Summer is when I generally start thinking about big transitions in my work, my teaching, and my habits. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the kinds of work I do and have come to the notion that all work can be divided into three classes:
- World-changing (like political stands, Uncle Toms Cabin)
- Adventurous (1000 true fans)
- Disinterested (most ads, emails, pleas)
Like most think-pieces philosophizing about the nature of work, this applies mostly to professional knowledge workers. But it could equally apply to a lot of production, manufacturing, agriculture, and service work.
World-changing work is what it sounds like: the work that genuinely moves the needle in some corner of the world. This does not mean you have to be elected President or selected as the Pope.
World-changing work, but how to do it?
World-changing work could be writing a book on a topic that has never been covered before. It could be providing medical care to people who otherwise have none.
The problem with world-changing work is defining how big our world is. Providing medical care in a neighborhood does not rise to most people’s assumptions about the scope of the world.
You could write a book, for example, and the definition of “world-changing” can come from bestseller lists, awards, nominations, or sheer influence. There’s a world of difference between the Pulitzer Prize winning book Frederick Douglass by David Blight and Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Abraham Lincoln is said to have met Beecher Stowe in the White House and introduced himself by saying, “SLincoln tells her, “So, you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” Talk about world-changing.
The other problem with world-changing work is it rarely seems obvious how to do it, how to start, or what even needs doing some of the time within the scope of a person’s means and abilities.
Adventurous Work
In my course syllabi there’s a level between “Excelling” and “Average” called “Approaching”. Because I did not want to call this “Approaching Work”, I’m substituting “Adventurous” until I can think of something snappier.
Adventurous work is the kind of work that is highly niche, specialized, and sometimes but not always localized. It gets to Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans theory: you don’t need to impact millions of people or even try to appease throngs of people. You just need 1,000 true fans. This works well for small artists particularly well in music, painting, YouTube channels, and fan fiction authors. You produce things that 1,000 true fans enjoy and that is enough to sustain your professional endeavors and life.
Disinterested Work
This is what most people do most of the time. Forms, paperwork, random emails reminding people about things you already said, following-up on meetings, sitting in meetings, taking notes in meetings, meeting about meetings, and all manner of Zooms, Slacks, Teams threads, and whatever other monotonous strain we endure day to day.
I’d add in most ads and a lot of creative work for small businesses who, for better or worse, do not care and do not enable others to do their best work. This includes the young designer laying out a restaurant menu for the kind of diner that buys their bread toast from Costco. Or the developer working with someone who was a programmer fifteen years ago but left the industry and is now unfamiliar with modern specs or best practices.
For me this is some of that stuff but also creating vast networks of posts and webpages that I know have zero value. It’s the stuff clients ask for sometimes, sometimes because they have to, like “Thank you to our sponsors” and “You should join us at this event/fair/booth we’ve got a table at.”
This is the kind of work that could be shunted to a junior or an intern, but isn’t if one is not available. And it’s where AI can do a lot of the work because as I remind my students, “AI is probably already better than you at a lot of things.” AI is professional, speaks with the dull and comforting business tone that people know won’t get them fired or yelled at, and requires no proofreading for typos or grammar. All perfect for the stuff no one was ever going to read anyway, or, others will use to skim or summarize.
I’m noodling on this notion of how absurd it is that we all know what this work is (I sometimes call it “meta work”), and we all do it, and now we’re all very excited about how a robot can do it so your robot can summarize it or archive it. Just wild. But that’s a post for another day.
Today, disinterested work is a scourge of professional knowledge workers and even among tasks that AI can’t do or do well, there is considerable interest in figuring out ways to do so.
As one example, I had two conversations recently with two different people. Both were working on new websites and both generated documents that contained AI-generated text about … stuff. What most people call “content” but this was less than that. It was asking ChattyG for a bunch of ideas about what your site could do or be or what you’re selling and they pasted it in. I don’t know if the intent was for me to read it and do something with it (I didn’t, and I wasn’t), or if it was for them. Either way, they didn’t read it either.
All this is just wild to me and a sure sign of some kind of bubble or hype phase that seems to be slowing down among some nerd circles, but has clearly just now reached non-nerds. Like a cold front sweeping across the plains, it comes with its own kind of devastation and much-needed rain in different areas at different times.
The quest, then, ought to be how to zero in on Class I or Class II level work and reduce the Class III work. I have not yet thought though what a strategy for that looks like, but I’m sure ChattyG can give you an answer that is mildly comforting and nutritionally defunct.
