Depth Necessity: Cal Newport's Deep Work Hypothesis - in Light of the Exponential Advancement in Automation

Beneficiaries

Newport identifies three beneficiaries (14), those who... 1) work well and creatively with machines (24, Tyler Cowen), 2) are the best at what they do, and 3) control capital. To survive, one must 1) quickly master hard things-endlessly-and 2) produce at an elite level, in terms of quality and speed (29). These two things require deep work: "a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limit... create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate" (3).

Now, this divide is nothing new. Naval Ravikant explains the disproportion between knowledge workers using leverage and customer service roles that support that leverage: "knowledge-worker jobs, intellectual jobs - [like programming] - where a good developer can write a piece of code that can literally make your business hundreds of millions of dollars over the next few years; and there are developers who can write code all day long, and just because they're working on the wrong thing, it's not creating value, no matter how hard they work. ... Customers don't care about your inputs, they only care about outcomes and outputs. ... What you don't necessarily want to be in is a support role, like a customer service role for example, [where] inputs and outputs match relatively closely to each other... It helps to move toward things that have these skill sets where it is very hard to match inputs to outputs [like] software, sales, or building and selling a product."

The key difference now is that the majority of the spectrum of knowledge-worker jobs - "mid-qualification jobs in factories and offices" - can be quasi-automated with the marginally free intellectual leverage artificial intelligence provides knowledge workers. Companies can now hire low-skilled service providers at low wages but get exponentially more output from them while bolstering their high-skilled labor, gnawing away mid-level jobs from both directions. While the power and application of AI growth will bring about new employment, it will undoubtedly decrease the value and quantity of mid-level jobs via elimination, redefinition, repricing, or resizing. I suspect many companies will just lay off a large portion of their workforce and continue operations with consistent and steady growth, without needing to rehire.

Why This Matters

AI may be an increasingly meritocratic vehicle, destabilizing industry. For example, ex-FB VP Chamath Palihapitiya recently tweeted: "I'm starting an incubator. Funded entirely by me. It's called 8090. Tell us what enterprise software you use and my team and I will build you an 80% feature complete version at a 90% discount. We are using AI and offshoring to make this happen" (@chamath). The use of cheap, skilled offshore labor by onshore capitalists leveraging AI will destroy enterprise software and the way companies are run. The labor market may value the almighty dollar more than American protectionism. Paradoxically, American society is designed to degrade our attention spans. "[We] have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as [we] use it" (100), but "the constant switching from low-stimuli / high-value activities to high-stimuli / low-value activities, at the slightest hint of boredom or cognitive challenge,... teaches the mind to never tolerate an absence of novelty" (161-2). Yet, that is exactly what social media is designed to do: distract. Our workdays are no different: filled with meetings, promptly answering emails and office communication. As Clifford Nass explains: "People who multitask all the time can't filter out irrelevancy. They can't manage a working memory. They're chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand... they're pretty much mental wrecks" (158). As Paul Graham would put it, many makers who need focus and attention to solve challenging problems are trapped in a manager schedule.

We are hampering our increasingly most valuable asset, arriving at Newport's Deep Work Hypothesis: "The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy... the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive" (14). The question then becomes: 'How do I improve my capacity for deep work?' Remyelinating your brain for deep work (38) by practicing focus and rest, and severely limiting or eliminating mindless distraction - to "leave the distracted masses to join the focused few" (263).

Joining the Focused Few

Newport offers some suggested approaches on how to schedule deep work:

• Monastic Living: living life in complete seclusion by guarding all your time and attention, preserving it for deep work - like Donald Knuth: "Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration" (103).
• Bimodal: "divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else" (108).
• Rhythmic: "a simple regular habit [of deep work] that removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding if and when [to] go deep" (111).
• Journalistic: "fit deep work whenever you can into your schedule... trained to slip into a [deep work] mode on a moment's notice" (115).

Thus, you must learn to ruthlessly guard your attention and your schedule, buying back your time (Martel, Buy Back Your Time) when you can - investing the profits of production back into production (Smith) - in deep work. This requires a level of disagreeableness and ability to operate in momentary discomfort, but you must learn to say 'no.' In doing so, Newport advises to: "be clear in [your] refusal but ambiguous in [your] explanation for the refusal... avoid providing enough specificity about the excuse that the requester has the opportunity to diffuse it... [and] resist the urge to offer a consolation prize that ends up devouring almost as much of [your] schedule" (239-40).

Additionally, don't waste your investment into deep work by constantly avoiding hard problems via "looping over and over again what you already know" instead of taking the intellectual challenge to dive deeper (172), checking social media and current events propaganda, obliterating your attention span with TikTok / Instagram Reels / YouTube Shorts, being a slave to advertisement and notifications, or blasting music in every spare moment of your time. Newport advises 'Productive Meditation:' "take a period in which you're occupied physically but not mentally - walking, jogging, driving, showering - and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem... you must continue to bring your attention back to the problem at hand when it wanders or stalls. ... By forcing you to resist distraction and return your attention repeatedly to a well-defined problem, [productive meditation] helps strengthen your distraction-resisting muscles, and by forcing you to push your focus deeper and deeper on a single problem, it sharpens your concentration" (170-1).

By following Newport's advice on deep work, you will be able to systematically define problems by reviewing the relevant variables, defining the specific next-step questions that need to be answered, and solving and consolidating those answers (173) which will hopefully serve you well in a world of constant distraction - freeing your limited will, energy, and focus to invest into things that matter. For me, that is studying, pursuing an intimate relationship with Christ, spending time with people I care about, and excelling in my academic and professional pursuits.

"I'll live the focused life, because it's the best kind there is" (92, Winifred Gallagher).