← The Art & Business of Writing Podcast with Nicolas Cole
The Art & Business of Writing Podcast with Nicolas Cole
Why Your Niche Isn’t The Problem (The Genius-Idiot Rollercoaster)
00:08:48
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If you think your niche is saturated, your business is dying, competition is too strong, whatever trend you were writing is over. Then today's video is for you. I want to introduce you to what I like to call the genius idiot roller coaster. And it goes like this. You start doing something, so you start writing online. You start providing a service, you start selling a product, you start building a business. And in the beginning, it takes some time to see traction, right? I mean, we've all gone through that. But for example, let's say you decide to start writing online. You write two things. You don't go viral and magically become the most read writer on the entire Internet overnight. And very quickly, you rationalize stopping. And the easiest way to write, rationalize stopping, is by blaming some external factor. So whatever platform you picked to start writing on is broken, or the algorithm is against you, or readers today don't recognize real artistic talent, which you clearly have. The niche you picked is too competitive or it's too saturated. The topic that you chose to write about isn't trendy anymore. Whatever. In the beginning, we all do this. This is what we tell ourselves. And a small number of people, despite all of these rationalizations, keep going. They decide, you know what? I'm going to give it a little bit more time. I'm going to give it 30 more days, I'm going to give it 60 more days, whatever. Until all of a sudden, one day, they write something that strikes a chord, and they get 10 times or a hundred times or even a thousand times more viewership on what they wrote overnight. And every single person who experiences this, especially the first time, comes to the same conclusion. I'm a genius, right? Instantly, you decide, you were right all along. You always had it in you. You're smart, you're capable, you're talented, and the world is finally taking notice. Now, sometimes this euphoria lasts a day, sometimes it lasts a week, sometimes it lasts a month. But what goes up must come down. And inevitably, at some point in the not so distant future, that euphoria is going to wear off and you're going to feel yourself riding this roller co in the other direction. An easy example here is imagine you followed my advice. You watched tons of my YouTube videos. Maybe you even joined one of our programs like Shift 30 for 30 or premium ghostwriting Academy, and you decide to start writing in a line. You decide to start ghostwriting. So you embark on this journey, you start building some of these new skills, and then you start reaching out to potential clients. And in the beginning, before you've landed your first client. You can hear all of those early rationalizations just screaming inside your brain. This doesn't work. Cole was wrong. Cole doesn't know what he's talking about. This probably doesn't even work for my industry. The niche I picked is too saturated. Nobody can afford my services, right? Just over and over again, this is everyone. We've had over a thousand people go through our premium ghost training academy. And I can tell you without fail, every single person says some variation of this to me and our team during their first few weeks, until one day, a prospect responds to their outreach. They want to talk, so they hop on the phone. And then later that afternoon, the ghostwriter makes their first $5,000. And literally, in an instant, the complete opposite happens. And the writer starts saying to themselves, oh, my God, this works. I picked an amazing niche. I'm great at this. I'm a genius. And you completely forget that 24 hours before this happened, your entire worldview was, this won't work. This won't work. This won't work. And so you would think after an experience like this and experiencing this switch, you would learn, right? We would learn that whatever point of view we held before might not be a hundred percent correct. But that's not what happens. Sticking with our example, let's say you land another client, and then you land another client, and what happens is you continue thinking you're a genius, you have the best business ever. Entrepreneurship isn't even that hard. Until one day, two clients churn, and overnight your income goes down by 60%. And then what happens? You begin riding the genius idiot roller coaster all the way back down. Two clients turn, and you go right back to where you were before, thinking, I knew this didn't work. I knew my industry was saturated. I knew I picked the wrong niche. I knew nobody could afford my services. And unfortunately, you stay there, sometimes for a day, sometimes for a month, sometimes for a year, until you land two new clients and you repeat the cycle all over again. I'm a genius. I'm an idiot. I'm a genius. I'm an idiot. And so what's the moral of what I'm telling you? It's that neither of the extremes are true. And I want to tell you a quick story to show you why. I have a close friend who's a therapist and life coach. When he graduated from grad school, I helped him get his business up and running. And in the beginning, he said his only goal was to make 100k per year. If he could do that, he would be happy, he'd be satisfied. That would be enough for him. That's eight grand per month. And I told him that was completely doable. So I helped him work on his positioning. I helped him figure out who his ideal client could be. I helped him refine his sales pitch, all of it. And for the first couple months, same as everybody else, he didn't believe that it was going to happen. He hoped. He trusted me. But he was skeptical. And his wife was even more skeptical. She was encouraging him in the background to just get a regular job and work for someone else's practice because that was more reliable. But we stuck with it. He stuck with it. And eventually he started landing clients. So nothing happened. Nothing happened, Nothing happened. And then all of a sudden, everything happened and it finally