.
It isn't. The 60% is the job.
If I understood all of it, I'd be a scientist, and I'd have a scientist's blind spot: I'd assume everyone else understood it too. What I actually do is stand at the exact point where technical truth has to become a decision someone can make. That's a seat, not a shortcoming. And I've come to think it's the most useful seat in almost any organization.
Why this newsletter exists
I kept trying to decide what Compound Advantage was about. Leadership? Health? Investing? Fatherhood? Science? Every week the answer changed, which felt like a problem.
It isn't a problem. The subject matter can be broad because the premise is narrow.
I'm trying to become more capable: physically, professionally, financially, as a husband and father, as a leader, as an owner. And I'm running the same translation on my own life that I've spent fifteen years running for other people's science: take the thing that's complicated, figure out what actually matters, and turn it into something you can use on a Tuesday.
Some days that laboratory is literally a laboratory. Some days it's a boardroom. Some days it's a bike, or a gym, or sitting on the floor putting together a desk for my daughter.
Same job either way.
So here's the deal. Once a week I'll send you one thing I'm learning or using that might help you feel better, lead better, or build a little more freedom. Not five hacks. Not a research report. Not me pretending to be an expert on everything. One observation, framework, experiment, mistake, conversation, or tool, and what I think you can do with it.
Every issue answers the same question: what's one advantage we can compound from here?
This week: the useful ten minutes
Before any meeting that matters, I write down three things. Takes five minutes.
What outcome do I want?
What are the two or three facts that actually matter?
What am I asking someone to do?
No prep doc. No deck review. Five minutes and a pen.
It's changed how I show up more than any productivity system I've tried, and I've tried most of them. Not because the answers are clever; they're usually obvious. Because writing them down means I walk in with a position instead of assembling one live while someone's watching.
The same thing turns out to be true of my body.
I can't always get the training session I want. Travel, fire drills, a week where the calendar wins. For a long time that meant I did nothing, because the hour wasn't available and I'd decided the hour was the unit.
Now I do ten minutes of mobility. It changes how my body feels for the rest of the day.
Here's what connects them:
The perfect version is usually unavailable. The useful version almost always is. Five minutes of prep beats the hour of prep you didn't do.
Ten minutes on a bad day beats an hour on a good one, because bad days are more common. Your average is set by the floor, not the ceiling.
The real cost of skipping isn't the session. It's that you become someone who skips. That identity is expensive and it compounds in the wrong direction.
Pick the version small enough that you'd still do it at 11pm in a hotel room. If it requires a good day, it isn't a system. It's a preference.
I've stopped treating health and leadership as separate practices. They run on the same mechanism: small things, held, compounding. The five minutes before a meeting and the ten minutes on the floor are the same move.
Try this week: pick one thing you keep skipping because you can't do it properly. Cut it to the version you'd do on your worst day. Run it for two weeks before you judge it.
Where I'm starting from
One more thing, since this is issue one and I'd rather be honest now than manage it later.
I'm not writing this from the finish line. I'm replacing my bed because my back has been talking to me for months. My training is real but nowhere near where I want it. Food is good, not dialed. Sleep needs work and knows it.
There's a gap between being healthy and being in performance condition, and I'm in it.
I thought about waiting, getting into the shape I want first, then writing any of this. Show up as the finished product. But I don't think the finished product is useful to anybody. Every operator I know is somewhere in a gap.
So I'm not the case study. I'm the experiment. You'll get what works and what doesn't, in roughly equal measure.
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.