Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

by Seth Godin

Imagine an organization with an employee who can accurately see the truth, understand the situation, and understand the potential outcomes of various decisions. And now imagine that this person is also able to make something happen.

Every organization, every nonprofit, every political body, every corporation desperately seeks this person. This is our leader, our marketer, our linchpin. She creates forward motion.

Branson’s real job is seeing new opportunities, making decisions that work, and understanding the connection between his audience, his brand, and his ventures. 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. In other words, most of the time, you’re not being brilliant.

brilliant author or businesswoman or senator or software engineer is brilliant only in tiny bursts. The rest of the time, they’re doing work that most any trained person could do. It might take a lot of tinkering or low-level work or domain knowledge for that brilliance to be evoked, but from the outside, it appears that the art is created in a moment, not in tiny increments.

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. You’re always looking over your shoulder, always trying to be a little less mediocre than the guy next to you. It wears you out.

Expertise gives you enough insight to reinvent what everyone else assumes is the truth. Sure, it’s possible to randomly challenge the conventions of your field and luckily find a breakthrough. It’s far more likely, though, that you will design a great Web site or direct a powerful movie or lead a breakthrough product development if you understand the status quo better than anyone else.

Emotional labor is the hard work of making art, producing generosity, and exposing creativity. Working without a map involves both vision and the willingness to do something about what you see.

Every interaction you have with a coworker or customer is an opportunity to practice the art of interaction. Every product you make represents an opportunity to design something that has never been designed, to create an interaction unlike any other. For a long time, few people were fired for refusing

Linchpins are able to embrace the lack of structure and find a new path, one that works.

She solves problems that people haven’t predicted, sees things people haven’t seen, and connects people who need to be connected.

Krulak’s law is simple: The closer you get to the front, the more power you have over the brand.

Emotional labor was originally seen as a bad thing, a drain on the psyche

Organizations seek out people who are fearless, but go out of their way to weed out the reckless. What’s the difference? Fearless doesn’t really mean “without fear.” What it means in practice is, “unafraid of things that one shouldn’t be afraid of.” Being fearless means giving a presentation to an important customer without losing a night’s sleep. It means being willing to take intellectual risks and to forge a new path. The fear is about an imagined threat, so avoiding the fear allows you to actually accomplish something.

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

They understand that there is no map, no step-by-step plan, and no way to avoid blame now and then.

The problem with meeting expectations is that it’s not remarkable. It won’t change the recipient of your work, and it’s easy to emulate (which makes you easy to replace). As a result of the tsunami of pretty good (and the persistence of really lousy), the market for truly exceptional is better than ever. That’s what I want if I hire someone for more than what the market will bear—someone exceptional.

The solution lies in seeking out something that is neither good nor perfect. You want something remarkable, nonlinear, game changing, and artistic.

Raising the bar is easier than it looks, and it pays for itself. If your boss won’t raise your bar, you should.

It’s unprofitable to establish a career around the idea of doing what the manual says. So, consider this your whispered call to freedom. The world wants you (needs you) to bring your genius self to work.

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.

says “no” all the time. She says no because she has goals, because she’s a practical visionary, because she understands priorities. She says no because she has the strength to disappoint you now in order to delight you later.

He can find a new solution to a problem that has caused others to quit. His art, his genius, is to reimagine the opportunity and find a new way to lean into it.

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”).

He’s an artist because he takes a stand, he takes the work personally, and he doesn’t care if someone disagrees. His art is part of him, and he feels compelled to share it with you because it’s important, not because he expects you to pay him for it.

When it is time for layoffs, the safest job belongs to the artist, the linchpin, the one who can’t be easily outsourced or replaced.

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

Annie Leibovitz built her career around this gift. She was hired to do celebrity photographs, but she kept pushing the limits. I would imagine that some of her shots were a hard sell to clients who believed that they were buying yesterday’s version of Annie, not today’s.

The reason is simple: artists have the chance to make things better. Other people often make the choice to be victims. They can be the flotsam and jetsam tossed by the waves of circumstance. Until they make the choice to be artists, they sadly float along.

Now, though, the economy is forcing us to confront this fear. The economy is ruthlessly punishing the fearful, and increasing the benefits to the few who are brave enough to create art and generous enough to give it away.

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

When you first adopt the discipline of shipping, your work will appear to suffer. There’s no doubt that another hour, day, or week would have added some needed polish. But over time—rather quickly, actually—

difficult as the group gets larger. And for important projects in an organization with something to lose, the group pushes to get larger. People with something at stake (and we all believe we have something at stake) want to get involved in the really good projects, mostly because we’re afraid that everyone else will screw it up and we’ll get blamed.

The daemon is the source of great ideas, groundbreaking insights, generosity, love, connection, and kindness.

The road to comfort is crowded and it rarely gets you there. Ironically, it’s those who seek out discomfort that are able to make a difference and find their footing.

Discomfort brings engagement and change. Discomfort means you’re doing something that others were unlikely to do, because they’re busy hiding out in the comfortable zone. When your uncomfortable actions lead to success, the organization rewards you and brings you back for more.

One antidote is to pursue multiple paths, generating different ways to win. This meeting or that proposal no longer means everything. If nothing is do-or-die, then you don’t have to worry so much about the dying part. Confidence self-fulfills as well. If you can bring more of it to an interaction, you’re more likely to succeed, which of course creates more confidence for the next interaction. The cycle can bring you up, or it can bring you down. It’s up to you.

Effort gets you to this nice spot; effort and planning are tools to beat the resistance before it beats you.

The less commotion you cause, the more likely you are to fail, to be ignored, to expose yourself to failure. We tried to set up an economy where you could hide your big ideas, go through the motions, and get what you needed. That’s not working so well now.

When you set down the path to create art, whatever sort of art it is, understand that the path is neither short nor easy. That means you must determine if the route is worth the effort. If it’s not, dream bigger.

The best way to overcome your fear of creativity, brainstorming, intelligent risk-taking, or navigating a tricky situation might be to sprint. When we sprint, all the internal dialogue falls away and we focus on going as fast as we possibly can. When you’re sprinting, you don’t feel that sore knee and you don’t worry that the ground isn’t perfectly level. You just run.

something that could easily disappear. The resistance

If you accept that human beings are difficult to change, and embrace (rather than curse) the uniqueness that everyone brings to the table, you’ll navigate the world with more bliss and effectiveness. And make better decisions, too.

The combination of attachment (to the world as they wanted it to be) and passion (to spend time and money to ensure this) was both risky and wasteful.

The linchpin has no time or energy for whining or litigation. Instead, she’s obsessively focused on the projects that have a likelihood of changing the outcome.

The system wants you to fit in, but pleasing the system may not be your real work.

“I realize that games of pure chance have a long history, but that doesn’t make them any less moronic,” he writes. Here’s how Candyland is played: You pick a card and do what it says. Repeat.

decree: If you own a copy, burn it. Replace it with Cosmic Encounter or chess or a big box filled with wooden blocks. Please don’t look at school or even board games the same way again. If they’re teaching your kids or future employees to be map readers and agenda followers, make them stop.

The alternative is to draw a map and lead.

That’s fine, as long as there’s a balance, as long as you leave enough time for the work that matters. The resistance encourages you to avoid the work, and our society rewards busywork as well. Serious artists distinguish between the work and the stuff they have to do when they’re not doing the work.

Creating a career where you are seen as the indispensable linchpin may at first seem to be a selfish goal on your part, but you will achieve this goal by giving selfless gifts, and those benefit everyone.