Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

by Seth Godin

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.

We see this in organizations of all types. We ask someone to do something wacky or original and they change the tiniest surface element instead of finding the root of a creative solution. That’s no accident. That’s what we taught them to do. The opportunity is in changing the game, changing the interaction, or even changing the question.

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.

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.

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

A tourist may have significant technical skill, but if she doesn’t know the territory—your territory—then the skill isn’t worthwhile.

depth of knowledge alone is enough to get you into serious trouble.

Instead of hiring someone with deep domain knowledge who knew exactly what to do, Bill Ford hired someone who knew how to train people to live without a map.

The closer you get to the front, the more power you have over the brand.

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.

Organizations seek out people who are fearless, but go out of their way to weed out the reckless.

the brand that leans into the problem the hardest will win. The linchpin brings the ability to lean. 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.

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.

Most of all, art involves labor. Not the labor of lifting a brush or typing a sentence, but the emotional labor of doing something difficult, taking a risk and extending yourself.

Passion is a desire, insistence, and willingness to give a gift. The artist is relentless. She says, “I will not feel complete until I give a gift.” This is more than refusing to do lousy work. It’s an insistence on doing important work.

I think art is the ability to change people with your work, to see things as they are and then create stories, images, and interactions that change the marketplace.

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 future of your organization depends on motivated human beings selflessly contributing unasked-for gifts of emotional labor. And worse yet, the harder you work to quantify and manipulate this process, the more poorly it will work.

Optimism is for artists, change agents, linchpins, and winners. Whining and fear, on the other hand, are largely self-fulfilling prophecies in organizations under stress.

Passion for your art also means having a passion for spreading your art. This means being willing to surrender elements that you are in love with in order to help the other parts thrive and spread.

And at the same time, passion means having enough connection to your art that you’re not willing to surrender the parts that truly matter.

Art, at least art as I define it, is the intentional act of using your humanity to create a change in another person.

the greatest shortage in our society is an instinct to produce. To create solutions and hustle them out the door.

The reason that start-ups almost always defeat large companies in the rush to market is simple: start-ups have fewer people to coordinate, less thrashing, and more linchpins per square foot. They can’t afford anything else and they have less to lose.

The only hope for our species is that the rest of the brain, the civilized part, will care so deeply about positive outcomes that it will organize to avoid the lizard, and will invest in systems that make the resistance less powerful.

Sites like lifehacker.com are stuffed with time-saving, productivity-enhancing tools. In general, your nervous co-workers avoid these tools, because being more productive just gets them that much closer to having to actually do something, to ship something new out the door.

A lot of the stress we feel in the modern world comes from this conflict between the small world in which we’re wired to exist and the large world we use to make a living.

One of the factors in the growth of the Protestant Reformation was that commercial interests supported its spread because they needed the moral authority to lend and borrow money.

Metcalfe’s law says that the value of a network increases with the square of the number of nodes on the network.

As big business has realized that people crave connection, not stuff, they’ve tried to institutionalize it, measure it, and reward it. And they fail every time.

Great bosses and world-class organizations hire motivated people, set high expectations, and give their people room to become remarkable.

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

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 Quadrants of Discernment

The linchpin is enlightened enough to see the world as it is,

At the same time, the linchpin brings passion to the job. She knows from experience that the right effort in the right place can change the outcome, and she reserves her effort for doing just that.

The market doesn’t care about your defense. It cares about working with someone who can accurately see what was, what is, and where things are headed.

When a vendor or a customer must choose between an organization working hard to defend the status quo and one that’s open to big growth in the future, the choice is pretty simple.

Lab assistants do what they’re told. Scientists figure out what to do next.

The linchpin is able to invent a future, fall in love with it, live in it—and then abandon it on a moment’s notice.

The patients who were told that the situation was permanent, that they would need to live with a bag their entire lives, ended up being happier than those who were told that there was a chance they’d recover use of their colon.

The only thing that separates great artists from mediocre ones is their ability to push through the dip.

Given a choice between dignity and “more,” most people choose dignity.

the most generous thing you can do is open yourself to the feedback that improves your art and helps it spread. Discerning the difference between feedback that helps and criticism that degrades, though, will take some time.

In the case of personality, most psychologists agree that there are five traits that are essential in how people look at us: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extra-version, Agreeableness, and Emotional Stability.

Work, great work, has been transformed in just a hundred years from doing things that involve heavy lifting to leveraging and enhancing your personality.

the individual in the organization who collects, connects, and nurtures relationships is indispensable.

The memories and connections and experiences of the person in the center of this culture are difficult to scale and hard to replace.