Niche down is the worst advice anyone ever gave a creative person.

The people who told you to pick a lane had already picked theirs. That's the only reason it worked for them.

Someone said it to me three years ago, very kindly, in a coffee shop, “you’re focusing on too many things all at once!,” they said. “You have to focus on one thing and make it work.”

It’s always about pick one thing. Go deep. That’s how you build an audience, a brand, a business that lasts. They had a newsletter with 40,000 subscribers and a clean one-sentence bio and I believed them completely.

I spent six months trying to become a version of myself that fit in a single sentence.

It didn’t work. Not because I wasn’t disciplined… I was, probably too much so. It didn’t work because the thing I was trying to describe wasn’t one thing. It was the space between things. The particular way a person moves when they’ve lived more than one kind of life and can’t stop noticing how they connect.

The logic made sense to me at the time. If you want to be found, you have to be findable. I watched people with clean bios grow their audiences fast, and I thought I understood what was expected.

I tried it and there were months I was actually pretty good at it.

But somewhere in the applying, I lost the whole plot.

‘Pick a lane’ is advice built for products. The problem is it gets handed to people, specifically the ones already half-convinced they’re too much, too all over the place, too hard to explain. And it lands like confirmation.

Even the person with 40,000 subscribers thinks you need to simplify.

I think that’s where the real damage happens. Not in the strategy but in the permission.

Because what it’s actually saying, underneath all of it, is: the parts of you that don’t fit together are the parts you should cut. The curiosity that wanders. The thing you made last year that doesn’t match this year. The interest you can’t monetise yet. Trim those. Get legible. Match what the audience wants.

And a lot of people do. I did. I got very legible for a while and I was also, quietly, a little less myself.

But here’s what I’ve been witnessing instead; that there’s people who never quite niched down and built something anyway. They don’t look like a niche. They look like a perspective. A way of seeing that shows up across everything they touch, even when the topics seem completely unrelated.

I’ve tried to work out what makes it and honestly, I can’t. Or I can identify pieces of it but they never add up the same way twice. And I’m starting to feel it’s not something you build deliberately. It’s something you end up with after long enough of not cutting the parts that don’t fit.

Maybe it’s about your niche finding you, slowly, from the pile of things you couldn’t stop making.

The whole "pick a lane" strategy is designed to make you findable. It’s optimization, the right words in the right boxes. And I get it, visibility matters. But the stuff that actually changes you, the essays still sitting in an open browser tab a week later, the writers you return to when you’re trying to understand your own thoughts, they never start with a clean promise. They don't give you a roadmap upfront. They just invite you in, and you only see the pattern after you've been walking it for a while.

I think about the version of me that followed the advice properly. She’d have a cleaner bio. A more legible brand. Probably a faster-growing audience at first. She’d also have spent three years writing about a version of herself that was edited down to fit a category someone else named.

I’m not her. I tried to be, for a bit but it felt like wearing something tailored for a different body.

What I do instead is messier, non-linear and sometimes listening to intuition. I write about work and identity and what it costs to try to live more than one life at once — and sometimes about coffee shops and the strange particular loneliness of a Tuesday and the version of myself who didn’t take the risk.

A generalist’s brain in a world that rewards specialists. These things connect. I know they connect. I’m still working out how.

So I just make the next thing. Whatever is pulling. The piece that doesn’t fit. I follow that inner knowing.

Even now I don’t know yet if the complete shape will show up. I don’t know if the people who resisted the niche advice and built something real are an exception or a rule. I don’t know if I’m being principled or just scared of being legible.

Maybe there’s probably a bit of both?