There’s this idea that if we want to experience more financial abundance, we must identify and rewire our limiting beliefs about money, such as “money doesn’t grow on trees” or “money is the root of all evil.” But the people I know who have lots of money usually didn’t bother to fuss over their beliefs. In fact, current brain research tells us that dwelling on limiting beliefs can be self-defeating since you’re still reinforcing the same neural patterns by thinking about them, thereby making them stronger. A more effective approach is to largely ignore your so-called limiting beliefs. Put your focus on what you desire first and foremost. The tricky part is figuring out what you actually desire. I found that the best approach for me, financially speaking, is to follow my path with a heart and to admit that money just isn’t that important to me in the grand scheme of things. So I actually seek to minimize the role of money in my life, making it mostly irrelevant. I create enough financial abundance that I don’t have to devote much mental bandwidth to fussing over money. Money is there when I need it; otherwise I can largely ignore it. This frees up my attention to express my creativity, to explore relationships with people, to travel, to read a lot, and to generally enjoy and experience the aspects of life that matter to me so much more than money ever will. When I tried to center my life around money, it didn’t make me happy. I found it pretty stressful actually. It set me up for a competitive relationship with others. And I wasn’t very good at making money for the sake of money anyway. I didn’t find myself particularly motivated to do the things that would make me more money. I would procrastinate on seemingly profitable work and spend time learning about personal growth instead, which for much of my life was just a side hobby. Eventually I saw the folly in investing so much energy into trying to make more money, especially when I wasn’t doing a very good job of it anyway. I realized that I don’t actually want to fuss or stress over money in my life. I don’t really want to make a lot of money. That isn’t a true desire for me. A more genuine desire is that I’d like to live without giving much attention to money. I’d like to live as if everything I desire is free. Growing up, I was inspired by the characters in the universe of Star Trek: The Next Generation. They didn’t seem to need money. Technically they did have money in their universe, but money was so unimportant that hardly anyone talked about it — except for one race that everyone made fun of. The people in that universe worked because they wanted to work, not because they got paid. Money was irrelevant because they lived in a universe of abundance. They had unlimited food, cozy quarters, quality healthcare, and speedy transportation. Having all their needs met gave them the freedom to focus on other parts of their lives: hobbies like music or painting, recreation, intimate relationships, reading, exploration, and more. They lived in the ultimate personal growth playground. I was inspired by that idea and asked myself how close I could get to it in the real world. Obviously this reality isn’t the same idealized fictional universe, but I could at least get closer to it if I tried. I realized that one step was to earn a certain threshold level of income in such a way that it wouldn’t require me to do a lot of grunt work to maintain it, and then all my expenses would be covered. That’s what got me interested in passive income. I’ve been experiencing that reality for many years now, and honestly… I love it. In order to play the game of life this way, I made decisions that many people would consider foolish. That’s because their priority is to make more money. My priority is to have a life. I’m not interested in getting rich or retiring. I’m already doing what I’d do if I were retired. So I deliberately pass up many opportunities to earn more money, so I can give less attention to money and more attention to personal growth, relationships, and more. I’m very pleased with this trade-off. I don’t want to waste my life fussing over money. I did that during much of my 20s, and I think it was a mistake to live that way. What may surprise you is that I learned to live this way even when I was broke. The key is how you focus your mind. To really enjoy life, focus your mind on what you love most, and bring that into your life now — not later, not when you have more money. Whatever you think money will add to your life, you’re probably wrong about that. Add those elements to your life now. So if you think money will allow you to travel more, start traveling now, even if you’re doing a lot of couchsurfing. Realize that you already have the means to do what you tell yourself you’re going to do when you have the money. You’ve just been programmed by social conditioning to think you need more money, but you don’t. And besides, you aren’t really going to be more motivated to earn extra money if you aren’t already following your path with a heart.
