How a compounding life works
When the job ends, what’s left?
I’m Oscar Hu. Days Well Made is about a way of working I’m building: every bit of effort has to leave something you can use next time. I call it a compounding life. This page shows how it adds up.
Same five jobs, two ways of doing them.
One writes the effort in sand, the other lays it as stone. The work is the same. The only difference is where the next job starts.
Written in sand
Job 5 starts: still from the shore.
Laid as stone
Job 5 starts: from the fourth stone.
That’s compounding. Not a number going up: the starting line moving forward.
Follow one stone
What one real job left behind.
This isn’t a methodology. It’s a small thing that actually happened.
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Building the website for WEDO, my company. Every test passed; the faults only showed once a browser was open.
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A rule: passing tests doesn’t mean anyone can see it. Anything that moves gets watched in a real browser, start to end, in both directions.
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The next website started with that rule already on the list. Nobody had to remember it, and nobody had to hit the same wall again. The page you’re reading was made this way.
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One mistake became a stone the company keeps. Whoever picks it up walks on from there.
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A rule doesn’t go and look by itself, and a direction doesn’t choose itself. What to say and who to answer to are mine to settle.
What counts as a stone
If you can use it next time, it counts.
Decisions
Your past judgement, written down. Otherwise even you can’t see where your strengths are.
Processes
A route that worked this time, so next time nobody has to feel their way.
Tools
Code that runs it for you, so you don’t have to be there each time.
Rules
When to move and when to stop. Written in advance, so you can’t fool yourself.
Relationships
Someone who’d come back. Someone who’d speak up for you.
Things people can see
An article someone can find, a page someone can open.
If something from this week were still useful next year, which one would it be?
Most people are still chatting with AI.
I’m building an AI OS.
It started with writing down more than a decade of experience and decisions. Then I found the same way of working applied to companies, projects and trading, and to content and production too. Now these connect, and I call the whole set an AI OS: it remembers my judgement, runs my workflows and makes the result of one thing the starting point of the next.
It isn’t a product you can download, and it won’t be laid out in full here. What you see is what it makes, like the site you’re reading. Judgement, acceptance and responsibility to people stay with people.
If you want one of your own, that’s what CanTrust does. Write to me about it
One day, what’s in your hands is worth more than your job title.