On Finding your Niche

There are those fortunate people who find their niche very early in life. For example, Paul Graham has an article about his father, a mathematician who discovered early on his interest in life. Below, he recounts his father’s words:

My father is a mathematician. For most of my childhood he worked for Westinghouse, modelling nuclear reactors.

He was one of those lucky people who know early on what they want to do. When you talk to him about his childhood, there’s a clear watershed at about age 12, when he “got interested in maths.”

He grew up in the small Welsh seacoast town of Pwllheli. As we retraced his walk to school on Google Street View, he said that it had been nice growing up in the country.

“Didn’t it get boring when you got to be about 15?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “by then I was interested in maths.”

In another conversation he told me that what he really liked was solving problems. To me the exercises at the end of each chapter in a math textbook represent work, or at best a way to reinforce what you learned in that chapter. To him the problems were the reward. The text of each chapter was just some advice about solving them. He said that as soon as he got a new textbook he’d immediately work out all the problems — to the slight annoyance of his teacher, since the class was supposed to work through the book gradually.

We all know of someone like this. Perhaps it’s your best friend, who found out very early in life that he wanted to be a surgeon, and then spent the next two to three decades in pursuit of that goal, or that person from your high school who was starting some kind of businesses since she was in Elementary School and ended up becoming an entrepreneur.

These people may be outliers. Not only outliers in the sense that they find their niche early on in life, but that they also have the luck to pursue that interest and to develop their talent in that niche. And luck is a broad and influential variable, including the family you are born into, the resources you are able to access, the talent you were born with, the success of the person-environment fit [1], and so on.

This is important as there are situations where someone may discover their niche early on in life, but may not have the luck necessary to pursue that dream. Here, we can imagine an aspiring athlete who finds over time that his passion for the game does not match his talents or disposition. Or he may just be out of luck, getting a career-ending injury.

And so, we see that there are multiple factors at play here. As children, if we are lucky enough, we test out different niches and organically figure out what we are interested in and have an aptitude for (interest and aptitude are probably interdependent). And as we follow through with our interests and deepen our experience, some of us are lucky enough to continue to pursue that interest and to make a career out of it — To find our niche.

Most people, however, are not so lucky.

Given the topic of this article, the question that begs an answer is: What should one do when a good or great niche for them closes it’s doors? The short answer would probably be “find another one”.

In this response, however, there is the assumption that another niche will be “just as good” for you as the initial niche. But it does not necessarily have to be just as good. My hypothesis is that niches are sort of like romantic partners: There is a spectrum, with one end being “worst fit” and the other end “best fit”, which can encapsulate the fit that every potential romantic partner is for you. So while in theory there may be one “best fit”, in reality, there is a range of fits that are excellent. And the difference between fits there may not be so great or even noticeable. So the goal ends up being to find another niche which is still a good fit, although you may not ever know how it compared to the initial niche.

And so, we find that when one niche closes, we should strive to find another niche that may be just as good or better, even though we probably won’t know whether it is good or better. But although we may not know this, we do have indications on whether it is a good fit for us. Over time, if we do what we did as children and test out different niches and follow our natural curiosity and interests, something may stick.

Unfortunately, this gets much more difficult as we get older due to numerous factors such as demands on our time, energy levels, and attention. While a child may be free to pursue an interest without much restraint or outside influence, an adult may want to pursue an interest, but may not have much time or energy due to employment, children, and other obligations.

Ultimately, however, if the goal is to find a niche for yourself, you must take time to explore and dive into different interests.