FINDING YOUR ‘NICHE’…. We all have — we need to find.

A Niche is a job or position that suits you and gives you name and fame and, most of all, satisfaction.

A Niche is one where you can sell yourself on the open market and fish out rich dividends.

 A Niche is something that you can thrive on in a particular environment.

NICHE – ‘Nurturing Intelligence Cognizance Harnessing Entrepreneurship.’

The challenge and endeavour are to find that Niche.

In life’s rat race, everyone follows one path blindly. There always stands a good chance that you can pave your own way, which can be on a totally different course than the flow of the breeze. You find your Niche, and once you are in the mould, you will just have to continue to be self-assured about your objects and ideas and endeavour to flourish in them.

There is no trail to success; everyone constructs their own pathway.

Not everyone is born with a silver spoon, but everyone is undoubtedly born with lines of destiny, skill, talent and passion. The son of a billionaire may know the art of squandering massive wealth but undeniably lacks the skill that a poor artisan’s son possesses to sculpt a Taj Mahal out of a single marble piece.

The art is not to follow family traits and thrive . . . The art is finding a Niche and doing something that takes you to a different pedestal of success and recognition. Despite following a profession and making a decent living, the Niche remains obscured and undermined.

The trick is to find that Niche, that passion that nourishes your soul, not your pocket.

‘Find something that you are passionate about and stay tremendously interested in it.’

Aditi post-graduated from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad in Textile Design. She followed mundane jobs that brought decent money home but weren’t satisfied. The reason for her dissatisfaction was that she was not meant to be running the rat race and competing with the entire world. She had different dreams and an insatiable urge to find her Niche. On her birthday, an overseas friend gifted Aditi a book on ‘paper folding’. Aditi’s free time was spent folding every newspaper or magazine that she could lay her hand on, anywhere while working or travelling. She purchased more books and slogged her brain on google to find the best work in paper folding around the globe.

Today, Aditi has taken the Paper folding art –’ The Origami’  to an altogether different dimension. Textile design breathed low oxygen into the backyard while the Origami thrived and took Aditi by storm. Today, she is a name, a brand and a topic of inspiration to millions who think that paper folding is just making birds, ordinary toys and flying kites.

Aditi finally found her Niche and is not just doing this but living her passion.

‘You have to keep trying to find your Niche and try to fit into whatever slots are left for you – or make one for yourself.’

We build walls around us. We force ourselves to live in those precincts thinking that there is no way out. We breathe and die in that precipice only. To some extent, parents also wrongly feed the naïve minds and enforce their unfulfilled dreams on them. They do not delve into their child’s mind about what he wants or can do. Parents obscure a child’s skills by forcing upon him hobbies that they could not follow when they were growing. Ms Sharma forces her son to learn guitar because, in her neighbourhood, Ms Sahani’s son is a guitarist.

‘You are confined only by the walls you build yourself’ – annihilate the boundaries and figure out who you are.

No Niche is small if it’s yours.

The need is to nurture that vital purpose in life. You don’t need a push or pull from your peer group – your passion will make you crazy and will drive you there.

WHAT TO DO? – In finding your Niche.

*Recognize your interests and passions and nurture them religiously.

*Clarify the problems that you may envisage or encounter along the journey.

*Use your mind and intellect to explore and understand the ongoing competition in your field of interest.

* Learn about the viability of your project.

* Keep testing and grilling your ideas to improve and excel.

*Believe in yourself, it’s your life, and you are the driver in the seat.

“Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did.” MARK TWAIN.

A stamp of social acceptance is not required to crown your Niche. It’s your perception of what you want to achieve and in what way.

After putting everything into Hand surgery and Microsurgery and globe-trotting to learn and train my surgical skills for more than thirty years, I finally found my Niche in Writing, Poetry and Narrations. It is not a question of the financial facet but my acceptance of what matters.

I found my Niche . . . Finally.

After reading my Books and Poetry, a school time friend said, “Anuj, I am sure that you are a Doctor by default . . . You are actually a born artist who can play with words more than with the scalpel blade.” Unfortunately, I lost that precious friend last year in Covid – I miss her.

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