Deep Work Is Valuable

 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.