Picking a niche is cliché
Picking a niche is cliché.
As Alain de Botton says, “The problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones.”
The concept of the niche is simple: to own a small piece of the vast internet, you should identify your unique intersection, aka your niche.
The prompt is usually along the lines of: combine what you’re interested in, what you’re good at, and what makes money, and that’s who you should be on the internet.
Like BuzzFeed quizzes that reveal deep insights about your inner psyche, the simplicity of three circles telling you who you’re supposed to be on the internet is an easy sell.
(For what it’s worth I’m a beach girl!)
Believers (myself included) watched endless YouTube videos, read books and blog posts, enrolled in courses, and even copied the niches of others.
But this search for the creator’s niche is creating what I think is unnecessary frustration, confusion, and identity crises.
I want to explore why the niche Venn diagram, though well-intending, is a vague formula that leads to generic profiles and pigeon-holed creators.
What's superficial about the "niche"
Like de Botton said, the cliché idea is not false but rather superficial.
In the search for a creator’s identity, the intersectional approach is a great starting point, but the niche framework is superficial for 3 reasons:
1. The intersection is not personal enough
2. The intersection is not deep enough
3. The intersection is not humble enough
1. Getting personal: from topics to traits
We’ve got the cause and effect backwards when it comes to the niche Venn diagram.
The topics we are interested in aren’t the cause of who we are. They are the effects.
Take Gary Vaynerchuck and Naval Ravikant.
Both are at the intersection of technology, business, and investing. But you wouldn’t mistake one for the other.
One brings extreme excitement, the other sage-like calm.
One is all about the hustle, the other one channels Eastern philosophies.
One loves basketball, the other is inspired by science…
Gary Vee and Naval’s distinctiveness come from the intersection of their traits, informed by their personalities, values, philosophies, inspirations, experiences.
These traits influence the frequencies of their voice, the metaphors and examples they use, the fonts and colors they choose, and the indescribable feelings they evoke in you.
Because in the end, that’s how we remember someone - we notice and relate to human qualities.
The added benefit of being distinct with your traits is that you no longer have to restrict your creative journey to specific topic areas.
Intersectional Reframe:
The source of your creative identity is not expertise, but rather human experience.
2. Going deep: from superficial to depth
Identifying topics of interest isn’t without use. We should just change how we leverage them.
When we are trying to find a niche, the assumption is to sum up.
For example, I like Arsène Lupin the gentleman thief, the high school Detective Conan, and the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes.
To sum up, the obvious commonality is the genre - crime and mystery. Perhaps crime and mystery is a topic I should write about.
But what happens when I dig down instead?
A good trick I learned in law school: ask why again and again until you get to the "truth".
I like Lupin, Detective Conan, and Sherlock Holmes. Why?
Arsène Lupin: I like the way Lupin uses disguises to repeatedly reveal the fragility of our System 1 versus System 2 thinking and the many cognitive biases that work against us
Detective Conan: I like the way Conan poses sharp questions to uncover crucial yet seemingly harmless answers that shed light on human motivations
Sherlock Holmes: I like the way Holmes can flexibly step into someone else's shoes, see hints hiding in plain sight, identify red herrings, and flexibly rearrange facts and deduce relationships
Why am I curious about multiple identities, motivation, observation, communication, flexibility and counterintuitiveness?
Because deep down, I'm fascinated by how humans frame and solve problems - manifesting as the these elements above.
This deep fascination with humanistic problem solving has led me to diplomacy, law, management consulting, entrepreneurship, and the creator’s economy.
These fields might look loosely related, but to me there is a very clear underlying thread.
The specificity in the concept of a niche is crucial. But the key is not just specificity, but where you place the specificity.
The manifestation of my interests may look like a fascination with crime and mystery. But by being specific about the source of my interests, I uncovered my deep curiosity in problem solving.
Crime and mystery is not the cause, it’s the effect. If I look closely, my interest in law, diplomacy, entrepreneurship, languages, philosophies, music, design, art, neuroscience, psychology, and a whole array of other subject areas are also effects caused by the root of my curiosity in problem solving.
