Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
by Seth Godin
Amazon Link: Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
CONTENTS
A FIRST LOOK AT LINCHPIN
The world has changed (again) and the stakes are higher than ever. Now we're facing a full-fledged revolution—a hyper-competitive world involving art and gifts and fear and the ability for you (for anyone) to make an indispensable contribution to something you care about. If you're not indispensable (yet) it's because you haven't made that choice. My goal is to help you see that the choice is yours.
Introduction
You are not a faceless cog in the machinery of capitalism (anymore). You now have a choice. This book outlines the two paths available to each of us, and teaches you about why you might be resisting the less-traveled (but better) choice.
The New World of Work
We have gone from two teams (management and labor) to a third team, the linchpins. These are people who own their own means of production, who can make a difference, lead us, and connect us. The death of the factory means that the entire system we have built our lives around is now upside down. This is either a huge opportunity or a giant threat. Revolutions are frightening because the new benefits sometimes lag behind the old pain. This time, the opportunity is to bring your best self to the marketplace and be rewarded for it.
Thinking About Your Choice
And it is a choice. A choice to buy into the fear and the system or to chart your own path and create value as you do. It's your job to figure out how to chart the path, because charting the path is the point.
Indoctrination: How We Got Here
The scam is that just about everything you were taught in school and by the media was an invented myth, a fable designed to prep you to be a compliant worker in the local factory. School exists for a reason, but that reason might not be what you think it is.
Becoming the Linchpin
The linchpin is an individual who can walk into chaos and create order, someone who can invent, connect, create, and make things happen. Every worthwhile institution has indispensable people who make differences like these.
Is It Possible to Do Hard Work in a Cubicle?
To become indispensable involves doing difficult work. Labor in the best sense of the word. The act of bringing your whole self to work, of engaging in tasks that require maturity and soul and personal strength, and doing it for the right reason. Linchpins are geniuses, artists, and givers of gifts. They bring humanity to the work, they don't leave it at home. The hard work isn't lifting or shoving or sharpening. The hard work is being brave enough to make a difference.
The Resistance
So, why is this so hard? It turns out that it's biological. Deep within your brain lies the amygdala, the lizard brain. It sets out to sabotage anything that feels threatening, risky, or generous. Until you name, recognize, and deal with the resistance, you will stay frustrated.
The Powerful Culture of Gifts
Art is a gift. A real gift, not part of a deal, not a transaction entered into with reciprocity in mind. The culture of gifts has a long history on this planet, and understanding how it brings people together is a critical step in becoming indispensable.
There Is No Map
Indispensable linchpins are not waiting for instructions, but instead, figuring out what to do next. If you have a job where someone tells you what to do next, you've just given up the chance to create value.
Making the Choice
If value is created by what you choose to do (as opposed to what you were born with), then the essence of becoming a linchpin is a choice. Deciding to overcome the anxiety (false fear) associated with leading and connecting is the choice that few are willing to make.
The Culture of Connection
Linchpins don't work in a vacuum. Your personality and attitude are more important than the actual work product you create, because indispensable work is work that is connected to others.
The Seven Abilities of the Linchpin
What does it take to be indispensable, the person they can't live without?
When It Doesn't Work
There are no guarantees that the marketplace (commerce) will embrace your ideas (art). And when the connection isn't made, blind persistence isn't always the best approach.
Summary
Today is a turning point, a once-in-a-lifetime moment in time when you get to make a choice. Every day, people like you are choosing to go down a less well-defined path, one in which they make choices and make a difference. It turns out that not only does this fulfill our potential as workers and citizens, it is also precisely what the marketplace demands. Instead of focusing on complying with management as a long-term strategy for getting more stuff and being more secure, we have a chance to describe a powerful vision for our future and to actually make it happen. This new dream isn't about obedience, it's about vision and engagement.
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Chapter and heading list
- Introduction
- You Are a Genius
- Reality
- This Time It's Personal
- Making the Choice
- The Take-Care-of-You Bargain
- Where Does Success Come From?
- Where Does Average Come From?
