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

by Seth Godin

Emotional labor is available to all of us, but is rarely exploited as a competitive advantage.

Why do so many handmade luxury goods come from France? It’s not an accident. It’s the work of one man, Jean-Baptiste Colbert. He served under Louis XIV of France in the 1600s and devised a plan to counter the imperialist success of the countries surrounding France. England, Portugal, Spain, and other countries were colonizing the world, and France was being left behind. So Colbert organized, regulated, and promoted the luxury-goods industry. He understood what wealthy consumers around the world wanted, and he helped French companies deliver it. Let other countries find the raw materials; the French would fashion it, brand it, and sell it back to them as high-priced goods.

Personal interactions don’t have asymptotes. Innovative solutions to new problems don’t get old. Seek out achievements where there is no limit.

Organizations that earn dramatic success always do it in markets where asymptotes don’t exist, or where they can be shattered.

If you can’t be remarkable, perhaps you should consider doing nothing until you can.

The world wants you (needs you) to bring your genius self to work.

It sounds to me like if you don’t have more than a résumé, you’ve been brainwashed into compliance.

Great jobs, world-class jobs, jobs people kill for—those jobs don’t get filled by people e-mailing in résumés.

Projects are the new résumés.

Find a company that doesn’t use a computer to scan résumés, a company that hires people, not paper.

If the game is designed for you to lose, don’t play that game. Play a different one.

If you want a job where you are treated as indispensable, given massive amounts of responsibility and freedom, expected to expend emotional labor, and rewarded for being a human, not a cog in a machine, then please don’t work hard to fit into the square-peg job you found on Craigslist. If you need to conceal your true nature to get in the door, understand that you’ll probably have to conceal your true nature to keep that job. This is the one and only decision you get to make. You get to choose. You can work for a company that wants indispensable people, or you can work for a company that works to avoid them.

Emotional labor is the task of doing important work, even when it isn’t easy. Emotional labor is difficult and easy to avoid.

The act of giving someone a smile, of connecting to a human, of taking initiative, of being surprising, of being creative, of putting on a show—these are things that we do for free all our lives.

The essence of any gift, including the gift of emotional labor, is that you don’t do it for a tangible, guaranteed reward. If you do, it’s no longer a gift; it’s a job. The hybrid economy we’re living in today is blending the idea of capitalism (“do your job and I won’t fire you”) and the gift economy (“wow, this is amazing”).

An artist is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artist takes it personally.

A cook is not an artist. A cook follows a recipe, and he’s a good cook if he follows the recipe correctly. A chef is an artist. She’s an artist when she invents a new way of cooking or a new type of dish that creates surprise or joy or pleasure for the person she created it for.

But it goes far beyond that. When you give something away, you benefit more than the recipient does. The act of being generous makes you rich beyond measure, and as the goods or services spread through the community, everyone benefits.

Perhaps your challenge isn’t finding a better project or a better boss. Perhaps you need to get in touch with what it means to feel passionate. People with passion look for ways to make things happen.

The combination of passion and art is what makes someone a linchpin.

An artist’s job is to change us. When you have a boss, your job is to please the boss, not to change her. It’s okay to have someone you work for, someone who watches over you, someone who pays you. But the moment you treat that person like a boss, like someone in charge of your movements and your output, you are a cog, not an artist.

Nobody Cares How Hard You Worked

One of the most difficult tasks the military had in Iraq was to teach soldiers how to treat Iraqi civilians as potential partners, how to vary from the stated mission of the day, how to be human in the face of huge unknown danger.

Your art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it. Your art is the act of taking personal responsibility, challenging the status quo, and changing people.

Whining and fear, on the other hand, are largely self-fulfilling prophecies in organizations under stress.

Why aren’t all waiters amazingly great at being waiters? I think it’s fear, and I think we’re even afraid to talk about this sort of fear. Fear of art. Of being laughed at. Of standing out and of standing for something.

Artists think along the edges of the box, because that’s where things get done.

