When you ask people for their opinions on what you should focus on you get varied responses. Some people tell you to niche. Others tell you to have varied taste and dip into a little of everything.
I’m telling you to do both; at different times.
This whole “focus” thing to me is about stages. It’s not as black and white as people make it out to be. Without going into a lot of detail, there are three [main] stages to this “focusing”.
STAGE ONE: Newbie
In the first stage you are inexperienced. You know nothing, absolutely nothing. Don’t worry though, if you properly navigate this stage you won’t be dumb for long.
The newbie stage requires you to niche, you need to pick one task and focus on it. There’s no other way to successfully navigate through this stage. If you try to learn a bit of everything in the beginning, you’ll fail at everything and master nothing. The only thing you can do is focus on one specific area.
I’ll use musicians as examples. It would be pretty dumb for a singer (wanna-be-singer at this stage) to learn opera, R&B, rap, country, hip hop, pop, rock & rock, and soul at the same time.
But they can focus on just singing R&B for the time being. Most people never question the simplicity of this logic. But why do we not apply this logic to other areas of life? We try to do everything at once when it comes to self improvement and personal development, art and design, social media, and in business and entrepreneurship. FOCUS ON ONE THING! To quote someone famous:
A student of all is a master of none.
If you want to become a social media manager I say don’t focus on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter from the get-go. Focus on one of them. Aim to be an expert of so called “guru” (I hate the term, but I have to use it) in one field, one very, very specific field. If you can still get more specific in a field then you aren’t trying hard enough. Keep laser focusing until you get as specific as possible.
And if you do this long enough you’ll reach stage two.
STAGE TWO: Niche Expert
In stage two, you’ll know everything about your field. You’ll be recognized as “the industry leader”, “the guru”, “the expert”, “the know-it-all”, whatever. There are countless words used to describe what you are, but put simply, “You’re the best“.
People come to you for advice and guidance on your subject of expertise, they praise you, kneel at your feet, and spread the word about you to their friends and colleagues. I call this the “hero stage“.
Going back to musician example this is the stage where people recognize you as an R&B singer. You have countless peers in the R&B industry and have an established fan base.
The danger here is in staying put.
The danger here is in being predicable, old, and tired.
Most musicians end up watching their careers fade away, and helplessly watch as they are replaced by new, younger versions of themselves because of one thing; they think they’ve completely the journey. But they’re wrong.
Don’t get me wrong though, if you want to remain at this stage you can (and you’ll make a good living staying put), I’m just saying that you’re missing out on the beauty and creativity that is stage three.
STAGE THREE: The Living Legend
Once a “Niche Expert” decides to revisit that original need to dip into a little bit of everything, they enter stage three.
By entering stage three they are making themselves vulnerable again by allowing themselves to be “newbies” again. The R&B singer realizes that she knows nothing about rap and rock. But she has something to fall back on; her expertise in R&B. Unlike her younger self she is not learning new styles in order to fully understand them, she is learning them to improve upon her old R&B style (the fans will support this). She has reached the point where just singing R&B is not enough (it used to be enough, but in a world where the underdog is hungrier and more talented than ever, it no longer is).
What the R&B singer is doing is securing her hold on the top.
She’s making sure that she is never replaced.
See, the underdog will have to go through the same stages she did, and focus on one area at first, and once the underdog has become a “niche expert” they’ll still only know one style of music. But by adding say, rock, to her R&B style she will have that “edge” that no one else has. And once she’s successfully added rock, she’ll add rap to it later on.
She’ll be the first (or one in a billion) singer who’s ever done this. People will have no choice by to see her as a legend, a living legend. If stage two was the “hero stage” this is the “god stage“.
It Takes Years
Although I easily outlined the stages out, believe me when I say that navigating through each stage is going to be one of the (if not the) hardest things you’ll ever have to do. And the higher the stage, the harder it gets. It will take years (if not centuries) to reach stage three; not days, month, years. It’ll feel like you’re in Dante’s Inferno, where you continuously navigate to deeper and harsher level of as you proceed.
But if you persist just a little bit longer, and work a little bit harder, the rewards will be great.
photo credit: fueledbynofx