Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

by Seth Godin

A genius looks at something that others are stuck on and gets the world unstuck. So the question is: Have you ever done that? Have you ever found a shortcut that others couldn’t find?

This choice doesn’t require you to quit your job, though it challenges you to rethink how you do your job.

Here’s the deal our parents signed us up for: Our world is filled with factories. Factories that make widgets and insurance and Web sites, factories that make movies and take care of sick people and answer the telephone. These factories need workers. If you learn how to be one of these workers, if you pay attention in school, follow instructions, show up on time, and try hard, we will take care of you. You won’t have to be brilliant or creative or take big risks. We will pay you a lot of money, give you health insurance, and offer you job security. We will cherish you, or at the very least, take care of you. It’s a pretty seductive bargain. So seductive that for a century, we embraced it.

But in the face of competition and technology, the bargain has fallen apart. Job growth is flat at best.

Suddenly, quite suddenly in the scheme of things, it seems like the obedient worker bought into a sucker’s deal. The educated, hardworking masses are still doing what they’re told, but they’re no longer getting what they deserve.

Where Does Average Come From? It comes from two places: 1. 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).

There’s an alternative available to you. Becoming a linchpin is a stepwise process, a path in which you develop the attributes that make you indispensable.

THE NEW WORLD OF WORK We Are Surrounded by Bureaucrats, Note Takers, Literalists, Manual Readers, TGIF Laborers, Map Followers, and Fearful Employees The problem is that the bureaucrats, note takers, literalists, manual readers, TGIF laborers, map followers, and fearful employees are in pain. They’re in pain because they’re overlooked, underpaid, laid off, and stressed out.

Our society is struggling because during times of change, the very last people you need on your team are well-paid bureaucrats, note takers, literalists, manual readers, TGIF laborers, map followers, and fearful employees. The compliant masses don’t help so much when you don’t know what to do next.

What we want, what we need, what we must have are indispensable human beings. We need original thinkers, provocateurs, and people who care.

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

It doesn’t matter if you’re a wedding photographer or an insurance broker; there’s no longer a clear path to satisfaction in working for the man.

The cause of the suffering is the desire of organizations to turn employees into replaceable cogs in a vast machine. The easier people are to replace, the less they need to be paid. And so far, workers have been complicit in this commoditization.

Part of it was economic, no doubt about it. Factory work offered average people with small dreams a chance to make a significant change in their standard of living. As a bonus, this new wealth came with a pension, job security, and even health insurance.

The key piece of leverage was this promise: follow these instructions and you don’t have to think. Do your job and you don’t have to be responsible for decisions. Most of all, you don’t have to bring your genius to work.

Like scared civilians eager to do whatever a despot tells them, we give up our freedoms and responsibilities in exchange for the certainty that comes from being told what to do.

People want to be told what to do because they are afraid (petrified) of figuring it out for themselves.

The PERL (Percentage of Easily Replaced Laborers) In the factory era, the goal was to have the highest PERL.

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

Consumers are not loyal to cheap commodities. They crave the unique, the remarkable, and the human. 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.

There are no longer any great jobs where someone else tells you precisely what to do.

(The Final Straw: The Law of the Mechanical Turk)1 Here’s the law: Any project, if broken down into sufficiently small, predictable parts, can be accomplished for awfully close to free.

The Internet has turned white-collar work into something akin to building a pyramid in Egypt. No one could build the entire thing, but anyone can haul one brick into place. Here’s the scary part: some bosses want their employees (you?) to become the next Mechanical Turk. Is that your dream job?

Henry Ford changed all this. His development (and promotion) of mass production meant that cars could be made in huge quantities and at very low cost. Capitalism had found its holy grail. Within two years of the launch of the Ford System, the productivity at some Ford plants had increased by 400 percent or more. The essence of mass production is that every part is interchangeable. Time, space, men, motion, money, and material—each was made more efficient because every piece was predictable and separate.

