The Power of the Marginal

09 Oct 17

Rita Zerrizuela

great new things often come from the margins, and yet the people who discover them are looked down on by everyone, including themselves.
Insiders

One reason so many good ideas come from the margin is simply that there's so much of it. There have to be more outsiders than insiders, if insider means anything.
I think there's more going on than this. There are real disadvantages to being an insider, and in some kinds of work they can outweigh the advantages.
Audience
a few of the disadvantages of insider projects: the selection of the wrong kind of people, the excessive scope, the inability to take risks, the need to seem serious, the weight of expectations, the power of vested interests, the undiscerning audience, and perhaps most dangerous, the tendency of such work to become a duty rather than a pleasure.
the trouble with most tests for selecting elites is that there are two ways to pass them: to be good at what they try to measure, and to be good at hacking the test itself.
the first question to ask about a field is how honest its tests are, because this tells you what it means to be an outsider. This tells you how much to trust your instincts when you disagree with authorities, whether it's worth going through the usual channels to become one yourself, and perhaps whether you want to work in this field at all.
Tests are least hackable when there are consistent standards for quality, and the people running the test really care about its integrity.
One way to tell whether a field has consistent standards is the overlap between the leading practitioners and the people who teach the subject in universities. At one end of the scale you have fields like math and physics, where nearly all the teachers are among the best practitioners.
At the bottom are business, literature, and the visual arts, where there's almost no overlap between the teachers and the leading practitioners.
don't learn things from teachers who are bad at them.
How much you should worry about being an outsider depends on the quality of the insiders.
Anti-Tests

Where the method of selecting the elite is thoroughly corrupt, most of the good people will be outsiders.
If it's corrupt enough, a test becomes an anti-test, filtering out the people it should select by making them to do things only the wrong people would do. Popularity in high school seems to be such a test.
lord-of-the-flies schools and bureaucratic companies are both the default. There are probably a lot of people who go from one to the other and never realize the whole world doesn't work this way.
People at big companies don't realize the extent to which they live in an environment that is one large, ongoing test for the wrong qualities.
If you're an outsider, your best chances for beating insiders are obviously in fields where corrupt tests select a lame elite. But there's a catch: if the tests are corrupt, your victory won't be recognized, at least in your lifetime. You may feel you don't need that, but history suggests it's dangerous to work in fields with corrupt tests. You may beat the insiders, and yet not do as good work, on an absolute scale, as you would in a field that was more honest.
It can be worth participating in a corrupt contest, however, if it's followed by another that isn't corrupt. For example, it would be worth competing with a company that can spend more than you on marketing, as long as you can survive to the next round, when customers compare your actual products.
Risk

Even in a field with honest tests, there are still advantages to being an outsider. The most obvious is that outsiders have nothing to lose. They can do risky things, and if they fail, so what? Few will even notice.

The eminent, on the other hand, are weighed down by their eminence. Eminence is like a suit: it impresses the wrong people, and it constrains the wearer.
Being able to take risks is hugely valuable. Everyone values safety too much, both the obscure and the eminent. No one wants to look like a fool. But it's very useful to be able to. If most of your ideas aren't stupid, you're probably being too conservative.
Lord Acton said we should judge talent at its best and character at its worst.
Almost everyone makes the mistake of treating ideas as if they were indications of character rather than talent—as if having a stupid idea made you stupid.
Tradition is less of a guide, not just because things change faster, but because the space of possibilities is so large. The more complicated the world gets, the more valuable it is to be willing to look like a fool.
Delegation

And yet the more successful people become, the more heat they get if they screw up—or even seem to screw up. In this respect, as in many others, the eminent are prisoners of their own success.
If you ask eminent people what's wrong with their lives, the first thing they'll complain about is the lack of time.
The eminent feel like everyone wants to take a bite out of them. The problem is so widespread that people pretending to be eminent do it by pretending to be overstretched.
The lives of the eminent become scheduled, and that's not good for thinking. One of the great advantages of being an outsider is long, uninterrupted blocks of time.
Obscurity is like health food—unpleasant, perhaps, but good for you.
So if you want to beat those eminent enough to delegate, one way to do it is to take advantage of direct contact with the medium.
And in the process pay close attention to accidents and to new ideas you have on the fly. This technique can be generalized to any sort of work: if you're an outsider, don't be ruled by plans. Planning is often just a weakness forced on those who delegate.
Techniques for competing with delegation translate well into business, because delegation is endemic there. Instead of avoiding it as a drawback of senility, many companies embrace it as a sign of maturity.
it's one reason startups win. The needs of customers and the means of satisfying them are all in one head.
Focus

