How to Find Your Calling & Choose a Niche
One of the things I see pop up quite often on business forums & FaceBook business groups, is: “How do I know where to start?” “How do I choose a niche?” or “How to choose a business focus?” Sometimes that filters down to “how do I choose what to write about in my book or on my blog?”
In other words, you want to “find your calling.”
While some say you should evaluate the opportunity’s value first via extensive keyword research, I recommend a different approach. I suggesting choosing things that interest you, and consider your skills & expertise.
It’s tempting to see news stories about PewDieDie’s YouTube channel and see that he earns $7+Million per year from game commentary videos on his YouTube channel. But before you go off and say “video games are where it’s at, I’m going to do that too!” take a deep look and ask yourself if video games are a passion. While I’m happy for him, I really don’t give a shit about video games.
Even as a kid, once I got old enough to get on a bike and make it to swimming or soccer practice, that’s what I wanted to do. I was fascinated with training, reading about training, sports performance & psychology. I think the second book I ever purchased was “Flow” by Mikail Czitzenmihalai about the psychology of optimum performance.
What was it you liked to do as a young person? What were you passionate about?
If it was video games, that’s fine too! Apparently you can make a good living at playing games now. Maybe you’re passionate about watching kids play. Awesome. People are making money with that too nowadays.
Seth Godin, in his brilliant blog put it like this:
I don’t think we have a calling.
I do think it’s possible to have a caring.
A calling implies that there’s just one thing for you, just one thing you’re supposed to do.
What we most need in our lives, though, is something worth doing, worth it because we care.
There are plenty of forces pushing us to not care. Bosses, systems, bureaucracies and the fear of mattering.
None of them are worth sacrificing something as important as caring.
That’s why chasing BSOs (Bright Shiny Object) crushes productivity. When we chase features and quick lists, and we stray from principles and clarity. The BSO paradigm is that we’re always in a cycle of starting because we neglect focus on the principles and values that should guide us, and like the crow flying from BSO to BSO. “Hey Look! There’s a tactic that I must do to be a success on the interwebs!”
So let’s get focused; here’s a powerful an simple exercise to help you find your focus and caring. It takes just 5 minutes a day for five days.
Another way to look at finding focus is: Where Passion & Expertise connect.
Try this 5 day exercise; Take a sheet of paper, draw a line down the middle. On one side, write Passions, on the other Expertise. Give yourself 5 minutes and write everything that comes to mind. Each day, for five days, start with a clean page and repeat. at the end of five days, tally results, and you should have some solid areas to focus on.
My result is that my passions are mostly around health & fitness, yoga & personal development, and my expertise is in marketing & sales. So I can use the marketing expertise to build the health & fitness side of the blog, etc.
on’t cheat and re-read your list from yesterday when you do today’s… At the end, patterns will emerge, and you’ll feel confident that those recurring passions and expertise areas are a good place to start focusing. Tally up the scores at the end of day 5.