“What makes you unique?” is one of those questions asked by potential employers to catch you out.
Whatever your response you’re doomed to come off as an idiot. That said, I tried to be interesting.
My knee-jerk reaction to the question, “What make you unique?” is to reply nothing. To misquote Chuck Palahniuk we “are not special… not a beautiful and unique snowflake” we are “the same decaying organic matter as everything else”.
That’s not going to get me the job, is it?
So I go looking in a dictionary for clarity and inspiration. The word unique is written alongside words like individual, special, idiosyncratic, eccentric, solitary, exclusive, rare, peculiar, novel, and strange.
I could easily make a list of personal characteristics that correlate to these synonyms, but you don’t have the time, and I don’t have the hubris, to start telling you about my idiosyncratic taste in anything.
Uniqueness I realise is dependant very much on context.
In a room full of writers, being a writer is not unique. The same can be said of artists or photographers, managers or technicians. But in a room full of specialists, I’m a polyamorous generalist, a creative thinker chasing novelty, and that makes me a bit of an alien.
So to answer your question, what makes me unique? I’m gonna say, I’m an alien!
Darrin // Nightingale 