I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, focused on launching a writing and advisory business around personal finance for Gen Xers. I’m blogging here daily to track my progress. In Monday Marketing, I research, plan, and evaluate my marketing and promotion activities.
The first rule of content creation businesses seems to be: choose a well-defined niche and target audience. That will help you stand out from the crowd, build trust and credibility, and increase your opportunities, some say.
I’m having a hard time sticking to my chosen niche, personal finance for Gen X. This week, I feel inspired to write about the box universe theory, and how that applies to reinvention, as well as about how to use ChatGPT to give you very good Tarot-driven advice. Neither of these fit into my niche, although my sister has pointed out to me that my musings about the box universe and reinvention can be applied to investing as well.
In her book Beyond Anxiety, life coach and self-help guru Martha Beck suggests that starting with niche and building a career and life from there is the wrong way to go. She says many of us work out of a sense of deprivation and fear. She writes of psychologist Jordan Litman’s distinction between two kinds of curiosity:
The first, which he called “deprivation curiosity,” is a worried need to know that stems from lacking enough information to feel safe—for example, not knowing how to get food or whelter. The second, which Litman called “interest curiosity,” comes from a sense of wanting to know, the way children want to know what will happen if they put crayons in the toaster.
Working within one niche and only learning about that area and writing about and producing content about that area is a kind of deprivation-motivated approach. Working from what inspires you and motivates you at a given point of time is an interest-motivated approach.
Lately I’ve been feeling a lot of confidence and optimism about my future, so much that I feel less urgent and impatient about whatever’s next. I’ve been feeling very Star-like in my sense of flow and possibility.