Gary Bloomer | SHAKING THE TREE # 256
There’s an oft-repeated mantra in the modern creative and professional world, one that’s repeated with near-religious fervor: Find your niche.
We’re told to drill down, to specialize, to become the undisputed go-to person for one very specific thing. The “Web3 Fintech UX Strategist.” The “Sustainable Vegan Leathergoods Copywriter.”
You get the general idea.
The algorithm, we are assured—again and again—rewards this.
Finding your niche makes you easy to find, and easy to label, and therefore easy to sell.
And for a while, it works. Over time, the box you build for yourself gets to feel pretty comfortable. After all, it’s yours, you carved it out, and it has your name on it. Right?
The work comes in, the accolades pile up, and you become known. Right?
You have achieved brand clarity. Yes?
Wrong. And, sadly, no. Not all the time.
As the years creep by a subtle shift occurs. The walls of the box of your niche, the walls that were once a reassuringly solid structure—they begin closing in on you, they begin feeling less and less like a reassuring framework and more and more like a cage.
The niche—YOUR niche, the thing that you once saw as a source of power, presence, and opportunity, it becomes a ruling tyrant.
If you’re not careful, you find yourself staring at the same four corners of your expertise, wondering where all the other rooms in your mind have gone.
This is the creative cost of over-specialization.
It’s the slow, quiet death of the multi-hyphenate soul.
When you are known for only one thing, every new idea is forced through a single, narrow filter.
That spark of inspiration for a ceramic sculpture? Irrelevant—you’re the data visualization person.
That curiosity about medieval history? A distraction—your audience that’s expects marketing tips doesn’t see the value in.
The tiny threads of interest that you come across throughout your working week, the things that make you stop and wonder, the things that make you go hmmmm … instead of being kindling for a range of small fires your audience might like, they gon unused. Ignored.
Your focus on your one and only niche means you start pruning your own interests, cutting here, chopping there, viewing them not as sources of joy, delight, intrigue, and connection, but as deviations from the one true brand bible.
The result is insipid stew of bland creative anaemia.
Your work, however technically proficient, loses its verve, loses its life and its vitality. Your influence, what there was of it, begins to rot, wither, and dry out because there’s no cross-pollination of disparate ideas, things that in truth are the sparks that spur all true innovation and genuine artistry.
The specialist—the person focused on learning more, and more, and more about less, and less, and less—this person knows everything about their one thing, meanwhile the multi-faceted polymath connects their one thing to everything else.
While the polymath is forever looking around them, the specialist only ever looks inward. This is a dangerous place in which to be. In a world of complex, interconnected problems, which mind would you rather have?
So, how do we break free without torching the hard-won credibility we’ve built?
We stop building a monolithic pillar of expertise and instead, we start building a spoked wheel.
Imagine your core passion—your niche—as the central hub. It’s strong, it’s solid, it’s what you’re known for. But from that hub you extend a series of spokes, each one representing a robust, intentional connection to another field, interest, or hobby.
One spoke might be woodworking.
Another, 19th-century poetry.
A third, beekeeping.
A fourth, quantum physics and chaos theory.
These are not hobbies as such; they’re vital channels of exploration and discovery through which you’ll expand your thinking and broaden your interests. They are your escape routes from the tyranny of the mundane, and from the prison of the niche.
The woodworking teaches you about patience, material grain, and the beauty of joinery—lessons that might later inform your approach to user interface design.
The poetry sharpens your sense of verbal rhythm, metaphor, and economy of language, enriching your copywriting.
The beekeeping offers a masterclass in complex systems analysis and in decentralized collaboration systems, a model that could reshape your team’s workflow or your understanding of AI.
The magic doesn’t happen in the hub or even at the end of any given spoke. It happens when there’s tension, conflict, and dissonance between the categories within the wheel.
How do these varies areas of interest overlap and interact? How do they fit together? What attracts each element? What repels them?
The magic happens in the spaces between the spokes as new ideas are caught and held; mixed and blended. In this model, your unique perspective is no longer defined or enveloped by the depth of interests or via the degree of personal area of specialization. Instead, it’s wrapped around the unique constellation of connections only you can see and that only you can make.
In this approach to content creation, rather than being a static label that defines you and traps you, your identity as a content creator becomes a dynamic, interconnected system of varied interests and fascinating observations.
You are no longer the box. You are the wheel, and you are built to move.
Your goal is not to become a dilettante, skimming the surface of a dozen fields. The hub must remain strong. Your goal is to grant yourself permission to be a curious, searching, wondrously whole person—a person whose professional value is amplified, not diminished, by a rich and varied inner life.
So, take a critical look at your content niche and ask yourself if it’s a platform or has it become a prison?
If you feel as if the walls closing in, it may be time to pick up a tool and start building a spoke. It may be time to drill a hole in the side of your expertise and connect it to something seemingly unrelated.
Nurture that connection.
Defy the tyranny of the niche.
Build a spoked wheel, and roll, unboxed, into a more creative and fulfilling future.
As always, thanks for reading.
—Gary
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P.S. If you found this useful, share it with another creator who needs an ego check (in a nice way). Want more unfiltered takes on content creation? Join my newsletter. No fluff, just the stuff that works.
Next time on Shaking the Tree: Confronting your inner critic
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.