Starting from wisdom rather from scratch
If you're in your 40s, 50s or 60s, congratulations: you've hit the content creation motherlode!
Gary Bloomer | SHAKING THE TREE # 285
If you’re in your 40s, 50s or 60s, congratulations: you’ve hit the content creation motherlode!
Think I’m kidding? Not at all.
All those 20 something TikTok stars? How many of them know what you know?
Few of them.
Think about that for a moment.
Then think about everything you’ve learned over decades of experience. And I mean, really think about the tasks and challenges you’ve taken again and again and done so so often they’ve almost become second nature.
Those skills and abilities? They have value, which means they can be monetized.
Content-wise, this makes you super wealthy. Not just rich: wealthy. As in in old money wealthy.
The single most overrated piece of advice for the seasoned professional staring down at a new chapter—maybe it’s a new job, maybe it’s retirement—is “find your niche.”
I used to think this was stellar advice. These days though, not so much. here’s why:
A niche is a small, defined hole in any given market. As such it’s something you carve out, it’s a place you fit into.
However, for someone with decades of hard-won, scar-tissued, in-the-trenches experience, rather that setting yourself the goal of fitting in to a pre-existing slot, why not build something on ground only you can stand on?
That landscape is your Uncommon Ground.
It’s not your job title or your industry. It’s not where you worked or what you did. It’s bigger than that because it’s the land of the unique, often unspoken, geological formations of your experience—the failures that taught you more than the wins; the heretical ideas that worked; the slow-drip realizations that became your bedrock.
Finding your uncommon ground requires more than a personality quiz or a market gap analysis.
It requires conducting a Wisdom Excavation.
I touched on the idea of a Wisdom Excavation in an earlier article called Why your next adventure is a new genre but in short, a Wisdom Excavation is the deliberate, sometimes uncomfortable process of digging beyond the bullet points of your résumé to uncover the foundational principles you’ve unknowingly built your entire career on.
Those guiding questions you listed aren’t just prompts; they are archaeological tools.
“What is the invisible knot I've learned to untie, that others simply cut through or ignore?” This unearths your latent mastery. This is the thing you do so well and so instinctively that you’ve forgotten it’s actually one of your superpowers. It’s not about a point on “managing budgets.” It’s “the art of translating anxious stakeholder emotions into a rational spreadsheet column to get buy-in.” That’s a sought after and highly teachable point of view.
“What successful rule did you have to break to see real progress?” This reveals your defining heresy. Your most valuable insight is often the sacred cow that everyone else held dear that you were brave and bold enough to slaughter. It’s the proof of your ability to think independently, even when other people are convinced you’re wrong. This isn’t about involving yourself in acts of rebellion for the sake of it; it’s the evidence-based innovation you’ve honed that now forms your core philosophy.
“What ‘obvious’ truth did it take you twenty years to truly understand?” This uncovers your earned simplicity. This is the super simplistic yet oddly profound kernel of truth it took you a lifetime of studying complexity to distill. This is the antithesis of generic advice. It’s the one-sentence truth around which you can build an entire methodology.
Your answers to these questions are not your topics.
“Communication” is a topic. “Design” is a topic.
Your hard-won, well-thought out frameworks for “De-escalating Email Warfare Before the First Reply is Sent” and “Why Your Logo is Not your Brand and What to do Instead” are cornerstones.
The Pioneer’s Principles for a Wisdom Excavation
Principle 1: Suspect your own résumé. Your official work history is a media release. Start your archaeological dig in the margins—with the failed project that was a learning goldmine, with the side responsibility you secretly loved, with the feedback you resisted but later realized was vital. The treasure is buried in the contradictions, in the changes, and in the corrections.
Principle 2: Follow the friction. What did you constantly find yourself pushing back against? Which “best practices” felt wrong? That friction is a signal. Your Uncommon Ground often forms in opposition to commonly accepted, widespread, unquestioned dogma. Map the friction points and make notes of what set them apart from the surrounding landscape. These points outline the borders of your unique philosophy.
Principle 3: Look for recurring patterns rather than isolated events. A single success is an anecdote, a footnote. But a pattern of solving a specific type of mess across a range of applications is a system. Identify the category of problem you were consistently brought in to fix or that you saw an solution to. That category defines your zone of generational impact.
Principle 4: Translate instinct into protocol. Your wisdom is either part of your subconscious or buried deep in your super subconscious. The excavation’s crucial work then is to dig out your wisdom, even if it’s difficult to define and to make it conscious and therefore recordable and transmissible. Take the “gut feel” you’ve always had and reverse-engineer it. What were the key data points you always seemed to sense that others were oblivious to? What was the heuristic? If an algorithm is a detailed, step-by-step recipe, a heuristic is a cook's instinct—it’s the recipe instruction that says "season to taste" or "cook until done." A heuristic gets you to a workable result without needing to measure every grain of salt or calculate the exact moment of perfect doneness. If you can’t teach it, you haven’t yet fully claimed it.
Principle 5: The audience is your mirror, not your master. Forget about starting by asking “What does the market want?” The market hasn’t got a clue what it wants! Instead of looking for an open market right out of the gate, conduct a forensic audit of your own uncommon ground. Then, hold that rare ore up to the light of the world and get it out there into the market place. The most receptive audience—those struggling with the very problems you’ve mastered—will find it because they recognize themselves in it. You are not fitting yourself to a niche; you are magnetizing your uncommon tribe.
This excavation is not an act of nostalgia. It is an act of strategic reclamation.
You are not mining the past to live in it. You are prospecting for the critical, non-renewable resources—your proprietary insights—to fuel the next venture.
Your legacy isn’t what you did. It’s the singular way you saw the world that made what you did possible. That is your Uncommon Ground.
Plant your flag there.
Build there.
The world doesn’t need another voice droning on in what’s already a crowded niche.
It needs your distinctive, excavated wisdom, the sort of voice that can only be heard from the ground only you occupy.
As always, thanks for reading.
—Gary
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Next time on Shaking the Tree: The confidence of earned scars
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Originally from the U.K., Gary Bloomer is a writer, branding advocate, marketing specialist, and an award-winning graphic designer.
His design work has been included in Creative Review (one of the UK’s largest design magazines). Since 2009, he has answered over 5,000 marketing and business questions in the Know-How Exchange of MarketingProfs.com, placing him among the top 3% of contributors. He lives in Wilmington, Delaware, USA.