The Jim Kroft Podcast

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Jim Kroft Podcast.
Today’s episode is called An Artist’s Assault on Niching Down.
That might sound like I’m picking a fight with the internet’s favourite bit of advice—but this goes deeper than that.
It’s for creatives who never quite felt they fit the playbook laid out by society.
That moment when you just knew something other was calling you—
but you had no idea yet what the hell it was.
And yeah, you look around—
and feel baffled watching everyone else seem to have it all figured out in advance,
even though they’ve barely tasted the first drip of life itself.
Everyone’s choosing their lane, tightening focus, building a brand.
And you?
You’re staring out the window, hungering after the world in all its wild, majestic, unknowable complexity.
Nothing’s narrowing—only expanding.
Maybe that made you feel late to the party.
Or like something was wrong with you for not having it all worked out.
But what if the problem isn’t you?
What if the real issue is the pressure to niche down—
before you’ve even lived enough to know who you are?
And then comes the realisation:
Yes—that’s it.
Life itself is calling me.
And I must meet it—even if it means railing against everything I was taught,
everything they try to push you into being.
This episode is for those who never fit the playbook.
Who were told to pick a path before they’d even found their footing.
Who are still searching for the thread that ties it all together—
the through-line, as I call it.
Here’s what we’re diving into:
— First, what gets lost when you niche too soon
— Second, why drift, failure, and non-linear becoming are teachers, not flaws
— And third, why the artist’s job isn’t to shrink—but to expand into the world
This is my assault on the quackery of the one-size-fits-all path.
Because if my own reckless, shape-shifting journey has taught me anything—
it’s that real knowledge doesn’t come from cutting yourself off from the hardline of experience.
Or as Hermann Hesse put it:
“At the last, you will have to take the whole world into your soul—come what may.”
So if you’ve ever felt too much, too scattered, or too slow to brand—
this one’s for you.
Let’s begin.
Your host,
Jim Kroft

1. The Elephant in the Room
Let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room:

Niching down works.

The fallacy is thinking it’s the only path—and that it’s the right path for you.

It works brilliantly if you’re a YouTuber selling courses about how to be a YouTuber.
Likewise, if you’re a content creator selling content about content, or a marketer building marketing funnels through marketing.

It’s one version of a Ponzi scheme.

Because in our crumpled Instagram society, it taps into the universal longing:
To be successful at all costs.

Even at the expense of Self.
Even at the cost of who you are.

You’re sold the idea that the only path to success is to trade the life you want to live for a futurized version of it.

What they forget to tell you is this:
It’s life itself you’re trading for it.

You see its outcome everywhere:

The middle-aged realisation that you don’t get to go back to the energy you had in youth. And neither do you have the time to develop the skills to forge the path you once promised yourself you’d return to—but willy-nilly sacrificed.

The quackery of niching down misses something crucial:

That discovering who you are—and learning to survive as that person—requires drift.
Adaptation.
You pivot when you hit a wall.
You dig when you fall into a hole.
You find the version of yourself that is most you only when your world has been broken.
Sometimes again and again.

Given that most people’s lives are shaped by drift, disruption, and survival—and many don’t even have the luxury to think about “niching down”:

Why is it so widely sold as the only path through a complex world?

Here’s why — because it offers:

Clarity. Efficiency. Growth.
The holy trinity of modern life.

Make your message clear so people know what they’re getting.

Limit yourself to one thing—then package it a thousand ways.

Stick to your niche, and the algorithm will reward you.

That’s the promise.

And yet—don’t you feel it in your gut?

The bah-ness of it.

No one wants to talk about what this mindset actually creates:

A miasma of sameness.

This mindset gave birth to genre.
To the artwork that isn’t art, but a participant in a category.

The romcom made for the niche.
The novel written for the market.
The song designed for the algorithm.

The problem is how these tactics are now being sold as the way to live.

As if your life should follow the flight plan of a captain whose aircraft was never even headed where you were going.

You’re taught the plan.
No one teaches you the cost.

So let me say it plain:

Premature niching leads to imitation, not authenticity.

