Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

by Seth Godin

If a genius is someone with exceptional abilities and the insight to find the not so obvious solution to a problem, you don’t need to win a Nobel Prize to be one. A genius looks at something that others are stuck on and gets the world unstuck.

A guy is riding in the first-class cabin of a train in Spain and to his delight, he notices that he’s sitting next to Pablo Picasso. Gathering up his courage, he turns to the master and says, “Señor Picasso, you are a great artist, but why is all your art, all modern art, so screwed up? Why don’t you paint reality instead of these distortions?” Picasso hesitates for a moment and asks, “So what do you think reality looks like?” The man grabs his wallet and pulls out a picture of his wife. “Here, like this. It’s my wife.” Picasso takes the photograph, looks at it, and grins. “Really? She’s very small. And flat, too.”

This book is about love and art and change and fear. It’s about overcoming a multigenerational conspiracy designed to sap your creativity and restlessness. It’s about leading and making a difference and it’s about succeeding.

My goal is to persuade you that there is an opportunity available to you, a chance to significantly change your life for the better. Not by doing something that’s easy or that you’ve been trained to do, but by understanding how the rules of our world have fundamentally changed and by taking advantage of this moment to become someone the world believes is indispensable.

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).

Becoming a linchpin is a stepwise process, a path in which you develop the attributes that make you indispensable. You can train yourself to matter. The first step is the most difficult, the step where you acknowledge that this is a skill, and like all skills, you can (and will) get better at it. Every day, if you focus on the gifts, art, and connections that characterize the linchpin, you’ll become a little more indispensable.

Do not internalize the industrial model. You are not one of the myriad of interchangeable pieces, but a unique human being, and if you’ve got something to say, say it, and think well of yourself while you’re learning to say it better. —David Mamet

THE NEW WORLD OF WORK We Are Surrounded by Bureaucrats, Note Takers, Literalists, Manual Readers, TGIF Laborers, Map Followers, and Fearful Employees

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

One of the most popular books ever written on building a business is called The E-Myth Revisited, and here’s what its author, Michael E. Gerber, says about the perfect business model:

The Model Will Be Operated by People with the Lowest Possible Level of Skill

can’t make this stuff up. His point was that you want a cookie-cutter business that you can scale fast, without regard for finding, nurturing, and retaining linchpin talent.

Indispensable businesses race to the top instead.

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.

In fact, history is now being written by the artists while the factory workers struggle. The future belongs to chefs, not to cooks or bottle washers. It’s easy to buy a cookbook (filled with instructions to follow) but really hard to find a chef book.

For our entire lives, the push has been to produce, to conform, and to consume.

Hugh MacLeod: “The web has made kicking ass easier to achieve, and mediocrity harder to sustain. Mediocrity now howls in protest.”

Corporations have no right to our attention. For years (or decades), corporations made average products for average people and routinely interrupted us, hoping we would notice them—and eventually, we stopped paying attention. Now, the only way to grow is to stand out, to create something worth talking about, to treat people with respect and to have them spread the word.

The only way to get what you’re worth is to stand out, to exert emotional labor, to be seen as indispensable, and to produce interactions that organizations and people care deeply about.

If you want a job where it’s okay to follow the rules, don’t be surprised if you get a job where following the rules is all you get to do. If you want a job where the people who work for you do exactly what they’re told, don’t be surprised if your boss expects precisely the same thing from you. If you want a job where you don’t need to be creative because the company’s cost structure is so aggressive that customers just materialize, don’t be surprised if the low cost structure costs you your job. If you want a job where you get to do more than follow instructions, don’t be surprised if you get asked to do things they never taught you in school.

The linchpin sees the world very differently. Exceptional insight, productivity, and generosity make markets bigger and more efficient. This situation leads to more opportunities and ultimately a payoff for everyone involved. The more you give, the more the market gives back.

Be remarkable Be generous Create art Make judgment calls Connect people and ideas . . . and we have no choice but to reward you.

No, the competitive advantage the marketplace demands is someone more human, connected, and mature. Someone with passion and energy, capable of seeing things as they are and negotiating multiple priorities as she makes useful decisions without angst. Flexible in the face of change, resilient in the face of confusion.

Who would your employer look for to replace you?

Would your organization be more successful if your employees were more obedient? Or, consider for a second: would you be more successful if your employees were more artistic, motivated, connected, aware, passionate, and genuine? You can’t have both, of course.

Letting people in the organization use their best judgment turns out to be faster and cheaper—but only if you hire the right people and reward them for having the right attitude. Which is the attitude of a linchpin.

We’ve bought into a model that taught us to embrace the system, to spend for pleasure, and to separate ourselves from our work. We’ve been taught that this approach works, but it doesn’t (not anymore). And this disconnect keeps us from succeeding, cripples the growth of our society, and makes us really stressed.

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.”

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.

It’s almost impossible to imagine a school with a sign that said: “We teach people to take initiative and become remarkable artists, to question the status quo, and to interact with transparency. And our graduates understand that consumption is not the answer to social problems.”

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 think that your job is to do the work that needs doing, anonymously. Of course, this isn’t true, but it’s what you’ve been taught to believe. I’ve been lucky enough to meet or work with thousands of remarkable linchpins. It appears to me that the only way they differ from a mediocre rule-follower is that they never bought into this self-limiting line of thought. That’s it.

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. Sure, we need school and we need teachers. The thing is that we need a school organized around teaching people to believe, and teachers who are rewarded for doing their best work, not the most predictable work.

It’s not an accident that school is like a job, not an accident that there are supervisors and rules and tests and quality control. You do well, you get another job (the next grade), and continue to do well and you get a real job. Do poorly, don’t fit in, rebel—and you are kicked out of the system.

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. And schools can teach leadership as easily as they figured out how to teach compliance. Schools can teach us to be socially smart, to be open to connection, to understand the elements that build a tribe. While schools provide outlets for natural-born leaders, they don’t teach it. And leadership is now worth far more than compliance is.

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.

Depth of knowledge combined with good judgment is worth a lot. Depth of knowledge combined with diagnostic skills or nuanced insight is worth a lot, too.

Depth of knowledge is rarely sufficient, all by itself, to turn someone into a linchpin.

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 of the stewardesses studied by Hochschild for her book. The mistake in her analysis was failing to consider the alternative. The alternative is working in a coal mine. The alternative is working in a sweatshop. It’s called work because it’s difficult, and emotional labor is the work most of us are best suited to do. It may be exhausting, but it’s valuable.

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.

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.

The opposite of being a cog is being able to stop the show, at will. What would it take for you to stop the show?

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.”

So yes, good is bad, if bad means “not a profitable thing to aspire to.” And perfect is bad, because you can’t top perfect. The solution lies in seeking out something that is neither good nor perfect. You want something remarkable, nonlinear, game changing, and artistic.

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.

A lot of this discussion begs the question: If you’re a linchpin, indispensable, worth hiring, and able to make a difference, how do you get a job in a world filled with me-too résumés and factories? 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 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.”

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

Groucho Marx famously said, “I don’t care to belong to any club that would have me as a member.”