November 28, 2025

Why NOT be picky?

Fellow list member Avi Marcus wrote in with an excellent perspective on my recent message about niching down (shared with permission):

Right - niching down can be for any kind of subset of the market. It depends on what you’re optimizing for.

If you’re optimizing for a specialty then you can charge more.

If you’re optimizing for easier marketing and making more use of your domain knowledge in that field, then pick a vertical.

If you want less emergencies and less stress, pick a group that is more relaxed and has less emergencies.

If you want to have more fun and click with a certain kind of person, then only accept those as clients.

Anything that is “I don’t need to be desperate, I can be picky about my clients” is one form of niching down.

I especially like Avi’s closing point.

I mean, seriously...

Why WOULDN’T you be picky about who you work with?

Probably because you’re desperate for work.

If that’s the situation you’re in, you might want to figure out how to decrease your desperation.

The Catch-22 of this is that the fastest way to stop being desperate for work is to start getting picky about who you work with.

Yours,

—J

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