Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

by Seth Godin

Art is about intent and communication, not substances.

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

Art is the product of emotional labor. If it’s easy and risk free, it’s unlikely that it’s art.

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.

A day’s work is your chance to do art, to create a gift, to do something that matters. As your work gets better and your art becomes more important, competition for your gifts will increase and you’ll discover that you can be choosier about whom you give them to.

The passion wasn’t in making the money—it was in making a difference, solving a problem, creating a change that would help millions.

If art is about humanity, and commerce has become about interactions (not stuff), then commerce is now about art, too.

I don’t see it that way. 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.

people do their art where they find it, not the other way around.

Some people are hooked on passion, deriving their sense of self from the act of being passionate. 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.

The combination of passion and art is what makes someone a linchpin.

Whistling as you walk through the woods is a form of art, but you’re not doing it hoping a squirrel will applaud.

The easier it is to quantify, the less it’s worth.

Your art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it. Your art is the act of taking personal responsibility, challenging the status quo, and changing people.

Can the time you spend at work be the place you give gifts, create connections, invent, and find joy?

The job is not your work; what you do with your heart and soul is the work.

artists have the chance to make things better.

Part of the passion is having the persistence and resilience to change both your art and the way you deliver it. Passion for your art also means having a passion for spreading your art.

And if the ideas don’t spread, if no gift is received, then there is no art, only effort.

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

Shipping means hitting the publish button on your blog, showing a presentation to the sales team, answering the phone, selling the muffins, sending out your references. Shipping is the collision between your work and the outside world.

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.

I first heard about the daemon when Elizabeth Gilbert talked about hers at TED (you can watch the video at www.ted.org). Then I read the source of her talk: Lewis Hyde’s take on it in The Gift.

Elizabeth warns us that the life of the writer is a life that could end up on “the scrap heap of broken dreams with your mouth filled with the bitter ash of failure.” Why do creative ventures threaten our mental health, she wonders. Why is there writer’s block but no chemical engineering block? Artistry, it seems, always leads to anguish. This anguish is caused by the clash between the daemon and the resistance. Society pushes artists to be geniuses, as opposed to encouraging artists to allow the genius within to flourish. Different tasks.

You can’t give a speech while drowning. You can’t fall in love while having a heart attack. You can’t write a sonnet at the same time you’re vomiting from being on a roller coaster.

Weak managers? Why is it that so many bosses shy away from useful criticism or substantive leadership? Why is it so easy to hide behind an office door or a title instead of looking people in the eye and making a difference? Same answer. The amygdala resists looking people in the eye, because doing so is threatening and exposes it to risk.

Eye contact, all by itself, is enough to throw your lizard brain into a tizzy. Imagine how scary it must be to set out to do something that will get you noticed, or perhaps even criticized.

They learn that the tactics they used didn’t work or that the person they used them on didn’t respond. You become a winner because you’re good at losing. The hard part about losing is that you might permit it to give strength to the resistance, that you might believe that you don’t deserve to win, that you might, in some dark corner of your soul, give up.

Going out of your way to find uncomfortable situations isn’t natural, but it’s essential.

The road to comfort is crowded and it rarely gets you there. Ironically, it’s those who seek out discomfort that are able to make a difference and find their footing.

Finding good ideas is surprisingly easy once you deal with the problem of finding bad ideas.

One way to become creative is to discipline yourself to generate bad ideas. The worse the better. Do it a lot and magically you’ll discover that some good ones slip through.

If it works, then you have to do it. Then you have to do it again. Then you have to top it. If it works, your world changes. There are new threats and new challenges and new risks. That’s world-class frightening.

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.

three biological factors that drive job performance and innovation are social intelligence, fear response, and perception. Public speaking brings all three together. Speaking to a group requires social intelligence. We need to be able to make an emotional connection with people, talk about what they are interested in, and persuade them. That’s difficult, and we’re not wired for this as well as we are wired to, say, eat fried foods.

Fear is the most important emotion we have. It kept our ancestors alive, after all. Fear dominates the other emotions, because without our ability to avoid death, the other ones don’t matter very much.

There are books and classes that can teach you how to do most of the things discussed in this book. And while many copies are sold and many classes attended, the failure rate is astonishingly high.

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.

Ship early, sending out defective ideas, hoping they will be rejected.

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.”)

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.”

“I don’t know what to do”—this one is certainly true. The question is, why does that bother you? No one actually knows what to do. Sometimes we have a hunch, or a good idea, but we’re never sure.

“I didn’t graduate from [insert brand of some prestigious educational institution here]”—well, MIT is now free online, for anyone who wants to learn. The public library in your town has just about everything you need, and what’s not there is online. Access to knowledge used to matter. No longer.

Your work is to do the work, not to do your job. Your job is about following instructions; the work is about making a difference. Your work is to ship. Ship things that make change.

Where did your art go while you were tweeting?

A workaholic brings fear into the equation. She works all the time to be sure everything is all right, and she experiences resistance all the time. She satisfies the raging fear of her lizard brain by being at the job site all the time, just to be sure.

Zen Habits helps you think your way through this problem. His program is simple: Attempt to create only one significant work a year.

Anxiety is needless and imaginary. It’s fear about fear, fear that means nothing.

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.