- Developing Indispensability
- The New World of Work
- We Are Surrounded by Bureaucrats, Note Takers, Literalists, Manual Readers, TGIF Laborers, Map Followers, and Fearful Employees
- Where Were You When the World Changed?
- Thank You for Protecting Us from Our Fear
- The PERL (Percentage of Easily Replaced Laborers)
- The Rule of Ordinary People
- Tough Times in Queens
- Your Street Corner
- How Companies (Used to) Make Money
- A Century of Interchangeable, Disposable Labor
- (The Final Straw: The Law of the Mechanical Turk)
- (The Pursuit of Interchangeability)
- Was the System Always About Obedience?
- Art and Initiative and Who's an Artist Now?
- The Myth of the White-Collar Job
- Average Is Over
- When the New System Replaces the Old
- Who Wins?
- (You Are What You Do)
- (Karl Marx and Adam Smith Agreed)
- The End of ABC and the Search for the Difference Maker
- Owning the Means of Production
- Mediocrity and the Web
- The Hierarchy of Value
- (How the Average Subsidize the Merely Mediocre—and the Above Average Get Screwed)
- Remarkable People
- Thinking About Your Choice
- Can You Become Indispensable?
- Teaching Remarkable
- If You Want …
- Limited or Unlimited?
- Will You Still Be Loved?
- Special Circumstances
- You Can't?
- The New American Dream
- What Would Make You Impossibly Good at Your Job?
- "Not My Job"
- More Obedience
- Secret Memo for Employees
- Secret Memo for Employers
- This Is No Time for Dumb Tools
- The Boss's Lie
- Indoctrination: How We Got Here
- Mediocre Obedience
- Description of the Factory
- You Get What You Focus On
- Factory Workers
- Avoiding Overproduction
- From Superhero to Mediocreman (and Back Again)
- The Tiny Range of Motion
- Fear at School
- Does School Work?
- "I Am Good at School"
- What They Should Teach in School
- Solve Interesting Problems
- Lead
- In Search of Great Teachers
- Becoming the Linchpin
- You Can't Get Far Without One
- Creating Forward Motion
- Linchpins and Leverage
- Massive Shift in the Leverage of Productivity
- The Tedium, Pain, and Insecurity of Being Mediocre
- Does Every Organization Need Linchpins?
- Depth of Knowledge Alone Is Not Enough
- The Best Reason to Be an Expert in Your Field
- Emotional Labor and Making Maps
- Your Job Is a Platform
- Degrees of Freedom
- Marissa Mayer
- Give Yourself a D
- Who Are You Trying to Please?
- The Troubleshooter
- Krulak'S Law: Linchpins Whether You Want Them or Not
- Why We Started to Care
- A League of Your Own
- On the Other Hand …
- (Colbert's Rapport)
- Fearless, Reckless, and Feckless
- Where Do You Put the Fear?
- The Problem with (Almost) Perfect
- Showstopper!
- The Pursuit of Perfect
- Rough Edges and Perfect
- The Problem with Bowling
- The Downside of Good
- He Works for Blessings
- The Work Whisperer
- Do You Need a Résumé?
- Google You
- How to Get a Great Job
- Hiring at IDEO
- Saying No
- How to Make the Olympic Ski Team
- Posture for Change
- Unsolicited Advice for Steve
- What's in It for Me
- Remarkable People Deserve Remarkable Jobs
- Is It Possible to Do Hard Work in a Cubicle?
- Labor Means Difficult
- Volunteering to Do Emotional Labor
- The Gift of Emotional Labor
- Artists Who Can't Draw
- The Art of Interaction
- There's a Village in China
- Gifts and Art and Emotional Labor
- Selling Yourself Short
- Passion
- "Wait! Are You Saying That I Have to Stop Following Instructions and Start Being an Artist?
- The Poverty Mentality
- A Practical Reason to Become an Artist
- Do You Need to Be an Artist to Market Tofu?
- Would Shakespeare Blog?
- The Myth of Project-Specific Passion
- Touching Someone
- Understanding Gifts
- Who Is It For?
- Nobody Cares How Hard You Worked
- Soft Gifts and the Conundrum for MBAs
- The Job Versus Your Art
- Can Your Work Become Your Art?
