Creativity in Review (2023 edition)

I don't have a niche. And that's scary as fck.

In this post, I will:

1. Reflect on my 2023 creative journey via quantitative and qualitative milestones

2. Give away a FREE gift that took me a year to make (it’s at the end 😂)

4 Quantitative Milestones

1. Published 91 blog posts this year (as of December 19th) 🤯

2. Doubled my Facebook audience for the 4th year in a row (6,000 → 12,000 → 25,000 → 50,000). I also know for a fact that this will not happen in 2024 😅 The landscape on Facebook is looking tough for creators in general, but bloggers more specifically.

3. 200+ blogging students graduated this year from my blogging Boot Camp - Writing On The Net. This experience has been a creative endeavor in itself. It taught me the similarity between Teaching, Science, and Art.

4. Almost doubled my Substack subscribers (from 2,800 to 5,400 emails) 🥳

A Few Qualitative Milestones

The Birth of Tung - The Diagram Guy

One of the most important milestones of 2023 for me was the birth of my niche as “The Diagram Guy” in the Vietnamese Blogosphere.

It all started because of this blog…

The questions I ponder while creating these matrixes and graphs are very creatively satisfying.

Can you visualize your key message in a diagram? Can you do it in a way that everyone can understand?

Sometimes, I will draw the ideas before I even use words to explain them.

As I continued exploring this format, I inspired many writers to pursue this style of compressing one’s idea into a simple diagram. I think I created an entire “genre” of blogging :)

That made me realize another creative superpower I have - Idea Visualization - I can explain very complicated thoughts, feelings, and models using simple diagrams.

Using that strength, I approached my second TEDx talk with a matrix, telling the story of how I went from a terrible writer in high school to a blogging teacher over a year ago. It was such a fun experience.

I can speak with 100% certainty (and data from the event’s feedback) that my matrix was the most memorable image of the event.

This year, I got to experience and combine my 3 strongest creative expressions - Writing, Drawing, and Public Speaking.

These identities have been fragmented for many years as I tried to separate my Public Speaker self from my Writer self (while the Illustrator self was a new discovery).

Now, I embrace the fact that I’m all of the above, and more.

Exploration (and failed)

If doubling down on my Diagram niche was an act of “exploitation”, trying to resurrect my weekly Newsletter was an act of “exploration”. After 3 tries over the past 18 months, I have concluded that a weekly Newsletter is NOT my cup of tea. I cannot create sustainably with a deadline.

Dreading to write something just for the sake of shipping it on Monday kills my creativity and joy for creating. So I decided to abandon this dream of having a “fixed cadence” forever :) I’m either a daily writer or an i-post-it-when-i-want-to writer. No in-between.

A new discovery

Fortunately, I discovered a type of focus/cadence that might work very well for me - “Series” - a specific topic in a limited time frame. I’ve produced 4 quite successful Series this year on (1) The Creator Economy, (2) My Favorite Teacher of All Time, (3) My Founder’s Journal, and (4) My Experience in India.

I will continue to pursue this format in 2024 (expanding my current collections on Substack) 😋

Writing in Series has allowed me to dive really deep into 1 topic for an extended period (from 1 month to 4 years). Such focus is not something a creator of my type (someone who writes about a bunch of different, seemingly unrelated topics) can usually afford.

I know that I’m a super curious learner, so I get excited about a lot of different topics. This means that I love jumping from topic to topic, making it really hard for my audience, the Internet, and even myself, to put me in a box and say: “Oh, Akwaaba Tung writes about XYZ.”

The fear of not having a niche

This lack of clearly defined “niche” scares me many times this year (and the years prior), especially when I’m surrounded by bloggers/co-workers whose niches are so well defined (Productivity and Tech for

Tuấn Mon

, Learning for

Long Hoàng

, Product and EdTech for

Phuong Do

).

I often feel awfully forgettable and replaceable. The fear of “not having a niche” usually came with intense writer’s block and imposter syndrome.

Intensified…

The Internet advice around niches is always about finding a Content niche - a topic where you can become an influential voice. I’ve been following such advice for 2 years, trying to fit myself in 1 topic and excel. But I couldn’t.

I thought that there was something wrong with me, that I shouldn’t try to build a career out of being a creator because I don’t have a niche.

Those were tough thoughts, especially when I’m not just betting my personal career on this creative thing, my co-workers and businesses are also betting on my success.

Only when I discovered my love for making Diagrams and Series that this obsession with finding a niche died down.

This year, I learned that there are 2 types of niches

There’s the Content Niche (aka What you write). This is what you often think about when the word “niche” comes up. This is how people can easily describe your blog. And this is what I don’t have.

But there’s also the Format Niche (aka How you write). This makes it a bit harder for your fans to describe you because “style” is much more vague than a specific topic. But this is what writers like Tim Urban or More To That taught me.

Sometimes, people subscribe not because of a specific topic you’ll be writing about, but because they love the way you explain things (through stories, models, or sometimes diagrams).

So my advice is

Set yourself free.

Be free to explore different Content and Format.

Don’t be obsessed with finding your niche. Be obsessed with finding what you love to create and how you want to make it.

Love what you’re creating. Enjoy the process. Do it for a long enough horizon and your niche will emerge, whether it’s Content or Format.

It took me 4 years and 400+ blog posts to have a vague idea of what my niche is. You don’t have to know it right away.

Niche, in my definition, is something you love doing so much - that people can just look at it and say: “That is so you!”

I have a gift for you

To conclude 2023 - one of the most creative years in our lives,

Tuấn Mon

and I compiled 30 content bytes we consumed in 2023 that completely transformed how we approach writing and creating.

You can get it for free here:

If you’ve made it this far, I would deeply appreciate it if you can reply to this email or leave a comment about:

1. Your favorite piece of writing from me in 2023, and

2. What topic you would like to read from me in 2024.

Thank you for being a part of my creative journey 💝

Have a creative 2024!