Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

by Seth Godin

The problem doesn’t lie with the great teachers. Great teachers strive to create linchpins. The problem lies with the system that punishes artists and rewards bureaucrats instead.

Here’s what Woodrow Wilson said about public education: “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”

The best way to increase profit was to increase both the productivity and the compliance of factory workers. And as Carnegie saw, the best way to do that was to build a huge educational-industrial complex designed to teach workers just enough to get them to cooperate.

This is a fundamentally different statement from, “I did well in school and therefore I will do a great job working for you.” The essential thing measured by school is whether or not you are good at school.

The contributions of school are often superfluous. On the other hand, the best schools are great selectors of people with attitude and talent. Getting in and getting out is a testament to who you were before you got there. Many successful people got that way despite their advanced schooling, not because of it.

What They Should Teach in School Only two things: 1. Solve interesting problems 2. Lead

Leading is a skill, not a gift. You’re not born with it, you learn how.

When schools were organized to produce laborers, lousy teachers were exactly what we needed. Now, lousy teachers are dangerous.

Every successful organization has at least one linchpin; some have dozens or even thousands. The linchpin is the essential element, the person who holds part of the operation together. Without the linchpin, the thing falls apart.

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. Why on earth would you ever begin to consider the possibility of firing her? Inconceivable.

The distinction is subtle; calming your boss’s anxiety is a first step in getting the organization to embrace the change you’ll be making. Doesn’t matter if you’re always right. It matters that you’re always moving.

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. Most of the time, you do stuff that ordinary people could do.

Two hours into Guys and Dolls, time stops.

How many of your coworkers spend all day in search of perfect? Or, more accurately, spend all day trying to avoid making a mistake?

We hire for perfect, we manage for perfect, we measure for perfect, and we reward for perfect.

The problem is simple: Art is never defect-free. Things that are remarkable never meet spec, because that would make them standardized, not worth talking about.

The interviewer then reminded Dylan, “But you’ve sold over a hundred million records.” Dylan’s answer gets to the heart of what it means to be an artist: “Yeah I know. It’s a mystery to me too.”

Organizations that earn dramatic success always do it in markets where asymptotes don’t exist, or where they can be shattered. If you could figure out how to bowl 320, that would be amazing. Until that happens, pick a different sport if you want to be a linchpin.

Almost anyone else would have seen this job as a grind, a dead end, a mind-numbing way to spend six years. David saw it as an opportunity to give gifts. He had emotional labor to contribute, and his compensation was the blessings he got from the customers (his customers). His art was the engagement with each person, a chance to change her outlook or brighten his day.

This is controversial, but here goes: if you’re remarkable, amazing, or just plain spectacular, you probably shouldn’t have a résumé at all. If you’ve got experience in doing the things that make you a linchpin, a résumé hides that fact.

Having a résumé begs for you to go into that big machine that looks for relevant keywords, and begs for you to get a job as a cog in a giant machine. More fodder for the corporate behemoth. That might be fine for average folks looking for an average job, but is that what you deserve?

If you don’t have a résumé, what do you have? How about three extraordinary letters of recommendation from people the employer knows or respects? Or a sophisticated project an employer can see or touch? Or a reputation that precedes you?

Or a blog that is so compelling and insightful that they have no choice but to follow up? Some say, “Well, that’s fine, but I don’t have those.” Yeah, that’s my point. If you don’t have these things, what leads you to believe that you are remarkable, amazing, or just plain spectacular? 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.

They have jobs. That’s a huge shift from just a few years ago, when the work you did inside of an organization was almost entirely anonymous. The Internet shines a light on your projects. The only way to prove (as opposed to assert) that you are an indispensable linchpin—someone worth recruiting, moving to the top of the pile, and hiring—is to show, not tell. Projects are the new résumés.

If that is the question, you don’t. You won’t often be able to persuade the standardized HR system to make an exception. A better plan: find a company that understands the value of the linchpin. Find a company that doesn’t use a computer to scan résumés, a company that hires people, not paper.

You are not your résumé. You are your work.

