The World Is So Full of a Number of Things
A woman without a niche
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The world is so full of a number of things,
I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.
— Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child’s Garden of Verses
With a new year beginning, it feels like a good time to revisit what Flower Child is all about. And that means what I’m all about.
Flower Child and the rest of my life have a lot in common. In both, I feel like I’m always having to compensate for not having a niche.
All the Substack growth strategists tell me I need to find a niche and stick to it. And guess what — that message is nothing new to me. It was there long before Substack.
Everything in our culture is telling us we should specialize; we should fit into a niche; we should focus on one thing. At all costs, avoid being a generalist, a dilettante, a jack of all trades and master of none.
I’ve internalized these messages and often feel bad about not specializing more. But our world is so full of a number of things; I can’t make myself choose one.
What’s in a niche?
I get that if you’re a brain surgeon, a skyscraper architect, or a rocket scientist, you’d better be a deep expert in your field. I’m sure that can be said of many kinds of work. And believe me, I respect the experts.
But even experts are best served by spending time on more than one thing, if they want to keep their lives interesting and be interesting to others — and, I’d add, do well in their jobs. A brain surgeon’s patients are best served by the surgeon understanding other parts of the body and how they interact with the brain, and maybe also a thing or two about people in general.
To be fair, though, my own lack of a niche is not based on some principle that I should be well-rounded or interesting. It’s based on my inability to pick one thing and dive deep into it. Does that mean I’m too lazy to dive deep? Maybe; I have my suspicions. But it also means I find too many things interesting.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not interested in everything. I’m not fascinated by math, though I can see why some people would be. Talk of finance or business concepts puts me to sleep. I don’t have the slightest interest in sports.
To some extent, I identify with what inspirational career coach Barbara Sher called the “scanner” personality type — someone who’s excited by many different topics and feels constrained if forced to focus on just one. But I may not be a true scanner: there are many things I like doing more than once, I’ve committed to jobs for years at a time (though my longest-lasting job, at Adobe, changed so often it didn’t feel like just one job), I don’t necessarily lose interest in something once I master it (though even as I type that, I realize there’s a kernel of truth to that for me), and some themes have persisted through my life. But I relate to a lot of what Sher describes for this personality type; the range of topics I find interesting is somewhat broad; and I’m constantly being pulled in a number of directions by interesting stuff that catches my eye.
That seems to be who I am — yet I struggle with being a scanner, or even scanner-adjacent. After I wrote about fonts last week, Rafael and I watched Helvetica, a documentary about fonts (thanks to Mimi for the recommendation!). I was struck by the extent to which the font designers profiled dedicated their lives to this pursuit; I’ve never focused so intently and deeply on one thing. I admire those who do, and I often feel like I should have devoted my life to one endeavor — but the thought of doing that makes me feel trapped.
It’s not just laziness, though some laziness may be involved
To establish myself as a proofreader and copyeditor in my twenties, I took classes to learn my craft and diligently researched available opportunities — before the internet, so I had to use tools like the library! I practiced and improved over time; I’d go so far as to say I was considered a very good copyeditor.
Still, I never delved into the mechanics of grammar. Ask me about a past participle, the accusative case, or the pluperfect tense, and I’ll give you a blank stare. Or Google them. I didn’t learn those things in school, and I got by as an editor without knowing all the terms because I have a good feel for grammar and for language in general. But grammar is kind of mathematical, and I was never interested in becoming proficient at its deepest internal workings.
Does that mean I’m lazy? Clearly, I struggle with that concern. But I worked hard to establish my freelance editing business. I worked hard, decades later, to transition from working in tech to a career in clean energy. Both involved doing volunteer work while still at full-time jobs. I haven’t been sitting around eating bonbons.
Now that I’m writing a Flower Child post every week, you could say I’m working hard on my Substack — only it doesn’t feel like work, even when I’m researching the history of goddesses or the economics of heat pumps or the enshittification of online platforms. In fact, I spend a lot of my free time on Flower Child and write these posts to avoid doing things that are less fun, like exercise or taxes or managing my IRA.
What makes us happy
I think a lot about the Robert Louis Stevenson quote I shared above. What I especially love about it is that it’s not saying the world is full of wonderful things or that everything is great — just that there are a lot of things.
Apparently, that should keep us happy.
As Father would have said, “I don’t know about that.” I can’t say that the world being full of a number of things has kept me happy, and I really don’t know how happy kings are to begin with.
Yet when I sit down (or stand on my treadmill desk) to write, I almost instantly feel better. Something about the act of writing calms me, even when I struggle with it. A lot of what makes me feel better is the writing itself; if I have a niche at all, it’s writing. But another important part is exploring any number of topics — whatever interests me at the moment — as I do here.
That may mean I don’t attract thousands of readers, those hordes who apparently are out there scouring Substack for writers with a niche. As much as I’d love to have thousands of readers — and I won’t stop trying to get there — it’s more important for me to find my people. And I guess my people are others like me, people who are interested in a number of things.
If that’s you, thanks for being here. Whether you’re a fellow Flower Child or a Flower Child in spirit, I hope this is a place for you. I’m very glad to have you here as we tumble into 2026.
Are you interested in a number of things? Does it make you even a little bit happier to know that the world is full of a number of things? Tell me in the comments!
Rosana, I just have to say I get a huge kick out of seeing your tracking sheet. I remember all those names from my own search in the 1980s.
And the routine of buying — for what was it, a dollar-fifty? — the Sunday paper, spreading out the classifieds section, and scanning the items under Publishing, red pen in hand. (My system involved cutting out the circled ads and glue-sticking them onto index cards.) That is, incredibly, how I found my first job.
One of my favorite quotes from my dad: "I don't know everything about everything. In fact, I don't know everything about anything. But I know something about everything." Now, there's a career goal.