A thought on uniqueness

“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!

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