Day 5 of the 31 Day Calendar of Blog Post Ideas for January and the topic for the day is: “Habits and Personality Traits. Every niche attracts a certain type of people and a certain kind of customers. What do they have in common?”

I find this topic a little difficult to write about. It seems that every niche I’ve ever been a part of, I have found each person to be quite unique and different from another. For instance, if I think back to my University days where the crowd I hung around with were all dental students, I definitely felt we had very little in common. As a group, we would never have become friends if it weren’t for the fact that we were studying the same subjects. The usual topic of conversation at just about every gathering was dentistry.

I recall an incident one night when we were having dinner together and one person remarked, “Why do we always talk about dentistry? It’s all we ever talk about. Let’s talk about something different tonight. Shall we agree not to mention anything about dentistry?” We all agreed not to talk about dentistry for the night and a strange silence fell over the table. It seemed like none of us could think of an alternative topic to talk about. Barely five minutes later, we gave up and talking about dentistry again.

Now that I am no longer practicing as a dentist, I find myself somewhat of an outsider to the group. I feel like I don’t fit in any more because I no longer have any dental stories or experiences to share. It’s such a shame that I no longer have anything in common with that group.

Another niche I hung around with was a rock climbing group. What brought us together was the fact that we were all rock climbers. We spent nearly every weekend at the crag and we often had dinner together after climbing. During the week we would meet up at the local climbing gym and have supper together after our climbing session (which usually ended when the gym closed).

Once again, I felt this was a pretty diverse group of individuals. It’s ironic that I spent much of my free time with this group, yet I barely knew any personal details about each individual because every social opportunity was absorbed by the topic of climbing. Whether it was about a route that we were working on, how to improve, training techniques, the happenings in the rock climbing community, our trips together – nearly everything we talked about was in some way related to rock climbing. It felt like it was the rock climbing that kept us together. True enough, when we stopped climbing, we also stopped hanging out together.

There were niches in each of my ex-companies as well. While I worked with the company, I spent time with my colleagues – lunches, dinners, and a variety of events both work and non-work related. After I left each company, it was like I slowly lost touch with each group. Even when I would get together with them again for the odd special occasion, like a wedding, I find that the topic is very central to work at the company.

After reflecting upon this, I guess the thing that each niche has in common is the subject that brought them together. Like with the dental group, it was Dentistry; for the rock climbing group, it was climbing; and for the work group, it was the company. I guess that as long as we have one thing in common, we can be friends with almost anyone.