The very skill of insiders can be a weakness. Once someone is good at something, they tend to spend all their time doing that.
Much of the skill of experts is the ability to ignore false trails. But focus has drawbacks: you don't learn from other fields, and when a new approach arrives, you may be the last to notice.
Since you can't derive as much benefit (yet) from a narrow focus, you may as well cast a wider net and derive what benefit you can from similarities between fields. Just as you can compete with delegation by working on larger vertical slices, you can compete with specialization by working on larger horizontal slices
The second way to compete with focus is to see what focus overlooks. In particular, new things. So if you're not good at anything yet, consider working on something so new that no one else is either. It won't have any prestige yet, if no one is good at it, but you'll have it all to yourself.
In the computer world we get not new mediums but new platforms
As well as being more comfortable working on established lines, insiders generally have a vested interest in perpetuating them.
The Achilles heel of successful companies is their inability to cannibalize themselves. Many innovations consist of replacing something with a cheaper alternative, and companies just don't want to see a path whose immediate effect is to cut an existing source of revenue.
Instead of working on things the eminent have made prestigious, work on things that could steal that prestige.

The really juicy new approaches are not the ones insiders reject as impossible, but those they ignore as undignified.
Less
Outsiders are not merely free but compelled to make things that are cheap and lightweight. And both are good bets for growth: cheap things spread faster, and lightweight things evolve faster.

The eminent, on the other hand, are almost forced to work on a large scale.
Outsiders are free of all this. They can work on small things
small things can be done fast.
Working on small things is also a good way to learn. The most important kinds of learning happen one project at a time. ("Next time, I won't...") The faster you cycle through projects, the faster you'll evolve.
Responsibility

When you're old and eminent, what will you miss about being young and obscure? What people seem to miss most is the lack of responsibilities.

Responsibility is an occupational disease of eminence.
How does responsibility constrain you? The worst thing is that it allows you not to focus on real work. Just as the most dangerous forms of procrastination are those that seem like work, the danger of responsibilities is not just that they can consume a whole day, but that they can do it without setting off the kind of alarms you'd set off if you spent a whole day sitting on a park bench.
For insiders work turns into a duty, laden with responsibilities and expectations. It's never so pure as it was when they were young.

Work like a dog being taken for a walk, instead of an ox being yoked to the plow. That's what they miss.
Copying is a good way to learn, but copy the right things.
Half the distinguishing qualities of the eminent are actually disadvantages. Imitating these is not only a waste of time, but will make you seem a fool to your models, who are often well aware of it.
What are the genuine advantages of being an insider? The greatest is an audience.
If I'm right that the defining advantage of insiders is an audience, then we live in exciting times, because just in the last ten years the Internet has made audiences a lot more liquid.
Outsiders are still learning how to steal audiences.
Hacking

If I had to condense the power of the marginal into one sentence it would be: just try hacking something together.
the main value of that initial version is not the thing itself, but what it leads to. Insiders who daren't walk through the mud in their nice clothes will never make it to the solid ground on the other side.
most people have more ideas when they're happy.
If you're not sure what to do, make something.
Just make stuff and put it online.
Inappropriate

If you really want to score big, the place to focus is the margin of the margin: the territories only recently captured from the insiders. That's where you'll find the juiciest projects still undone, either because they seemed too risky, or simply because there were too few insiders to explore everything.
An essayist needs the resistance of an audience, just as an engraver needs the resistance of the plate.
You're on the right track when people complain that you're unqualified, or that you've done something inappropriate. If people are complaining, that means you're doing something rather than sitting around, which is the first step. And if they're driven to such empty forms of complaint, that means you've probably done something good.
If you make something and people complain that it doesn't work, that's a problem. But if the worst thing they can hit you with is your own status as an outsider, that implies that in every other respect you've succeeded. Pointing out that someone is unqualified is as desperate as resorting to racial slurs. It's just a legitimate sounding way of saying: we don't like your type around here.
"Inappropriate" is the null criticism. It's merely the adjective form of "I don't like it."

