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Artists are people with a genius for finding a new answer, a new connection, or a new way of getting things done.
Linchpins are the essential building blocks of tomorrow’s high-value organizations. They don’t bring capital or expensive machinery, nor do they blindly follow instructions and merely contribute labor. Linchpins are indispensable, the driving force of our future.
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.
Flexible in the face of change, resilient in the face of confusion.
“Not My Job” Three words can kill an entire organization.
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.
Marissa Mayer
The Art of Possibility.
Krulak’s Law: Linchpins Whether You Want Them or Not
Jean-Baptiste Colbert.
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.
Personal interactions don’t have asymptotes. Innovative solutions to new problems don’t get old. Seek out achievements where there is no limit.
“I work for blessings.”
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.
This is why organizations under pressure often crack. All parties can see that their current system isn’t working, but they’re unable to embrace a new one because they’re certain that it won’t turn out perfectly, that it can’t be as good as what they have now. Organizations under pressure are stuck because their pain makes it hard for them to believe in the future.
Whining and fear, on the other hand, are largely self-fulfilling prophecies in organizations under stress.
“Real Artists Ship”
The only purpose of starting is to finish,
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 voice in your head has revealed the resistance. It is trying to teach the daemon a lesson, encouraging it to be more careful next time. The lizard hates your genius, and tries to stamp it out. When you hear this dialogue, don’t listen to it. Remember that it serves as proof of the resistance, and guard yourself even more diligently to ignore it.
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.
My friend JP lost her job. She’s amazing at what she does, she deserves to be promoted, not fired. She brings everything she has to work, every day, and they were so lucky to have her. But these dolts, they fired her. Some people would take that as a slap, a cut deep into their soul, a message that they ought to back off, stop trying, and care less. JP did the opposite. First, she realized that they made a bad decision, not that she did a bad job (good call). And second, she quickly understood that if she let the resistance stand up and say, “I told you so,” she’d be giving in. Give in to the
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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.
Cog workers have very little freedom at their jobs. Their output is measured, their tasks are described, and they either produce or are fired.
Of course, this isn’t the answer. Doing more of what you were doing, but more obediently, more measurably, and more averagely (is that a word?), will not solve the problem, it will make it worse.
It turns out that the three biological factors that drive job performance and innovation are social intelligence, fear response, and perception.
It’s not an accident that successful people read more books.
Here are some signs that the lizard brain is at work: Don’t ship on time. Late is the first step to never. Procrastinate, claiming that you need to be perfect. Ship early, sending out defective ideas, hoping they will be rejected. Suffer anxiety about what to wear to an event. Make excuses involving lack of money. Do excessive networking with the goal of having everyone like you and support you. Engage in deliberately provocative behavior designed to ostracize you so you’ll have no standing in the community. Demonstrate a lack of desire to obtain new skills. Spend hours on obsessive data
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The Cult of Done Bre Pettis wrote this manifesto on his blog: 1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion. 2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done. 3. There is no editing stage. 4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it. 5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it. 6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done. 7. Once you’re done you can throw it away. 8.
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“Thanks for the feedback, boss,”
The artist is producing a gift, making a change, causing good things to happen without hope for repayment. So, it’s possible to give less than you get from someone who is generous. For a while. But smart people don’t tolerate this for long, and the marketplace values these rare people too highly for this inequity to be a long-term solution for capitalists. If you are lucky enough to work with someone this generous, pay him a lot, or your competition will.
Slow down and think that one through. If you are fortunate enough to find an artist, you should work hard to pay him as much as you can afford, because if you don’t, someone else will.
The Two Reasons Seeing the Future Is So Difficult Attachment to an outcome combined with the resistance and fear of change. That’s it. You have all the information that everyone else has. But if you are deliberately trying to create a future that feels safe, you will willfully ignore the future that is likely.
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. If there’s no way in the world you can please that customer with a reasonable amount of effort, perhaps it’s better to accept the situation than it is to kill yourself trying (and failing) to change that person’s mindset.
There’s a difference between passively accepting every element of your environment (and thus missing opportunities to exploit) and being wise enough to leave the unchangeable alone, or at least work around it.
The linchpin is enlightened enough to see the world as it is, to understand that this angry customer is not about me, that this change in government policy is not a personal attack, that this job is not guaranteed for life. 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.
Here’s another way to describe the two axes: One asks, Can you see it? The other wonders, Do you care?
Your hard-charging boss wants to look good, and he’s going to do this by cutting short-term costs. You can help him by doing nothing all day, spending no money, and making no noise. Then what happens?
The human resources department makes sure that the people staffing the machines (they are part of it, after all) are obedient, reliable, and cheap.
If your organization won’t live without a map, can you change it? If you can’t, should you leave?
2. Find a boss who can’t live without a linchpin. Find a boss who adequately values your scarcity and your contribution, who will reward you with freedom and respect. Do the work. Make a difference.
Ishita Gupta wrote, Every day is a new chance to choose.
Most of what people do all day is roach stomping. The little tasks that distract us from the art of the work, that slow us down and wear us out. The good news is that plenty of people are happy to stomp the roaches for you. Your job is to hire someone to clean your brushes, organize your papers, and clear the way. Your job is to make art the best you can, to change the status quo, and to become indispensable. If you burn out along the way, you’re not doing anyone a favor. It’s not merely about hours worked. It never has been. Do the work and get whatever help you need to do it as well as you
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You will fail at this. Often. Why is that a problem? In fact, this is a boon.
It’s a boon because when others fail to be remarkable or make a difference or share their art or have an impact, they will give up. But you won’t, you’ll persist, pushing through the dip. Which means that few people will walk in the door with your background, experience, or persistence.
The self-hating artist burns out. The hypercritical lizard brain will pick apart anything we do in order to preserve its sense of short-term safety. The alternative is to develop a sense of loyalty to your mission and generosity to your work.
Discerning the difference between feedback that helps and criticism that degrades, though, will take some time. In the meantime, ease up on yourself. We need you.
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.
