Finding Your Niche at a Cycle Turning Point

Recently, I've been wrestling with a few questions: Who am I? What should I do? Why do I work? And in an era where a major cycle may be turning, how can I live better?

These questions seem scattered, but I've gradually realized they all point to the same core: I need a direction that allows for long-term accumulation and creates optionality.

1. My Understanding of "Cycles": Nesting and Resonance

I increasingly believe that changes in the real world aren't driven by a single factor, but are the result of multiple overlapping cycles.

Political cycles are like the longest wavelength—they determine rules, order, and boundaries.

Beneath political cycles, there are multiple economic cycles: growth, recession, recovery, reflation—these changes repeat continuously.

Beneath economic cycles, there are even shorter inventory cycles: supply-demand imbalances, restocking and destocking, price fluctuations.

These cycles occasionally "resonate" at certain moments, creating the macro environment and individual life experiences we observe today. My intuition tells me that we're currently standing at a turning point in the political cycle: the beginning of a new order challenging the old. In this context, conflicts and frictions will increase, change will accelerate, and certainty will diminish.

This raises a practical question: If the external environment becomes more unstable, how should I live better?

2. Competition and Profit: Why I Started Looking for a Niche Market

I recently learned an interesting perspective: "Competition is for losers."

Combined with economics' description of perfectly competitive markets, I can understand the logic: in perfect competition, long-term profit margins are continuously compressed, eventually approaching zero.

If I'm in a highly homogenized, easily replaceable track, I might forever be trapped in a cycle of "work a little harder, grind a little more," unable to achieve real excess returns.

So I'm increasingly certain: what I need isn't "finding a hot track and competing fiercely," but finding a niche where I can accumulate long-term value—something others are unwilling to do or can't do well.

3. From Macro to Personal: I Need Optionality, Not Predictions

When I put "cycle turning points" and "competition compressing profits" together, I arrive at a more personal conclusion:

In an era of dramatic change, the most important thing for individuals isn't betting correctly on a macro direction, but building a capability that ensures you still have space, fallback options, and choices amid change.

For me, "optionality" comes from three things:

• Resilience: Not losing your rhythm due to a single fluctuation (cash flow, health, psychological resilience).
• Transferable capabilities: Skills and work that can travel with you, not being locked to a single organization, region, or industry.
• Verifiable value: Continuously delivering visible results, rather than just describing achievements on a resume.

4. What I Can Do Now: Building Accumulative Assets Through Output

I realized that I've too easily stayed in the realm of "thinking" and "learning," lacking an external vehicle to transform my thoughts into assets.

So I'm preparing to start something simple but effective in the long term: writing a blog.

For me, blogging isn't about decoration—it's about achieving three goals:

• Organizing chaotic inputs into structured outputs (training expression and thinking).
• Turning skills and projects into presentable work (training delivery and reusability).
• Giving myself more explanatory power and more choices when future opportunities arise (building personal narrative and credibility).

This is also why I recently started considering building a personal website, learning deployment, and understanding proxy/network tools—I want to turn "output" into a stable system, not just occasional inspiration.

5. A Tentative Direction: Building "Accumulative Infrastructure" Amid Change

If I compress all these thoughts into one sentence:

I hope that in an era of major cycle transitions, I can live not by betting, not by grinding, but by continuously accumulating transferable, verifiable capabilities.

One direction I'm currently thinking about: using my familiar tech stack to do work that "others can't live without, but aren't willing to do long-term"—like turning chaotic data into structure, turning systems from "runnable" to "stable," turning results from data into explanations.

These capabilities may not always be the most glamorous, but they're often more cycle-resistant and easier to form into your own niche.