This makes you a unique person

¿Qué te hace una persona única?

aridio fernandez

Feeling that you are a unique person, that you are different from the rest and that you stand out for something, is a source of self-esteem that can help you feel good. It is realizing that you have your own voice, that it does not matter if it is you or someone else who does or says something.

Of course it’s nice to feel part of a group, a community, a collective. When you recognize that the team is more than the sum of the individuals, you feel part of something bigger than yourself and that’s good too. But if within that group you do not have your own voice, you realize that you do not contribute as much and that perhaps you are not so indispensable to others.

OK, I got it. But how do I be a unique person?

Many try to stand out in something: to be the person who knows the most about Borges, who remembers the most digits of pi, who climbed Aconcagua the most times, or who knows the most about special relativity. And some do. But they are very few. Only one person is Usain Bolt and only 10 people are in the top ten of anything.

So, for most of us, that intent doesn’t make us unique. So here comes the idea.

What makes you truly unique is the combination of things you did, lived through, or knew about. Once you’ve traveled enough jobs, hobbies, relationships, that journey is going to be unique. And it is not necessary to have been the best in each of those steps. It is enough to have done them with dedication and focus.

There are not many people in the world who have read 3 Borges stories, who know that the first digits of pi are 3.1415926, who tried to climb Aconcagua and almost made it to the top, and who once thought they understood Einstein’s twin paradox . That combination makes you a unique person, someone unrepeatable. It gives you a lens to see the world that only you have.

When I was a business consultant, I wasn’t the best. But he was probably the only one who had grown up in Buenos Aires, had participated in a correspondence chess tournament, had programmed BASIC on the Commodore 64, had studied physics, and had read Asimov voraciously. And that mixture made it possible for me to make a contribution that only I could do.

Those intersections between what you did and what happened to you throughout your life make you unrepeatable and indispensable.

What are the combinations of knowledge and experiences that make you a unique person? What can you do to broaden your life a little more and thus develop your own voice? If you want to share your answers, you can do so in this post on Instagram or on LinkedIn.

This idea came from conversations we had with Rebeca Hwang, while I was helping her prepare her TED talk. If you haven’t seen her yet, here she is. Thank you Rebecca