- A Few Questions About Emotional Labor
- Artists Are Optimists
- The Passion to Spread
- Fear of Art
- The Resistance
- "Real Artists Ship"
- The Contradiction Between Shipping and Changing the World
- What It Means to Ship
- Thrashing
- Coordination
- The Resistance: Your Lizard Brain
- The Daemon and the Resistance
- How the Resistance Evolved
- (Evolving a Brain That Could Create Civilization)
- The Man with Two Brains
- (Eye Contact and the Lizard Brain)
- It's Difficult to Reason with the Lizard
- The Resistance at Work
- The Lizard Goes to School
- The Lizard Goes to Work
- The Hard Part About Losing
- Seeking Out Discomfort
- Developing Plan B
- Where Are All the Good Ideas?
- You Don't Need More Genius. You Need Less Resistance
- Uncomfortable with Permission
- Freedom Feeds the Resistance
- Some Classical Musicians Aren't Artists
- Standardized News
- "This Might Work"
- When Did the Resistance Take Over Your Life?
- Proof of the Resistance
- Fear of Public Speaking
- Where Is the Fear?
- Fear Self-fulfills
- The Paradox of the Safety Zone
- The Resistance Works to Destroy the Tools That Oppose It
- Symptoms of the Lizard Brain
- "I Don't Know What to Do" and Other Classic Quotes from the Resistance
- The Cult of Done
- The Work
- Built to Ship
- Using Resistance as a Weather Vane
- Throwing Yourself Under the Bus
- Steeper Near the Top
- Why the Lizard Brain Wants You to Be Stuck
- Is It Important Enough?
- The Internet Is Crack Cocaine for the Resistance
- Where Do You Hide Your Brilliance?
- Tick Tick Tick
- Anxiety Is Practicing Failure in Advance
- The Grateful Dread: Two Ways to Deal with Anxiety
- Anxiety and Shenpa
- Shenpa and Social Connection
- "People Will Laugh at Me"
- (Shenpa and Turbulence)
- Shenpa and Income and Success
- Watching the Watching
- Downhill Versus Uphill
- One Way to Thrash and Overcome Resistance
- Rethinking Your Goals in Light of the Resistance
- Amplifying Little Thoughts
- The Resistance Gets Its Next Excuse Ready in Advance
- The Powerful Culture of Gifts
- Gifts?
- Giving, Receiving, Giving
- We Can Never Repay Keller Williams
- There Are No Artists on the Assembly Line
- Selfish
- The Curse of Reciprocity
- Gifts as a Signal of Surplus
- (Dunbar's Number and the Small World)
- Gifts Make the Tribe
- (Martin Luther and the Beginning of the Money Culture)
- The Forgotten Act of the Gift
- Alcoholics Anonymous and Gifts
- The Difference Between Debt and Equity
- What Does All This Have to Do with You?
- The Circles of the Gift System
- The Difference Between "If" and "And"
- Washing Rental Cars
- Gifts of Art
- The Selfish By-product
- Three Ways People Think About Gifts
- Sunny Bates and Metcalfe's Law
- The Magic of Living Below Your Means
- How to Receive a Gift
- Manipulation of the Gift Economy
- The Internet as a Gift System
- Sometimes, I Don't Want Your Gift
- "Thank You and …"
- How to Encourage Gifts
- You Can Rip Off an Artist Only Once
- But How!?
- There Is No Map
- The Linchpin, the Artist, and the Map
- Seeing, Discernment, and Prajna
- Seeing Clearly Isn't Easy
- Annoyed at Intent
- Teaching Fire a Lesson
- Elements of Attachment
- The Two Reasons Seeing the Future Is So Difficult
- Yelling at the Ref
- Effort Can Change Things
- Zen at the Airport
- The Quadrants of Discernment
- Someone Else, Please Be in Charge
- Self-defense
- The Artist and Prajna
- Untangling the Truth
- Tell the Truth
- Attachment to Things We Can't Control
- Scientists Are Mapmakers
- The Guild of Frustrated Artists
- The Endless Emergency of Fitting In
- Making the Choice
- Impossible, Yes, So Let's Get to Work
- Getting a New Job Without Leaving
- The Banker to the Amish
- John Sells Insurance
- Who Sets Your Agenda?