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

Having a factory job is not a natural state. It wasn’t at the heart of being a human until recently. We’ve been culturally brainwashed to believe that accepting the hierarchy and lack of responsibility that come with a factory job is the one way, the only way, and the best way.

Most white-collar workers wear white collars, but they’re still working in the factory. They push a pencil or process an application or type on a keyboard instead of operating a drill press. The only grease they have to get off their clothes at the end of the day is the grease from the take-out food at lunch. But it’s factory work. It’s factory work because it’s planned, controlled, and measured. It’s factory work because you can optimize for productivity. These workers know what they’re going to do all day—and it’s still morning.

Here’s the win (actually, there are two): First, understand that your competition has been building a faceless machine exactly like yours. And when customers have the choice between faceless options, they pick the cheapest, fastest, more direct option. If you want customers to flock to you, it’s tempting to race to the bottom of the price chart. There’s not a lot of room for profit there, though. You can’t out-Amazon Amazon, can you?

An organization of indispensable people doing important work is remarkable, profitable, and indispensable in and of itself.

Second, the people who work for you, the ones you freed to be artists, will rise to a level you can’t even imagine.

This Is No Time for Dumb Tools 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.

The world works too fast for centralized control. These systems can’t be run by a supervisor at the top of the organizational chart. Bullet trains in Japan run fast and on schedule without a centralized switchboard. It turns out that pushing decision making down the chart is faster and more efficient.

“What I want is someone who will do exactly what I tell them to.” “What I want is someone who works cheap.” “What I want is someone who shows up on time and doesn’t give me a hard time.” So, if this is what the boss really wants, how come the stars in the company don’t follow these three rules?

What the boss really wants is an artist, someone who changes everything, someone who makes dreams come true.

We’ve been taught to be a replaceable cog in a giant machine. We’ve been taught to consume as a shortcut to happiness. We’ve been taught not to care about our job or our customers. And we’ve been taught to fit in.

Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote, “Violence, sexism, and general nastiness are biological since they represent one subset of a possible range of behaviors. But peacefulness, equality and kindness are just as biological—and we may see their influence increase if we can create social structures that permit them to flourish.”

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. Factories have been the backbone of our economy for more than a century, and without them we wouldn’t have the prosperity we have today. That doesn’t mean you want to work in one.

A hundred years ago, our leaders worried about two things that seem truly archaic to us now: How to find enough factory workers; and How to avoid overproduction.

Factories convert natural resources into salable products. They turn iron ore into steel and corn into Twinkies. A surplus of natural resources cuts your costs and increases your productivity. If human beings are a natural resource for factories, then your goal as a factory owner is to get good ones, cheap. So captains of industry and government reorganized our society around this goal.

The launch of universal (public and free) education was a profound change in the way our society works, and it was a deliberate attempt to transform our culture. And it worked. We trained millions of factory workers.

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. The typical household spent a tiny fraction of what we do on everything in our budget.

Keeping up with the Joneses is not a genetic predisposition. It’s an invented need, and a recent one.

If you’re insecure, the obvious response to my call to become a linchpin is, “I’m not good enough at anything to be indispensable.” The typical indoctrinated response is that great work and great art and remarkable output are the domain of someone else. You

Creativity is not choosing to wear a pink shirt to an office where only blue and white are standard. That’s merely window dressing.

Studies show us that things learned in frightening circumstances are sticky. We remember what we learn on the battlefield, or when we burn a finger on a hot tea kettle. We remember what we learn in situations where successful action avoids a threat.

So, is it any surprise that people have learned to fit in, do the standardized test, keep heads down, obey instructions? Decades of school have drilled that into us—

fear, fear, and more fear. Fear of getting a D-minus. Fear of not getting a job right out of school. Fear of not fitting in.

Teaching people to produce innovative work, off-the-chart insights, and yes, art is time-consuming and unpredictable. Drill and practice and fear, on the other hand, are powerful tools for teaching facts and figures and obedience.