Take time to experience the simple pleasures of life. Put more attention on what you can enjoy and experience right now. That doesn’t actually require money. You can enjoy a long walk for free. Long walks are still one of my favorite pleasures. When I couldn’t afford to buy books, I would go to the library and check out five or ten personal development books and audio programs and go through them. I very much enjoyed doing that, and it was free. I still do this today, typically averaging about one audiobook per week. Today I can buy the best organic produce. I don’t have to look at prices when I shop. I like to shop as if everything were free. Whatever the bill is, I know I have plenty of money to cover it. When I couldn’t afford the best food, I bought the best that I could afford and learned to appreciate it. I tried different foods. I learned to cook. I expressed my desire to have growth experiences through whatever level of abundance I could muster. That approach was very motivating. It gave me a reason to actually earn some money. My reason for earning money was to help express my desired life path — a path centered around personal growth, exploration, and relationships. The real shift happened when I stopped using a lack of money as an excuse for not pursuing that path. I released the fear of not having enough. I started pursuing this path when I was broke. The money came later. In my experience, needing money has usually pushed it away. When I don’t adopt a needy relationship to money, I seem to attract plenty of it. It flows to me quite naturally as a result of following my path with a heart. When I’m on this path, I’m feeling good about my life, my self development, my connections to people, and my contribution to the world. That state of being is very attractive. It attracts people, opportunities, business deals, and more. And that state of being doesn’t depend on having any particular level of income. What if I want to increase my income? Trying to increase it directly seldom works. What works for me is to expand my path with a heart first. Internally I must open my heart to greater challenges or new levels of experience. If those experiences require more money, then the money will flow into my life — but only when I take the first step and get moving. Quite often when it seems like money is a block to having certain experiences, that’s a false belief. We block ourselves because we aren’t ready. We’ve turned our backs on our light. In truth we are very powerful and creative beings, capable of summoning wonderful experiences into our lives when we’re finally ready to embrace them — and all their rippling consequences. I used to think that traveling overseas was a really big deal. I turned it into this behemoth of complexity. I definitely used a lack of money as a reason for not traveling more. I also used the excuse of being in a relationship with a woman who didn’t like to travel. But once I realized that those limitations were just excuses and that of course I was a powerful enough being to summon the experience of travel into my life, I simply made it happen. It felt like there was a push to get moving initially, but afterwards it felt more like allowing than pushing. Once I started traveling more, I began getting a lot more free travel invites. As I shed the belief that I needed money to travel, I found myself being able to enjoy amazing trips while spending very little money. For instance, people would invite me to speak at their events, and they’d pay for my travel expenses and provide a place to stay. I recently received an invite for my fourth free trip to Europe within the past two years, to speak at the Lifestyle Design Convention in Zurich in January 2015. I haven’t been to Switzerland yet, so I’m really looking forward to it. But of course this wouldn’t be happening if I wasn’t following my path with a heart. Part of that path involved facing and overcoming fears. I used to really dislike public speaking. Now I love it! It’s such a beautiful way to share a positive message and connect with people. I’ll probably be getting speaking invitations with free travel opportunities for the rest of my life. I love speaking, I love traveling, and I love meeting new people, so this adds a lot of happiness to my life. This unfolded very gracefully by following my path with a heart. I didn’t have to push myself to do work I disliked to earn more money just so I could travel. I made travel a part of my life first, to the extent that I could afford it, and then it expanded, including the expansion of opportunities to fuel it. You may be assuming that money is the ultimate fuel, the ultimate enabler, the ultimate resource in life. If that were true, then people with lots of money should be so much happier, shouldn’t they? But the data shows that once you get passed about $75-80K per year in income, happiness doesn’t increase with additional income and often decreases. I have many wealthy friends who earn 10 to 100 times as much as I do. Most of them, however, actually seem less happy than I am. Some of them have told me they’re jealous of my lifestyle. They have empires to manage. They travel 150-200 days per year because they believe they have to. Otherwise they wouldn’t make as much money, and they might have to start laying people off. They often seem worried about potential threats to their revenue streams. Some of them are disturbed by the fact that I’ve uncopyrighted most of my work since they believe that intellectual property is their most valuable asset. But what does their income matter if they aren’t as happy as they could be, if they’re experiencing chronically higher stress levels, if they spend a lot of time worrying, if they wrap their self-esteem into their achievements (which sets them up for an inevitable fall)? I think that especially in the U.S., we undervalue what actually makes us happy in life. We push ourselves to earn more, but why? If the path to get to that next level of income isn’t fulfilling, and if the money isn’t likely to fulfill you either, then why expend so much energy on an unfulfilling path? Why not put happiness and fulfillment first in our lives — and then see what it does to our incomes? The approach that worked for me was to surrender the socially conditioned path. I gave up the path that said I have to earn lots of money first, and then I can do whatever I want and be happy. After trying that for many years, I found it foolish and unfulfilling. I actually resigned myself to being broke, figuring it would be worth it to be perpetually broke if I could at least spend a lot of time doing what I found fulfilling and enjoyable. But much to my surprise and delight, that path with a heart turn out to also be the path of abundance. 🙂
As the Athletic Director and head coach of the Varsity Soccer team at Ryerson University, Dr. Joseph is often asked what skills he is searching for as a recruiter: is it speed? Strength? Agility? In Dr. Joseph's TEDx Talk, he explores self confidence and how it is not just the most important skill in athletics, but in our lives.
