A very brief post that could be much longer.
One of my ever-present goals with students was to help them see more of their incredible potential. One effective tool for this was using a simple thought experiment to prove to them that they were unique, no matter how normal they presumed themselves to be. (In case you care, this was extremely relevant in a class on digital entrepreneurship, where a crucial question was "what are you going to do to help others that has not already been done, and how are you going to do it, when no one else has been able to?")
I would ask them a series of questions:
- Where were you born? How many people were born in that state who are presently alive?
- What is an experience you have had that has been pivotal in your life? How many people have had that experience?
- What special expertise might you have had? ...
...you get the picture.
Then I would briefly recap how the probability of several things co-occuring is computed by multiplying the percent chance of each of those things together. Since each number is less than 1, you don't need many of those to make an extremely tiny number, even 1:350,000,000 (the population of the USA).
People don't make a difference because they are unique. Everyone is as unique as their fingerprint.
People make a difference because they choose to act according to their uniqueness. The funny thing is that if everyone did this, this would also not be unique. But hardly anyone does.
This is not my point, but it is prerequisite for the next post.