I sent this to my mailing list in 2011....about a concept I'd been revolving since 2009: The home court advantage.

Hey there.

You’ve heard of a home court advantage. A place where you’re ideally suited to operate, where you control the environment and have all the connections.

How about if you’re not feeling like you have that advantage? In the digital age, you can get it.

Now it’s a floating sense of the perfect place for you to live and operate. You are the best person to create it for yourself since it’s customized to both your strengths -- and your disadvantages.

Tara and I’ve spent a total of 24 years living abroad so much of our mindset (and our solutions to the pains of situation mismatch) spring from that world-flung displaced experience.

But everything we’re talking about here at Global Niche pertains to people like you who face your own particular situation mismatch. Somehow the dominant culture in your life doesn’t support your inclinations or aims.

To get you oriented, I rooted through the records to find where all this Global Niche talk started.

...it was back in 2009.

I was asked to contribute a post for a major American writers’ publication about how my expatriatism positively impacted my publishing career. Great opportunity for an invisible expat in Istanbul like me.

As I began to describe in “Publishing and the Digital World Citizen” how being oceans away from employers and readers and colleagues led to me to seize whatever gate-jumping opportunities I could, it dawned on me.

Finding a solution to my problem *leap-frogged* me over many in my field (as well as professional peers in my physical surroundings). In fact, I was now in better shape to face the future than most people who were smack in the middle of the industry (that dreaded comfort zone).

So embrace your discomfort, because it’s the key to your home court advantage.

Your ideal playing field is your Global Niche.

Here's a vision of it from 2013: