Be non-fungible

I don’t remember who the 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 often bristled when senior leaders treat junior roles and people as fungible—whether staffing particular engineers on a team, or the broader world of generalists in consulting. It always rubbed me the wrong way—but to an unreasonable degree. I think it was because I was reflecting my own experience as a more junior IC, and how I was never “fungible”. I felt that I was always doing more and different things than the next designer. And I see that in the junior people I’ve lead and managed, as well.

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 believe (based on an overwhelming history of evidence) that 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 of working 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”.