- The Candyland Decree
- Looking for Something to React or Respond To
- The Choice
- Heads, You Win
- Will Working More Hours Make You a Better Artist?
- The Typical Transaction (and the Missing Arrow)
- More Cowbell
- Return on Machines
- Learning the Tools
- On Strike for a Better Future
- A Timid Trapeze Artist Is a Dead Trapeze Artist
- How Big Is Your Badge?
- Does Your Job Match Your Passion?
- How Does a Linchpin Work?
- If Only …
- Nostalgia for the Future
- The Stressful Part Is the Hoping
- Madison House and Passion
- Be the Linchpin Once
- Ishita's Meditation
- Linchpins Can't Merely Grind It Out
- This Is What Hard Work Looks Like
- The Gifts That Matter
- Resilience
- Loyalty and Generosity to Yourself
- The Culture of Connection
- The Linchpin Can't Succeed in Isolation
- The Five Elements of Personality
- Creating a Culture of Connection
- Return on Connection Investment
- The Secret of Frank at Comcast
- He's Good with People
- What Moby Says About Art
- The Problem with the Script
- Honest Signals in Everyday Life
- Genuine Gifts
- The Placebo Effect
- Why Don't We Believe That Social Intelligence Makes a Difference?
- The Seven Abilities of the Linchpin
- Is There a List?
- A Unique Interface Between Members of the Organization
- Delivering Unique Creativity
- Managing a Situation or Organization of Great Complexity
- Leading Customers
- Inspiring Staff
- Providing Deep Domain Knowledge
- Possessing a Unique Talent
- Compliance and Humility
- When It Doesn't Work
- What Do You Do When Your Art Doesn't Work?
- "My Boss Won't Let Me"
- Pulitzer Prize Fighting: You Might Not Be Good Enough
- Maybe You Can't Get Paid for Doing Your Art
- Calling Ellsworth Kelly
- The Endless Giving Cycle of Art
- Summary
- The System Is Broken
- Will You Choose?
- No Regrets
- Can You Change Everything?
- Last Word
- Acknowledgments
- Bibliography
- On Gifts and Art
- On Sociology and Economics
- On Education
- On Programming and Productivity
- On Science, Evolution, and the Brain
- On Wisdom
- On Overcoming Resistance and Getting Creative
- Key Blogs and Bloggers
- Key ideas
- The Seven Abilities of the Linchpin
- Is There a List?
- Linchpins do two things for the organization.
- They exert emotional labor and they make a map.
- Those contributions take many forms.
- Here is one way to think about the list of what makes you indispensable:
- 1. Providing a unique interface between members of the organization
- 2. Delivering unique creativity
- 3. Managing a situation or organization of great complexity
- 4. Leading customers
- 5. Inspiring staff
- 6. Providing deep domain knowledge
- 7. Possessing a unique talent
- The list in detail
- A Unique Interface Between Members of the Organization
- If your organization is a network (and it is), what holds that network together?
- Is it just the salary and each person's fear of losing his job?
- If so, you've already lost.
- In a story so good that it should be apocryphal, Zappos offers graduates of their two-week paid training school $2,000 if they will quit their new jobs.
- Why would Zappos offer to pay great people to quit?
- Tony Hsieh, CEO, does this because he wants to be sure that every person at the company is there for the right reasons, not because she's getting paid.
- If you're willing to leave for a few thousand bucks, good riddance.
- In great organizations, there's a sense of mission.
- The tribe is racking up accomplishments, going somewhere.
- That mission doesn't happen accidentally.
- A linchpin helps lead, and she connects people in the organization, actively and with finesse.
- This takes emotional labor, and it can't be done by following the instructions in a manual.
- The organization also includes its customers and prospects.
- That means that if you are the person who provides the bridge between the outside world and the company, you are in a critical position.
- In most organizations, people do these jobs because they have to, and they do them to spec.
- But occasionally, you find someone who relishes the opportunity.
