Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

by Seth Godin

It turns out that digging into the difficult work of emotional labor is exactly what we’re expected (and needed) to do. Work is nothing but a platform for art and the emotional labor that goes with it.

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.”

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

Is it art when Harvard scientist Jill Bolte Taylor holds us spellbound for eighteen minutes talking about her near-fatal stroke? Certainly.

Look this up

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.

A day’s work for a day’s pay (work <=> pay). I hate this approach to life. It cheapens us. This simple formula bothers me for two reasons: 1. Are you really willing to sell yourself out so cheap? Do you mortgage an entire (irreplaceable) day of your life for a few bucks? The moment you are willing to sell your time for money is the moment you cease to be the artist you’re capable of being. 2. Is that it? Is the transaction over? If we’re even at the end of the day as the formula says, then you owe me nothing and I owe you nothing in return. If we’re even, then there is no bond, no ongoing connection between us. It’s like Hector in Queens. You have become a day laborer and I have become a day boss.

“Wait! Are You Saying That I Have to Stop Following Instructions and Start Being an Artist? Someone Who Dreams Up New Ideas and Makes Them Real? Someone Who Finds New Ways to Interact, New Pathways to Deliver Emotion, New Ways to Connect? Someone Who Acts Like a Human, Not a Cog? Me? ” Yes.

Sometimes, shipping feels like a compromise. You set out to make a huge difference, to create art that matters and to do your best work. Then a deadline arrives and you have to cut it short. Is shipping that important? I think it is. I think the discipline of shipping is essential in the long-term path to becoming indispensable. While some artists manage to work for years or decades and actually ship something important, far more often we find the dreams of art shattered by the resistance. We give in to the fear and our art ends up lying in a box somewhere, unseen.

Why is shipping so difficult? I think there are two challenges and one reason: The challenges: 1. Thrashing 2. Coordination And the reason: The resistance.

Any project worth doing involves invention, inspiration, and at least a little bit of making stuff up. Traditionally, we start with an inkling, adding more and more detail as we approach the ship date. And the closer we get to shipping, the more thrashing occurs. Thrashing is the apparently productive brainstorming and tweaking we do for a project as it develops.

Thrashing is essential. The question is: when to thrash?

Professional creators thrash early. The closer the project gets to completion, the fewer people see it and the fewer changes are permitted.

Coordinating teams of people becomes exponentially more difficult as the group gets larger. And for important projects in an organization with something to lose, the group pushes to get larger. People with something at stake (and we all believe we have something at stake) want to get involved in the really good projects, mostly because we’re afraid that everyone else will screw it up and we’ll get blamed.

The lizard brain is the reason you’re afraid, the reason you don’t do all the art you can, the reason you don’t ship when you can. The lizard brain is the source of the resistance.

Your mind, the thing that drives you crazy and makes you special, has two distinct sections, the daemon and the resistance. The daemon is the source of great ideas, groundbreaking insights, generosity, love, connection, and kindness. The resistance spends all its time insulating the world from our daemon. The resistance lives inside the lizard brain.

Elizabeth Gilbert talked about hers at TED

Link to this

Then I read the source of her talk: Lewis Hyde’s take on it in The Gift.

Source of resistance

The metaphor goes like this: the older a brain system is on the evolutionary scale (and the closer to the brain stem), the more power it has to suspend the actions of the younger systems. And the lizard brain within the limbic system is the loudest example of this metaphor. You rarely have a heart attack (I hope) and you probably won’t get so dizzy that you fall down, but your amygdala regularly suspends all civilized activity within your brain and takes over, putting you into lockdown.

Looking busy is not the same as fighting the resistance. Being productive at someone else’s task list is not the same as making your own map.

The reason the resistance persists in slowing you down and prevents you from putting your heart and soul and art into your work is simple: you might fail. Of course you might. In fact, you will. Not all the time, certainly, but more than you’d like.

Successful people are successful for one simple reason: they think about failure differently. Successful people learn from failure, but the lesson they learn is a different one. They don’t learn that they shouldn’t have tried in the first place, and they don’t learn that they are always right and the world is wrong and they don’t learn that they are losers. They learn that the tactics they used didn’t work or that the person they used them on didn’t respond.

The resistance desperately seeks to sabotage your art. A well-defined backup plan is sabotage waiting to happen.

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.

And yet it’s Yo-Yo Ma and Ben Zander and Gustavo Dudamel who are in demand, who make great money, and who are having all the fun. These are the guys who don’t fit in, who don’t follow the score, who know the rules but break them. They are artists. Many others have been indoctrinated by the system and frightened by the resistance into following instructions.

When you were a kid, beautiful art—questions, curiosity, and spontaneity—poured out of you. The resistance was only starting to figure out how to shout out the art coming from the rest of your brain. Then, thanks to disorganized hazing by friends, raised eyebrows from the family, and well-meaning, well-organized, but toxic rules at school, the resistance gained in strength.