If that’s the kind of success you want—no problem.
The trouble comes when that success doesn’t grow from how you actually want to live.
It becomes a version of you—but not the thing itself.

In chasing success as society’s holy grail, we rarely stop to ask:
What’s it compensating for?
Because every compensation carries a cost.
And looking back, the hardest thing to recover is the space left by the questions we silenced to fit in.
That’s where the spiritual emptiness comes from—the one so many silently carry.

Yes, there’s so much opportunity in modern life—but few are willing to call out the hollowness. Not just of the dream, but of the path we’re sold to reach it.

But if you’re living a creative life—if you want a success that is yours, that grows from your own being:
You have to risk something.

You have to risk your life by doing the opposite of what all the manuals say.

Because if you want to leave something behind—something real and something lasting

You can’t live a replica.

2. The Success That Hollows You Out
No one ever seems to ask:
What’s the cost of success if it doesn’t align with who you are?

Many of us discover a skill early in life.

But that skill often doesn’t align with what we care about.
It doesn’t spark joy, meaning, or even interest.

And from that mismatch comes the fatherly advice—championed by people like Cal Newport and Scott Galloway:

“Don’t follow your passions.”

And yet—Scott Galloway speaks openly about his addiction to being liked, to winning, to wealth.
He said recently: “I can tell you on any given day precisely what I’m worth.”

He’s brilliant, emotionally intelligent—but there’s a mysterious hole that sometimes reveals itself in his reflections.
A shadow.
A sense of something missing.
A muted grief that occasionally slips through the cracks.

He advocates a path — with heart — and yet I sense so often a regret.

And I mean that not as a criticism but as an observation.

It makes ask:
What is the real cost of choosing the practical over the meaningful?

What happens when you sacrifice the things you love, the things you’d die to do, in exchange for the rewards that come from the happenstance of being good at something.

Yes, I understand the logic.
You need to take responsibility for your life.
You need to survive.
You need to earn.

What I take issue with is the idea that doing so must require cutting off a part of yourself.

And if that sounds like aspiring to the ideal—so be it. It’s the job of the arts to reflect society back to itself, especially when society sees nothing looking back.

Here’s how I see it:

When you choose not to cut off a part of yourself—
Something else happens entirely.

You fidget forward.
You fuck-up your way into unexpected knowledge.
You accrue fantastical wisdom, the kind that can only be stolen from forgotten places.
Buried rooms.
Wrong turns.
Dead ends.

In my experience, it’s the holes, the pits, the “failed” paths—
That’s where I’ve made my life’s education.

Because your identity isn’t fixed in advance.
It’s not hiding in your most polished skill.
It’s shaped by what you wrestle with—by the friction between what you can do and what you long to become.

If you only follow what you’re good at, and ignore what you love,
You amputate the part of you still in the process of becoming.

But if you honour that longing—if you let yourself drift into the unknown—
You might just discover the greater boon:

A path that is yours.
And yours alone.

They say there’s nothing new under the sun?

It’s not true.

Statistically, your DNA is so staggeringly unique that the odds of reproducing it are mathematically negligible.

A “1” followed by more than 3 million zeros.

That number dwarfs the atoms in the universe,
the seconds since the Big Bang,
and the distance light has travelled since time began.

You are new under the sun.

And if you want to niche that miracle down into a playbook, be my guest.

But I’m saying:

Go like hell after the version of your gift that emerges only from the absurdity of you.

Because you have one opportunity—in the vastness of time and space—
To express, however imperfectly, the cosmological ridiculousness of your existence.

That, my dear friends, is something worth safeguarding.
Worth daring for.
Worth risking it all for.

Or—
You can make a marketing funnel teaching people how to make courses on marketing funnels.

Proudly displaying my press pass while covering the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall at Brandenburg Gate— was utterly baffled how I’d ended up covering it, especially as a Brit!
3. The Absurd Glory of Making Your Own Choice
At the centre of this whole thing is a single, burning truth:

Choice.

And yet—social media has left most of us living in a state of deficit.

No matter what we do, we don’t feel like we’re enough.