There are two ways the linchpin can use “no.” The first is to never use it. There’s a certain sort of indispensable team member who always finds a yes. She always manages to find a way to make things happen, and she does it. It’s done. Yes.

Amazingly, there’s a second kind of linchpin. This person says “no” all the time. She says no because she has goals, because she’s a practical visionary, because she understands priorities.

You may say, “But I’ll get fired for breaking the rules.” The linchpin says, “If I lean enough, it’s okay if I get fired, because I’ll have demonstrated my value to the marketplace. If the rules are the only thing between me and becoming indispensable, I don’t need the rules.”

The linchpin understands that this choice of posture is the critical step. Consider the customer service troubleshooter, the dervish who walks into any situation and makes it better. Her posture is forward; she’s looking for opportunities. She wants to mix it up. She looks for trouble; trouble gives her a chance to delight. The cog is standing by, waiting for instructions.

If he waits for a job to be good enough to deserve his best shot, it’s unlikely that he’ll ever have that job.

Author Richard Florida polled twenty thousand creative professionals and gave them a choice of thirty-eight factors that motivated them to do their best at work. The top ten, ranked in order: 1. Challenge and responsibility 2. Flexibility 3. A stable work environment 4. Money 5. Professional development 6. Peer recognition 7. Stimulating colleagues and bosses 8. Exciting job content 9. Organizational culture 10. Location and community

Often, when people hear about my radical ideas for how you should train for a career, as well as the best way to present yourself, they object. They point out that not fitting in is certainly going to be an ineffective way of getting one of these average jobs. They remind me that not having a résumé is all fine and good, but how will that help them get a job at a place that requires a résumé? You can’t win both games—not at the same time, anyway.

Showing up unwilling to do emotional labor is a short-term strategy now, because over time, organizations won’t pay extra for someone who merely does the easy stuff.

But when an information worker develops her skills at confronting fear (whether it’s in making connections, speaking, inventing, selling, or dealing with difficult situations) we roll our eyes. It turns out that digging into the difficult work of emotional labor is exactly what we’re expected (and needed) to do.

The opportunity doesn’t necessarily feel like an opportunity. Volunteering to do emotional labor—even when you don’t feel like it, and especially when you’re not paid extra for it—is a difficult choice. My first argument, though, is that you are paid for it. In fact, in most jobs that involve a customer, that’s all you are getting paid for.

So bring that gift to work. And what do you get in return? As we saw in the case of JetBlue, there are companies that now value this sort of labor and encourage

for it and rewarding it. In most cases, though, you get little in return. At least, little in terms of formal entries in your permanent file or bonuses in your year-end pay. But you do benefit. First, you benefit from the making and the giving. The act of the gift is in itself a reward. And second, you benefit from the response of those around you. When you develop the habit of contributing this gift, your coworkers become more open, your boss becomes more flexible, and your customers become more loyal.

Roy Simmons coined that phrase and I like it a lot. “Most artists can’t draw.” We need to add something: “But all artists can see.”

Art isn’t only a painting. Art is anything that’s creative, passionate, and personal. And great art resonates with the viewer, not only with the creator.

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

Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient. An artist is an individual who creates art. The more people you change, the more you change them, the more effective your art is.

The resistance is the voice in your head telling you to use bullets in your PowerPoint slides, because that’s what the boss wants. It’s the voice that tells you to leave controversial ideas out of the paper you’re writing, because the teacher won’t like them. The resistance pushes relentlessly for you to fit in.

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.

The devil’s advocate is actually a card-carrying member of the resistance.

The most pernicious thing (from an author’s point of view) is that the lizard hates it when you read books like this one.

When you started reading this book, did it make you squirm a bit when I called you a genius? A lot of people are uncomfortable with that sort of permission, authority, or leverage. If you’re a genius, after all, then you need to deliver genius-quality results.

Cog workers have very little freedom at their jobs. Their output is measured, their tasks are described, and they either produce or are fired.

The freedom of the new kind of work (which most of us do, most of the time) is that the tasks are vague and difficult to measure.

This freedom is a pox, because it’s an opening for the resistance. Freedom like this makes it easy to hide, easy to find excuses, easy to do very little.