Ditching Hourly Philip Morgan - Specialization Is Never Boring
Specialization guru Philip Morgan joins me to talk about when to niche down and what to do about the fear of doing so.
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TRANSCRIPT
Jonathan (00:00):
Hello, and welcome to ditching hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Today. I am joined by special guest, very special guest and old friend, Phillip Morgan, Phillip, welcome to the show.
Philip (00:09):
Great to be here, Jonathan. Thanks
Jonathan (00:11):
For having me. So for folks who maybe haven't heard your name before, could you give us a quick 32nd name, rank and serial number?
Philip (00:19):
All right. Start the timer. My name's Philip Morgan. I help independent consultants thrive. I've arrived at this weird made up job for myself, starting with an interest in how specialization is the beachhead that provides this really outsized advantage. And I've ended up becoming generally interested in how sort of indie experts, you know, folks like yourself, Jonathan me, to an extent like how do we cultivate expertise and turn that into economic output. Hmm.
Jonathan (00:51):
Awesome. Love it. Yeah, totally aligned. Of course. So the, the sort of impetus for this particular interview was an email you sent out to your list with a subject line perpetually fascinating specialization. And you know, I guess someone sent this question into you.
Philip (01:10):
Yeah. When folks opt into my email list, I just redirect them immediately to a survey that says, Hey, you know, what's on your mind. What sort of questions do you have? It's totally optional whether they fill it out, but this question came in through that channel.
Jonathan (01:23):
Gotcha. Cool. And the question was, how do I discover the area of specialization that is both perpetually fascinating to me and valuable to the market? An age old question. Yeah. That's what we all want. Yeah. We, I get this all the time where people, you know, I, I talk about it in the context of positioning and, and, you know, becoming the go-to person for a particular something, you know, and, and it's, you're kind of like with, with me as a solo person or people that work with me who are solo, you're kind of dead in the water. If you don't have some kind of differentiator, because if you're just presenting yourself to the market as a, just another one of these things, you know, coder, developer designer, then you're not meaningfully different from anyone. Then you're going to have really powerful, downward pressure on your prices.
Jonathan (02:16):
No leverage in the negotiation. It's, this is a terrible place to be. It's much better to be the one and only of something instead of just one of many. And it just has a dramatic effect on the prices that you can charge. And also the impact that you can have, all of your marketing suddenly starts to work. Imagine that so, you know, we're super aligned on this, but the thing, the pushback that this reminds me of is that people have the fear as you coined it many years ago about specializing and, and there's a bunch of different ones, but a bunch of different fears of sort of three or four different fears it'll crop up. And, but this one comes up all the time where say to me I, I totally buy in on the idea of positioning and I understand why that would be good for me, but which position or which specialization, or they're not the same thing, but which focus do I pick? Like how do I pick the thing?
Philip (03:15):
Yeah. And it's, I mean, it really kind of gets to the heart of, I think, what is intimidating and scary and mysterious about this decision? It's a decision is maybe the first thing we should point out. Like we could, I could make 10 specialization decisions in the next minute. If I wanted to, the decision is free. It costs almost nothing, right? Like I could say, well, I want to specialize in actually the person who asked this question went on to say, I could specialize in underwater basket weaving, but I would not want to sink a lot of time and effort into marketing that unless I have some confidence that there's a market for it. So there's a lot going on there. But the first thing we should point out is like the decision costs, nothing. I think what people are worried about is the potential negative cost of the decision of like, Oh, I made the wrong decision or I made this decision and it looked great on paper and then it didn't pan out.
Philip (04:22):
So that's one thing I think we should talk about more today. And then the, there's another really, almost headline level aspect to this question, which is the question is saying, I want this to be perpetually fascinating. Yeah. And you know, when these questions come in through this form that I send people to, I don't have all the context. Right. So I feel a little, it feels a little risky to assume too much, but I just don't feel like anyone would use the word perpetually by accident, you know, like that's, that's associated with things like tombstones and, you know, big structures then, you know, in perpetual living memory of so-and-so it's, it's just not a word you toss around casually. So I assume that this person really was looking for a way of specializing. That would for them be always interesting.
Jonathan (05:17):
Yeah. Never boring. Yeah. Right. Yeah. There's the afraid they're going to get bored.
Philip (05:21):
Right. The answer is it doesn't exist. Like that's, that's the simple one sentence answer that that specialization does not exist for anybody. Yeah.
Jonathan (05:31):
It's kind of like, it's kind of like an oxymoron. Like if you're actually specializing it almost can't get boring.
Philip (05:38):
That's the thing is I I'd be curious about your experience with pricing. It probably like your specialization Jonathan in pricing, because I don't think it'll quite fit the pattern, but if there is a pattern, I think you could say you do need to be prepared for things to temporarily get and I'm pausing on purpose because I'm not sure boring is the right word. Maybe simpler, maybe less chaotic. And then after you get through a phase of that, things will get way more interesting.
Jonathan (06:16):
Yep. Yeah. It's like S-curves and you keep breaking through, so you go up, you go up the learning curve that you're on and you get to the top and you're like, Oh, I guess, okay. I guess I look right. And then you're like, Whoa, new door opens. Right. And it's, I mean, the S-curve thing is generally in an ascending, you know, learning curve going up. And, you know, if you imagine an S curve, it's sort of like as a steep incline at the beginning, and then it tapers off it plateaus and then it another steep learning curve and then it plateaus. But really there's a reverse metaphor of, you're just going deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole and finding new caverns to explore. Yeah.
Philip (06:55):
I, I have this sort of mental model of the human skin, this grosses some people out, which makes it even more fun for me to use. But you know, when you specialize, it's like you're getting a hypodermic needle so that you can Pierce the outer layer of the skin, the epidermis, it's mostly dead skin cells. It's very thin. There's not much going on there. There's something there, but you have to get through it to get to the good stuff, which is the dermis and the hypodermis of the skin. I thought, you know, when I first laid hold of some of these ideas about specialization and started exploring them and I was like, Oh, I'm an expert after six months in this. But that was the epidermis that was, you know, the thin dead layer where everything is kind of over simplified. And there's not a lot of nuance....