(2017-07-07) Rao Semicolonshaped People

Venkatesh Rao: Semicolon-Shaped People. Speaking of teaching and deep projects, let's talk about deep work. The phrase is the title of a book by Cal Newport who, not coincidentally, has built a career out of sincerely and effectively steelmanning what I've often disparaged as "credentialism" in my writing

Newport preaches and practices what used to be called the T-shaped work ethic

If that appeals to you, by all means turn off social media and go do deep work. If on the other hand, you're a hopeless Internet reprobate and consider a day without at least 5 cat gifs and 1 flame war a wasted day, you may want to pursue a different path to deep work: be a semi-colon shaped person.

Don't get me wrong. Unlike empty suit types, scenesters, and pretenders, T-shaped people are people of substance. They are sincere and they do good, sometimes great work.

As in Tetris, T's are easy to work with

People who have a highly socialized, institutionalized, and territorial understanding of knowledge and work love the T-shaped-person idea. Academics particularly love it.

I personally find T-shaped people boring, and am personally a lousy T. By the norms of T-shaped people, I am a could-have-been T who betrayed the values and virtues of T-dom.

Fortunately, I don't navigate by T-shaped norms. I navigate by the belief that there is an entire universe of deep knowing and doing that cannot be accessed by T-shaped means

Here's an example. My buddy Kyle just released version 1.0 of a powerful React-based open-source website building tool called Gatsby, after a year of heavy effort.

One of the interesting things about watching the project evolve was how it was driven by Kyle's contrarian view that the messy explosion of Javascript frameworks and libraries is a good thing

It is also not surprising that you need a contrarian view of apparent messiness, and a willingness to ignore disciplinary maps and categories, to navigate and build on such rhizomatic knowledge

To do deep work in the world of Javascript, you can't afford to be a T-shaped person. You have to be what I call a semi-colon shaped person

The dot of the semi-colon represents the anchor community for your deep work. In Gatsby's case, the world of Javascript sprawling messily across industry and open-source worlds

The curvy tail is the rhizomatic structure you explore to do something deep. It will sprawl untidily across a map built out of T's. (rhizome)

The gap between the dot and the tail is what I call the Explorer's Chasm. To do deep work in a rhizomatic zone, you must have a "secret" separating you from your community

The chasm is crucial. It represents a sort of epistemic estrangement from the nearest socialized zone of knowledge. This is necessary for work that is not just deep, but has truly original elements

Paradoxically, because being semicolon-shaped means being less attached to a default social home locus, it requires you to be more agile, nomadic, alive, and active in relating to social context.

To do deep work in semicolon mode, you must be plugged in, despite being fundamentally alone on your path, continuously renegotiating the meaning of what you're doing with the social context

I suspect, for T-shaped people, exploration is at best an instrumental activity that furthers their social development. For them, belongingness trumps curiosity. That's why it can stay in its lane

But curiosity ungoverned by belongingness motives does not stay in fixed lanes, seek permission to stray, apologize for wandering, or express contrition for "moving fast and breaking things."

semicolon shaped people and their modes of knowing and doing reflect a primacy of curiosity over belongingness. A willingness to sacrifice social harmony and relationships to the exploratory urge

Most of the time, most people are (and should be), T-shaped. But in times of institutional decay, renewal, and churn, you should be asking yourself: should I perhaps be semicolon-shaped?

Because here's the thing, when things are being turned upside down, and up and down are churning, the only sense of "depth" available to you is one you generate internally