As we’ll see, the greatest shortage in our society is an instinct to produce. To create solutions and hustle them out the door.

Shipping means hitting the publish button on your blog, showing a presentation to the sales team, answering the phone, selling the muffins, sending out your references.

Anguish? Sure. The conflict between your ideas and the outside world. More important, the chasm between the part of you that wants to be safe and invisible, and your daemon, which is demanding to speak to the world.

There are several small parts of your brain near the end of your spinal cord responsible for survival and other wild-animal traits. The whole thing is called the basal ganglia, and there are two almond-shaped bits in everyone’s brain. Scientists call these the amygdala, and this mini-brain apparently takes over whenever you are angry, afraid, aroused, hungry, or in search of revenge.

It’s the lizard brain that tells you that you’re not qualified, that your degree isn’t advanced enough, that you didn’t go to a good enough school. It’s the lizard that tells you not to apply to a great school, because you don’t deserve to get in. And it’s the lizard that cares deeply about grades, and not a bit about art or leadership or connection.

The reason the resistance persists in slowing you down and prevents you from putting your heart and soul and art into your work is simple: you might fail. Of course you might. In fact, you will. Not all the time, certainly, but more than you’d like.

Successful people are successful for one simple reason: they think about failure differently.

Successful people learn from failure, but the lesson they learn is a different one. They don’t learn that they shouldn’t have tried in the first place, and they don’t learn that they are always right and the world is wrong and they don’t learn that they are losers.

You become a winner because you’re good at losing.

In difficult economic times, the resistance explains that we’d better get a steady job, because the world is fraught with uncertainty and this is no time to do something crazy like starting a company. And in great times, of course, the resistance persuades us not to start a company because competition is fierce and hey, salaries are high. “Don’t be stupid,” it says. The resistance wants you to check your e-mail now, because something great may have shown up (or more likely, something horrible). No time to sketch out a new product . . . why are you always

dreaming . . . we need to focus on getting that conference call scheduled.

The race to make average stuff for average people in huge quantities is almost over. We’re hitting an asymptote, a natural ceiling for how cheaply and how fast we can deliver uninspired work.

Don’t let the lizard brain win.

It turns out that the three biological factors that drive job performance and innovation are social intelligence, fear response, and perception. Public speaking brings all three together. Speaking to a group requires social intelligence. We need to be able to make an emotional connection with people, talk about what they are interested in, and persuade them. That’s difficult, and we’re not wired for this as well as we are wired to, say, eat fried foods. Public speaking also triggers huge fear responses. We’re surrounded by strangers or people of power, all of whom might harm us. Attention is focused on us, and attention (according to our biology) equals danger. Last, and more subtly, speaking involves perception. It exposes how we see things, both the thing we are talking about and the response of the people in the room. Exposing that perception is frightening. In a contest between the rational desire to spread an idea by giving a speech and the biological phobia against it, biology has an unfair advantage.

Fear dominates the other emotions, because without our ability to avoid death, the other ones don’t matter very much.

The resistance is everywhere, all the time. Its goal is to make you safe, which means invisible and unchanged. Visibility is dangerous. It leads to the possibility of people laughing at you, or even death.

It’s interesting to say it out loud. “I’m doing this because of the resistance.” “My lizard brain is making me anxious.” “I’m angry right now because being angry is keeping me from doing my work.”

“I don’t have any good ideas”—actually, you don’t have any bad ideas. If you get enough bad ideas, the good ones will take care of themselves. And as every successful person will tell you, the ideas aren’t the hard part. It’s shipping that’s difficult.

—Can’t you just hear the lizard brain behind every word in this question? Precisely how many counterexamples do you need before you get over this excuse?

Your job is about following instructions; the work is about making a difference. Your work is to ship. Ship things that make change.

The people who have experienced this and fought back—by quitting when they were stuck—tell me that the feeling of liberation and new potential is incredible.

Anxiety is the exaggeration of the worst possible what-if, accompanied by self-talk that leads to the relentless minimization of the actual odds of success.