If you are familiar with Paul Graham, the English/American computer scientist, and you are familiar with the components of his distinctive background, skip the next introductory paragraph and scan to the section below about his insight that I am discussing here. But if you don’t know much about Paul Graham, keep reading and prepare to be amazed.
Paul Graham holds two doctoral degrees, one in computer science and one in philosophy, a combination that might not be completely unusual, but nonetheless provides a significantly expansive and inclusive platform on which to build a view of the world and a career in business. As if that weren’t enough of a distinctive pedigree, Graham has also studied fine arts and painting at both the Rhode Island School of Design and the Accademia Belle Arti in Florence, Italy. If you’re envisioning a sort of renaissance person, you’re likely on track. Some have called Graham the “hacker philosopher,” not inappropriately. After authoring and launching some high-impact computer coding languages and platforms, Paul Graham joined colleagues to found a company called Y Combinator, one of the world’s most successful start-up accelerators. Companies who have grown with the assistance of Y Combinator include Airbnb, Stripe, Instacart, Reddit, Dropbox. You get the idea.
Of late, Graham has focused on the nature of work, authoring extensive posts about what constitutes what he calls “great work.” Someone even digested his posts and created a graphic that maps the ingredients, behaviors, relationships and organizational factors that are conducive to what Graham calls great work. It was a mapping that I found very inspiring and provocative, and in addition to the wealth of ideas presented in the graphic, one of them leapt off the page for me. It was Graham’s counsel: Do Work That Compounds.
Now compounding, as a term, has an array of meanings. You are likely most familiar, unless you are a chemist who understands the idea quite specifically, with compounded interest rates on loans or savings accounts. But Graham seems to recommend doing work that compounds in an application where it means that it both builds on a foundation as well as endures.
Compounded work has these sorts of attributes: Reusability – it is done once, but the benefit continues over time; Leverage – it reaches more people or scales with technology; Durability – it stays useful for years; Improvement over time – feedback and other input make it better; and Optionality – it creates future opportunities you can’t fully predict.
The aspiration to do work that compounds stuck me as having two important focal points: compounding work as an external phenomenon, and compounding work as an internal reality. The external applications of compounded work are the concepts included within those five points in the previous paragraph. Who among us would not want our day-to-day work to have endurance and impact and value generation for others? We find ourselves at the onset of a new year, and it seems an opportune moment to evaluate our work. Are we doing work that is truly compounding for others and for the organizations in which we labor?
I think we could pose these same sorts of questions to our industry as a composite body of work. Are the achievements of our workplace and furniture industry generating value and outcomes that are compounding? I think you could make the case that we are, indeed, doing compounding work as an industry. Think about how early efforts at systems furniture created new paradigms for workplace design and planning; or how those early efforts were built upon as the industry embraced the importance of ergonomics and technology integration; or how the cumulative understanding of work process sharpened a focus on postural rotation and the proliferation of sit-to-stand workstations. And those are just a few examples of compounding work. It fully appears that compounding work is happening in our workplace segment of the business world.
Though Graham doesn’t discuss it, I am also struck by the application of this notion of work that is compounding to our personal and cognitive development. Again, on the threshold of the new calendar year, it might be an insightful exercise to reflect on how work that is compounding applies in our own personal journeys. Have there been ideas that have taken root in each of us which have become the foundation, the cornerstones of our growth and development, catalysts for even more ideas and insights that followed? Are there experiences over the years that have been so formative that they persist within our view of the world and our understanding of ourselves? Are there relationships we have formed whose impact is so powerful that we carry forward the strength and inspirations that have their genesis in those people who have shaped who we are? I’m guessing that your answers to these sorts of reflective queries will yield a conclusion that you are indeed doing work that compounds.
All these musings about the internal landscape of work that compounds coalesced for me around a phrase from the French that I recently discovered. Evidently, the French language uses the term “bibliothèque intérieure,” meaning inner library. What a wonderful image and metaphor to capture the wealth of insights that compose our personal cognitive, psychological and emotional resources that have compounded, like interest on a savings account, from throughout our work histories. Consider that we each have a robust and diverse and inspiring inner library of resources that we can bring to bear on our day-to-day work activities. We can do work that compounds.
Not a bad idea to ponder to start 2026.