Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

by Seth Godin

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 collection. (Jeffrey Eisenberg reports that “79 percent of businesses obsessively capture Internet traffic data, yet only 30 percent of them changed their sites as a result of analysis.”) Be snarky. Start committees instead of taking action. Join committees instead of leading. Excessively criticize the work of your peers, thus unrealistically raising the bar for your work. Produce deliberately outlandish work product that no one can possibly embrace. Ship deliberately average work product that will certainly fit in and be ignored. Don’t ask questions. Ask too many questions. Criticize anyone who is doing something differently. If they succeed, that means you’ll have to do something differently too. Start a never-ending search for the next big thing, abandoning yesterday’s thing as old. Embrace an emotional attachment to the status quo. Invent anxiety about the side effects of a new approac...