The era of the Dash-Shaped Professional

Dash-Shaped Professionals. I harp so much on the T-shaped professional (I already talked about it in this note, in Portuguese) that sometimes I am even afraid of citing the term, so I don’t get stamped with that view. Actually it is quite obvious that, in the knowledge society, you have a certain breadth and end up making yourself necessary, especially if you are leading or working with many decision makers at the same time.

And then there is this discussion of the specialist professional versus the generalist. It is actually the discussion in that book Range, subtitled “Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World”. Everybody tries to land on a conclusion that is neither specialist nor generalist.

But the fact is that, at this speed of transformation of work, and certainly now in the last four years, with the pressure of artificial intelligence, we are pushed to be even more generalist. You need to know a little about everything, which forces you to have less time for depth.

Add to that these mechanisms that reduce our friction and our cognitive need, and it gets even harder to spend more time on your own specialty. So more and more we keep forcing ourselves toward the dash.

I find it interesting that this dash has the sense of being this horizontal bar: you generalize and have no depth in anything. And the dash also has an interesting connotation nowadays, when we mention em dashes, which I don’t know exactly how to translate into Portuguese, they would be travessões. Those separators that people usually use in English. In Portuguese we usually put it between commas, but a lot of American literature, journalists, use them to set off an aside. And artificial intelligence loves these asides, using this em dash format, the dashes, the em dashes.

So, I think we have reached the era of the Dash-Shaped Professional. The one who has to do everything fast, which is also a translation of dash. Everything generic, and you need to be a generalist in all things.

Speed, pressure and artificial intelligence generate these em dashes and this dash. This force of speed that doesn’t let us connect deeply with anything.

It leaves no room for boredom, no room for thinking. Nowadays, the only moment you get any depth of thought is when you are in the shower and don’t even have the tic of looking at your own mobile device.

🤖 nota do Faisca

Machado de Assis (the great 19th-century Brazilian novelist) used the aside between em dashes a lot; the pair of dashes was once everyday elegance in Portuguese.