One of my favorite concepts from all of those years studying biology was the concept of the niche. An organism or creature finds a spot where the competition isn’t too intense, and raw materials they can work with, and decides to set up shop. They work with their environment and find a place where they can be successful, or they die out. Sometimes the environment around them changes, and the creature needs to adapt or perish.
The same thing is true for businesses, economics, families,you name it- as it’s true for bacteria or lemurs. If you find a niche and can exploit it to your advantage, you have a strategy for success that will carry you far. That is essentially the whole basis for great books like “Blue Ocean Strategy” (Amazon Link) that talk about finding markets where the competition isn’t fierce, or just isn’t there yet- you have the ability to own the niche.
One way businesses achieve this is by creating their own ecosystems. Apple is brilliant at this, with iTunes and the App Store- it has created a whole economy that it owns. It lets others play in the sandbox, helping diversify the entire ecosystem, making it more robust, and letting others compete to fill in the niches of best song, or best movie or best work productivity App, all the while taking a percentage, like an agent, as owner of the ecosystem or world. Amazon has done this, as has Ebay. All of these ecosystems compete at points of overlap- like a town encroaching on an animal’s habitat- but for large swaths of the ecosystem, there is less competition and life goes on pretty happily.
Finding your niche is difficult for a lot of folks, in part, because it starts with the very hard question of who YOU are, what you do best, and what you love to do. Sometimes, we can fill a niche because we are perfectly suited for a job that’s available, but if it doesn’t make you thrilled or excited to go to work every day, how are you really going to have the heart required to maximize the opportunity day after day?
Another spot of friction is when you know your talents and strengths, how do you communicate those to others is a short, coherent, easy to grasp way so they can help you find a niche that works? Some people refer to this as a lobby or elevator pitch- what is your tag line that inspires other people to be interested in you and hire you?
For example, on Twitter, I am largely known as LD Podcast, for the podcast I’ve done about learning and learning disabilities. But the important part there is really the Learning part- that transcends people struggling in school or work with things like dyslexia and ADHD. I feel I’m all about learning and teaching, and trying to find the most effective ways to make your message clear. I read business books and marketing books because these fields are all about making messages clear in order to get someone to buy something. I take all these ideas and concepts and apply them to help businesses, medical education, and other clients/niche owners to make their ideas and talents more easily understood. When you understand, quickly, what someone or some business is about, you can quickly decide whether you need that service, and you can convey that information easily to others- making the idea a virus, as Seth Godin would say. The principals are the same whether we’re talking math facts for middle school kids or marketing plans for adults or social media tools- you’ve got to be able to make a case and sell your ideas for anyone else to understand them and do anything with them. And that, in a nutshell, is about good, precise communication.
Which brings us back to science. In science and technical writing, precision is really important. I’ve spent hours struggling over a sentence or two in an abstract, trying to get the exact language as concise and accurate as possible. Likewise, in law school, your ability to win a case or argument depends on how you use language to communicate your client’s position to another, and use supporting information to convince the decision maker you are correct. In business and marketing, you have to do the same thing- use language to convince someone your product or service solves a need or problem- maybe even one they didn’t know they had. (Just ask Ron Popiel, or read about him in Malcolm Gladwell’s “What The Dog Saw“.)
In the end, it’s all about finding your unique niche where you can thrive. You need enough resources (which includes money and customers for business, often money and students for education) to make the most of the niche, and you have to be constantly willing to adapt and change with the environment. If you can’t adapt and evolve, you will likely suffer, decline, and possible even go extinct, or at least out of business.
It’s easier said than done of course. But the process starts and ends with you, not with the shiny new objects or social media tools or anything else. I’d love to be able to say Get Twitter and life will be perfect, but that’s not true. Like monkeys figuring out to poke a stick in a log to get food, it’s all about how you use that tool to its greatest effect that will bring you success, and it often involves experimentation, failure, and reinvention time after time.
