A month ago, a woman contacted me about writing some short- and long-form content for her company’s website and marketing department. The organization needed to find someone to generate quality blog posts and white papers about unified communication. A Google search revealed yours truly, among others.

Any seasoned comms vet will tell you that UC is old hat. Definitions of it run the gamut. For here, suffice it to say that it’s an umbrella term that encompasses the many different types of—wait for it—communication that takes place within an organization’s physical or virtual walls. (I mention UC briefly in the early pages of Zoom For Dummies.)

I spoke with her for about half an hour to assess her firm’s needs and provide a rough estimate. I created one in Notion and quickly fired off a proper PDF.

And then, crickets.

I followed up with her a few times and, about six weeks after our chat, finally read the inevitable response:

Thank you, but we’ve decided to go with someone who specializes in UC. Your background is too varied for us.

I immediately thought to myself, “Good. I’m doing something right.”

Embracing the Miscellaneous Mindset

To be fair, the woman’s criticism or reason wasn’t inaccurate. I’ll be the first to cop to taking many paths over the course of my professional career. (Serving as a college professor and starting Racked Publishing are my most recent sojourns.) Like you, I know writers, consultants, and speakers who don’t. Instead, they focus on a single, narrow topic: marketing, project management, and customer experience. That’s their jam, and they lean into it.

While the miscellaneous mindset ostensibly hurt me with this prospect, I wouldn’t have it any other way—and I have been banging this drum for years. A single topic doesn’t intrigue me enough to exclude all others for years at a time. As but one example, my 2011 book on platforms led to an interest in—and subsequent book on—Big Data in 2013. That, in turn, fueled a desire to write data visualization text in 2014.

And so it goes.

I am not alone in thinking that a deliberate willingness to explore different subjects makes a person more interesting. (Check out David Epstein’s excellent book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.)

Notion and Slack for … Relationship Management?

Balancing the Upsides and Downsides

A propensity to be curious and learn new things will deter some prospects, but it will attract others. The benefits can be manifold and significant. For example, I can chat with serious would-be authors about ghostwriting books about something other than our friend unified communications.

So, I can write or speak about everything, right?

Being able to write well supercedes my current knowledge on events, issues, and trends.

Hardly. I’m not remotely qualified to write or ghostwrite memoirs, fiction, and a bevy of non-fiction topics. I can think of dozens of conceivable business or tech subjects about which I’m just not the write candidate. (I’ll never understand why a conference organizer or event planner would hire a speaker who claims to be able to give a rollicking talk about anything.)

At the same time, though, it’s not a stretch to apply this miscellaneous mindset, wrting acumen, research proficiency, curiosity, and skills to other dynamic areas. Recent topics for my writing clients have included cryptocurrencies, public policy, DeFi, and blockchain. With my ideal client, being able to write well supercedes my current knowledge on events, issues, and trends.

All things considered, the miscellaneous mindset has borne plenty of fruit.