So that, I think, should be the highest goal for the marginal. Be inappropriate. When you hear people saying that, you're golden. And they, incidentally, are busted.
[2] As usual the popular image is several decades behind reality.
[3] In fact this would do fairly well as a definition of politics: what determines rank in the absence of objective tests.
[4] In high school you're led to believe your whole future depends on where you go to college, but it turns out only to buy you a couple years. By your mid-twenties the people worth impressing already judge you more by what you've done than where you went to school.
If you're expected to do more with less, then you're being starved, not eating virtuously.

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31 Aug 16

Jim Howes

27 Mar 16

Ryan Baldwin

koolaid

06 Dec 14

Jordan Goldman

A couple years ago my friend Trevor and I went to look at the Apple garage. As we stood there, he said that as a kid growing up in Saskatchewan he'd been amazed at the dedication Jobs and Wozniak must have had to work in a garage. "Those guys must...

expert opinions start-up tips

26 Sep 14

Jean-Monazi Chang

innovation inspirational business productivity subversion creativity

Now a startup operating out of a garage in Silicon Valley would feel part of an exalted tradition, like the poet in his garret, or the painter who can't afford to heat his studio and thus has to wear a beret indoors. But in 1976 it didn't seem so cool. The world hadn't yet realized that starting a computer company was in the same category as being a writer or a painter. It hadn't been for long. Only in the preceding couple years had the dramatic fall in the cost of hardware allowed outsiders to compete.
They already had something few real companies ever have: a fabulously well designed product. You'd think they'd have had more confidence. But I've talked to a lot of startup founders, and it's always this way. They've built something that's going to change the world, and they're worried about some nit like not having proper business cards.
That's the paradox I want to explore: great new things often come from the margins, and yet the people who discover them are looked down on by everyone, including themselves.

It's an old idea that new things come from the margins. I want to examine its internal structure. Why do great ideas come from the margins? What kind of ideas? And is there anything we can do to encourage the process?
This little thought experiment suggests a few of the disadvantages of insider projects: the selection of the wrong kind of people, the excessive scope, the inability to take risks, the need to seem serious, the weight of expectations, the power of vested interests, the undiscerning audience, and perhaps most dangerous, the tendency of such work to become a duty rather than a pleasure.
A world with outsiders and insiders implies some kind of test for distinguishing between them. And the trouble with most tests for selecting elites is that there are two ways to pass them: to be good at what they try to measure, and to be good at hacking the test itself.
One way to tell whether a field has consistent standards is the overlap between the leading practitioners and the people who teach the subject in universities. At one end of the scale you have fields like math and physics, where nearly all the teachers are among the best practitioners. In the middle are medicine, law, history, architecture, and computer science, where many are. At the bottom are business, literature, and the visual arts, where there's almost no overlap between the teachers and the leading practitioners. It's this end that gives rise to phrases like "those who can't do, teach."
Where the method of selecting the elite is thoroughly corrupt, most of the good people will be outsiders. In art, for example, the image of the poor, misunderstood genius is not just one possible image of a great artist: it's the standard image. I'm not saying it's correct, incidentally, but it is telling how well this image has stuck. You couldn't make a rap like that stick to math or medicine.
If it's corrupt enough, a test becomes an anti-test, filtering out the people it should select by making them to do things only the wrong people would do.
If you're an outsider, your best chances for beating insiders are obviously in fields where corrupt tests select a lame elite. But there's a catch: if the tests are corrupt, your victory won't be recognized, at least in your lifetime. You may feel you don't need that, but history suggests it's dangerous to work in fields with corrupt tests. You may beat the insiders, and yet not do as good work, on an absolute scale, as you would in a field that was more honest.
It can be worth participating in a corrupt contest, however, if it's followed by another that isn't corrupt. For example, it would be worth competing with a company that can spend more than you on marketing, as long as you can survive to the next round, when customers compare your actual products. Similarly, you shouldn't be discouraged by the comparatively corrupt test of college admissions, because it's followed immediately by less hackable tests.
Even in a field with honest tests, there are still advantages to being an outsider. The most obvious is that outsiders have nothing to lose. They can do risky things, and if they fail, so what? Few will even notice.

