Perhaps the near universal reach of this mind-set is best captured in an experience I had recently on my commute to the Georgetown campus where I work. Waiting for the light to change so I could cross Connecticut Avenue, I idled behind a truck from a refrigerated supply chain logistics company. Refrigerated shipping is a complex, competitive business that requires equal skill managing trade unions and route scheduling. It’s the ultimate old-school industry and in many ways is the opposite of the lean consumer-facing tech start-ups that currently receive so much attention. What struck me as I waited in traffic behind this truck, however, was not the complexity or scale of this company, but instead a graphic that had been commissioned and then affixed, probably at significant expense, on the back of this entire fleet of trucks—a graphic that read: “like us on Facebook.”
Deep work is at a severe disadvantage in a technopoly because it builds on values like quality, craftsmanship, and mastery that are decidedly old-fashioned and nontechnological. Even worse, to support deep work often requires the rejection of much of what is new and high-tech. Deep work is exiled in favor of more distracting high-tech behaviors, like the professional use of social media, not because the former is empirically inferior to the latter. Indeed, if we had hard metrics relating the impact of these behaviors on the bottom line, our current technopoly would likely crumble. But the metric black hole prevents such clarity and allows us instead to elevate all things Internet into Morozov’s feared “uber-ideology.” In such a culture, we should not be surprised that deep work struggles to compete against the shiny thrum of tweets, likes, tagged photos, walls, posts, and all the other behaviors that we’re now taught are necessary for no other reason than that they exist.
Bad for Business. Good for You.
Deep work should be a priority in today’s business climate. But it’s not. I’ve just summarized various explanations for this paradox. Among them are the realities that deep work is hard and shallow work is easier, that in the absence of clear goals for your job, the visible busyness that surrounds shallow work becomes self-preserving, and that our culture has developed a belief that if a behavior relates to “the Internet,” then it’s good—regardless of its impact on our ability to produce valuable things. All of these trends are enabled by the difficulty of directly measuring the value of depth or the cost of ignoring it.
If you believe in the value of depth, this reality spells bad news for businesses in general, as it’s leading them to miss out on potentially massive increases in their value production. But for you, as an individual, good news lurks. The myopia of your peers and employers uncovers a great personal advantage. Assuming the trends outlined here continue, depth will become increasingly rare and therefore increasingly valuable. Having just established that there’s nothing fundamentally flawed about deep work and nothing fundamentally necessary about the distracting behaviors that displace it, you can therefore continue with confidence with the ultimate goal of this book: to systematically develop your personal ability to go deep—and by doing so, reap great rewards.
Chapter Three
Deep Work Is Meaningful
Ric Furrer is a blacksmith. He specializes in ancient and medieval metalworking practices, which he painstakingly re-creates in his shop, Door County Forgeworks. “I do all my work by hand and use tools that multiply my force without limiting my creativity or interaction with the material,” he explains in his artist’s statement. “What may take me 100 blows by hand can be accomplished in one by a large swaging machine. This is the antithesis of my goal and to that end all my work shows evidence of the two hands that made it.”
A 2012 PBS documentary provides a glimpse into Furrer’s world. We learn that he works in a converted barn in Wisconsin farm country, not far inland from the scenic Sturgeon Bay of Lake Michigan. Furrer often leaves the barn doors open (to vent the heat of the forges, one suspects), his efforts framed by farm fields stretching to the horizon. The setting is idyllic but the work can seem, at first encounter, brutish. In the documentary, Furrer is trying to re-create a Viking-era sword. He begins by using a fifteen-hundred-year-old technique to smelt crucible steel: an unusually pure (for the period) form of the metal. The result is an ingot, not much bigger than three or four stacked smartphones. This dense ingot must then be shaped and polished into a long and elegant sword blade.
“This part, the initial breakdown, is terrible,” Furrer says to the camera as he methodically heats the ingot, hits it with a hammer, turns it, hits it, then puts it back in the flames to start over. The narrator reveals that it will take eight hours of this hammering to complete the shaping. As you watch Furrer work, however, the sense of the labor shifts. It becomes clear that he’s not drearily whacking at the metal like a miner with a pickaxe: Every hit, though forceful, is carefully controlled. He peers intently at the metal, through thin-framed intellectual glasses (which seem out of place perched above his heavy beard and broad shoulders), turning it just so for each impact. “You have to be very gentle with it or you will crack it,” he explains. After a few more hammer strikes, he adds: “You have to nudge it; slowly it breaks down; then you start to enjoy it.”
At one point about halfway through the smithing, after Furrer has finished hammering out the desired shape, he begins rotating the metal carefully in a narrow trough of burning charcoal. As he stares at the blade something clicks: “It’s ready.” He lifts the sword, red with heat, holding it away from his body as he strides swiftly toward a pipe filled with oil and plunges in the blade to cool it. After a moment of relief that the blade did not crack into pieces—a common occurrence at this step—Furrer pulls it from the oil. The residual heat of the metal lights the fuel, engulfing the sword’s full length in yellow flames. Furrer holds the burning sword up above his head with a single powerful arm and stares at it a moment before blowing out the fire. During this brief pause, the flames illuminate his face, and his admiration is palpable.
“To do it right, it is the most complicated thing I know how to make,” Furrer explains. “And it’s that challenge that drives me. I don’t need a sword. But I have to make them.”
Ric Furrer is a master craftsman whose work requires him to spend most of his day in a state of depth—even a small slip in concentration can ruin dozens of hours of effort. He’s also someone who clearly finds great meaning in his profession. This connection between deep work and a good life is familiar and widely accepted when considering the world of craftsmen. “The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy,” explains Matthew Crawford. And we believe him.
But when we shift our attention to knowledge work this connection is muddied. Part of the issue is clarity. Craftsmen like Furrer tackle professional challenges that are simple to define but difficult to execute—a useful imbalance when seeking purpose. Knowledge work exchanges this clarity for ambiguity. It can be hard to define exactly what a given knowledge worker does and how it differs from another: On our worst days, it can seem that all knowledge work boils down to the same exhausting roil of e-mails and PowerPoint, with only the charts used in the slides differentiating one career from another. Furrer himself identifies this blandness when he writes: “The world of information superhighways and cyber space has left me rather cold and disenchanted.”