Transcription
Let's say we niche down on the problem of sleep. Okay, a lot of times people struggle with sleep through and let's talk about it through the lens of psychology and spirituality. Okay, we're not we're not talking about like health and wellness.
A lot of times people struggle with sleep because of um overthinking. Their mind is racing. It's time to go to bed and they can't get their thoughts to slow down. And as a result, they have a really hard time falling asleep. And they cope with that problem by putting a TV in their room and turning on Netflix, which is the worst thing that you can do because all that blue light ends up disrupting your sleep even more, right? And then you become reliant on this sound, and it takes you two hours to fall asleep every night, and then you wake up the next day and you're not as well rested. I think we all know this this problem.
Now, if if I said I think you should niche down to the point where you help people, whether it's through a lens of psychology or spirituality, um, gain control over their racing thoughts before bed so that they can bring themselves into a calm state, so that they can have a good night of sleep and no longer be reliant on Netflix putting them to bed. Most people would tell me that that is way too specific. And yet, let's ask the follow-up question. How many people in the world do we think have a hard time turning off their brain to go to sleep? Almost everyone who's high functioning or you know >> everyone everyone right? And so that that is th this is like the hardest idea to understand when it comes to niching down is that everyone thinks that niching down means I am limiting opportunity and it's not opportunity that's getting limited. What's getting limited and and it's it's a good thing. What's getting limited is that you are not trying to solve every problem for every person. What you're trying to do is you're trying to solve one problem or one group of problems and those problems because they are so specific end up being so universal, right?
And so I think this like whenever I I'm answering questions around niche oftentimes there's two there's two big things that I notice. One is this faulty belief of if I get too specific I'm limiting opportunity which is not true and I just walked you through why. And the second issue is that and I think this is this is very common for for people who haven't yet committed to one niche because now like I I have learned this lesson so much because I've committed to a niche for 10 years. So like I've I've learned what this actually looks like. Until you commit to one specific niche for a prolonged period of time, you don't actually realize yet how difficult it is to even solve one problem for people. Like every beginner thinks, I can I can solve lots of different problems. And you can, but that doesn't like but that's not the path to getting to where you're you're trying to go.
A great example is like ghostwriting for I'll use ghostwriting. I started ghostwriting in 2016. That was a decade ago. I then spent thousands of hours, like north of 5,000 hours ghostwriting for executives. And the whole time I was doing that, I also was building training documents for all the people I employed inside my ghostwriting agency. So pretty much 14 hours a day I was either thinking about ghostwriting, talking to clients and selling them on ghostwriting, actually ghostwriting or training or creating training materials for all of the writers inside our company to ghostwrite. Then after that, we started PGA, which is our premium ghostwriting academy. And then I've spent over the past three and a half years, I've spent another 3,000 4,000 hours talking about ghostwriting, answering questions about ghostwriting, creating documentation, teaching ghostwriters how to do what I do, creating frameworks, writing a book about ghostwriting. So all told, I mean, easily easily 10,000 hours of just talking about ghostwriting. And I will tell you that today, a decade later, 10,000 hours of doing nothing but talking about that one topic. Today, I have never been more aware of how much more work I need to do in order to really continue helping people become great ghostwriters.
And this this is like one of those things that you it is so hard to wrap your head around as a beginner because as a beginner you think well I I could solve this problem and I could solve this problem and I could help this person and I could do this thing over here and and the the lesson that you haven't learned yet is when you commit to just one thing. The more that you do that one thing, the more that you realize a how much deeper that rabbit hole goes and b how hilarious it is that you ever thought you could do more than just that one thing. You're h you're humbled by it. I wake up humbled every single day because I'm like, what an Cole? What were you thinking 10 years ago? You really thought you were going to build like 10 different businesses helping 10 different people all at once? 10,000 hours. I I still feel like I've barely scratched the surface on one.
And so I I share all of that to point out that like so much of where people struggle with niching down is just you don't have the pattern recognition yet to to realize that that the way that you're thinking about it is is it's the opposite. Like you think, okay, I can help lots of people, but it's the opposite. It's no, you can really only dig into one person and help that one person. And you think like, oh, if I do that for like 3 months or 6 months, then I can move on to the next one. No, you could do it for 10 years and you would still feel like there's more to do, you know? And so that that that's fundamentally why when it comes to niching down, specificity is such a good thing because it it really makes you realize it it helps you clear the deck and go, I'm not going to try and chase 10 10 birds at once. I'm just going to focus on doing one thing really really well.
And going back to our example, it's like how much opportunity do you think there is in the world to only talk about psychology or manifestation or spirituality just through the lens of helping people sleep through the night. You could write books on that. You could create digital products on that. You could you could scale that and have entire spirituality sleep conferences where people fly in from all over the world for a three-day Tony Robbins style event. Like you, the world is your oyster. The pro that that problem or that topic for example is not too small. There's like quite literally an overwhelming amount of opportunity. And even you, like, and just to take it one step further, like even you, if you built a $10 million a year business doing that, I would still tell the next person who said, "I'm also interested in spirituality, sleep, whatever." I would still tell them to do the same thing that you're doing because like a $10 million a year business is not every one in in the world. You do not own a 100% of that market. You own maybe like 1% of that market.
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