The eminent, on the other hand, are weighed down by their eminence. Eminence is like a suit: it impresses the wrong people, and it constrains the wearer.
And yet the more successful people become, the more heat they get if they screw up—or even seem to screw up. In this respect, as in many others, the eminent are prisoners of their own success. So the best way to understand the advantages of being an outsider may be to look at the disadvantages of being an insider.
The lives of the eminent become scheduled, and that's not good for thinking. One of the great advantages of being an outsider is long, uninterrupted blocks of time. That's what I remember about grad school: apparently endless supplies of time, which I spent worrying about, but not writing, my dissertation. Obscurity is like health food—unpleasant, perhaps, but good for you. Whereas fame tends to be like the alcohol produced by fermentation. When it reaches a certain concentration, it kills off the yeast that produced it.
Another way to find good problems to solve in one head is to focus on the grooves in the chocolate bar—the places where tasks are divided when they're split between several people. If you want to beat delegation, focus on a vertical slice: for example, be both writer and editor, or both design buildings and construct them.

One especially good groove to span is the one between tools and things made with them. For example, programming languages and applications are usually written by different people, and this is responsible for a lot of the worst flaws in programming languages. I think every language should be designed simultaneously with a large application written in it, the way C was with Unix.
For outsiders this translates into two ways to win. One is to work on a variety of things. Since you can't derive as much benefit (yet) from a narrow focus, you may as well cast a wider net and derive what benefit you can from similarities between fields. Just as you can compete with delegation by working on larger vertical slices, you can compete with specialization by working on larger horizontal slices—by both writing and illustrating your book, for example.
The second way to compete with focus is to see what focus overlooks. In particular, new things. So if you're not good at anything yet, consider working on something so new that no one else is either. It won't have any prestige yet, if no one is good at it, but you'll have it all to yourself.
In the computer world we get not new mediums but new platforms: the minicomputer, the microprocessor, the web-based application. At first they're always dismissed as being unsuitable for real work. And yet someone always decides to try anyway, and it turns out you can do more than anyone expected. So in the future when you hear people say of a new platform: yeah, it's popular and cheap, but not ready yet for real work, jump on it.

As well as being more comfortable working on established lines, insiders generally have a vested interest in perpetuating them. The professor who made his reputation by discovering some new idea is not likely to be the one to discover its replacement. This is particularly true with companies, who have not only skill and pride anchoring them to the status quo, but money as well. The Achilles heel of successful companies is their inability to cannibalize themselves. Many innovations consist of replacing something with a cheaper alternative, and companies just don't want to see a path whose immediate effect is to cut an existing source of revenue.
So if you're an outsider you should actively seek out contrarian projects. Instead of working on things the eminent have made prestigious, work on things that could steal that prestige.

The really juicy new approaches are not the ones insiders reject as impossible, but those they ignore as undignified. For example, after Wozniak designed the Apple II he offered it first to his employer, HP. They passed. One of the reasons was that, to save money, he'd designed the Apple II to use a TV as a monitor, and HP felt they couldn't produce anything so declasse.
Outsiders are not merely free but compelled to make things that are cheap and lightweight. And both are good bets for growth: cheap things spread faster, and lightweight things evolve faster.
The eminent, on the other hand, are almost forced to work on a large scale. Instead of garden sheds they must design huge art museums. One reason they work on big things is that they can: like our hypothetical novelist, they're flattered by such opportunities. They also know that big projects will by their sheer bulk impress the audience. A garden shed, however lovely, would be easy to ignore; a few might even snicker at it. You can't snicker at a giant museum, no matter how much you dislike it. And finally, there are all those people the eminent have working for them; they have to choose projects that can keep them all busy.
Outsiders are free of all this. They can work on small things, and there's something very pleasing about small things. Small things can be perfect; big ones always have something wrong with them. But there's a magic in small things that goes beyond such rational explanations. All kids know it. Small things have more personality.
A lot of outsiders make the mistake of doing the opposite; they admire the eminent so much that they copy even their flaws. Copying is a good way to learn, but copy the right things. When I was in college I imitated the pompous diction of famous professors. But this wasn't what made them eminent—it was more a flaw their eminence had allowed them to sink into. Imitating it was like pretending to have gout in order to seem rich.