We scroll to fill the emptiness,
then wonder why we feel hollow at the end of it.

What were we actually searching for?

Here’s the thing:

You were searching for something.
You just couldn’t find it in your phone.
Not in someone else’s algorithm,
someone else’s simulation,
someone else’s matrix.

You were looking for your own potential.
And you didn’t even know it.

I can tell you from experience:
The road less travelled is awful at times.

You’ll feel adrift.
Disconnected from everything.
You’ll sacrifice more than you ever expected, and wonder why you started down this path at all.

Because your chances of “success”—your own kind of success—will often feel negligible.

That’s why so many artists struggle.

Not just because the path is painful.
But because the very territory you set out to discover—
the uncharted part of yourself—
might trap you in it.

You can’t be an astronaut without risking becoming untethered.

And the expanse is vast. Looming. Incomprehensible.

The paradox?

It’s in coming untethered that the good stuff happens.

You want to map space?

Someone has to.

We all know those moments:
When the universe suddenly feels like it belongs to you.
When you become so unmoored from what exists,
you feel you’re discovering the meaning of existence itself.

I remember feeling like I was walking into the heart of madness — especially in my 20s.

Everything in me wanted to pull back.

But once you’re caught in the gravity of your own Self—
You can’t pull back.

It was only by going through—not returning—that things began to fall away.

Everything false.
Everything assumed.
Everything that wasn’t me.

I thought I was walking into the jaws of madness.
But it wasn’t.

It was the pain of transformation.

The hard business of having your outer shell broken.
The slow extraction of your defence mechanisms.

Shaking, shaking—until all that’s left is something you recognise:

You.

Not the “individual” sold to you by the West.
But the ancient Self.
The deeper intelligence.
The godhead that comes from somewhere else entirely.

The paradox is this:

Once you’ve touched that space,
you can’t go back.

No, I’m not talking about bloody enlightenment, I’m talking the encounter we must inevitably make.

The cost of discovery was that I could not live a lie — no more, and not for one more day of my life.

That’s why it can be so terrifying — because once you meet that Self, there is no way to go back to the conditions that existed before its emergence.

Many a moon ago…Modern Monk
You’ve crossed the bridge; and in turning back, noticed it was on fire.

That’s why I rave against niching down — because you are not a genre.

Whose dream logic are you chasing?

The one sold to you by people who’ve never found what they were seeking?

Or do you want to actually discover the thing you were searching for all along?

The reason we hesitate is simple:

Because that vow—the one to discover what you know deep down is true—
will demand everything from you.

You risk being misunderstood.
You risk falling through the cracks.
You risk ridicule, rejection,
even madness itself.

Or—you can niche down.

But let’s call it what it is:

It’s not niching down.
It’s niching away.

Because if you cut off the totality of your being before you’ve even dared to meet it—
you’ll never feel like you’re living in the heart of life.

Just in its shadow.

And if I must be seen as a clown for saying that—so be it.

Because I would choose the desperate, difficult, soul-harrowing journey into life’s heart—

Every time.
Every day.
Every lifetime.

Over the genre’d version of someone else’s.

Photo taken in the heart of a protest by refugees in Idomeni, northern Greece at the heart of the refugee crisis, 2016. Conditions were utterly desperate and for weeks no aid arrived.
4. Breaking the Carnival of Mirrors
Niching down assumes you already know who you are and what you’re here to say.

Maybe that kind of clarity comes—with time.

But far too many are adopting it as a tactic.

It’s the illusion of starting with the end in mind—
without ever having lived enough to know what that end would be.

Because if you start with the wrong ending in mind, you spend your life chasing a version of success imagined before you knew what life would ask of you.

It’s a cosmic prank:

To sell your life before you’ve even figured out what life is.

Where did this madness come from?

This collective mania to skip the whole damn thing?

It’s the dream that success will compensate for the hole you feel right now.

That if you give up all you might have discovered, loved, and created now—for a compromised, niched-down, severed version of yourself—you’ll somehow fill the hole.

The idea?
If you sacrifice enough of your living self—
you’ll be rewarded
With status.
With riches.
With the smug comfort of knowing others think you’ve made it.