I know my life is one great experiment. I think I know something, and that knowledge gets challenged. I can stick to my guns, or adapt to the new conditions. I have to apply what I know. In reading The Checklist Manifesto- How to get Things Right, they talk about two distinct kinds of mistakes we make all the time. There are errors we make of ignorance- we don’t know what we don’t know- and then there are egregious errors- when we know the right thing to do, but we just can’t seem to execute as we’re supposed to, leading to disaster.
For example, I know easily 20 different diet plan that promise to help me lose weight, but it’s not a lack of knowledge, it’s the consistent implementation over time that causes trip-ups. Part of it is programming the environment, and making doing the right thing easier than doing the self-destructive or ignorant or convenient thing. Part of it is keeping simple rules forefront in your mind, and avoiding the infinite shades of gray.
Success will be measured by how well you can adapt to the “rules” or metrics of your environment, or control the environment to your advantage. It’s how well you can fill your social, cultural or economic niche.
And that’s why studying biology and evolution is essential to everyone. Period. Know your niche and optimize it.
I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, What The Dog Saw. Unlike The Tipping Point, Blink, or Outliers, which are basically “single” ideas expanded into book form, What The Dog Saw is a collection of Gladwell’s remarkable writing from The New Yorker. You can see this collection, in part, as ideas that elaborate or continue themes Gladwell talks about in previous books, and others that might fit into a future book as well.
Each of the pieces does a great job at what I think Malcolm does best- take a few stories, and deconstruct them, to underlying principals,as if each story were a puzzle piece to solving some larger mystery or problem you’ve thought about but never really found a solution to yourself. He is a fantastic story teller, and can make anything from ketchup to hair dye fascinating. (This link will take you to an audio excerpt from the book from the section on hair color).
But what I get most from Malcolm’s work is insight.
For example, I read about Ron Popeil in the early chapters, and the deconstruction of the infomercial pitch made me think about how those pieces are elemental to any sort of business- you need to have a product or service that can be the star, and you have to find a way to tell the Star’s story, make it intriguing, and then make sure you ask for the money, so everyone can share a piece of the Star’s story for themselves. If you take those pieces and then keep them in mind when you are, say, constructing a presentation, or your website, you start to look at it in a whole new light.
In later chapters, Malcolm talks about genius, and how we also make snap decisions- an idea that’s reminiscent of Blink. But it’s making me consider how we evaluate people, how people evaluate each of us, and what small things you can do to create better “impression management”. There are some people, and one of my children is this way, who are naturally charming and engaging. These are the people we love to be around- they seem to be extra alive and have that X factor that gains them attention whether they want it or not. As a parent, I see part of my job as developing the person behind the charisma, and trying to make sure my child has the smarts and experience to back up his charm. In the end, that first impression opens up doors and lets you have greater access to opportunity, but it’s the execution on that opportunity that will eventually determine whether or not you’re successful.
What The Dog Saw is one of those books I’ll keep coming back to, because there are stories in here, and puzzle pieces I’ll be combining and recombining for a while, to see what new picture shows up in the end. Thank you, Malcolm, for a new book that causes me to think and consider more than any other book I’ve read recently- there’s gold buried in these pages.
Contest!
Thanks to the great folks at Little Brown Publishing, I received a set of Malcolm Gladwell’s books (pictured above) and they would love to send one of my readers their own complete set as well!
(I’m glad to have it, since I regularly lend out these books to friends, and ironically, my golden doodle took a bite out of What The Dog Saw, but didn’t do too much damage – here’s proof:)
(What the Dog Saw became briefly What the Dog Tried to Eat, but fortunately not too much damage).
Please leave a comment here or on one of the other posts I’ve written since November 15, 2009 on what I’m learning while reading “What The Dog Saw” and we’ll place all the names in a hat and do a drawing- I’ll announce the winners here, and Little Brown will send you a complete set for your own, just in time for the Holidays.
