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A few agencies have reached out lately after reading my writing here in this newsletter. Which is very cool. Like so so cool. So when those emails started coming in, part of me thought: oh. Something is working. And another part of me thought: I don’t think I’m ready.

Not because I’m discrediting myself. I promise I’m not doing the thing where I receive a compliment and immediately throw it into traffic. What I really mean is I didn’t resonate with kind of support that has been offered so far.

Almost all of the advice felt the same: we can help you with your niche, your content pillars, study the categories that are performing, make the newsletter easier to package, pitch, and scale. Here’s the list of brands that are interested in working with you, etc. etc.

And listen. I get it. Growth needs clarity. People need to understand why they’re here. A stranger should be able to land on your work and feel the shape of it pretty quickly. But the more I listened, the more I felt resistance in my body.

Because there is a version of growth that would be technically successful and creatively devastating.

More subscribers, cleaner positioning, better funnels, stronger conversion, all pointed at a version of the work that feels less alive.

And I think that’s the part I’m afraid of. Not growth itself. Growing the wrong thing.

Which is why the new iPhone Duo caught my attention for reasons that had very little to do with whether I actually need a phone and more with the memories that were unlocked for me.

I saw it all over my feeds this week, and my first reaction was practical: wait, is this just a small iPad?

My second reaction immediately transported me back to my 8th grade English classes where Mr. Chance confiscated my beloved Sidekick. This duo reminded me so much of that design.

The flip. The camera. The dramaaaaa of opening it like you had a very important message to send on AIM.

There was something hilarious about watching the internet obsess (and myself - I texted two of my Apple corporate pals to share said feedback) over this futuristic phone while my brain immediately ran backward to one of my first phones. But that little loop is what got me thinking about what it actually costs to grow.

Apple announced the end of the iPod touch on May 10, 2022. That day, Apple’s market cap was about $2.46 trillion. This week, it is around $4.60 trillion. Not a perfect apples-to-apples proof point (pun intended), but a helpful reminder.

The iPhone replaced the iPod. And that is kind of the point.

Apple could have spent years trying to protect the iPod. It was iconic. It worked. It had a whole cultural identity. People loved it. But the iPhone made the iPod less necessary, and instead of fighting that, Apple let the better thing take up more room.

Sometimes growth does not mean saying yes to every good thing. Sometimes growth means having the discipline to stop fueling something good so you can say yes to something incredible.

The scary part is that the iPod was not a failure. It was beloved. It was culturally iconic. It was still a good thing. Which makes the decision harder.

It is easy to stop doing something that clearly is not working. It is much harder to stop protecting something that is working, but may be too small for what wants to come next. And maybe the iPhone Duo will kill the iPad? Who knows?

I keep thinking about that with my own work. Not because this newsletter is an iPhone. But because I can feel the temptation to protect the most legible version of what I’m doing: the version that fits cleanly into a pitch deck, the version that can be explained in three content pillars, the version that makes sense to someone selling me a growth system.

But what if that version is the iPod?

Good. Clear. Useful. Maybe even beloved. But not the whole future.

I do have a niche. I write about emerging tech, creativity, work, ambition, building, business, AI, and the emotional weirdness of trying to become a more capable person in public. But the more I write, the more I’m starting to notice the topic is not actually the niche.

I am.

I mean the specific overlap of what I notice, what I’ve lived through, what I’m learning, what I resist, what I’m trying to understand, and what I can say because I am the one saying it. That is the part no content pillar can fully capture.

A niche can help people find you. A point of view gives them a reason to stay.

And in 2026, that distinction is important, I know this. AI can summarize almost any topic. It can generate content ideas about emerging technology. It can outline the best-performing niches. It can tell you what creators in your category are posting.

But it cannot have your life.

It cannot remember the Sidekick and think about the iPod and then worry about your newsletter and then realize you’ve spent years trying to make your identities look more marketable when the whole point was that they were already connected.

That’s the part I don’t want to outsource. And honestly, I don’t want to shrink it down either.

The old advice says: narrow until you are easy to categorize. But maybe the better question is: what good thing am I protecting that might be too small for where I’m going?

The next version of the work does not require me to delete the job I had, the skill I learned, the identity I used to downplay, the obsession I thought was too specific, or the perspective I assumed was too ordinary because it was mine.

The next version asks me to stop treating those pieces like separate little products and start letting them become part of something bigger.

That feels like the choice in front of me right now. Not whether to grow or stay small. Whether to make the work easier to package, or more unmistakably mine. Not finding the perfect niche, but trusting that the most interesting one is already in process through the life I’m actually living.