Most information out there says pick a topic and keep throwing ideas out there. Keep writing until something resonates with your audience and then you can find your niche by doubling down on what works.

The question I keep asking myself is when people aren't reading my content now, why are they going to read it later? And how will I find my niche without readers?

When you're a subject matter expert, your credibility exists when you start and people will read your stuff. For example, if you've sold your first startup and are writing about building a startup your credibility already exists. An aspiring entrepreneur is likely going to read your posts.

But what if you want to write about, say, psychology but you have no qualifications except for the few books you read? How will this build an audience?

Today I spent a few hours listening to podcasts on why 'Learning in Public' works. Learning in public is just a fancier way of saying - document everything you're learning and make it public.

If you’re in the very early stages, share your influences and what’s inspiring you. If you’re in the middle of executing a project, write about your methods or share works in progress. If you’ve just completed a project, show the final product, share scraps from the cutting-room floor, or write about what you learned. - Austin Kleon

Learning in public is a mindset to solve our own problems and productising it

We can either do lots of research to find what our users and the market wants and build it, or look inwards and solve our own problems.

James Clear mentioned that he wrote Atomic Habits for himself. It's what he would have wanted himself to read years before he wrote it.

But how would James Clear know what he was exactly thinking years back if he hadn't documented it? Without documenting the trial and error of his own theories, how would he have known what to tell his past self why something won't work?

His ultimate product was a book. But all his documentation served as a reference to the person he should write the book for and along the way as his content got better and he built his credibility by simply showing up in public.

Learning in public helps us distill our learning and make progress

I often see myself learning something one day, only to forget everything I've learnt and go back to the same topic a few weeks later. The aha moment, the insights and everything that I found when I learnt about it, is just temporary. It goes away.

Writing and documenting it not only helps retain this information, but also helps to think deeper and distill it into the most understandable way for my future self. This way I don't have to go back to that 3 hours of podcast to know the same thing months or years later.

It helps me make real progress on what I'm learning as against chewing on the same information continuously wondering where to go next. With the credibility we gain from showing up and by refining the quality of our thinking and writing, we create something of value that our audience is interested in.

Learning in public is more importantly for our future self

Before audience building, the first person learning in public benefits is us. For example, I didn't know much about learning in public or audience building before I wrote this article, but with curiosity and spending a couple of hours walking around the park listening to a few podcasts, I now have a solid foundation to continue my journey on.

I now have a convincing theory clearly distilled in a way I would understand on why this works. Without having written this, there would have simply been a bunch of ideas floating around in my head only to be forgotten soon.