Everyone Is Unique

There is no recipe for uniqueness. It’s not a commodity to be bought and sold on a mercantile exchange floor. Sometimes, in our mission to help each other grow or otherwise meddle in the lives of our friends and family, we oversimplify. We want people to understand us so we break something that shouldn’t be broken down into a system. A paint by numbers life. A 12-step program that will fix everything that’s wrong with our lives.

But it doesn’t work this way. Uniqueness is like a song. Or a novel. Or a great plate of coconut shrimp with orange marmalade. How long will it take? What are the steps to get it perfect every time? The answer is that it depends. Each person has their own path, a unique journey to a unique destination.

That said, just as with art and great cooking, there are some general rules and guidelines to help us find our way.

First, everyone is unique. But some people are more unique. This reminds me of the book Animal Farm where everyone is equal, but some animals are more equal than others. Yet the principal for uniqueness is less about fooling the less-unique into thinking they are equal with the privileged few. Instead, this is just a fact of life. It’s not a happy fact, but a fact none the less.

We can take this one of two ways. One, we can fret about it, throw a fit, give up, yell obscenities, and cry at our own party. Or we can accept this fact of life as the freeing reality it is.

We can’t become someone we’re not. And we shouldn’t expect to.

I believe the real lesson here is to worry less about how unique we are and instead just try to be the best version of ourselves we can be. Everyone can do that. And besides, if everyone had the same magnitude of uniqueness, that wouldn't be very unique.

 Stay tuned for the rest of the guidelines to finding your uniqueness in upcoming blogs.

 

Thank you for joining me in this celebration of uniqueness.

I'm working on my sixth book, The You Gap, and intend to include some of this content in it. Please help me make The You Gap better by leaving a comment below.