How Fear Blocks Your Unique Path

I believe the most important aspect to uniqueness is curiosity.

It supports uniqueness, or is the precursor to it, since it drives the interest necessary to differentiate oneself from the crowd.

And I suppose if I dive a little deeper, I believe fear is what keeps someone forever in the tribe of mediocrity and common viewpoints.

Curiosity about our fears teases out the conditioning that led to the fear in the first place, and if you face any fear with curiosity, then a unique viewpoint has the soil to grow– under the right conditions.

I’m a self-taught jeweler, and started getting curious about fire and metal about 20 years ago. I didn’t take any formal classes. It took me 6 months to get over my fear of the torch since I had to figure it out myself.

But I got curious about propane and oxygen, and one thing led to another.

Since I am self-taught, once I conquered my fear of melting metal and soldering, I began the process of developing a unique way of making jewelry since I was never taught the standard methods of professional metalsmiths.

It allowed me the freedom to try something out, see what happens, then use my mistakes as jumping off points to develop my unique aesthetic.

The process of individuation is a long one, though.

It requires a lot of time to reinvent the wheel, according to how YOU might do it, and without the benefit of the shared knowledge of the people that came before you.

You have to leave the tribe, in many ways, in order to become unique.

And one of the most ingrained fears we have as humans is leaving our tribe.

Get curious about overcoming that fear of turning your back on the common consensus of the crowd or tribe and see what happens.

True uniqueness is the path of solitude.