Unique… like everyone else

I was at a retreat the other day listening to the sea of voices from a variety of Artificial Intelligence scholars and I kept thinking how funny it is that we all want to be unique and how different we all are.  Just like the person sitting next to you on the bus, you are unique.   We are all different, unique and interesting just like everyone else.  My grandfather could build a house, was excellent at Maths, do pottery, take photos, make his own beer, make statues, garden, cook and fix cars.  He was a smart man… very unique, just like my aunt who teaches disabled children, my friend who designed his renovations and is a programmer and so on.

My point is we all have something to use, a talent that needs polishing, ideas that need explaining and a host of other things that constitute our uniqueness.  One guy I saw at this retreat/conference was making a robot fish to find pollutants in rivers where humans couldn’t go and of course for commercial reasons (SKYNET!).   How unique and interesting!  There was a man studying glycomics, another looking at the semantic web and me doing whatever I can to avoid work.

Why don’t you begin to be unique and special, just like everyone else.  Don’t stop doing something because it makes no money or because it’s going nowhere.  If you believe it’s you, you should want to do it just to be unique and different.  It’s the different things that make this world so interesting, at least to a boring academic like me!  There are no guarantees of success but at least you can be happy within yourself.  Don’t throw it all away, just spend one hour a week being unique, then build it up to 190,000 hours.  Before you know it you will as unique as everyone else!

Powered by MightyAdsense