I came across this quote on the Fast Company blog today,

“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can’t see from the center.”

– Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

and I felt that it was a fitting summary of how I continue to feel about my life in the workforce. A few months after graduating I realized that I was coming home most days feeling frustrated. I knew that I wasn’t frustrated with my job so I gave it some thought. The explanation was a simple one: I was working at my margins.

I was tackling new problems every single day and having to learn new techniques to solve them. My frustration was that I was consistently right on my margin, right on the edge of not being able to keep up, yet I wasn’t aware of this.

After this realization, frustration turned to excitement. What an incredible thing. To always be a student. To always be learning. To always be pushing personal limits. It’s now a goal of mine to spend as much of my career as possible working at my margin.

This is another reason I’m doing this - to continue to push myself.

To continue to work at my margin.


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Working at the Margin (Why Am I Doing This? Part 2)

Posted on 12.12.05 to General. Subscribe to follow comments on this post. Add your thoughts or trackback from your own site.

Welcome to the conversation.

Hi, I'm Fraser and this is my personal site where I write about the things I'm interested in: start-up strategy, the web, music, and life.

My days are spent commercializing emerging technologies. Currently I'm helping to deliver the promise of semantic web to the consumer market at AdaptiveBlue. Previously I was at Trivaris, a Canadian seed stage investment firm.

I am a co-founder of Innovation Night, a community driven event supporting entrepreneurship in Canadian and US cities.

Here's what I'm doing right now:

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