The calipers felt cold and stupidly precise in my hand. On the workbench sat two Grade 8 bolts, identical in every way a human eye could perceive. Same head markings, same silvery-zinc finish, same manufacturer’s stamp. One cost $1.71, the other, from a different supplier, cost $2.41. A difference of 71 cents. And for the last 21 minutes, my entire world had shrunk to the task of justifying that difference. Was the thread pitch off by a thousandth of an inch? Was the hex head a fraction of a millimeter wider? The digital display flickered with meaningless variations, ghosts in the machine of my own obsessive need to find a concrete reason for the gap in value.

I was measuring the wrong thing. I knew it, even as I tightened the thumbscrew again. The frustration wasn’t in the bolts; it was in the question I was asking. This whole charade was a perfect, miniature replica of the advice that has paralyzed an entire generation of creators, entrepreneurs, and anyone trying to carve out a space for themselves: “Find your niche.”

We hear it and immediately start reaching for the calipers. We think it means being more specific. So we tighten the screws. You’re not just a business consultant; you’re a business consultant for mid-sized artisanal dog food companies in the Pacific Northwest. You’re not just a painter; you paint photorealistic portraits of pet lizards. We define ourselves into ever-smaller, more restrictive boxes, believing that specificity is the same as value. We end up with a niche so narrow it has no oxygen, a label so precise it describes a prison of our own making. After 11 rounds of this, we’re left with a perfectly defined, unsellable, and soul-crushing specialty.

The core frustration is that the advice is both true and utterly useless. Yes, you need a niche. But we have fundamentally misunderstood what a niche is. We’ve been told it’s a topic, a demographic, a subject matter. A what. And that is a lie. A well-intentioned, but destructive, lie.

Your true, defensible, uncopyable niche is your personal operating system. It’s the unique way you process the world, the specific methodology you use to solve problems, the lens through which you see patterns that others miss. It has almost nothing to do with the subject matter. The subject is just the data you’re feeding into the system. The system-your system-is the product.

I learned this from a man named Wei P., a traffic pattern analyst I met at a truly terrible conference 11 years ago. While everyone else was talking about funding rounds and marketing funnels, Wei was quietly explaining how an intersection in suburban Phoenix behaved exactly like a poorly designed database query.

“People think I study cars,” he said, stirring his coffee with a plastic fork. “I don’t. I study blocked processes. A car waiting at a red light is a data packet waiting for a port to open. A driver making an irrational lane change is a corrupted bit of information causing a system-wide slowdown. The cars are just the most visible expression of the system.”

Wei’s niche wasn’t “traffic analysis.” That was just his current job title. His niche, his operating system, was “the diagnosis of inefficient flows in complex systems.” He told me he’d once taken a 21-day contract to help a hospital redesign its emergency room intake. He didn’t know anything about medicine, but he knew everything about choke points. He watched nurses, patients, and doctors move, not as people, but as nodes in a network. He found the bottleneck not in the treatment rooms, but at the third computer terminal where a nurse had to enter a patient’s insurance information a second time. He fixed the flow. He could have applied that same OS to shipping logistics, server architecture, or the checkout lines at a grocery store. The subject didn’t matter.

This idea blew a hole in my entire professional identity. For years, I had been trying to find my topic. I tried “explaining financial derivatives.” I wrote 31 articles on the subject. I was miserable. It felt like assembling furniture with someone else’s instructions. The topic was a cage. I’d read the advice, grabbed my calipers, and measured myself into a tiny, boring box. I was holding two bolts, arguing about a 71-cent difference that nobody, except my anxious mind, cared about. My failure was a failure of definition.

My operating system, as it turned out, was something like “translating inscrutable expertise into human feeling.” It was the process of finding the story, the anxiety, the human core inside a complex system. Whether that system was a financial instrument, a piece of software, or a scientific discovery was irrelevant. The what was just a container for the how.

We All Have an Operating System

We all have an operating system like this. It’s built from our weird obsessions, our professional histories, the scars from our mistakes, and the strange connections our brains make when we’re not paying attention. It’s the reason why a chef, a programmer, and a kindergarten teacher might all organize a messy garage in three radically different, yet equally effective, ways. The chef might set up ‘mise en place’ for tools. The programmer might create a system of nested ‘if-then’ logic for storage. The teacher might use color-coding and labels to make it intuitive for a family to maintain. None of them are “garage organizing experts,” but they are experts in their own operational logic. This logic shows up everywhere, even in the choices that seem mundane. The way a new parent approaches outfitting their child is an expression of their OS. They aren’t just buying clothes; they are building a system for comfort, speed, and resilience. Every choice, right down to the specific type of Newborn clothing Nz they select, is a reflection of their core values-is it about organic simplicity, durability for 101 washes, or just pure aesthetic joy? The clothes are the expression, but the underlying philosophy is the product.

I’ve come to believe that the relentless push for topical niches is a form of industrial-age thinking that no longer applies. It’s about categorization for the sake of an assembly line. It treats people like interchangeable parts. “We need a bolt for this hole.” But in our current world, the value isn’t in the bolt; it’s in the unique and surprising way you solve the problem of fastening two things together.

So I despise the question, “What’s your niche?” It’s lazy and it forces a label that is, at best, a temporary snapshot of your current interests. I still find myself giving a simple answer, of course, because it’s socially expedient. But it always feels like a lie.

Instead of “What’s your niche?” what if we asked, “What’s your method?” or “How do you solve problems?” or “What pattern do you see everywhere?” That’s where the real value is. That’s the thing that can’t be easily copied by an algorithm or outsourced for a lower price. Anyone can learn about a topic. Almost no one can replicate your specific, hard-won, time-tested operating system.

This is why it’s a mistake to look at someone successful and copy their topic. You see a popular YouTube channel about restoring old tools and think, “I should start a channel about restoring old tools.” You’re copying the what, but you’re missing the how. The success probably has nothing to do with the tools themselves. It might be the creator’s operating system of “finding the hidden story in discarded objects,” or their method of “calm, methodical progress in a chaotic world,” or their unique lens of “connecting with a grandfather they never met through his craft.” The tools are just the medium. The real niche is the unstated, deeply personal process.

I still have those two bolts. They sit on my desk. They’re a reminder. A reminder that obsessing over tiny, superficial differences is a trap. The 71-cent price gap probably came down to some boring logistical detail-one company bought a shipping container of 1,000,001 of them, the other only bought 101. It was a detail that had nothing to do with the intrinsic worth or function of the object itself. It was a distraction. The real work is to stop measuring the bolts and start understanding the engine you’re building with them.