“Unlike animals who thrive in a specific niche, like a lion in the Savannah, humans create jackets for the cold and fans for the heat. We’re tool builders and deep generalists.” ~Dan Koe

***

Hi all, Baz here, and Happy Thursday!

You know, for years, I taught students to niche down and become a big fish in a small pond.

It’s not that I got it wrong, it's just that I was a bit off target.

Here’s what I think hits the bullseye: 🎯

My interests include income security, personal improvement, and spiritual growth.

I'm blending them together into a single container on my website at www.BazMorris.com.

To illustrate this, I published the article below on Medium that talks about learning this lesson from a colleague who runs a community I think you'll enjoy:

***

Becoming Niche-less & Putting an End to Repetitive Pivoting in My Writing & Business

by Barry Baz Morris

​Evan Kelly, a writer who coined the phrase ‘atomic newsletter,’ to describe a minimalist daily email to readers, recently caught me off guard with his niche-less experiments.

He recently posited the following on NICHELESS, his Skool community, and I was astounded at how they resonated with my experience. He posted this checklist and I checked the boxes for all six options:

• You’re passionate about a lot of things — and those passions change. ✅
• You feel allergic to being boxed into one topic or identity. ✅
• You’ve started and stopped more projects than you can count. ✅
• You’ve spent too long trying to “narrow down” instead of owning your range. ✅
• You want to build something that lasts — something that evolves with you, not against you. ✅
• You want to create with clarity without compromising your complexity. ✅

Man, I'll tell you, for the first time in a long time I felt seen...and just like that…

I’d become niche-less, too

I instantly knew why I’d experienced so many stops and starts—pivoting so many times that my readers probably questioned my sanity.

I knew why I’d become frustrated with running three Substacks and a Medium publication, only to lose interest in all of them, and subsequently go silent.

If there's one overriding lesson this taught me, it's this...

I’m not wired for a niche

The problem, as Evan puts it, isn’t that I have too many interests:

And, so, with Evan’s help via his community, I’m building a wider container.

Here’s what I know about creative side:

So, what the hell does one do with that? Here’s what I’m doing:

• I’m blending instead of pivoting.
• I’m transitioning between interconnected pillars instead of creating separate newsletters.
• I’m synthesizing instead of mining.

When I was mining — drilling deeper into one aspect of a single topic — I felt limited and bored, which led me to not doing the work I wanted to be doing.

It isn’t easy to do what you’re not deeply interested in it.

However, discovering my niche-less mindset has, quite honestly, been liberating, and everything I’d deeply drawn to is now part of my brand and my work.

Does this make everything I taught students over the years obsolete?

Not at all.

I’d simply add that examining their interests, they will discover common threads that can be blended together might make their brand more appealing and more enjoyable. Pillar content needs to be related anyway, so everything I’ve ever taught about this still holds up.

What about you?

• Are you also a synthesizer and a creator who feels constrained by a narrow niche?
• Are you not doing the work because it’s become too boring?
• Are you confused about why you were so excited initially about your topic, only to become apathetic a few weeks later?

Perhaps you’re like me, the proverbial square peg trying to fit into a round hole. It’s uncomfortable at best, and a success killer at its worst.

You might be like me, Evan, Dan Koe, and millions of other creators who are becoming niche-less and instead building a unique brand that blends your authority topics into a Niche of One.

***