- Darienne Page is the first civilian you meet if you're called to a meeting with Barack Obama at the White House.
- As the official receptionist of the United States, she views her job as an opportunity to make a connection.
- In the moments between your being checked through security and arriving at her tiny office, she'll have Googled you.
- She'll be ready with not just a warm welcome and a smile, but with relevant information you can chat about.
- She's looking forward to the engagement, it's a chance to perform, to do some art.
- Certainly, the White House will function without Darienne Page.
- But by escalating the job above the manual, she changes it.
- Delivering Unique Creativity
- Three fairly simple words, very difficult to combine in a meaningful way.
- Let's go backwards:
- Creativity is personal, original, unexpected, and useful.
- Unique creativity requires domain knowledge, a position of trust, and the generosity to actually contribute.
- If you want to create a unique guitar riff, it sure helps if you've heard all the other guitar riffs on record.
- Unique implies that the creativity is focused and insightful.
- Delivering unique creativity is hardest of all, because not only do you have to have insight, but you also need to be passionate enough to risk the rejection that delivering a solution can bring.
- You must ship.
- The resistance, our fear of standing out, rears its ugly head every time we're on the hook for this sort of work.
- So we avoid the work.
- The sparse list of people willing (and able) to do this sort of work makes it particularly valuable.
- Managing a Situation or Organization of Great Complexity
- When the situation gets too complex, it's impossible to follow the manual, because there is no manual.
- That's why linchpins are so valuable during times of great complexity (which is most of the time).
- Linchpins make their own maps, and thus allow the organization to navigate more quickly than it ever could if it had to wait for the paralyzed crowd to figure out what to do next.
- When I used to help run a summer camp in Canada, the craziest day of the year was travel day.
- Hundreds of kids going to dozens of cities around the world, all at the same time.
- We had buses and cars and planes to coordinate.
- Kids with passports, kids who forgot their passports.
- Parents on the phone, parents at the gate, and parents who forgot to show up.
- Out of ninety staff members, only a dozen could be trusted to handle travel day.
- They were ambassadors, cut off from the king, making decisions on their own in a foreign land.
- The good ones were priceless.
- All of our staff members were great, but most couldn't handle this task.
- It required mapmaking and clear judgment, and if you hadn't practiced either, it was hard to invent on the fly.
- This isn't a gift you're born with.
- It's a choice.
- Leading Customers
- As markets fragment and audiences spread, consumers are seeking connection more than ever.
- In short, we're looking for people to follow, and for others to join us as we do.
- The traditional model of commerce is that a tiny group defines a product or a brand, and a team of people go sell it.
- It's a one-way transaction and it's static.
- Tide detergent is Tide detergent; take it or leave it.
- The new model is interactive, fluid, and decentralized.
- That means that organizations need more than a tiny team.
- It means that every person who interacts with a consumer (or a business being sold to, or a donor to a nonprofit, or a voter) is doing marketing as leadership.
- There's no script for leadership.
- There can't be.
- Inspiring Staff
- Organizations obey Newton's laws.
- A team at rest tends to stay at rest.
- Forward motion isn't the default state of any group of people, particularly groups with lots of people.
- Cynics and politics and coordination kick in and everything grinds to a halt.
- In a factory, this isn't really a problem.
- The owner controls the boss who controls the foreman who controls the worker.
- It's a tightly linked chain, and things get done because there is cash to be made.
- Most modern organizations are now far more amorphous than this.
- Responsibility isn't as clear, deliverables aren't as measurable, and goals aren't as cut and dried.
- So things slow down.
- The linchpin changes that.
- Understanding that your job is to make something happen changes what you do all day.
- If you can only cajole, not force, if you can only lead, not push, then you make different choices.
- You can't say, "Get more excited and insightful or you're fired."
- Actually, you can, but it won't work.
- The front-desk worker at a hotel who runs out in the middle of the night to buy gym shorts for a guest isn't doing it out of fear of being reprimanded.
- He does it because he was inspired to do so by a leader who wasn't even in the hotel when the clerk decided to contribute.
- Providing Deep Domain Knowledge
- Earlier, I argued that having deep domain knowledge by itself is rarely sufficient to becoming indispensable.
