Genius Thrives in the Margins

How living between disciplines can spark innovation and propel your career

Steve Jobs was a walking paradox.

A tech geek who could debate circuit board design, yet possessed the soul of an artist obsessed with typefaces. A cold, calculating businessman who spoke of "putting a dent in the universe."¹ He occupied a unique space at the intersection of technology and humanity.

This ability to thrive in the "margins," the spaces between established fields, is what made Jobs a unicorn in Silicon Valley. His superpower wasn't mastery of either world. It was his capacity to live in the space between them.

The iPhone wasn't just a better phone or a smaller computer. It was an entirely new category born from the collision of communication, computing, and design. Jobs didn't just connect dots – he saw dots others didn't even know existed.

This skill of occupying margins isn't unique to Jobs, though. I've experienced it firsthand in my own career.

Since 2022, I've been building products for a $1.5 billion AI startup. When I started, I couldn't read a single line of code.

In most tech companies, this would be like showing up to perform surgery without a medical degree. Yet, someone saw value in my unconventional background. Why? Because I brought a different toolkit to the table.

My studies in economics and entrepreneurship, with hands-on experience in manufacturing, distribution, and sales, gave me a unique lens through which to view product development. I wasn't constrained by "the way things have always been done" in tech.

Instead, I could draw connections and insights from seemingly unrelated fields.

Adaptable minds outpace deep expertise

We often celebrate the specialists who've drilled deep into a single field.

When Marc Andreessen built Netscape, the first widely-used web browser, the internet was in its infancy. The knowledge required to create a browser was a fraction of what it is today.

Fast forward to the present, and building a new browser like Arc requires teams of highly specialized engineers working with complex codebases.

This phenomenon, dubbed "the burden of knowledge" by economist Benjamin Jones, refers to the ever-increasing amount of information you must absorb to innovate in a field. It's why specialists need years to master their craft, narrowing their focus to stay at the cutting edge.

Deep specialization can be too narrow.

As Charlie Munger said, "To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." Specialists often miss important connections that lie just outside their field. Connections that are often the spark of true innovation.

Take Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal. His expertise wasn't in finance, but in building security encryption and software for handheld devices.² This unlikely combination led to the launch of PayPal on the PalmPilot, long before mobile apps were commonplace.

Many of today's challenges require interdisciplinary solutions. Pure specialists, for all their depth, can struggle to provide these.

In a world changing at breakneck speed, the ability to occupy a margin is a more valuable skill than being a specialist.

Today's cutting-edge specialty could be tomorrow's outdated knowledge.

Intersections spark genius

In an effort to innovate, we often assume that specialization is the key to success. Real breakthroughs happen not in the depths, but in the spaces between disciplines.