By Max Marchione

In Silicon Valley, you can challenge almost anything.

Except one thing:

Singular focus.

You can start a fusion company.

You can rebuild the financial system.

You can launch a new religion.

But if you try doing more than one thing at once—building and investing, creating and coding, writing and operating—you’ll hear the same quiet concern:

“Aren’t you doing too much?”

“Isn’t that a conflict?”

“Shouldn’t you just pick one?”

It’s a funny kind of hypocrisy.

We idolize polymaths in hindsight—Elon Musk, Oprah, Donald Glover, Sam Altman.

But we penalize them in real time.

The truth is:

The people who leave a lasting mark don’t specialize. They synergize.

They don’t work in sequence.

They build in layers—simultaneously—and everything they touch gets sharper.

The Myth of Sequential Greatness

We’ve been fed a neat narrative:

Do one thing. Master it.

Then, maybe, graduate to the next.

But that’s not how history—or reality—actually works.