Breakthroughs happen at intersections

Most expertise is organized in silos. We train people to go deeper and deeper into a single domain, and depth is valuable — but it is rarely where the surprising ideas live.

The ideas that have most shaped my work came from collisions: a concept from distributed systems applied to organizational design, a mental model from finance applied to machine learning infrastructure, a lesson from travel applied to product strategy.

This is why I deliberately read and work across domains. Breadth is not the enemy of depth — it is the raw material for a different kind of depth. When you understand two fields well enough, you start seeing the gaps in each that the other can fill.

My advice to anyone early in their career: pick a core discipline and go deep, but keep a second and third field in orbit. The intersection is where you become hard to replace.