It’s All Lead to This

I started writing everyday on January 1st, 2020.

Since then, I met one of my best friends through writing, I got my current job through writing, I moved to NYC because of writing, I started a writing community in the city, I can go on. Everything in my life directly and indirectly has come through writing.

Ever since I started writing, one of my main conflicts has been to niche down or not. Every playbook on growing an audience says you’ve got to niche down. I love having the creative freedom of writing whatever I felt like, when I felt like it. I didn’t want to pigeonhole myself by focusing on a specific topic.

Then I had a conversation with my roommate that changed my perspective on this. We talked about the idea of newness vs nuance.

To a novice, novelty is newness. To a master, novelty is nuance. And nuance is infinite. Especially if you’re genuinely curious about the topic, you can go infinitely deep into it and not run out of ideas to discuss. That’s how you focus on a niche in an authentic way.

It then led to the question, what topic do I want to go infinitely deep on?

Well, what have I been writing most frequently in the past year? Anyone who’s followed my blog in the past year probably knows the answer to this.

I love reading about menswear. I love talking about menswear. I love writing about menswear.

I heard from one writer that it takes five years to find your thing. I’ve written 1707 blog posts for 1707 consecutive days without fail. I guess I’m almost at the five-year mark.

Once I decided to focus on menswear as the topic, everything started to fall into place. With this project, I’ll combine my experience in writing, menswear, community and more.

It’s time to lock in.

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Introducing Riveting. A weekly newsletter on practical advice, short essays, and conversations about all things menswear.

For my first post, I went into depth on my fashion journey: How I got into it and why it matters to me.

Over the next week, I’ll write some behind Riveting on the Internet Gardener.

Stay tuned :)