Welcome to the Daily Quote, the podcast designed to kickstart your day in a positive way. I'm your host Andrew McGivern and this episode is brought to you by the Great News podcast, because good news should be heard and the link is in the show notes.
Today's quote is widely attributed to Margaret Mead, one of the most famous and influential anthropologists of the 20th century, whose career was spent travelling the world studying vastly different cultures to understand what makes us human.
She is credited with saying:
”Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.”
Go ahead and laugh. Then stay with it, because underneath the joke is one of the most generous ideas you'll encounter this week.
The joke works because it appears to contradict itself. You can't be absolutely unique if everyone else is too. Uniqueness, by definition, implies distinction, being unlike the others. So the punchline lands as a gentle deflation of the self-seriousness that always remember you are unique can sometimes carry.
But Mead wasn't just being witty. She was being precise.Her life's work was built on cultural relativism, the principle that different cultures have their own unique values and norms, each worthy of study and understanding on their own terms. She spent decades travelling to Samoa, Bali, New Guinea, immersing herself in communities radically different from her own. And what she found, consistently, was this: every culture is unique. Every individual within every culture is unique. And that uniqueness is universal. It is the one thing every human being on earth shares without exception. That's not a contradiction. That's the most human truth there is.
You are unlike anyone who has ever lived, your particular combination of experience, perspective, memory, loss, joy, and life story is genuinely singular. And so is every other person you will ever meet.
The colleague who frustrates you.
The stranger on the train.
The person whose life looks nothing like yours and whose choices you don't understand.
All of them are absolutely unique. Just like you.
Mead spent her career arguing against the assumption that any one culture, any one way of being human, was superior to another. Your uniqueness doesn't elevate you above others. It places you alongside them. In the most democratic possible arrangement, everyone special, nobody exceptional alone.
That's not a diminishment. It's an invitation. To hold your own singularity with a little less solemnity, and to extend to every other person the same recognition of irreducible, absolute, universal uniqueness that you'd like extended to yourself.When I was at University, I remember my Psychology professor asking the class who believes they are above average. Almost everyone put up their hand, including me.
Then he said that is great that we have healthy ego's in the class and also isn't it awesome that we live in a world where everyone can be above average.
I remember thinking… touché. Of course everyone can't be above average. By definition at least half of us would have to be below average. And I wondered if I was one of the below average people. But then I thought… wait a minute. He asked a general question about being an above average person. And his point is that we can't all be above average. But if we get more specific, every single one of us in the class could absolutely be above average at something. And probably were! That was my take away from that lesson.So here's the question: Is there someone in your life right now whose uniqueness you've stopped fully seeing? Someone who you label as below average without knowing their unique talent or gift that makes them special and unique?Because Mead spent a lifetime crossing oceans to understand people who were nothing like her.
You are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.
That's it for today. I'm Andrew McGivern and I'll see you in the next one with another Daily Quote.
