I'm not sure that people predicting this massively multitasking future are wrong, but I do wonder whether they're not just operating in something close to blind faith that the future economy will look remarkably like today's leisure time. This rhetoric sounds all too "I.G.Y." to me.

A just machine to make big decisions Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision We'll be clean when that work is done We'll be eternally free, yes, and eternally young

Maybe this is just the Lent talking -- it's that time of year, after all -- but what I'd really like to see from future employers is the ability to realize that "synthesizing the vast quantities of information" is really hard and needs to be done slowly, carefully, and above all patiently. Malcolm Gladwell's Blink came out the same year as Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good for You and seemed to be an allied document. "The Power of Thinking Without Thinking" read the subtitle, and the back cover was emblazoned with the slogan "Don't Think, Blink!" But Edward Sidelsky was among several reviewers who noted that the book didn't bear out its own thesis: "Billed as a celebration of intuition, it goes on to amass a heap of evidence against it. Apparent deliverances of intuition turn out, as often as not, to reflect the unconscious operation of prejudice."

It seems to me that, whatever the job descriptions of the future turn out to be, and however much they rely on the mastery of online technologies, patience and self-reflectiveness are going to be in much shorter supply than quickness of judgment.

In this light I commend to you a recent post by Jason Fried of 37signals, in which he relates an anecdote about something that happened to him in 2007:

I was speaking at the Business Innovation Factory conference in Providence, RI. So was Richard Saul Wurman. After my talk Richard came up to introduce himself and compliment my talk. That was very generous of him. He certainly didn't have to do that. And what did I do? I pushed back at him about the talk he gave. While he was making his points on stage, I was taking an inventory of the things I didn't agree with. And when presented with an opportunity to speak with him, I quickly pushed back at some of his ideas. I must have seemed like such an asshole. His response changed my life. It was a simple thing. He said "Man, give it five minutes." I asked him what he meant by that? He said, it's fine to disagree, it's fine to push back, it's great to have strong opinions and beliefs, but give my ideas some time to set in before you're sure you want to argue against them. "Five minutes" represented "think", not react. He was totally right. I came into the discussion looking to prove something, not learn something. This was a big moment for me.

I don't know what kinds of jobs people will be doing in the future -- though I doubt that they'll be all that different than the ones people do now -- but I'm sure of this: especially in fields that deal largely in information, there won't be nearly enough people who know how to give it five minutes before making their judgments.

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