Niche down. Then niche down further. That was the advice, from business coach after business coach, each of them delivering it like they’d just invented fire.

So I did it. I started a drop shipping business selling trail running and orienteering gear. Then I niched down again. And again. Until all I was doing was selling belts that hold race bibs.

They were the best selling product on the site by a mile. Admittedly the site sold about four things, and it was a terrible business (great experiment, terrible business). But that’s not why I killed it.

I killed it because it was boring. I had optimised my way into a job I didn’t want, selling something I didn’t care about, to people I never actually spoke to.

Fair hit. I have picked a road to play on.

I just don’t think of it as a one lane country road with a locked gate at either end. It’s a multi lane highway. The mission here is broad on purpose: I write and talk about how to live deliberately, stay curious, and therefore stay relevant. That covers your work, your money, what you read, who you give your time to, and whether you’re still capable of changing your mind about anything.

So if something grabs me, I’m going to write about it. If I meet someone genuinely fascinating and think you’d want to hear from them, they’re getting an episode whether or not they tick the right demographic box. It’s my party and I’ll do what I want to.

David Epstein wrote a whole book about this, called Range. His argument is that specialists only win in what he calls “kind” learning environments, the ones with fixed rules and instant feedback. Chess. Golf. Everything else, which is to say most of adult life and nearly all of business, is a “wicked” environment. Rules change halfway through. Feedback arrives years late, if at all.

In wicked environments the people who do best are the ones who took the scenic route. Broad experience, slow specialisation, ideas dragged in from somewhere unrelated.

Which should be reassuring, because at 45 plus the scenic route is the only one any of us has taken. You’ve done three careers, sat through two recessions, managed people, lost people, and picked up a strange amount of knowledge about at least one thing nobody would guess. That isn’t clutter to be tidied away before you’re allowed to have an opinion. This is actually an asset.

Here’s the bit the coaches leave out. The niche is a discovery mechanism, not an identity.

Someone finds you because they searched for a specific problem at 11pm. Fine, that’s the door. But nobody sticks around for a search result. They stay because of how you think, what makes you laugh, the odd tangent you went on about a documentary, the fact you admitted the thing didn’t work.

Every publication or business you actually love is like this. You didn’t stay subscribed for the topic. You stayed for the voice.

Pick a mission rather than a category. “Race bib belts” is a category and it has a ceiling. “Living deliberately and staying relevant” is a mission and it has lanes. If you can’t articulate the through-line in one sentence, you don’t have a mission, you have a list.

Then hold the mission tight and the topics loose. A tangent is fine if it serves the through-line. Twelve unconnected tangents in a row is just a diary.

And keep yourself in it. The personal opening, the failed business, the thing you got wrong last week. That’s not filler ahead of the useful content. For most people, it is the useful content.

Write your mission in one sentence, out loud, to an actual person. If they nod, it’s a mission. If they ask “so what do you post about?”, it’s still a category and you’ve got more work to do.

Then publish one piece this week that’s a lane over from your usual. Not off the highway entirely. Just the next lane, the one you’ve been telling yourself your audience won’t want. Watch what happens. My experience is that the sideways ones outperform the on-brief ones more often than they have any right to.

Niching down works right up until the point you’ve narrowed yourself out of the thing you enjoy.

You’re not a category. You’re a person with a decent amount of mileage and a few opinions worth hearing.

Get in the other lane occasionally.