Thanks for stopping by, and even if you don’t win, I highly recommend What The Dog Saw. The sections make it easy to pick up and put down- a great book to read every night before bed, for example. I came away from the book simply in awe of Malcolm Gladwell’s writing and ability to tell stories- sometimes shifting in between diverse and seemingly incongruous stories, to show us the analogies and similarities that bring what makes us tick to light, and I only hope to aspire to that kind of brilliance in my writing.
I have been a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell’s work ever since reading The Tipping Point several years ago. About a week ago, I bought and started reading “What the Dog Saw and other adventures“, a book that’s largely a collection of his work in The New Yorker. It’s a book that you can basically approach episodically, story by story, but the further I get into it, the harder it’s becoming to put down.
Malcolm is a master story teller, plain and simple. He takes seemingly mundane topics like ketchup or hair dye and turns them into intriguing stories with history, intrigue and a bit of mystery to them. I feel like I’m talking to one of my smartest friends when I read his books, and walk away from each encounter feeling a little smarter and look at the world through slightly different lenses than before.
One of the points Gladwell makes in a story largely about Enron is the difference between a puzzle and a mystery. Puzzles, he says, depend on finding all the pieces to get to the bottom of the matter and arrive at a solution. Mysteries, however, often require more in-depth analysis and experience to put all the information together, including the insight to know what information is irrelevant and merely clouds the issue at hand.
This made me think about the large difference between listening and hearing- we can all access noise and information coming at us, but the real trick is taking this information and being able to hear the deeper messages, the heartbeat- find the thread that leads you to a greater understanding of the whole. For example, when someone tells you a story, you can take it on face value, or you can look at it as a clue that reveals a bit about how the person thinks, acts, and reacts in different situations. Each story we tell reveals a little bit more about how we perceive the world, and as we get older, our ability to use our collection of facts and stories to help people better understand us, and to help them better understand themselves increases.
Malcolm was one of the New Kings of NonFiction Ira Glass spoke to along with Susan Olean and Chuck Klosterman on a CD called An Evening with Ira Glass and the New Kings of NonFiction. (This is truly an amazing piece of audio, and well worth the $10 price.) I was struck by Malcolm’s discussion of how he works, how he would interview someone, and how you can see this in his work in What The Dog Saw. Malcolm takes the information he gathers and weaves it in to a narrative that contains a greater context, making every story bigger than the sum of its parts. That’s his particular genius- placing a context around disparate facts and constructing a case or point of view than makes you think.
Here’s a brief video of him on WNYC discussing plagiarism, and I think you’ll see a bit of what I mean here- Malcolm is not a surface thinker, but likes to place things into a larger framework of what’s really important:
When I read Gladwell’s stories, I’m endlessly inspired to listen a bit differently, to hear with a new set of ears, and to look carefully for those threads of deeper meaning that let me take the surface information, and work the clues and insights into something new. Like he says in the video above, musicians are very generous with identifying their influences and what inspires them, authors not always as much. I can say that what I take away from each of these stories as I read them are small insights that when applied to my projects, will hopefully make them shine a bit brighter, by understanding the interconnectedness of it all.
Contest and a Prize
After a recent recommendation by my friend, Chris Brogan, Miriam from Little Brown Publishing offered to send me a Malcolm Gladwell prize pack to give away on the site, and I could not be any more happy to do it. The prize is a set of Malcolm’s books- The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and What the Dog Saw, a wonderful set of books I think everyone should own, in part, because I do already.
Between now and December 7th, 2009, leave a comment here, or link back to this post on Twitter or from your own site, and tell me one thing you’ve learned this past year that’s changed the way you think about something. Sharing ideas and insights is what Malcolm does best, and I think this is a great way to share with each other in this spirit. On December 7th, I’ll put all the names in a hat and draw a winner, and we’ll send you out this gift pack of great books, just in time for the holidays.
And I’ll keep you posted as I work my way through this great collection of essays about the ideas that are changing the way I think as well.
