I’ve heard it for years: you need to find your niche!
What’s the one audience you are going to focus on serving? What are people going to come to you for help that they can’t get from anyone else?
I can’t tell you how much hair I’ve yanked from my head in an attempt to answer these questions. But I’ve landed on this: me.
I am the niche.
I create things to serve myself. People come to me for help because they know I don’t think like anyone else in whatever area I happen to be working in. Is my thinking style shaped by jaded expertise? Or ignorance? Yes.
At the same time, I get a lot of stories from my wife, who works in a very corporate environment (from home, but still). From where I sit, there seems to be an issue of specialty vs. generalism.
In some corporate setups, entry level employees are giving sort of a “floating rotation” for their first few years – a few months in one department, a few focusing on another specialty, loads of shadowing. Like med students in a hospital as they cycle through the various verticals of medicine – seeing how they are different, seeing how they talk to each other – before ultimately settling on a specialty.
(As I write this, we’re in the middle of watching The Pitt. Fantastic. And gross.)
Float around to see the areas you could work in before settling into a place to develop a specialty in what you’re interested in. Over the next several years/ decades you will eventually become an expert in that thing – and specialized experts are high value and in demand! Right?
Consider the Einstellung (a German mashup of “Setting Attitude”) Effect. On one hand, the expert can come up with THE answer to a problem because they’ve seen it a thousand times before – which is good if you need an emergency diagnosis to save a life. The drawback is that experts tend to be so set in their ways that they have a rigid way of thinking – meaning creative approaches are not their strong suit. When you think you know everything, it’s difficult to take in a new idea.
Yet, creativity is the act of putting old ideas into a new paradigm, and vice versa.
Why not cycle between a state of specialist and generalist?
In some circles, this looks like a sabbatical – tired of teaching the same curriculum for a dozen semesters? Take one off to explore something else. Or Continuing education – what’s new in your field? What new in the world? Usually: lots and nothing at all.
Anway, jack of all trades. Always. Masters are usually enslaved by their thinking.