Hanging up the abacus

Over the past several months, I’ve developed a number of quiet prejudices about “ways of working” - prejudices I’ve only recently become fully aware of, along with their implications. I’m hardly early to this realization. Years of AI popularization have already produced an avalanche of commentary about how work will change. Still, knowing an idea exists and internalizing it are very different things.

Here’s an analogy that finally made things click for me:

Imagine you’re hiring an in-house accountant. A candidate comes highly recommended: excellent references, strong work history, reasonable compensation expectations. By every signal, they’re a perfect fit. As a final step, you give them an in-person skills assessment. They sit down confidently, open their bag, and pull out an abacus to begin calculating.

In that moment, they’ve effectively disqualified themselves. No laptop? No spreadsheets? No chance.

That single choice of tooling crystallized something for me about the professional world we’re rapidly entering:

Skills exist on a spectrum. At the extreme high end, exceptional talent can outperform less-skilled peers even with inferior tools. Put differently: I don’t care how advanced your running shoes are, Usain Bolt will outrun you in flip-flops. But those ultra-performers represent perhaps 0.01% of the workforce in any given discipline.

For everyone else - including solid, senior, above-average talent - outdated tools are a handicap. In a modern environment, they can reduce strong contributors to merely average ones.

This tension is something I feel acutely on a personal level. I spend much of my free time crafting - silversmithing, goldsmithing, clay sculpture, drawing. I’m intimately familiar with the mindset that resists new tools, that romanticizes tradition and process. For years, I avoided 3D printing jewelry, choosing instead to sculpt wax models by hand, even when it meant pouring dozens of additional hours into the work.

But there’s an important distinction: my goal in those moments was pleasure and process; not efficiency, not competitiveness.

Very few people are fortunate enough to operate in domains where the free market rewards depth of process for its own sake. For most of us, the market rewards outcomes. And staying competitive increasingly means identifying, adopting, and exploiting efficiency.

As we all try to find our footing in this shifting landscape, there’s one conclusion I feel reasonably confident in:

In a competitive economy, the last person anyone wants to be is the carpenter arriving at the job site with a screwdriver while everyone else has power drills, the executive handwriting time-sensitive letters while competitors send email, or the accountant calmly sliding an abacus across the desk.

Some tools are no longer quaint. They’re disqualifying.