Habits create the foundation for Mastery. Mastery is about mastering a specific field or niche.
This essay is about how to discover your niche and about my concept of Self-Niche.
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 – for example, Accounting, Software Engineering, Aerospace Engineering and so on.
The niche also 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 Becomes a Natural Niche – Self-Niche
You can never be anything but yourself.
Hence being your Self is the natural niche.
Let’s call it Self-Niche.
With self-niches:
- You are playing to your strengths.
- It is ‘play’ for you because it is who you are. It is work for others who may try to emulate you.
- You are authentic because your just being yourself.
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.
We earn a living by offering something of value to society.
When we provide value to the society, we are rewarded with money. It may be called a salary, interest, dividend or profit, but it is a reward for doing something of value to the society.
You can create value for the society in one of the two ways:
1. Being the best in this world – Mozart, Shakespeare, Usain Bolt, Warren Buffett and so on. You get the gist. Be the best in the world.
If you have one world-class talent, skip the rest of the essay.
Others, not so world-class like me, read on.
2. 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.
One doesn’t have to spend energy to be the best in the world. You just need to discover a relatively rare combination of complementary skills that deliver value to a niche.
These complementary skills in your talent stack become your self-niche.
The Value of Being Average in Many Things
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. The latter approach of getting three people comes with the overhead of having a fourth person to manage communication and co-ordination between three people.
What used to take four people, can now be done by one. That’s an amazing business case.
Of course, society has to value your unique combination of skills. Or you have to create something of value with your unique combination of skills.
Scott Adams created Dilbert using the three complementary skills (writing, drawing, business) in his talent stack. This made him unique enough to have nearly 150 million daily readers and an estimated personal net worth of $75 million.
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.
Dilbert comics took off when people wanted to read a comic strip set in the work place. Any one who’s read Dilbert knows how well it connects to people in corporate jobs.
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?
Following come to my mind, but the list can be quite long.
- Merchandising – Calendars, mugs, T-shirts, posters with wolves.
- Wolf watching expeditions and camping.
- Travel blog to find out the wolf hosting sites near your place and put ads on it.
What’s your Self-Niche?
Write it down. Writing gives a concrete form to the vague vapourware in your mind.
Here’s mine to give you a view of the thought process.
- Reading – It is what I do when I am not doing anything else (to live or to earn a living). Reading is ‘play’ for me.
- Finance & Accounting – Developed through education and apprenticeship to be a Chartered Accountant. I work in a field where understanding of Finance and Accounting helps. It also helps me manage my finances and do my taxes.
- Technology – I followed my passion that developed into a career. I learned Technology on the job (got paid to learn, in fact) because I was valued for the Finance and Accounting skills.
I am expanding my talent-stack by working on my writing skills and blogging.
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