Be non-fungible

I don’t remember who this phrase, “be non-fungible”, was attributed to, but I think it was on an episode of Lenny’s Podcast with Marc Andreessen, and it was referenced during a conversation about how AI is reshaping roles, enhancing the best people even more than the average person, blah blah blah.

But it struck me like a lightning bolt when I heard it. I’ve rallied against senior leaders thinking of junior roles and people as fungible—whether talking about staffing particular engineers on a team, or even the broader world of generalists in consulting. It always rubbed me the wrong way—but to an unreasonable degree. Like, my reactions in those scenarios probably held me back from developing better relationships with those leaders. I think it was because I knew I was always doing more and different things than the next designer, so I was special, I wasn’t fungible.

This simple phrase, when used as a way of looking at myself or presenting myself, was novel to me. Or at least, something I’d never tried explicitly articulating like that. And I fell in love with it, because I’ve struggled to position myself when looking for a job, or asking for a promotion—or even introducing myself to a new team. I think it is because I feel the assumptions that others make about designers in whatever room I am in. I know most people haven’t worked with great designers, and I expect that I’m going to be a change of pace for them. Not just “better”, but very different in several ways that come from experience and training. But that doesn’t lend itself to a pithy headline on natebishop.com, does it?

Not sure what I’ll do with this lovely phrase, but pretty soon you’ll see my narrative on the homepage shift to include “non-fungible”.