What's paradoxical is that, at this depth, the intersection is at the same time distinct and expansive. My unique take on problem solving is through the lens of multiple identities, context switching, human motivation, communication and counterintuitiveness. My audience is not restricted to those who like crime and mystery. Rather I’m speaking to anyone who cares about problem solving.
This is the paradox of specificity, the more specific we are, the more expansive we can be in the topics we can write about. Human curiosity is not bound by the arbitrary boundaries of topics. If we can dive beneath the surface, we’ll find the true drivers that unify our explorations.
3. Being humble: from originality to imitation
Imitation is not the opposite of originality, it’s the source of originality.
Because curation is a part of creation when we zoom in.
Pablo Picasso created cubism by remixing Cézanne’s play on perspectives, Henri Matisse’s alarming interpretation of Cézanne, Henri Rousseau’s honest storytelling, the stunning features of tribal art, the beauty of the human form from the ballet, and more.
William Shakespeare took Chaucer’s literary tools like the iambic pentameter and the use of dialogue to indicate action and infused them into borrowed plots like Romeo and Juliet from an Italian contemporary, Hamlet from a Scandinavian story, and created his iconic plays at the Globe.
The trick is in what you focus on when you imitate. If we focus on copying the entire piece of work, then yes, it lacks originality.
But if we can:
- Single out a quality or two that inspire you - a playful voice, a deliberate technique, a charming format, a provocative phrase
- Collect, curate and combine qualities from multiple sources
- Remix them with your intersection of traits and curiosities
You can see where your originality leads you.
Tastemakers create through curating the best of many worlds all at the time.
My favourite example is obsessively passionate Van Gogh.
Van Gogh initially established his artistic base with an obsession for Jean-François Millet’s muted style of peasant paintings. He even painted exact replicas at times to perfect his Millet-ness.
But when Van Gogh moved to Paris, the change in light, colours, and subjects that surrounded him was remixed into his art. He layered on a more expressive, airy, and vibrant style, evolving who he is and what he wanted to express.
Van Gogh then remixed his Parisian style with other influences such as Japanese woodblock paintings to further explore what it means to be original.
You are a tastemaker, and the intersection of what you decide to extract from your inspiration is original self-expression.
Like Van Gogh, this approach to originality gives you the space to evolve as your taste evolves.
At the same time, you do not lose your distinctness because what inspirations you curate, where you remix the specific qualities of your inspirations, and how you choose to articulate the combination of your inspirations is originally yours.
We’ve got it backwards.
The Venn diagram, similar to picking a university major in high school, prematurely asks us to set the direction of our creative lives before we even have the time to explore it.
Many of us pick a major following what has a promised "future", and/or what we think we’re interested in (without having much practical experience), and/or what we seem to be good at, indicated by our grades.
But once we begin our studies, how many of us change our minds about that major? And of those who stick with their major, how many of us work in the same field? And of those who work in the same field, how many stay in the same field and love it?
That’s how I picked International Relations. Then law. Then investment banking. Then management consulting. Then entrepreneurship. Then the creator economy…
I thought maybe I was too easily distracted. Or put nicely, multi-passionate.
Then a study on winding career paths done by Harvard’s Mind, Brain, and Education program director Todd Rose and computational neuroscientist Ogi Ogas revealed something surprising.
The researchers surveyed fulfilled and successful career men and women, expecting to find maybe one unusual career path for every five respondents. Instead, they found that virtually every person surveyed had an unusual path. And each of them thought they were the anomaly.
In other words, we assume our interests should stay static. But in reality, the only static thing is change.
We don’t stay the same, and our creative identity should reflect this fact, not ignore it.
Our identity is a product of time. So the compass to guide our creativity shouldn’t be limited to a snapshot of our interests at a specific moment in time, but rather something more fundamental, that evolves with time.
And that something fundamental is our traits that’s accumulated over time. It’s the source of our curiosity. And it’s the originality we can’t help but express.
So instead of reducing yourself to the tiny section of three overlapping circles now, how about exploring your creative solar system? Stop worrying about your niche and start building a personal monopoly rooted in intersectional thinking!