Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? How to drive your career and create a remarkable future

by Seth Godin

A genius looks at something that others are stuck on and gets the world unstuck.

The problem is that our culture has engaged in a Faustian bargain, in which we trade our genius and artistry for apparent stability.

Stop settling for what’s good enough and start creating art that matters.

You have been brainwashed by school and by the system into believing that your job is to do your job and follow instructions. It’s not, not anymore.

2. Everyone has a little voice inside of their head that’s angry and afraid. That voice is the resistance—your lizard brain—and it wants you to be average (and safe).

We Are Surrounded by Bureaucrats, Note Takers, Literalists, Manual Readers, TGIF Laborers, Map Followers, and Fearful Employees

Artists are people with a genius for finding a new answer, a new connection, or a new way of getting things done.

The working middle class is suffering. Wages are stagnant; job security is, for many people, a fading memory; and stress is skyrocketing. Nowhere to run, and apparently, nowhere to hide.

In every corporation in every country in the world, people are waiting to be told what to do. Sure, many of us pretend that we’d love to have control and authority and to bring our humanity to work. But given half a chance, we give it up, in a heartbeat.

So we built giant organizations (political parties, nonprofits, schools, corporations) filled with easily replaced laborers.

The E-Myth Revisited,

The difference between what an employee is paid and how much value she produces leads to profit. If the worker captures all the value in her salary, there’s no profit.

Consumers are not loyal to cheap commodities.

Sure, you can always succeed for a while with the cheapest, but you earn your place in the market with humanity and leadership.

Those are the only two choices. Win by being more ordinary, more standard, and cheaper. Or win by being faster, more remarkable, and more human.

You traded years of your life to be part of a giant con in which you are most definitely not the winner.

Any project, if broken down into sufficiently small, predictable parts, can be accomplished for awfully close to free.

Instead of relying on a handful of well-paid people calling themselves professionals, Wikipedia thrives by using the loosely coordinated work of millions of knowledgeable people, each happy to contribute a tiny slice of the whole.

An eighty-dollar project becomes a fifteen-dollar project when you process it with the Mechanical Turk.

In other words, first you have interchangeable parts, then you have interchangeable workers.

The goal was to hire the lowest-skilled laborer possible, at the lowest possible wage. To do anything else was financial suicide.

Now, success means being an artist.

In fact, history is now being written by the artists while the factory workers struggle. The future belongs to chefs, not to cooks or bottle washers. It’s easy to buy a cookbook (filled with instructions to follow) but really hard to find a chef book.

Linchpins are the essential building blocks of tomorrow’s high-value organizations.

There are two teams, management and labor. Management owns the machines, labor follows the rules.

Yesterday’s remarkable is today’s really good and tomorrow’s mediocre.

The only way to get what you’re worth is to stand out, to exert emotional labor, to be seen as indispensable, and to produce interactions that organizations and people care deeply about.

If you want a job where you take intellectual risks all day long, don’t be surprised if your insights get you promoted.

Exceptional insight, productivity, and generosity make markets bigger and more efficient. This situation leads to more opportunities and ultimately a payoff for everyone involved. The more you give, the more the market gives back.

No, the competitive advantage the marketplace demands is someone more human, connected, and mature. Someone with passion and energy, capable of seeing things as they are and negotiating multiple priorities as she makes useful decisions without angst.

When work becomes personal, your customers and coworkers are more connected and happier. And that creates even more value.

When your organization becomes more human, more remarkable, faster on its feet, and more likely to connect directly with customers, it becomes indispensable.

The architecture of our systems is set up so that the people at the top know more. The goal is to hire as many cheap but talented people as possible, give them a rule book, and have them follow instructions to the letter.

Multiply this by millions of jobs at millions of organizations and you see what you end up with: systems everywhere, manuals, rules, and a few people at the top working hard to dream up new ones.

To his thoughts I’d add that mediocre obedience is certainly something we’re capable of, but if we take initiative and add a little bravery, artistic leadership is something that’s equally (or more) possible and productive.

I define a factory as an organization that has figured it out, a place where people go to do what they’re told and earn a paycheck.

A huge concern among capitalists at the turn of the last century was that as factories got better and better at making stuff, there wouldn’t be enough people to buy what they made. The problem wasn’t production; it was consumption.

WE TRAIN THE FACTORY WORKERS OF TOMORROW. OUR GRADUATES ARE VERY GOOD AT FOLLOWING INSTRUCTIONS. AND WE TEACH THE POWER OF CONSUMPTION AS AN AID FOR SOCIAL APPROVAL.

Studies show us that things learned in frightening circumstances are sticky.

The problem lies with the system that punishes artists and rewards bureaucrats instead.

The gap between what they are paid and what the capitalist receives is profit.

Being good at school is a fine skill if you intend to do school forever. For the rest of us, being good at school is a little like being good at Frisbee. It’s nice, but it’s not relevant unless your career involves homework assignments, looking through textbooks for answers that are already known to your supervisors, complying with instructions and then, in high-pressure settings, regurgitating those facts with limited processing on your part.

The law of linchpin leverage: The more value you create in your job, the fewer clock minutes of labor you actually spend creating that value.

Finding security in mediocrity is an exhausting process. You can work only so many hours, fret only so much. Being a slightly better typist or a slightly faster coder is insufficient.

Depth of knowledge combined with good judgment is worth a lot. Depth of knowledge combined with diagnostic skills or nuanced insight is worth a lot, too.

Expertise gives you enough insight to reinvent what everyone else assumes is the truth.

Every interaction you have with a coworker or customer is an opportunity to practice the art of interaction.

If you seek out critics, bureaucrats, gatekeepers, form-fillers, and by-the-book bosses when you’re looking for feedback, should you be surprised that you end up doing the things that please them?

Organizations that can bring humanity and flexibility to their interactions with other human beings will thrive.

Of course, you didn’t care so much, but the number of good jobs for manual laborers has been dropping for years.