"I am the captain of my ship and the master of my fate."
You may have heard this quote from German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer:
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Here’s a variation on this idea that we can use for personal growth transitions:
All growth passes through three stages. First, you’ll be ridiculed. Second, your efforts will meet with serious opposition. Third, you’ll be accepted as the new person you’ve become.
Have you seen this pattern show up in your life? I’ve run through it many times. Lots of readers have run this pattern. It happens with career transitions, relationships transitions, lifestyle changes, health improvements, and more. Schopenhauer was a pessimist. In fact, his worldview is called philosophical pessimism. If we apply Schopenhauer’s model to personal growth, aren’t we being a little pessimistic then? Pessimism isn’t truth. Pessimism is just one of many lenses we can use, and if we go into a growth experience with a pessimistic lens, aren’t we more likely to create a journey that looks like Schopenhauer’s stages? Are these three stages really necessary? Is the ridicule necessary? Is the violent opposition necessary? Do we really have to go through those first two stages to get to the third stage? Can’t we just skip to the end?
Seduced by Schopenhauer’s Script
Blogging about my personal growth journey since 2004 has given me a lot of feedback. For many years I basically ran Schopenhauer’s script. It was there from day one. What! You’re quitting the computer gaming industry? What the heck is blogging? You’ll never make any money doing that! After many years of such transitions, the script became all too predictable, and because of its predictability, I got faster at running it. Instead of taking weeks or months to play out, I’d be at stage three within days. Eventually I’d get there within 1-2 days. The criticism and resistance would blow up and then burn out within 24-48 hours. It was Schopenhauer’s script running on Internet time. Exploring subjective reality gave me a different perspective on this model as well. Were my own expectations creating these stages? If I changed my thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, would it be possible to skip ahead to stage three? I had to admit that I was indeed expecting opposition when I embarked upon some transitions. I’d prepare myself by raising my psychological shields. I’d pre-load my personal Schopenhauer script. And my expectations would largely come true. For many years I thought I benefitted from strong personal shielding. I made decisions carefully, weathered the criticism, and plowed ahead. The stormy parts didn’t phase me. I was comfortable with ridicule and opposition. I even gave myself extra practice by deliberately inviting critical feedback, such as when I made this April Fool’s post inviting people to apply to become my slaves, or this one announcing a fake D/s workshop. The criticism came flying in as expected. Some people even launched new websites specifically devoted to criticizing me, such as StevePavlinaIsTheDevil.com (that one eventually went offline). To me this was just a form of resistance training. The more criticism came through, the easier it was to handle it. It wasn’t going to phase me. Did I really want to keep running this pattern for the rest of my life though? Was there any more growth to be squeezed out from stronger shielding? For many years I figured it was indeed necessary and that I should just accept it as normal… at least normal for me. I’m a public figure. I write about many controversial topics on the Internet. I have some pretty strong opinions. Of course the criticism will keep happening. There’s no way around that. As the pattern sped up, however, this mindset began looking increasingly ridiculous to me. I wondered to what extent I was creating it through my own expectations. These rapid burns poked holes in my beliefs. I didn’t understand why the criticism would surge and then die so quickly.
Challenging the Script
In 2011 I did a 30-day trial of learning music composition. No one criticized me for that, and that probably doesn’t surprise you. It didn’t surprise me either. But I wondered… Was there a lack of criticism because learning music wasn’t objectionable to my readers? Or was there a lack of criticism because I didn’t expect any criticism for such a trial? That led to me to ask:
What if I stopped expecting resistance in areas where I’d previously expected it? Would the criticism still happen?
And that spawned more questions:
Were people criticizing me because they objectively didn’t like my ideas? Or were they criticizing me because I was broadcasting incongruence, defensiveness, or the expectation of criticism?
