RC #007: Niche-Picking, Excessive Inputs and Your True Believer
Hey friends,
Greetings from Louisiana! This week I decided to experiment a little bit with the format of the newsletter. Instead of curating external content as I’d normally do, I’ll be sharing with you three, short pieces I wrote reflecting on issues that are relevant and important to all of us as creators:
Bad Dating Advice Is Good Niche-Picking Advice
Excessive Inputs Make You Dangerous to Yourself
How to Find Your True Believer
I’m trying to make my content more actionable, and I’m aware I might not be there yet. But, hopefully, I’m headed in the right direction. So, here we go.
Bad Dating Advice Is Good Niche-Finding Advice
You can apply the worst dating advice in the world to find a niche as a creator (in just four steps):
Before you settle down, you have to be a player (in the dating sense). Flirt with every single topic/subject that seems interesting, have a couple of dates with all of them and get to know them better.
Once you have tried them all, pick your two or three favorites. Those you had a greater connection with. The ones you enjoyed the most. For now, ignore the rest.
Have an open relationship with your “favorites”. Switch and alternate between them. Also, try to combine them and make connections among them.
(1) If something interesting comes out of this open relationship, stick to it. As you go down this road, though, don’t be afraid of dumping one of your lovers or bringing in someone new. Be always open to making tweaks and adjustments.
(2) If nothing interesting comes out of it, go back to step 1. Repeat the whole process until you reach step 4.1.
In the past, folks approached their careers as if they were supposed to be an everlasting marriage. But this mindset won’t serve you when trying to pick a niche. Be a player.
Excessive Inputs Make You Dangerous to Yourself
This piece was inspired by this blog post.
When it comes to knowing, more is not always better. More can make you dangerous to yourself.
Too much information can be overwhelming and lead to poor decision-making. Therefore, the more complex the decision you have to make, the more frugal you should be with your inputs.
Likewise, too much knowledge can lead to more sophisticated biases and self-deceptions. So as you continue to accumulate knowledge, you should become more self-aware and skeptical.
That’s how you keep yourself from getting in your own way.
How to Find Your True Believer
This piece was inspired by this tweet.
A true believer is someone who is so passionate about your mission, project or goal that they would happily invest their time, money or reputation to help you succeed.
They can be a source of capital, connections, feedback or energy. Maybe all of them, if you’re lucky.
Your true believer will give you some form of leverage that will help you scale your audience and find your first 100(0) fans.
Now, how do you find your true believer?
I’m not sure if I had found mine yet, and there are probably many ways to go about this. However, I’been trying most of these things and I’m confident that all of them can help you find yours faster:
Make sure you’re working on something other people should care about
Build in public and be transparent
Reach out to interesting people and have meaningful conversations
Send cold DMs or emails to potential true believers
Thus, you increase the exposure of your story, values and goals, making it easier for potential true believers to find you.
As always, I hope you found value in this edition of Rational Creatives. If you did and know someone who could also benefit from it, please share this email with them.
If you have any feedback, suggestion or just feel like getting in touch, shoot me a DM on Twitter. I’d love to hear from you.
Cheers,
Daniel ♟🎨