Some Advice About Advice

Links:

• Finding a niche can be hard. Solving problems? Not so much.

• Selling eBooks on Gumroad is profitable and easy. Here’s a guide to making your first $1K.

You’ve seen it, right?

One guru swears by their method. Another guru says that exact method will destroy you.

Same day. Same platform. Opposite advice.

I got caught in this trap hard.

The big advice everyone pushed: “Niche down until you can’t niche any farther.”

Pick one thing. Get specific. Own a tiny corner of the internet.

So I did. I picked a lane so narrow I could barely turn around in it.

And it sucked.

Turns out, my experience doesn’t fit in a neat box.

Twelve years in the Air Force, construction management, technical writing for Google, factory work after losing everything during COVID. How do you niche that into “email marketing for solopreneurs” or whatever?

You don’t.

Instead, I built something wider. A lane based on my actual lived experience that no one else can recreate. Hence, Niche of One.

Here’s what I realized: all that advice was good. Just not for me.

The gurus weren’t wrong. Niching works for lots of people. But I’m not lots of people. Neither are you.

So here’s what actually works: take the advice, then adapt it.

Ask yourself three questions before implementing anything:

1. Does this fit my actual situation?

2. What part of this resonates?

3. How do I need to bend this to make it mine?

Use advice as a starting point, not a finish line. Build your own version. Make it fit your messy, complicated, uniquely yours experience.

What’s one piece of popular advice you’ve had to completely flip to make it work for you?