A dream that says: the hole you feel right now will be filled later—
if you just give up what matters now.

Give up joy.
Give up discovery.
Give up mess.
Give up everything for a clarified, niched, sellable version of yourself.

But here's the thing—

The Buddha was lonely in the palace.
And no one tells you about the isolation of the billionaire in the unending mansion.

Because what you start to realise—if you really live, if you really listen—is this:

The hole in you isn’t meant to be filled.

My experience of it is that a living potential is precisely living because it can never be filled.

It is ongoing.
It is ever experimenting.
It is ever shattered upon its own eureka—
and desperately re-synthesising itself.

And so the desperation to fill it—
whether through the endless tsunami of content,
or the radical compensation of enough billions in the bank—
will never fill it.

The inner vastness is precisely vast because it can never be filled.

You can never plug the hole.

Because it is a whole.

That’s why so many go crazy when they begin to countenance it.

They want it to be other than what they discover it to be.

But there is no holy compensation.

It is just as it is—
it is its own nature.

I often think of the bureaucratic maze we build
as just another way to try and impose order
on a logic that can never exist.

You can’t control it.
You can only let it be.

You have to let its own madness unfold—in order to grasp that it is not mad at all,
but has its own inner logic.

That’s what an artistic life is:

To refuse to paper over the void.
To get real that you can’t remedy the flaw if you know it not to exist.

Of course Nietzsche went mad.

You cannot build a bridge over the abyss.

You can only joyfully fall through it.

Portrait of Mo Lai Yanchi in Hong Kong, one of the great artists and directors I’ve been lucky enough to meet and who took me under her wing.
5. The Darkness of the Hero’s Journey
The hero’s journey is built on one essential idea:

The hero must find something.

A gift.
An elixir.
A truth that lives beyond the known world.

And that “something” can’t be picked up on the side of the road.
It lives out there—in the darkness.
It has to be travelled for, fought for, yearned for.

The forest must be entered where it is darkest—
because that’s where no path yet exists.

That’s what abandoning yourself to a creative life really is.
Not abandonment to nothing—
but abandonment after something.

You have to abandon part of where you came from,
in order to find what you couldn’t reach there.

Which is why it’s so damn hard to go back.

Because if you do find the elixir—
you are changed.

That’s not a side effect.
That’s the point.

You’re not supposed to come back the same.

That’s what Frodo taking the boat means.
That’s what Sam doesn’t quite understand.

It’s what Thomas Wolfe meant when he wrote:

You Can’t Go Home Again.

Why am I writing about this here?

Because this “niching down” business is almost always a forward-looking tactic.

But real journeys don’t begin with brand statements.
They begin with not knowing.

In today’s world, Frodo would be told to pick a niche before he ever left the Shire.

As if clarity can be reverse-engineered.
As if you’re supposed to define your message before you’ve had the experience to earn it.

The same tired idea is being sold to everyone:

Choose a niche. Stick to it.
Turn yourself into a repeatable product.

Define your target.

Optimise your output.

Shrink yourself to grow.

But that’s not wisdom.
That’s fear in a tailored suit.

There is the desperation to be wise—
before you’ve even done the living,
and had the experience to become it.

Again, it’s the desperation of the modern rush to the end.
To do the living before the life has been lived.

But it doesn’t work that way.

You don’t get the elixir without the darkness.
You don’t become whatever a hero is by reading the blueprint.

To become the hero of your own story,
you have to be willing to lose yourself a little along the way.

Not carve the summary before the story’s even begun.

Because the very essence of your story is this:

You don’t get to live it in advance.

A moment on stage with the timeless Laura Winkler, maverick singer of Holler My Dear
6. Become a Clown for the Great Idea
Dostoevsky once wrote:

“Sometimes a man must become a clown, that the Great Idea may not die.”

Sometimes, we abandon the Great Idea not because it isn't worthy—
but because we’re afraid of what it might make us look like.

We fear that chasing something new, something unknown,
will strip us of dignity.
Make us seem foolish.
Naive.
Like a clown.

