Why finding a niche should NOT be your starting point
Everything we read online says to be successful online you need to find a niche. Has this been your starting point? Are you still looking?
Finding a niche can send you down a rabbit hole of stress and despair beating yourself up because you cannot find that one thing that gets you up in the morning and continues to do so morning after morning.
You do not have to settle for daily drudgery, going through the motions. The internet is rife with people telling us to start a drop shipping company, start a blog, become a copywriter… start something that you can nurture and grow. You will be transformed from a life of mediocrity into the life of your dreams. Meanwhile their sole purpose is to get you into their mailing list, so you spend money you do not have to learn the secrets, bypass hours of ‘learning by mistakes’ because they have discovered how to make $10,000 per month. It has worked, you have just contributed to their $10,000 this month.
The issue is you can spend months or years chasing that dream and not have the success they are promising because you do not have their experiences, their motivations, the thing that led them down their path to success. A better way is to follow your passion, find your IKIGAI, that thing that will make excited to get out of bed in the morning and will continue to inspire you day after day.
So how do you achieve this? It will come to out of the blue when you least expected it, as soon as you start looking. It may be a news article with a picture that captivates your attention, as the picture at the top of this post did for me. It may be a Facebook post, a YouTube video, or even an article here on Medium.
You will know that you have found your thing because it inspires you to spend the rest of the day and possibly through the night googling it, trying to find out more and more. The more you google the more you will know you have found your thing. The pieces of the puzzle start to fall into place without effort, and you cannot keep your mind off it, you just want to rip in and carry on.
The answer you are looking for comes to you if you are prepared to notice the little signs that appear when you start looking. You will then have the ideas that you need to start your blog, you will know your niche and the ideas will be popping up so fast you can barely keep up.
Don’t start with trying to find your niche. So here is the rundown of how it happened for me: I studied the Youtube Video “Think and Grow Rich” one evening, wrote pages of notes as I went. The key here was the first two questions…
1) What does success look like? — is it $10,000 a month income, is it a new house, is it enough money to pay the bills and put food on the table?
2) What am I prepared to give in return?
What success looks like for you is specific to you. When you ask these questions and give the answer your undivided attention, you start asking the next question — how do I achieve it? How do I break it down into small but very achievable steps that lead me towards my goal?
As you ask the questions the answers will start to appear, and if you notice it you will find the one thing that gets you so excited you cannot sit still. All the other things you had been considering such as “What do I write about in my blog?”, “What are each of the parts of my IKIGAI”, or “what is my purpose in life?” will become immediately clear and you are away.
Find your thing, embrace it with everything you have, take it out into the world and become great at it.
P.S. You do not have to be great at it, you just have to start.