Why is it that the people who change entire industries are so often the ones who know the least about them?

There’s a bunch of examples:

Two bicycle mechanics without high school diplomas achieved what academics and engineers couldn’t—the Wright brothers flew first.
A guy who’d never driven a taxi built a company that now completes 11 billion trips a year. Travis Kalanick called it Uber.
Two designers who couldn’t afford rent started renting air mattresses. Airbnb now has 8 million listings and over 2 billion guest arrivals.
Two brothers from rural Ireland, neither with Wall Street experience, built Stripe—now processing over a trillion dollars annually.
A math teacher who was late returning a VHS tape disrupted Hollywood. Netflix now has 300 million subscribers and $40 billion in revenue.
A software engineer with zero aerospace experience built reusable rockets that NASA couldn’t. SpaceX is now valued in the hundreds of billions.

Ideas are so fragile. They’re easily knocked away by anybody. That’s why experts are dangerous. - James Dyson

Is there something about being an expert that can be harmful?

Experts get stuck

Long careers come with baggage. Every failed attempt, every piece of advice, every “we tried that already”. It all accumulates into a mental filter that pre-rejects ideas before they’re fully explored.

The expert marks a path as impossible after one bad attempt. The beginner, too naive to know better, walks it anyway, and sometimes finds it leads somewhere new.

Beginners can accidentally get it right

Jason Cohen puts it well:

The worst is when you’re an “expert” because then you’re even less likely to challenge your assumptions. - Jason Cohen

There are many advantages for being a beginner. One I read often from founders is that they were: “too naive to know how hard it would be”. Beginners underestimate difficulty and start down paths that experts would know not to try. They ask “dumb” questions that tear through fake constraints. They do things that were “not supposed” to be done that way.

Maybe the reason outsiders win isn’t that expertise is so bad. It’s that we should question everything.

So the next time someone tells you that you don’t have the experience to try something, remember: that might be exactly why you should.