The conventional advice about risk in business is to diversify — spread exposure across enough unrelated things that no single failure is catastrophic. There's truth in that, but having spent more than two decades genuinely working across fields that share almost nothing with each other, the more useful lesson hasn't been about spreading risk thin. It's been about something closer to the opposite: that real risk reduction comes from depth within each field, not from the mere fact of being in several of them.
Diversification without depth is its own kind of risk. Being present in four unrelated industries without genuinely understanding any of them well doesn't reduce exposure — it just multiplies the number of things you can get wrong, and adds the cost of not noticing early, because you're not close enough to any of them to recognise the early signs that something is shifting. The protective value of working across different fields only shows up once you've put in the time to actually understand each one on its own terms.
Curiosity is what makes depth bearable
Genuine depth in a narrow field is slow and, for long stretches, fairly unglamorous. The interesting strategic questions are rare; most of the work is procedural, repetitive, and easy to under-invest in if you're not actually curious about the subject for its own sake. This is, in practice, where curiosity stops being a personality trait and starts being a risk management tool. Curiosity is what makes someone keep paying attention to a regulatory filing or a supply chain detail long after the obvious strategic insight has already been extracted — and it's usually in that long tail of unglamorous attention that the early warning signs of real problems show up.
It's also, not coincidentally, the same instinct that makes travelling somewhere unfamiliar interesting rather than just logistically inconvenient, or that makes a long passage at sea worth doing rather than just enduring. The same willingness to sit with something until you actually understand it — a place, a culture, a weather system, a market — shows up whether the context is professional or not. It isn't really two different traits applied to two different parts of life. It's one trait, applied consistently.
Expertise compounds in a way that scale doesn't
The clearest advantage that's come from working this way over more than two decades isn't size — none of these fields have been approached with scale as the primary goal. It's that expertise, once genuinely built, tends to compound rather than depreciate. A piece of regulatory knowledge from a decade ago is often still relevant, sometimes more relevant, because the underlying complexity that made it valuable in the first place rarely simplifies over time; it usually grows. Scale, by contrast, has to be actively maintained and is vulnerable to a much wider range of disruptions.
None of this is a particularly novel insight, stated plainly. But it's a different thing to read it as advice and to arrive at it after two decades of watching it play out across fields with nothing else in common — which is, in the end, the only kind of conviction worth having about how to manage risk.