“Humans of New York” is one in a million
I've been thinking about what we can do to make ourselves stand out. How we can be unique (enough) to be truly 'one in a million'. For most of us, it's not as simple as it might be for someone like a Usain Bolt or Serena Williams; most of us are not equipped with a truly exceptional talent that sets us apart from every other person on earth by our mid-teens. Most of us have to look harder to find what makes us unique.
I've come to thinking that the key might be to look at the intersections of our talents, because there's uniqueness to be found at the overlaps.
In sport, for example, I'm not an absolutely stand-out athlete. I'm pretty short, and hilariously skinny, and no longer a spring chicken at 42 years old.
However I'm ridiculously fast over ten steps, especially for someone my age, and I have good hand-eye coordination and an excellent training ethic.
It turns out, when you overlap all those characteristics, I make an exceptional ultimate frisbee player... especially in my age category. Good enough, in fact, to earn a green-and-gold jumper by representing Australia at the World Championships. (We came fifth in my first attempt in 2017, and I look forward to the opportunity to try again in 2024 after 2020 was cancelled for obvious reasons).
I think Brandon Stanton—the genius behind Humans Of New York—represents this idea to perfection. HONY is an absolutely unique phenomenon; a Tumblr/Facebook page so successful it's become a cultural institution. In seeking to explain how he created something so brilliant, I had the following idea.
Brandon strikes me as a 'good' photographer. He seems capable, but not exceptional. If you picked 100 people at random and compared him to them, he might be the best, but if you picked 1000 people, I suspect probably not. Let's call him a one-in-a-hundred photographer.
He strikes me as an extremely good interviewer. He seems to have an incredible knack for eliciting meaningful, powerful, personal stories from people, complete strangers who he meets in the street. I think if you compared him to 10,000 random people, he might be the best interviewer (or certainly in the top handful). Let's call that a one-in-ten-thousand talent.
By combining his 1/100 photography skills with his 1/10,000 interviewing skills, he becomes a one-in-a-million storyteller, and this is the unique capability that forms the basis of HONY. It's the intersection of two talents that gives rise to something almost utterly unique.
Alisa Camplin, Australia's second-ever Winter Olympic gold medallist, talks of the fact that she originally wanted to be an Olympic gymnast, but wasn't quite at the level required to get there. I think it would be fair to describe her as a one-in-one-hundred-thousand level gymnast. By intersecting that talent with only very basic skills as a skier (she was literally barely better than an intermediate skier when she won gold, so let's call her a one-in-ten skier), she became one-in-a-million as a freestyle aerialist, and took gold in Salt Lake City.
I'm really excited by this idea and I'm keen to explore it further, so I'm putting the call out for help: Can you think of any other individuals who have set themselves apart from the rest and made themselves one-in-a-million by intersecting two or more talents to create a unique overlap?
I'd love to hear from you.
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Photo by Taryn Elliott from Pexels