Today i'm driving about an hour to get to a new warehouse location my wife and I bought recently. I've been on a biography kick.Listening to the founders, podcast episodes on different business leaders through history.
Today I listened to episode 314 Paul Graham as I sped along farm to market roads across no man's land to the small totown where the new property is located.
If you've followed my journey or read my comments throughout the years.I always stress curiosity. I get a lot of messages every day. And the number one question, every time is, how do you find your niches?
I tell people to work in an industry because you're going to have to have a job. You're gonna spend most of your life at that job or a job away from your family. Work harder on yourself than you do your job. Become curious of everything in that industry, no matter what industry it is. Make lists of questions. Your answers should lead to more questions. Look into and pull the thread of everything. Who are the manufacturers?Who are the creators?What's the process flow? Who are the distributors? What's the food chain? What are the channels to market? How are payments handled? How is revenue reinvested?
With every question always ask why? You want to approach it with a dialectic thinking. Look at both sides of an argument and don't have the bias to make up your mind until you've looked at the evidence on all sides simultaneously. Be flexible enough to change opinions. Be curious.
This podcast episode, reviewing this book and outlining it and pulling the quotes is amazing. It is so validating for me. I've struggled with language to describe to others how I find diverse overlooked, yet very profitable reoccurring revenue niche's in different blue collar industrial fields. I'm not interested in the specific product or have any passion for it. I have a passion for the curiosity that leads me to finding these things.
It starts simple and small yet overlooked.
I always say that your business is not going to look the way you planned it five years from now, ten years from now, twenty years from now.It just doesn't. As steve jobs used to say, you cannot connect the dots looking forward.
If you pursue curiosity though…..
There's so many crazy validating valuable points in this essay that I strongly encourage everyone to listen to the entire thing again and again. Everyone would get something different from it. Depending on where you're at in your journey and your age.
I like the fact too that anything he references in this essay is in the spans of years. Years. You could even say decades. Not overnight. Not weeks or months or days. Time is one of the three ingredients to any successful business. Finding that niche it can take years. Stay curious.
How are you being curious in your day to day?
Posted by FatherOften