Half the distinguishing qualities of the eminent are actually disadvantages. Imitating these is not only a waste of time, but will make you seem a fool to your models, who are often well aware of it.
If I had to condense the power of the marginal into one sentence it would be: just try hacking something together. That phrase draws in most threads I've mentioned here. Hacking something together means deciding what to do as you're doing it, not a subordinate executing the vision of his boss. It implies the result won't be pretty, because it will be made quickly out of inadequate materials. It may work, but it won't be the sort of thing the eminent would want to put their name on. Something hacked together means something that barely solves the problem, or maybe doesn't solve the problem at all, but another you discovered en route. But that's ok, because the main value of that initial version is not the thing itself, but what it leads to. Insiders who daren't walk through the mud in their nice clothes will never make it to the solid ground on the other side.
If I could go back and redo my twenties, that would be one thing I'd do more of: just try hacking things together. Like many people that age, I spent a lot of time worrying about what I should do. I also spent some time trying to build stuff. I should have spent less time worrying and more time building. If you're not sure what to do, make something.
If you really want to score big, the place to focus is the margin of the margin: the territories only recently captured from the insiders. That's where you'll find the juiciest projects still undone, either because they seemed too risky, or simply because there were too few insiders to explore everything.
This leads to my final suggestion: a technique for determining when you're on the right track. You're on the right track when people complain that you're unqualified, or that you've done something inappropriate. If people are complaining, that means you're doing something rather than sitting around, which is the first step. And if they're driven to such empty forms of complaint, that means you've probably done something good.
If you make something and people complain that it doesn't work, that's a problem. But if the worst thing they can hit you with is your own status as an outsider, that implies that in every other respect you've succeeded. Pointing out that someone is unqualified is as desperate as resorting to racial slurs. It's just a legitimate sounding way of saying: we don't like your type around here.

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15 Sep 14

takashi wu

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Tests
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Audience

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17 Apr 14

Tushar Deshpande

HackerNews

04 Dec 11

hadrien

So good!

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Lord Acton said we should judge talent at its best and character at its worst.
Is there a general rule for finding problems best solved in one head? Well, you can manufacture them by taking any project usually done by multiple people and trying to do it all yourself. Wozniak's work was a classic example: he did everything himself, hardware and software, and the result was miraculous. He claims not one bug was ever found in the Apple II, in either hardware or software.

09 Jun 11

09 Aug 08

Ed Griebel

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David Heller

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"One way to tell whether a field has consistent standards is the overlap between the leading practitioners and the people who teach the subject in universities."

"Lord Acton said we should judge talent at its best and character at its worst. "

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08 Jul 08

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"Work like a dog being taken for a walk, instead of an ox being yoked to the plow."

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georgiakharper

The big media companies shouldn't worry that people will post their copyrighted material on YouTube. They should worry that people will post their own stuff on YouTube, and audiences will watch that instead.

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a technique for determining when you're on the right track. You're on the right track when people complain that you're unqualified, or that you've done something inappropriate. If people are complaining, that means you're doing something rather than sitting around, which is the first step. And if they're driven to such empty forms of complaint, that means you've probably done something good.

03 Apr 08

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Brent Sordyl

I think that's one reason big companies are so often blindsided by startups. People at big companies don't realize the extent to which they live in an environment that is one large, ongoing test for the wrong qualities.

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Some of Silicon Valley's most famous companies began in garages: Hewlett-Packard in 1938, Apple in 1976, Google in 1998. In Apple's case the garage story is a bit of an urban legend. Woz says all they did there was assemble some computers, and that he did all the actual design of the Apple I and Apple II in his apartment or his cube at HP. [1] This was apparently too marginal even for Apple's PR people.
Even in a field with honest tests, there are still advantages to being an outsider. The most obvious is that outsiders have nothing to lose. They can do risky things, and if they fail, so what? Few will even notice.
The eminent, on the other hand, are weighed down by their eminence. Eminence is like a suit: it impresses the wrong people, and it constrains the wearer.
Outsiders should realize the advantage they have here. Being able to take risks is hugely valuable. Everyone values safety too much, both the obscure and the eminent. No one wants to look like a fool. But it's very useful to be able to.
Lord Acton said we should judge talent at its best and character at its worst.
Almost everyone makes the mistake of treating ideas as if they were indications of character rather than talent—as if having a stupid idea made you stupid.
The more complicated the world gets, the more valuable it is to be willing to look like a fool.
And in the process pay close attention to accidents and to new ideas you have on the fly.
If you want to beat delegation, focus on a vertical slice: for example, be both writer and editor, or both design buildings and construct them.
Focus