So I began to experiment. I started paying attention to my attitude, energy, and expectations as I made new decisions. If I felt defensive in advance, I began working through those feelings privately. I imagined the public criticism that would come, but instead of inviting it, I pre-processed it within myself. I worked on getting to a place of peace with my decisions first. I didn’t do this with every decision, but when I did apply this, it worked. I could write congruently about topics that previously would have invited plenty of critical feedback, and I wouldn’t receive a single negative piece of feedback. I want to say that this surprised me, but oddly it didn’t surprise me. Somehow it made perfect sense to me. When I was able to fully accept my decisions, I stopped broadcasting defensiveness, which stopped attracting criticism. Perhaps no one wants to bother criticizing someone whose mind is already at peace, at least not to that person directly. I realized that people can smell incongruence a mile away, and it’s that incongruence that riles them up and makes them want to set me straight. Otherwise they don’t bother. They might still criticize an idea on their own for whatever reason, but they wouldn’t send such feedback to me directly. The very presence of armor and shielding makes people want to hack at it with a sword. They really can’t resist. But when there’s no armor and shielding, people don’t even think to grab a sword and take a swing at you. There’s no reason to do so.
An Environment of Acceptance
As I thought about how to bypass the resistance stages, I recalled an effect I’ve seen many times at our workshops. When people spend days surrounded by other growth-oriented people, the deep and immediate acceptance really sinks in. In an environment of such acceptance and encouragement, people realize that it isn’t necessary to explain and defend their decisions. So the shields go down. The defensiveness vanishes. And the mind reaches a new level of congruence and peace. These kinds of experiences were an important part of my journey as well. When I began leaning into the idea of open relationships, I had doubts about the path and wasn’t congruent with it. When I first started writing about it several years ago, boy was there a lot criticism! But when I would hang out in person with people who’d been living that lifestyle for years, I couldn’t help but notice that they had zero defensiveness about it. For them it was a perfectly normal and sensible way to live. I couldn’t find their shields, even when I tried to play Devil’s advocate with them. This became a powerful tool for me, one that I like much better than polishing my armor. When I’m considering making a change, I find it really helpful to hang out with people who are on the other side. For me it’s a change. But for them, it’s just their normal everyday lives. When I see how normal it is for them, it helps me imagine the shift as being totally normal for me as well. It gives me a vision of what I’ll be like on the other side. Starting in the late 90s, I used this approach to transform my once failing computer games business into a successful one. I began hanging out with successful independent software developers, both online and in person. It sounds a little dumb in retrospect to say this, but I was struck by just how comfortable they were with their success. To me at the time, it was a really big deal to earn six or seven figures a year from selling one’s own software. But I couldn’t detect any of this amazement in the people I met. They didn’t feel special to have done it. It was just a normal thing to be doing. I realized that seeing a transition as special is a form of incongruence. When we project extraordinary qualities onto a change, we push it away. We invite ridicule. We invite opposition. We slow ourselves down. We remain stuck. It took many more years before I connected the dots between these two ideas and saw how sensible it would be to use an environment of acceptance to bypass resistance. This is how I skip the first two stages in Schopenhauer’s worldview. But really I still go through three stages. They’re just different stages. The model I use now looks like this:
All growth passes through three stages. First, envision the change as possible. Second, invite support for your change by meeting people who are already living as you desire. Third, realize you’re already one of those people — and that you love it!
Suppose you want to transition from a scarcity mindset to an abundant lifestyle using Schopenhauer’s original model. You’ll start by getting ridiculed by other scarcity minded people. Then you’ll deal with lots of obstacles and setbacks. And finally — hopefully — you’ll be spit out the other side. Does that work for personal growth? Not really. You could just as easily stay stuck indefinitely with this approach… unless you build some really strong psychological weaponry and fight your way through. Or you could take a gentler, more optimistic approach. Realize that other people are already living on the other side of the change you want to make. For those people your desired change is a perfectly normal and natural way to live. There’s nothing to debate. The benefits are self-evident. You can simply go and join them. They’re happy to welcome you. Leave your shields and armor behind. You can also create this environment of acceptance in your own mind by imagining it as real. Some people are really good at that. I usually get better results by talking to real people though, at least initially. Visualization is helpful after I’ve met people who are already on the other side, so I can better understand the subtleties of the vibe they have. You can still use Schopenhauer’s approach if you like armor and shields. It’s a little clumsy at times, but it does work. It can even be fun, especially when people go out of their way to swing their swords at you. That’s where the pessimistic model leads. You’ll eventually become a champion pessimist. But also recognize that there are alternative approaches that can bypass the resistance altogether. Connecting with people on the other side of your desired transition is one of the most effective. Other approaches are possible too, as long as you begin with the idea that you have the power to go straight to the acceptance phase. We don’t have to follow Schopenhauer’s model of truth either. We can encounter a new truth, welcome it, and accept it smoothly and easily. The challenge is to love the truth more than the untruth. Which do you love more? The place where you are, or the place where you want to be? If it’s the latter, then stop defending the former.
