The Mechanics of Compounding Attention

Your trajectory isn’t shaped by goals.

It’s shaped by something quieter and more structural: how you allocate attention to a small number of compounding projects over long periods of time.

That’s the real lever. Everything else is surface.

Projects beat goals

Goals are endpoints. Projects are engines.

Goals close loops. Projects generate momentum. Goals motivate briefly. Projects shape identity and capability over years.

Someone who says “I want to learn AI” is setting a goal. Someone who builds, writes, tests, and teaches around AI for three years is running a project. The outcomes are not comparable.

Compounding only happens inside projects.

Twenty years ago I started building digital twins: tracking products from production to customer, event by event. I wasn’t pursuing a goal. I was circling a question: what’s the point of all this data?

I tried answers. Customer loyalty systems. Retail behavior analysis. Crop insurance triggered by purchase data. Automated ERP declarations. Anomaly detection instead of noisy reports. Each attempt was useful. None was the answer.

But each attempt added to something. Not a goal. A project. The project: understand how enterprises should actually use their data.

Focus beats time

People overestimate the importance of time and underestimate the importance of attention quality.

Ten scattered hours rarely move anything meaningful. Two deeply focused hours, applied repeatedly to the same problem, can change trajectories.

The variable that matters isn’t time spent. It’s how much cognitive bandwidth is allocated to the same question over long periods.

Progress is not linear effort. It’s cumulative depth.

During the Big Data era, everyone was collecting. Hadoop. NoSQL. Dashboards everywhere. I was still asking the same question: what’s the point?

Then TikTok exploded. And what struck me wasn’t the algorithmic sophistication — it was the principle: TikTok doesn’t just analyze your data. It uses your data to surface the next action most likely to matter.

That’s when the transfer became obvious: Enterprises don’t need more dashboards. They need systems that surface the next decision worth making.

That idea didn’t become a company immediately. But it became a question I returned to again and again, across roles, projects, and years. That’s how compounding actually happens.

Clarity reduces the need for discipline

Discipline is often a symptom of misalignment.

When direction is unclear, you rely on willpower. You oscillate. You need effort just to stay consistent.

When direction becomes clear, much of that friction disappears. Energy organizes itself. Discipline is still required — but far less of it, and in more targeted ways.

Clarity isn’t motivational. It’s structural.

When LLMs and agents arrived, I started building. Returns processing. Invoice workflows. Useful, but small.

Then an executive said something that snapped twenty years of thinking into place: “Everyone is solving invoice approvals. But at the top of the organization, there’s nothing. No tools for the decisions that actually matter. The ones that require data, context, constraints, and judgment all at once.”

Suddenly the destination was visible. I didn’t need more motivation. The work organized itself around the clarity.

Identity shapes opportunity

People don’t just act based on skills. They act based on who they believe they are.

Identity filters perception:

• What you notice
• Which opportunities you take seriously
• What you say yes to
• What you quietly ignore

An operator sees execution gaps. An investor sees asymmetry. A builder sees systems. A researcher sees models.

Long-term projects don’t just produce results. They reshape identity.

After two decades of circling the same problem, I no longer thought of myself as someone interested in decision systems. I thought of myself as someone who builds them. The identity had already formed. The company was just the container.

AI-assisted programming finally allowed the compounding to express itself at speed. The architecture, the mental models, the structure — they had been accumulating long before the code ever did.

The engine

Your future is determined less by what you intend and more by what repeatedly receives your attention.

Not what you claim matters. Not what you plan. But what you return to — week after week — when no one is watching.

That’s where compounding actually lives. And that’s what ultimately determines trajectory.