The very skill of insiders can be a weakness. Once someone is good at something, they tend to spend all their time doing that. This kind of focus is very valuable, actually. Much of the skill of experts is the ability to ignore false trails. But focus has drawbacks: you don't learn from other fields, and when a new approach arrives, you may be the last to notice.
The really juicy new approaches are not the ones insiders reject as impossible, but those they ignore as undignified.
Plus making them is more fun. You can do what you want; you don't have to satisfy committees. And perhaps most important, small things can be done fast. The prospect of seeing the finished project hangs in the air like the smell of dinner cooking. If you work fast, maybe you could have it done tonight.
Working on small things is also a good way to learn. The most important kinds of learning happen one project at a time. ("Next time, I won't...") The faster you cycle through projects, the faster you'll evolve.
If I'm right that the defining advantage of insiders is an audience, then we live in exciting times, because just in the last ten years the Internet has made audiences a lot more liquid.
The big media companies shouldn't worry that people will post their copyrighted material on YouTube. They should worry that people will post their own stuff on YouTube, and audiences will watch that instead.
Hacking

If I had to condense the power of the marginal into one sentence it would be: just try hacking something together. That phrase draws in most threads I've mentioned here. Hacking something together means deciding what to do as you're doing it, not a subordinate executing the vision of his boss. It implies the result won't be pretty, because it will be made quickly out of inadequate materials. It may work, but it won't be the sort of thing the eminent would want to put their name on. Something hacked together means something that barely solves the problem, or maybe doesn't solve the problem at all, but another you discovered en route. But that's ok, because the main value of that initial version is not the thing itself, but what it leads to.
Insiders who daren't walk through the mud in their nice clothes will never make it to the solid ground on the other side.
There is try. It implies there's no punishment if you fail. You're driven by curiosity instead of duty. That means the wind of procrastination will be in your favor: instead of avoiding this work, this will be what you do as a way of avoiding other work. And when you do it, you'll be in a better mood. The more the work depends on imagination, the more that matters, because most people have more ideas when they're happy.
In life, as in books, action is underrated.
If you're not sure what to do, make something.
Inappropriate

If you really want to score big, the place to focus is the margin of the margin: the territories only recently captured from the insiders. That's where you'll find the juiciest projects still undone, either because they seemed too risky, or simply because there were too few insiders to explore everything.
This leads to my final suggestion: a technique for determining when you're on the right track. You're on the right track when people complain that you're unqualified, or that you've done something inappropriate. If people are complaining, that means you're doing something rather than sitting around, which is the first step.
If you make something and people complain that it doesn't work, that's a problem. But if the worst thing they can hit you with is your own status as an outsider, that implies that in every other respect you've succeeded.

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26 Jun 07

jmrodri

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24 Jun 07

Carlos Pereira

temp

09 Jun 07

Oscar Hernandez

path technology

One way to tell whether a field has consistent standards is the overlap between the leading practitioners and the people who teach the subject in universities.
Incidentally, this scale might be helpful in deciding what to study in college. When I was in college the rule seemed to be that you should study whatever you were most interested in. But in retrospect you're probably better off studying something moderately interesting with someone who's good at it than something very interesting with someone who isn't.
just try hacking something together.
If I could go back and redo my twenties, that would be one thing I'd do more of: just try hacking things together. Like many people that age, I spent a lot of time worrying about what I should do. I also spent some time trying to build stuff. I should have spent less time worrying and more time building. If you're not sure what to do, make something.
"Inappropriate" is the null criticism. It's merely the adjective form of "I don't like it."
So that, I think, should be the highest goal for the marginal. Be inappropriate.

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07 Jun 07

Rick L

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"Why do great ideas come from the margins? What kind of ideas? And is there anything we can do to encourage the process?"

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Great essay.