But to go after something new in life is to agree to a sequence of failure.

That’s the deal.
Because you don’t get to know it in advance.

In a society obsessed with authority,
failure—especially in public—is unforgivable.

To fail is to nuke your status.

But I write about the clown because—
almost everything good that’s happened to me
has come from failure.

Damn, sometimes the stuff I felt was humiliating became the very thing that broke me into a new insight.

My life isn’t precisely where I want it to be.
But it has grown upwards—
upon a mound of tiny failures.

It’s helped me gain skills I never imagined I’d need.
Most of them out of desperation.

Most of them learned at the intersection where one path ended,
and another refused to begin.

There were times I stared into the abyss and begged:

“Tell me one thing. Anything. I’ll do that. Just show me.”

That’s what happened after I lost my deal with EMI.

I had no viable skills.

But I had a camera.
I’d picked it up promoting a tour.
And through it, I discovered I had an eye.
I started filming too.
Making my own music videos because back then it was so expensive.
But I hopped onto the DSLR revolution without even knowing it.
It’s seredipity not niching that brings you new knowledge.
By putting out clips online new worlds opened up.
Others started to notice.
I couldn’t have known that it would lead to making six documentaries around the world—
or that the collection of those small, desperate skills
would one day help me fundraise for missions bigger than myself.

You chase The Great Idea and the great idea starts to form of you something other than you knew can be.

You’re no longer in control.

You’re rolling with the synchronicity.

For me, my path was never predicted.
And I could never have predicted it.

I never branded myself.
I just kept becoming.

No matter how crappy things ever felt I always had one mantra:
Do the next thing as well as you possibly can.

What I learnt about “branding” was this:

If you keep faithful to the act of becoming itself:
that becomes the brand — just one you never thought consciously to create.

You didn’t niche down into it.

You expanded into it.

Broke my arm right after telling a client, “Yeah, I can fly a drone.” Bought it, learned it, showed up for the job—just didn’t factor in that walking backwards through an abandoned German factory, with a backpack on, while flying it… maybe not the best idea.
7. The Adventure That Cannot Be Packaged
When I look at the prevalence of advice on “personal branding”—
on packaging ourselves—
what I see far too often
are people boxing themselves in
before they’ve ever explored what exists outside the box.

Your life is the Great Idea.

And to find it,
you cannot use someone else’s map.

Because that space has already been discovered.

You can only begin to measure the vastness
by walking into it on your own terms.

Yes—you can bring something back.

Yes—you can niche it down later, if you like.

But don’t lock yourself in a cage
before you’ve ever left the house.

Of course, you need to shape your life.
Of course, you need to act, and to offer.
Of course, you want to see if the world responds to what you’ve found.

But you can’t live the adventure before you’ve lived it.

And if you have the courage to walk headlong into the unknown,
you might just discover not only what you’re good at—
but the thing that makes you tick.

That thing you were meant to find.
That thing you were meant to bring back.

That’s the thing you package.
That’s what you share.
That’s what you help others with.

But only after you’ve found it.

In the meantime?
Get on with the business of living.

You don’t need to second-guess life.
You don’t need to package what you’ve not yet discovered.

So why not try Dostoevsky’s great premise?

If the world is afraid of looking like a clown—
why not be the one who’s willing to don the costume awhile?

You find a different rite of passage.
The one Becket describes:
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Because once you’ve been reduced—
once you’ve crawled through the rubble of status—
what you discover is something quietly holy:

You are, finally, yourself.

And all those things you wanted from the world—
to be accepted, to be respected, to be looked up to—
you begin to see that they were part of the trap.

Because they were the very things
keeping you from your own voice.

The real discovery begins when that illusion breaks.

When, like Lear in the storm,
stripped of everything,
you begin to understand what it means to be
unaccommodated man.

At the last, yes—we still have to live in the world.
But if you’re going to sell something—

Sell something you’ve walked through the fire to learn.

Or else you’re just selling coals
to people who don’t have matches.

Because the path that cannot be repeated—

That is your potential.
And you get to live it, every day.

That, dear friends, is the adventure of your life.

With love,
Jim