Have you ever heard the phrase “inch wide, mile deep” with respect to picking an area of focus for your education, career, website, business, etc? The idea here is that you should narrow your focus and concentrate on becoming highly skilled in one particular subfield. Then you’ll be able to carve out a space within your industry where you’re competent enough to compete… and hopefully make a good living. You can do that. It does work to a certain extent. But this article is about why you may not want to do that. You don’t have to use the inch wide, mile deep approach to niche down if it bothers you to do so. Many people have mixed feelings about it, and rightly so. There are some big consequences to consider. I don’t use this approach for my work because I don’t like the lifestyle consequences of sticking to one niche for so long. I’d be bored within a few years no matter what I picked, even if I picked something I love. I like variety too much. This life is precious to me, and while I love doing deep dives, I don’t want to be so myopically focused on any one aspect of life or business for so long that I miss out on exploring the other aspects that also interest me. You could say that my niche is personal growth, but that isn’t really a niche at all because anything fits into that huge space: productivity, relationships, career, finances, health, lifestyle, values, spirituality, social skills, and more. Name any topic you can think of, and I can link it to personal growth.
Mile Wide, Mile Deep
I prefer the mile wide, mile deep approach. It works well too, but the mindset and framework are different if you want to succeed with it. There are some consequences to accept, but you may actually like those consequences. To make this work in business, it’s important to focus on the long-term relationship with your audience instead of deliberately trying to nichify or brand yourself into a corner. You want to connect with them as human beings with lots of interests, problems, challenges, and desires – i.e. people just like you – not as monodimensional prospects who care about your niche. It’s important not to brand yourself in the typical branding sense if you want your audience members to relate to you as a real, multidimensional person. If I brand myself as anything, I prefer to just call myself an explorer. It turns out that many people like being able to maintain our relationship across a wide variety of interests – I like it too! – and branding myself into a singular niche would only get in the way of that. Doesn’t it kinda suck when you discover a guru you really like, but all they do is speak and write about the same narrow topic over and over again? Wouldn’t it be nice to connect on some other dimensions too, especially if you like and respect the person? How many emails or blog posts can you read about the same thing until you’re drowning in boredom and looking for the unsubscribe button?
The 50-Year Audience
Ask yourself this: What kind of audience could you keep for 50 years? Who’d stay with you that long? In which niche could you expect to still be working in 50 years after you start, assuming you lived that long? I’ll bet a lot of people in your audience would love to connect with you based on other interests beyond your main niche, and you’re probably not inviting them to do so. So they can’t bond with you as closely as they would with a real life friend with whom they may share multiple interests. But what if they could bond with you that closely? Motivation can be a lot harder in a nichified business after the first few years. Eventually the repetitiveness and lack of variety start to grind you down. I see this happening in so many friends. The passion just drains out of them after a while. And it shows up in procrastination, lifeless work, and frequent fantasizing about doing something else. What once seemed like a great niche is now stunting their growth as human beings, providing them with too little stimulation and variety. Eventually they begin to think there’s something wrong with them for being experts in their field and not feeling driven anymore. My business is a lot of fun to run because on any given day, week, or month, I can tackle any topic that interests me. I can switch topics seemingly at random, and I often do. This year I did three-day workshops on abundance, mental development, lifestyle design, and entrepreneurship. I spoke about relationships in Mexico and character development in the UK. I love, love, love that kind of variety. Even after 12+ years on this path, I’m more in love with the work now than during the first 5 years. Whichever direction my current interests twist and turn, a sizable audience has proven they’re willing to come along for the ride. Of course I lose some people now and then, but in the long run, the narrow-minded, mono-focused people get filtered out as they smash into walls at every zig and zag and can’t keep up with the course changes. Meanwhile the ones who make it through multiple years with me are the ones who, like me, love the variety and enjoy connecting with and learning from someone who’s very much like them – a multidimensional human being.