The more you have to fear, the worse it goes.

Don’t listen to the cynics. They’re cynics for a reason. For them, the resistance won a long time ago. When the resistance tells you not to listen to something, read something, or attend something, go. Do it. It’s not an accident that successful people read more books.

the resistance is wily. It works to do one of two things: get you to fit in (and become invisible) or get you to fail (which makes it unlikely that positive change will arrive, thus permitting you to stay still).

It’s interesting to say it out loud. “I’m doing this because of the resistance.” “My lizard brain is making me anxious.” “I’m angry right now because being angry is keeping me from doing my work.” When you say it out loud (not think it, but say it), the lizard brain retreats in shame.

When the lizard brain is getting what it wants, it is definitely not going to slow you down.

Actor John Goodman was interviewed about his role in Waiting for Godot. He had planned to spend the spring fishing and watching TV with his family in New Orleans, and he was prepared to turn the gig down. Here’s his take on challenging the resistance: “You’re an idiot. This is a once-in-a-lifetime deal. It will never come by again . . . I didn’t think I was up to it all. I had no confidence in myself. So it’s just a matter of throwing myself under the bus and crawling my way out.”

Shenpa is a Tibetan word that roughly means “scratching the itch.” I think of it as a spiral of pain, something that is triggered by a small event and immediately takes you totally off the ranch. A small itch gets scratched, which makes it itch more, so you scratch more and more until you’re literally in pain.

The best time to stop the spiral is the very first moment. Taking action at the start, calling it out, recognizing the cycle—this is your first and best chance. Embrace the itch from the start, but don’t scratch it. To do otherwise is to lose all perspective. You can’t make a useful map when you’re busy exaggerating the downside of every option. This is prajna. If you can’t teach the world a lesson, accept it, don’t get attached to a different outcome.

Shenpa is caused by a conflict between the lizard brain (which wants to strike out or to flee) and the rest of our brain, which desires achievement, connection, and grace.

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

I’m trying to sell you on the idea of building a platform before you have your next idea, to view the platform building as a separate project from spreading your art. You can work on the platform every day, do it without facing the resistance. As the platform gets bigger and stronger, you get to launch each idea a little farther uphill.

The very fact that gift giving without recompense feels uncomfortable is reason enough for you to take a moment to find out why.

In the linchpin economy, the winners are once again the artists who give gifts. Giving a gift makes you indispensable. Inventing a gift, creating art—that is what the market seeks out, and the givers are the ones who earn our respect and attention.

Capitalism has taught us that every transaction has to be fair, an even trade for goods or services delivered. What Keller and other artists demonstrate is that linchpin thinking is about delivering gifts that can never be adequately paid for.

It’s reciprocity that turned the gift system into the gift economy. Suddenly, giving a gift becomes an obligation, one demanding payment, not a gift at all. So marketers use the reciprocity impulse against us, using gifts as a come-on.

The magic of the gift system is that the gift is voluntary, not part of a contract. The gift binds the recipient to the giver, and both of them to the community. A contract isolates individuals, with money as the connector. The gift binds them instead.

The act of giving the gift is worth more to me than it may be to you to receive.

When I make an interest-free loan to you, I’m trusting you and giving you a gift at the same time. This interaction increases the quality of our bond and strengthens the community. Just as you wouldn’t charge your husband interest on a loan, you don’t charge a tribe member. Strangers, on the other hand, are not to be trusted. Going further, strangers don’t deserve the bond that the gift brings. It would turn the stranger into a tribe member, and the tribe is already too big. If I loan money to a stranger, I’m doing it for one reason: to make money.

One reason that art has so much power is that it represents the most precious gift we can deliver. And delivering it to people we work with or connect with strengthens our bond with them. It strengthens the tribal connection.

Real gifts don’t demand reciprocation (at least not direct reciprocation), and the best kinds of gifts are gifts of art.

The power lies in the creation of abundance. A trade leaves things as they were, with no external surplus. A gift always creates a surplus as it spreads.

When I treat you with respect or spend the time to try to change your mind, I am embracing you in the best way I can. If I touch you in any way, you then have two obligations: to make us closer, and to pass it on, to give a gift to another member of the tribe. Gifts don’t demand immediate payment, but they have always included social demands within the tribe.

If you give a gift, I hope you will do it because you respect your muse and embrace your art. But, right now anyway, I’ll settle for your simulating this behavior simply because you want to be the linchpin, the center of the tribe, the source of our inspiration, and the one we all count on to make a difference.

1. Give me a gift! 2. Here’s a gift; now you owe me, big-time. 3. Here’s a gift, I love you. The first two are capitalist misunderstandings of what it means to give or receive a gift. The third is the only valid alternative on the list.

When you cut your expenses to the bone, you have a surplus. The surplus allows you to be generous, which mysteriously turns around and makes your surplus even bigger.