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essay paulgraham marginal venturecapital VC creativity

27 Jun 06

m cassimatis

rw:V.rich PaulGraham on innovative outsiders (loooong via EdV) ///You're on the right track when people complain that you're unqualified, or that you've done something inappropriate. that means you're doing something rather than

z0606 item

Robert Feldt

Why does great ideas come from the marginal?

Creativity Innovation

justin_knoll

Paul Graham turns in another excellent essay.

paulgraham less marginal startup fromdelicious

business.startups

Ratcatcher

"One of the great advantages of being an outsider is long, uninterrupted blocks of time." mentions Chihuly

theory readme article art for:anvalisok

ken .

Long essay on why gummint can't write novels (or anything, without monopoly power?); creativity from the edge (margins->boundary of "firm" - apple in a garage, outside, not inside the firm); look at teachers for a fields professionalism; audience learning

action apple blogging business change competition creativity economics edge education entrepreneurship innovation

S Jones

Great essay on the outsider ethic or why all the action is at the social/business/technological perimeter.

paul.graham marginal fringe technology business entrepreneur _delicious

grahamlauren

paulgraham innovation creativity startup Delicious

kevin kirwin

ED_Opportunity

One way to tell whether a field has consistent standards is the overlap between the leading practitioners and the people who teach the subject in universities. At one end of the scale you have fields like math and physics, where nearly all the teachers are among the best practitioners. In the middle are medicine, law, history, architecture, and computer science, where many are. At the bottom are business, literature, and the visual arts, where there's almost no overlap between the teachers and the leading practitioners. It's this end that gives rise to phrases like "those who can't do, teach." Incidentally, this scale might be helpful in deciding what to study in college. When I was in college the rule seemed to be that you should study whatever you were most interested in. But in retrospect you're probably better off studying something moderately interesting with someone who's good at it than something very interesting with someone who isn't. You often hear people say that you shouldn't major in business in college, but this is actually an instance of a more general rule: don't learn things from teachers who are bad at them. How much you should worry about being an outsider depends on the quality of the insiders. If you're an amateur mathematician and think you've solved a famous open problem, better go back and check. When I was in grad school, a friend in the math department had the job of replying to people who sent in proofs of Fermat's last theorem and so on, and it did not seem as if he saw it as a valuable source of tips-- more like manning a mental health hotline. Whereas if the stuff you're writing seems different from what English professors are interested in, that's not necessarily a problem.

kevin kirwin

ED_Opportunity

One way to tell whether a field has consistent standards is the overlap between the leading practitioners and the people who teach the subject in universities. At one end of the scale you have fields like math and physics, where nearly all the teachers are among the best practitioners. In the middle are medicine, law, history, architecture, and computer science, where many are. At the bottom are business, literature, and the visual arts, where there's almost no overlap between the teachers and the leading practitioners. It's this end that gives rise to phrases like "those who can't do, teach." Incidentally, this scale might be helpful in deciding what to study in college. When I was in college the rule seemed to be that you should study whatever you were most interested in. But in retrospect you're probably better off studying something moderately interesting with someone who's good at it than something very interesting with someone who isn't. You often hear people say that you shouldn't major in business in college, but this is actually an instance of a more general rule: don't learn things from teachers who are bad at them. How much you should worry about being an outsider depends on the quality of the insiders. If you're an amateur mathematician and think you've solved a famous open problem, better go back and check. When I was in grad school, a friend in the math department had the job of replying to people who sent in proofs of Fermat's last theorem and so on, and it did not seem as if he saw it as a valuable source of tips-- more like manning a mental health hotline. Whereas if the stuff you're writing seems different from what English professors are interested in, that's not necessarily a problem.

26 Jun 06

Ian Delaney

citizen collaboration community business innovation essays toread startup

Alex Halavais

The best stuff comes from the margins

innovation learning society social_networks power technology creativity

Sean Winstead

$MINDSET insider outsider focus $IDEAS intersection emminence business innovation ideas

Andy Brudtkuhl

A couple years ago my friend Trevor and I went to look at the Apple garage. As we stood there, he said that as a kid growing up in Saskatchewan he'd been amazed at the dedication Jobs and Wozniak must have had to work in a garage. "Those guys must have be

business essays article

Andrew Pascoe

28 Dec 04

Markus Amalthea Magnuson

writings

The Power of the Marginal - The Diigo Meta page

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