Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

by Seth Godin

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.

There are fewer and fewer good jobs where you can get paid merely for showing up. Instead, successful organizations are paying for people who make a difference and are shedding everyone else.

Mediocre is merely a failed attempt to be really good.

The new American Dream, though, the one that markets around the world are embracing as fast as they can, is this: Be remarkable Be generous Create art Make judgment calls Connect people and ideas . . . and we have no choice but to reward you.

In a factory, doing a job that’s not yours is dangerous. Now, if you’re a linchpin, doing a job that’s not getting done is essential.

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.

Plenty of people can play the flute as well as you can, clean a house as well as you can, program in Python as well as you can. If all you can do is the task and you’re not in a league of your own at doing the task, you’re not indispensable.

The linchpin feels the fear, acknowledges it, then proceeds. I can’t tell you how to do this; I think the answer is different for everyone. What I can tell you is that in today’s economy, doing it is a prerequisite for success.

You are not your résumé. You are your work. If the game is designed for you to lose, don’t play that game. Play a different one.

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.

There are two reasons why it’s vital to know whom you are working for. The first is that understanding your audience allows you to target your work and to get feedback that will help you do it better next time. The other reason? Because it tells you whom to ignore.

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.

A warm smile to a stranger on an airplane at the right moment is an artistic endeavor that’s fairly easy for most of us to muster.

I’m not so interested in pushing you to become a brilliant filmmaker. I’m very passionate about exploring why you are so afraid about creating art that is actually within your grasp. Why didn’t you speak up at the meeting yesterday? When you had a chance to reach out and interact with a co-worker in a way that would have changed everything, what held you back? That proposal for a new project that’s been sitting on your hard drive for a year . . . Why aren’t all waiters amazingly great at being waiters?

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

You call the resistance “ hard-hearted capitalist common sense.” Perhaps you call it “being realistic about the system we live in.” Better, I think, to call it stalling, a waste, and an insidious plot to keep you from doing your real work.

The hard part is distinguishing between quitting because the resistance wants you to (bad idea) or because the resistance doesn’t want you to (great idea). The goal is to quit the tasks you’re doing because you’re hiding on behalf of the lizard brain and to push through the very tasks the lizard fears.

The goal is to strip away anything that looks productive but doesn’t involve shipping.

Worse, if you live in a state of anxiety about tasks that are in demand (like art, brave action, and generosity), it’s going to change what you choose to do. You’ll avoid the very things that would make you indispensable.

The best way to overcome your fear of creativity, brainstorming, intelligent risk-taking, or navigating a tricky situation might be to sprint.

You can’t sprint every day, but it’s probably a good idea to sprint regularly. It keeps the resistance at bay.

The first step is write down the due date. Post it on the wall. It’s real. You will ship on this date, done or not.

A trade leaves things as they were, with no external surplus. A gift always creates a surplus as it spreads.

Metcalfe’s law says that the value of a network increases with the square of the number of nodes on the network. In English? It says that the more people who have a fax machine, the more fax machines are worth (one person with a fax is useless).

If you appreciate a gift, consider saying, “thank you and . . .”

The linchpin understands that getting angry about the battery in the microphone isn’t going to make the battery come back to life. And teaching the stage-crew guy a lesson is senseless and not going to help much, either. So you deal with it.

If bad news changes your emotional state or what you think of yourself, then you’ll be attached to the outcome you receive. The alternative is to ask, “Isn’t that interesting?” Learn what you can learn; then move on.

When our responses turn into reactions and we set out to teach people a lesson, we lose. We lose because the act of teaching someone a lesson rarely succeeds at changing them, and always fails at making our day better, or our work more useful.

The challenge is in understanding when our effort can’t possibly be enough, and in choosing projects and opportunities that are most likely to reward the passion we bring to a situation.

The stressful part is the hoping. Hoping against hope that your plane will arrive, that you won’t miss it, that your seat won’t be given away, that you won’t crash, that you’ll land close to on time. Hoping that the surgery will turn out okay. Hoping that your boss won’t yell at you. All of this is nerve-racking for many people.

Every day is a new chance to choose.