Unsubstitutable

“You also have to become necessary to people, by working hard and well and bringing more than your bones and your skin to the project. Don’t just show up. Transform the work, yourself, and everybody around you. Be needed. Be interesting. Be something no one else can be - and consistently.”Katharine Hepburn

I learnt the word “unsubstitutable” recently, and it was the perfect word to pull apart some thoughts I’d had on authenticity and competition - which I believe are closely linked.

The fact is, we all want to get ahead in life. And when you start trying to get ahead, you see other people also trying to get ahead. And suddenly you find yourself in this group - or rat race - of people trying to get ahead. But this is antithetical: how can you get ahead if you’re going in the same, coagulated direction as everyone else?

What I have learnt is that if you want to blaze your own path, you have to actively work at not only being conscious of what you pick up on, but also leaning on your unique, different qualities. And that takes active work, because those qualities are often not encouraged and, in many ways, go in the opposite direction of what’s accepted, which only makes them harder to surface.

The forces that flatten us

Below are some, certainly not all, of these forces:

• Screens sucking our mental and physical energy.
• Inner or outer pressures from fear of not conforming.
• The overly similar perspectives on social media.

And so on.

Systems are identifiable at so many levels of life, and they work more efficiently when people are understandable, categorisable and recognisable.

This is to say that, to be easily understood by a system, you often have to become more like the things the system already understands.

This all sounds quite Matrixy, but bear with me. Because this isn’t a piece villainising the system. As ever, all OS pieces are meant to bring your awareness to what you are a part of, and leave the choice of what you want to do to you.

Essentially, the point here is that the more you adapt yourself (sometimes not knowingly) to what is easily understood or recognised, the more you bring yourself into alignment with everyone else. Which creates another issue for you.

Competition happens between substitutes

In my searching, I found the word substitute.

A substitute means a person or thing that takes the place of another, or the act of using one thing instead of another.

Competition happens between things or people that could replace one another. If two people offer the same thing, you can only go with one. Which brings to the forefront questions like: who is better? Cheaper? More professional?

Suddenly you’re locked into a competition you don’t actually want to be a part of. One escape is to blend your unique combination of past experiences, observations, way of thinking...into something different.

Then the pool of what you can be compared to shrinks - but your chance for luck, opportunity and all that good stuff paradoxically doesn’t.

Because when you are more specific, more you, people know what you are. We categorise things we don’t understand in order to understand them. Truly unsubstitutable people are unapologetically themselves, and are therefore 1 of 1.

This is the inverse of the popular “if you can’t beat them, join them”. In some ways, this is saying, “If you can’t beat them, don’t try to beat them at all.”

In other words: What would make your work or ideas impossible for anyone else to generate but you?

What does it mean to be unsubstitutable?

It means to be unable to be replaced by an equivalent.

The beloved Mac Miller had a lyric once: “I’m nothing man, I just am.”

Mac had that quality. Even if you don’t know him, a quick Google will show you that he was someone who just was who he was. He was basically uncopyable despite being influenced by a variety of popular and unpopular references.

He even did an album called Blue Slide Park, which was all about the park he grew up in. Who else could do that?

His references weren’t necessarily unique, but the combination was unique to him, and he acted on it.

How to actually become unsubstitutable

Take something like a lock. The more unusual or particular the combination, the harder it is to guess. Your past experience + your taste + your obsessions + unique experiences + your way of thinking + things you notice + your skills + your perceived contradictions.

All of those things could be generic by themselves, and similarly experienced or owned by others. But the exact combination of them means that, all together, they aren’t actually generic at all.

But there’s a trap! You can possess a completely unique combination and still make generic work if you leave all of it at the door.

This can oddly mean that being unique, in actual reality, is sort of passive (possibly a different OS piece), because it feels like enough of something. Surely just being unique is enough. But in the case of wanting to get ahead, it’s actually making use of that uniqueness - that active approach - which in turn gives you a chance of becoming truly unsubstitutable. Which doesn’t mean nobody else can beat you. It means what you bring can’t simply be replaced by an equivalent.

And who wouldn’t want to be that?

Thank you for reading Operating Self. The goal of this endeavour is to provide material for improving the quality of your thinking so you can make your self known.

I release articles once a week and my current goal is to get one stranger from the internet (someone who does not know me IRL) to buy me a coffee. If you want that to be you (and you’d kind of be the first paying subscriber in a way, which is pretty cool) the link is here:

Thank you and hope this piece, and what’s on this site, helps you.