clicked and he hit his goal. He went from being a broke grad school student to running his own practice, making eight grand per month fairly quickly. Guess what happened then? He thought he was a genius. Business was good. Clients were coming in and we'd talk on the phone and he'd tell me about how amazing everything was going and how this had completely reframed his own potential. Now he wanted to make 200k per year. Then he wanted to make 300k per year, right? Because it was so easy to find clients. He was in the genius part of the roller coaster, right? He was at the top end. Then a couple months later, some of those clients churned. Very normal in any service business. And it's not that his business was dead by any means, but he did start to fall below that 8k per month threshold which defined his quote unquote, success. So guess what happened then? He called me in an absolute panic. I knew this was too good to be true. I don't think my coaching offer works anymore. I think I need to change niches. I think I need to go after a different type of client. Literally every rationalization you could possibly think of, he said to me. And I remember it because it was like a two hour long conversation. I had to talk him off the ledge and tell him, dude, it happens. This is just part of the game. This is what running a service business looks like. Okay, Relax. But he couldn't relax. He was now at the bottom of the roller coaster. And the only thing he felt in that moment was that he was an idiot. He was an idiot for thinking that he could do this, and he was an even bigger idiot for trusting me. Okay, so guess what happened? Literally three days later, three new clients all came through the door and signed in the same week. And then he calls me again. And by this point in the story, you should know what the message was. He goes, cole, I'm a genius. I knew everything was fine. I have an amazing business. I have an amazing niche. Right. I have an amazing offer. This is a close friend. We talk on a weekly basis. And I can tell you that we have had some variation of this conversation every couple months for the past five years, ever since he started his coaching business. And I don't fault him for it, because I used to go through the same thing, especially when I was building my ghost writing agency. When we would land five new clients in a month, I would literally have trouble sleeping at night because I was so jacked up on adrenaline, daydreaming about how I was building this massively successful company and I was going to make millions of dollars and become a business titan. And then when we would lose five clients in a month, I would also have trouble sleeping because I thought my business was about to die and it was a trend and we just got lucky and the party's over. And it was good while it lasted. And I was an idiot for ever thinking otherwise, right? Genius. Idiot. Genius, idiot. And it's taken me a really long time to learn. Anytime you are trying to create something, this rollercoaster is inevitable. It's part of the process. And again, neither extreme is true. When things are going well, you aren't a genius. Things are just going well, probably because you executed the fundamentals consistently over a reasonable period of time. And when things aren't going so well, you aren't an idiot. Things just stopped working, probably because you stopped executing the fundamentals in some way or another. But that doesn't mean your business is about to die. Every single business has good months and bad months, has up times and downtimes. And every worker and team member inside of every business has good months and bad months, uptimes and downtimes. Salespeople are a great example of this. Every solopreneur, every creator, every single person trying to create anything in the world has good months and bad months, uptimes and downtimes. Which means there's a skill to build here. And that skill is learning how to be level headed despite being chained to the genius idiot roller coaster. Because it's going to happen either way. You're going to feel manic when things are going great, and you're going to feel depressed when things aren't going so great. The skill though, is being able to manage the highs and coach yourself out of the lows. Remind yourself at both the peak and the valley that neither extreme lasts forever. When you're up, instead of projecting that state out and thinking this feeling of euphoria is never going to end, you should talk yourself down a little bit, right? You should humble yourself. And when you're down, instead of projecting that state out forever and thinking that this feeling of depression will never end, you have to learn how to coach yourself out of that low. Right? You have to stay optimistic. If there's one soft skill I notice the vast majority of people lack, it is this one. They wrap their emotional state and identity up in the performance of whatever thing they're trying to build. When their business is doing well, they're doing well. And when their business isn't doing well, they aren't doing well. And that is a horrible, horrible way to approach any level of entrepreneurship. Instead, like I said, the skill to build is being able to manage the highs and coach yourself out of the lows. And in order to do that, your emotional state has to be separate from the performance of your business. Anyways, I just wanted to share that with you today because A, it's something I've been thinking about a lot, but B, because it's something I noticed that causes a lot of talented people to give up or quit something the moment they start sliding down that genius, idiot roller coaster when really they would be just fine if they just coached themselves out of the low and kept going. That friend of mine who told me 50 times his business is going to die, guess what? It's still going. And he's just fine. So the next time you feel yourself riding the roller coaster, relax, go for a walk, remind yourself that this is a skill and it's a skill that you need to build. You have to learn how to manage the highs and coach yourself out of the lows. Otherwise you aren't running your business. Your business is running.