- Combining that knowledge with smart decisions and generous contributions, though, changes things.
- Lester Wunderman knows quite a bit about direct marketing.
- In fact, he invented it.
- He helped create the American Express card and the Columbia Record Club.
- When Lester agreed to serve on the board of my Internet company in 1996, I was thrilled.
- It turns out that we didn't learn a thing about the tactics of direct marketing from him.
- Instead, my team learned about decision making and strategy.
- We came to understand the big personalities in the industry as well as the motivations of many of our partners.
- Mentoring is rarely about the facts of the deal (the facts are easily found), but instead is a transfer of emotion and confidence.
- Lester had drawn a map once before and so he had the standing and authority to help us draw a new map.
- Mapmakers often have the confidence to draw maps because they understand their subject so deeply.
- Possessing a Unique Talent
- When I was a kid, I loved the Legion of Super-Heroes and the Justice League of America.
- These were comics for slumming comic-book writers, fun and sort of stupid stories in which a whole bunch of superheroes would get together, hang out in the clubhouse, and then work together to destroy some sort of monster that any individual superhero could never have bested.
- Anyway, near the beginning of most of these comics was a scene where a stranger would meet the team.
- Inevitably, the heroes would introduce themselves.
- Of course, Batman or Superman wouldn't need an introduction, but the lesser (lower-rent) heroes had to speak up and describe their superpowers.
- "I'm the Wasp.
- I have the ability to shrink to a height of several centimeters, fly by means of insectoid wings, and fire energy blasts."
- Some fancy marketers might call this a positioning statement or a unique selling proposition.
- Of course, it's not that.
- It's a superpower.
- When you meet someone, you need to have a superpower.
- If you don't, you're just another handshake.
- It's not about touting yourself or coming on too strong.
- It's about making the introduction meaningful.
- If I don't know your superpower, then I don't know how you can help me (or I can help you).
- When I tell the superpower story to people, they seem to get it.
- But then I ask them their superpower, and they pick something that might be a power but it isn't really super.
- It's sort of an average power.
- "I'm pleasant and compliant" is the one we've been taught.
- Sorry, that's good, but it's not super.
- If you want to be a linchpin, the power you bring to the table has to be very difficult to replace.
- Be bolder and think bigger.
- Nothing stopping you.
- "Of course there is," some say.
- "I wasn't born with X-ray vision or even a lot of charisma for that matter."
- Awhile ago, I may have agreed with that—you needed talents and gifts to make a difference.
- But today there are so many ways to lead, so many things to do, so many opportunities to contribute that I don't buy it anymore.
- This concept gets to the heart of the chasm we're facing.
- You want your pretty safe skill to be enough.
- Enough to make you valued, enough to make you fairly paid, enough to make your life stable.
- But it's not.
- It's not enough because in a very connected, very competitive marketplace, there are plenty of people with your pretty safe skill.
- The "super" part and the "power" part come not from something you're born with but from something you choose to do and, more important, from something you choose to give.
- The Dip is about this very thing.
- If you're not the best in the world (the customer's world) at your unique talent, then it's not a unique talent, is it?
- Which means you have only two choices:
- 1. Develop the other attributes that make you a linchpin.
- 2. Get a lot better at your unique talent.
- It's possible that no one ever pushed you to be brave enough to go this far out on a limb.
- Consider yourself pushed.
- Compliance and Humility
- At some level, all of us are virtuous, powerful, and wise.
- But none of these gifts works all the time.
- We'll stray from our principles, falter in our efforts, or make a bad decision now and then.
- Which is why humility is so important.
- Humility is our antidote to what's inevitably not going to go according to plan.
- Humility permits us to approach a problem with kindness and not arrogance.
- But humility is not the same as compliance.
- Humility doesn't mean meekness or fitting in at all costs.
- Compliance feels like a shortcut to humility because it permits us to deny responsibility for whatever goes wrong.
- But compliance deprives you of your superpower; it robs you of the chance to make something better.
- The challenge, then, is to be the generous artist, but do it knowing that it just might not work.
- And that's okay.
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