A long time ago on a planet with a far, far more stable climate, people would ask me “what’s the use of philosophy?”
As a person with a philosophy degree, I was obligated to find and share a good answer. The fact that I even had to answer that question saddens me deeply. In Ancient Greek, the word φῐλοσοφῐ́ᾱ (phĭlosophĭ́ā), which the word philosophy derives from, means “loving wisdom.”
A person who does not have even a tacit understanding of the utility of loving wisdom is by definition a fool.
But you are no fool, which is why you clicked on this article.
There is a little known subfield of philosophy, even among its professed professors. This sub-discipline, formal axiology, pioneered by Robert S. Hartman, is the formal study of value. It is so little known, I had to add it to the dictionary of my browser because it thought I made a typo and meant audiology.
Since the beginning of thought, people have wondered what does it mean for something to be good? Hartman had a concise and powerful answer: a thing is good insofar as it exemplifies its descriptive properties.
In other words, something is good if it fulfills its concept.
Here are some examples:
- A good website for a consultant is one that does everything the consultant requires for a hosted interactive marketing system. It is good if it fulfills and exemplifies its requirements, if it plays the role its been assigned in the consultant’s true goals.
- A good person is one that has a concept of who they must be, and lives up to that concept.
- A good life is one that fulfills what one sets out to do.
- A consulting niche is not a target audience, but a fit between a transaction cost or friction problem and a consultant’s knowledge of a solution. A good niche is one that fulfills that concept.
Many economists have written on what transaction cost economics (TxCE) is, but as I (insufficiently) understand it: transaction cost economics is an approach that sees the constraining infrastructure of the flow of economic value as being governed by the friction or cost or difficulty of performing a transaction.
I’ll come back and revise this claim about TxCE after further study, but a source I’ve been liking is “The Zero Transaction Cost Entrepreneur” which also outlines examples of this.
If you can leverage your knowledge and/or resources to zero out a (not necessarily financial, even psychological) cost of doing business, then you can take profit from that effort.
The author argues that all entrepreneurship is the activity of reducing a transaction cost.
What does that have to do with picking a good consulting niche? Well, if you’ve identified what you value, then you can apply your values to places where a cost is standing because nobody else has applied that value there.
For example, I value knowledge, and can apply my knowledge of website development and consulting to help close the gap between consultants and their target audiences by building them good websites.
Let me leave you with this:
The purposes of one’s life are the gifts you aim to give; the meanings of one’s life are what others do with them.
A good consulting niche is not an audience that gives you money. A good consulting niche is a problem-solution fit that helps you fulfill what you must be.
The difference between a job and a true vocation is that a job is merely something you are financially bound to, but a vocation is something that you are existentially bound to.