Breadth AND Depth
You might be thinking that you can’t possibly go a mile wide and a mile deep. You have to go for breadth OR depth, don’t you? It’s an either-or decision. I think Leonardo da Vinci would call B.S. on that, and so would I. Breadth and depth enhance each other. You can have both. In fact, I think it’s a lot easier – and way more fun – to go for both. If you explore a lot, you’ll become a better explorer. You’ll be able to go deep faster and more efficiently by building skills across multiple areas. Most importantly, your mile deep will not be in the same spot as someone else’s mile deep. You’ll do your deep dives differently than nichified deep divers. Your deep dives will also be more holistic because you’ll be able to connect the dots with other deep dives you’ve done. You’ll be better than most people at seeing the big picture and understanding each niche within the context of the others. And that’s going to allow you to offer up some really unique insights, the kinds of insights that even the so-called experts within a field aren’t commonly sharing. There’s a huge advantage to being unattached to niches as well. You can be ridiculously disloyal to all of your niches and yet still be considered something of an expert within them. You can step into the role of expert within one niche and fire a shot at another niche, then switch sides and fire back. You can explore some really interesting paradoxes this way and find new truths beyond them. I’ll just have to let you chew on that one for a while. This one is hard to describe unless you’ve already experienced it.
Is Your Niche Draining Your Motivation?
Motivation is another key factor. You can dig more and deeper wells if you keep your motivation high. Do you think your depth is really going to be all that deep if your motivation is falling below a 6 out of 10? What if you’re constantly at a 9 or 10 for your motivation, but you jump around a lot? Can you imagine some situations where the 9+ will likely outperform the sub-6? I’ll readily admit that there are some problems better suited to the stubborn sub-6 who can chip away for years. But there are other problems where the 9+ will win hands down. You can choose to tackle either class of problems. Do you have a preference? You can actually solve many of the same problems with either approach. You’ll just use different strategies. For instance, a sub-6 might make money with a regular job or with stable self-employment, doing the similar work day after day. A 9+ might earn income by working in bursts, such as by setting up passive income streams (also called evergreen) or by doing income-generating projects. Also, when you get burned out on some particular niche, you can always take a pause, switch to something else, and come back to it with a fresh perspective. You can go surprisingly deep when you’re able to stave off burnout indefinitely. And every now and then you’ll get lucky just by trying lots of different approaches to many different areas of life. Sometimes gold isn’t buried that deep; it may be buried where no one has bothered to look yet.
The Social Consequences of Nichification
There’s the social aspect too. If you niche down, you’re going to take a lot of your social life into that inch-wide pit with you. By resisting your own nichification, you could enjoy a more varied and arguably richer social life vs. one that’s overstuffed with the same types of people. Partly this is because you can offer up dozens of different interests that people may share with you. Some people will notice that they have a LOT in common with you, and they’ll often reach out to you. If you present more facets for people to connect with, you can attract a great variety of connections as well as more compatible connections. Also, who really wants to be friends with a mono-focused person? If you go the niche route, there’s a good chance you’ll attract a lot of people who want to connect with you mainly because you’re an expert on that one particular thing. That can be cool for status and income, but it can also lead to a feeling of being used by other people and by society. Do you only want people to relate to you as a tool for their own advancement? That gets lonely after a while. It can also lead to a love-hate relationship with your work. And there’s the health aspect too, although this tends to be more indirect. As odd as it may seem, boredom can actually become stressful in the long run. When you’re bored with your work, it takes more effort to push yourself to get things done. Your brain doesn’t automatically generate high levels of motivation if it isn’t engaged and stimulated. When you don’t feel highly motivated to work, it’s harder to get results. And when your results start to slip because you aren’t working as productively as you used to, this can create feelings of inadequacy, which makes everything worse. Eventually the external pressures will begin to pile up, and that can create a lot of stress. And that isn’t healthy in the long run. Sadly I’ve seen this happen to a lot of people who nichify themselves into a corner. The worst cases are usually lawyers (no pun intended), one reason being that they often earn a few hundred dollars per hour and get used to that level of income, but they have to keep doing the same work over and over to maintain their lifestyle. Try finding a lawyer who loves his/her work after a decade in the same niche, and I’ll show you a four-leaf clover. I’d probably want to hire that lawyer too… if I ever happened to need one.
* * *
Don’t swallow the nichification pill without reading the warning label first. It’s not the only way to build a following or a business, and depending on your personality and interests, it may actually lead you into a nasty pit of despair. Give some careful thought to the lifestyle consequences of nichification first, and decide whether it’s truly the right path for you. If you don’t pick a niche, you’ll probably have to build more skills, face more fears, and build a stronger social support network. For people like me, those are powerful reasons not to niche down.
Zig Ziglar explains success in life using the analogy of a water pump. You must prime the pump before you start getting water. In other words, you must put something in, before you get something out.
"How much pumpin' are you gonna do to get a glass of water?"
"Anything is worth doing is worth doing poorly, until you can learn to do it well."
