How to Discover Your Niche
On How to Discover Your Niche, Reading Recommendations, One Year of Blogging and What I'm Doing
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HOW TO DISCOVER YOUR NICHE
In last week’s newsletter I discussed about Habits and Mastery. Mastery is about mastering a specific field or niche.
This week I discuss how to discover your niche and about my concept of Self-Niche.
[This is a summary version of the essay. Read the full essay here.]
A Niche refers to products, services, a segment of a market, or interests that appeal to a small, specialized section of the population.
Everyone goes through general education, followed by specialization in a field or niche. The niche was chosen because it offered opportunities to earn a living and has a relationship with something you enjoy doing.
Today there’s an emphasis on the young ones discovering their ‘calling’. To find out what they are passionate about and also earn a living from following their passion.
The question is: How to discover your niche?
Self is a Niche
You are unique in this world.
There is no copy of You. What you do and how you do it is a product of your unique journey in life.
The best niche is being one of a kind in this world - a monopoly.
Uniqueness is a crucial attribute of the best niche.
Because you are unique, You are a niche of ‘one’ in this world.
Self is a Natural Niche
You can never be anything but yourself.
Hence being your Self is the natural niche.
Let’s call it Self-Niche.
Self-Niche and Earning a Living
How to leverage Self-Niche to earn a living?
Self-niche is great, but it has to be valuable enough to earn a living, if not become rich.
You can create value for the society in one of the two ways:
Being the best in this world - Mozart, Shakespeare, Usain Bolt, Warren Buffett and so on. You get the gist.
By possessing a combination of talents that are unique in the world. A combination of skills creates a Talent Stack.
Talent Stacking
Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, wrote about this in his book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.
Scott Adams believes that he is neither the best artist nor the best writer nor a world-class business-person. He found extraordinary success by uniquely combining these three ordinary talents.
His formula for success:
“Every Skill You Acquire Doubles Your Odds of Success.”
To put it in an actual formula:
Good + Good > Excellent
One is better off being good at two complementary skills than being excellent at one.
The Value of Being Average in Many
Where’s the value in being average in many, and not great in one?
The value lies in finding one person who can seamlessly perform three activities, instead of hiring three different people, each possessing one skill, to do them.
Self-Niche is Discovered, Not Designed
Self-Niche may be a natural niche, but it needs to be discovered.
Self-niche emerges spontaneously from experimentation with things you enjoy doing, continuous learning, iterating and figuring out how they provide value to a niche in the society.
Is the Self-niche Big Enough?
With seven billion plus people on this planet, any sensible combination of skills is likely to provide value to a niche in the society.
Here’s a simple example of a niche that exists:
Hourly Wolves tweets a photo of wolves every hour.
Yes, wolves.
Guess how many follow this account?
Hourly Wolves has 47,000 followers on Twitter, up 20 percent in the last two months. Check it out if you love wolves.
How can you provide value when you have an audience the size of a decent sized town?
What’s your Self-Niche?
Write it down. Writing gives a concrete form to the vague vapourware in your mind.
To give you a view of my self-niche and the thought process, visit the full essay on the blog link below.
READING RECOMMENDATION
How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams
This is not an advice book as Scott says.
The book outlines Scott’s journey through a string of experiments, his failures and things learned that he has documented in his book for the benefit of readers.
A few interesting takeaways from this book.
On failures:
Failure always brings something valuable with it.
I don’t let it leave until I extract that value.
On viewing the world as math, not magic:
The best way to increase your odds of success - in a way that might look like luck to others - is to systematically become good, but not amazing, at the types of skills that work well together and are highly useful for just about any job.
Viewing the world as math (adding skills together) and not magic allows you to move from a strategy with low odds of success to something better.
A list of skills in which, Scott believes, every adult should gain working knowledge.
I wouldn’t expect you to become a master of any, but mastery isn’t necessary.
Luck has a good chance of finding you if you become merely good in most of these areas.
I'll make a case for each one, but here's the preview list.
Public speaking
Psychology
Business Writing
Accounting
Design (the basics)
Conversation
Overcoming Shyness
Second language
Golf
Proper grammar
Persuasion
Technology ( hobby level)
Proper voice technique
I’ll add a review and summary of the book next week.
Book Reviews and Summaries
You can read 40+ book reviews and book summaries on my blog Reading.Guru.
Three popular reviews and summaries:
Poems for the Soul by Sanober Khan – Yes. My review of the first full poetry book I have ever read is also the most popular one!
The Zurich Axioms by Max Gunther – A book that challenges conventional wisdom about investing, money and risk.
Freedom from the Known by J Krishnamurti – A book about freeing yourself from the past and the known.
ONE YEAR OF BLOGGING
Reading.Guru is one year old.
I started my blog in a moment of inspiration exactly a year ago on 11 Aug 2019 and celebrated it’s first birthday last week.
I have noted down a few Thoughts and Things Learned in the one year of blogging.
WHAT I’M DOING
This section is about what I’m doing now and a hint of what’s coming up next.
Now
Reading 📖
How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams
Thinking 🤔
Success demands a price.
If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it.
- Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big
Success is not permanent.
Success is never owned, it's only rented - and the rent is due every day.
- Rory Vaden
Nothing lasts forever.
Good news: nothing lasts forever.
Bad news: nothing lasts forever.
Success and failure are both temporary.
- Me :-)
Writing ✍️
I published two essays this week.
One Year of Blogging - Thoughts and things learned from one year of blogging.
How to Discover Your Niche - A full version of the article in this newsletter is now available on my blog.
Next
A hint of what’s coming up.
An essay on my Four Principles of Change. Read the outline here.
Book Review and Summary of How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams.
WordPress version upgrade. Without blowing up the website 😀.
Thank you for reading till the end.
A request - please hit the heart-shaped Like icon ❤️ at the top to let me know if you liked this edition. It would mean a lot to me.
Until next week,
- Satyajit
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