Deep Work Is Valuable
As Election Day loomed in 2012, traffic at the New York Times website spiked, as is
normal during moments of national importance. But this time, something was different.
A wildly disproportionate fraction of this traffic—more than 70 percent by some
reports—was visiting a single location in the sprawling domain. It wasn’t a front-page
breaking news story, and it wasn’t commentary from one of the paper’s Pulitzer Prize–
winning columnists; it was instead a blog run by a baseball stats geek turned election
forecaster named Nate Silver. Less than a year later, ESPN and ABC News lured
Silver away from the Times (which tried to retain him by promising a staff of up to a
dozen writers) in a major deal that would give Silver’s operation a role in everything
from sports to weather to network news segments to, improbably enough, Academy
Awards telecasts. Though there’s debate about the methodological rigor of Silver’s
hand-tuned models, there are few who deny that in 2012 this thirty-five-year-old data
whiz was a winner in our economy.
Another winner is David Heinemeier Hansson, a computer programming star who
created the Ruby on Rails website development framework, which currently provides
the foundation for some of the Web’s most popular destinations, including Twitter and
Hulu. Hansson is a partner in the influential development firm Basecamp (called
37signals until 2014). Hansson doesn’t talk publicly about the magnitude of his profit
share from Basecamp or his other revenue sources, but we can assume they’re
lucrative given that Hansson splits his time between Chicago, Malibu, and Marbella,
Spain, where he dabbles in high-performance race-car driving.
Our third and final example of a clear winner in our economy is John Doerr, a
general partner in the famed Silicon Valley venture capital fund Kleiner Perkins
Caufield & Byers. Doerr helped fund many of the key companies fueling the current
technological revolution, including Twitter, Google, Amazon, Netscape, and Sun
Microsystems. The return on these investments has been astronomical: Doerr’s net
worth, as of this writing, is more than $3 billion.
Why have Silver, Hansson, and Doerr done so well? There are two types of answersto this question. The first are micro in scope and focus on the personality traits and
tactics that helped drive this trio’s rise. The second type of answers are more macro
in that they focus less on the individuals and more on the type of work they represent.
Though both approaches to this core question are important, the macro answers will
prove most relevant to our discussion, as they better illuminate what our current
economy rewards.
To explore this macro perspective we turn to a pair of MIT economists, Erik
Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, who in their influential 2011 book, Race Against
the Machine, provide a compelling case that among various forces at play, it’s the
rise of digital technology in particular that’s transforming our labor markets in
unexpected ways. “We are in the early throes of a Great Restructuring,” Brynjolfsson
and McAfee explain early in their book. “Our technologies are racing ahead but many
of our skills and organizations are lagging behind.” For many workers, this lag
predicts bad news. As intelligent machines improve, and the gap between machine and
human abilities shrinks, employers are becoming increasingly likely to hire “new
machines” instead of “new people.” And when only a human will do, improvements in
communications and collaboration technology are making remote work easier than
ever before, motivating companies to outsource key roles to stars—leaving the local
talent pool underemployed.
This reality is not, however, universally grim. As Brynjolfsson and McAfee
emphasize, this Great Restructuring is not driving down all jobs but is instead
dividing them. Though an increasing number of people will lose in this new economy
as their skill becomes automatable or easily outsourced, there are others who will not
only survive, but thrive—becoming more valued (and therefore more rewarded) than
before. Brynjolfsson and McAfee aren’t alone in proposing this bimodal trajectory for
the economy. In 2013, for example, the George Mason economist Tyler Cowen
published Average Is Over, a book that echoes this thesis of a digital division. But
what makes Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s analysis particularly useful is that they
proceed to identify three specific groups that will fall on the lucrative side of this
divide and reap a disproportionate amount of the benefits of the Intelligent Machine
Age. Not surprisingly, it’s to these three groups that Silver, Hansson, and Doerr
happen to belong. Let’s touch on each of these groups in turn to better understand why
they’re suddenly so valuable.
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