Do you ever go down Wikipedia rabbit holes? Where you keep clicking and clicking, until you’ve learned about something new?

On one such journey years ago, I remember discovering the “Rare Earth Hypothesis”. The basic idea is: if there are trillions of stars and trillions of planets out there, surely there must be other life forms out in the universe, right?

But if we haven’t heard from anyone yet, are we actually alone? And if we are alone, how could that be in a universe of near infinite possibility?

The Rare Earth Hypothesis suggests that, while any one of our planet’s characteristics could be common, we have a series of unlikely traits that might have led to life developing on this planet and nowhere else. Not only are we the right distance from a star of the right size, we have the right-sized moon in the right orbit with the right gravitational pull to create tides and to shield us from asteroids, and the list goes on... Each individual trait of Earth might be common, but stack them all together? And the probability of finding another Earth shrinks, exponentially—maybe a trillion planets isn’t enough for another Earth to exist.

At least, that’s the theory…

In people it’s the same. In business it’s the same. Any one of your traits can be replaced easily. But stack your many common traits and skills together, and you have a truly irreplaceable person in a sea of billions.