Chapter 10 Compounding Wins
I did not set out to write a book about AI and I did not start using these tools because I had a grand vision about the future of work or because I believed I had figured out something most people had not. What I had was a growing sense that the gap between what my days demanded and what I had the capacity to give was widening in a direction I could not sustain, and I was willing to try one thing and see if it helped before I called it anything bigger than that.
The first week I used AI to help me draft a response to an email I had been avoiding for three days. It took four minutes instead of 45. I did not save the world and I did not overhaul my workflow. What I did was close my laptop and step outside for 41 minutes that had not existed an hour before, and at the time I was pregnant with the son who would later watch a blue dot move down a road toward ice cream and ask me how many minutes until dad got home. I did not know any of that yet. I just knew that 41 minutes felt like something worth paying attention to, even if I could not have explained exactly why.
What I did not fully understand in that moment was that those 41 minutes were not a one-time event. They were the first deposit in something that was going to grow in ways I could not yet see, and the way they grew had almost nothing to do with the tool I used to get them.
Why Compounding Is the Real Goal
A single AI win feels good in the moment, but a pattern of AI wins is what changes how ...
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