Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

by Seth Godin

Our society is struggling because during times of change, the very last people you need on your team are well-paid bureaucrats, note takers, literalists, manual readers, TGIF laborers, map followers, and fearful employees. The compliant masses don’t help so much when you don’t know what to do next.

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.

There are fewer and fewer good jobs where you can get paid merely for showing up. Instead, successful organizations are paying for people who make a difference and are shedding everyone else.

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.

You can see your marketplace as being limited, a zero-sum game, a place where in order for one person to win, another must lose. Or you can see it as unlimited. A place where talent creates growth and the market increases in size.

In a world that relentlessly races to the bottom, you lose if you also race to the bottom. The only way to win is to race to the top.

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.

Organizations are far more complex. There are essentially an infinite number of choices, endless degrees of freedom. Your marketing can be free or expensive, online or offline, funny or sad. It can be truthful, emotional, boring, or bland. In fact, every marketing campaign ever done has been at least a little different from every other one.

In the face of an infinite sea of choices, it’s natural to put blinders on, to ask for a map, to beg for instructions, or failing that, to do exactly what you did last time, even if it didn’t work. Linchpins are able to embrace the lack of structure and find a new path, one that works.

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.

For generations, we’ve been pushing workers to do something inherently unnatural. We’ve been teaching, cajoling, and yes, forcing people to hide their empathy and their creativity and to pretend that they are fast-moving automatons, machines designed to do the company’s bidding.

It’s not an effort contest, it’s an art contest. As customers, we care about ourselves, about how we feel, about whether a product or service or play or interaction changed us for the better. Where it’s made or how it’s made or how difficult it was to make is sort of irrelevant. That’s why emotional labor is so much more valuable than physical labor. Emotional labor changes the recipient, and we care about that.

Optimism is the most important human trait, because it allows us to evolve our ideas, to improve our situation, and to hope for a better tomorrow. And all artists have this optimism, because artists can honestly say that they are working to make things better.

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. Don’t.

Becoming more average, more quick, and more cheap is not as productive as it used to be.

It takes crazy discipline to do nothing between projects. It means that you have to face a blank wall and you can’t look busy. It means you are alone with your thoughts, and it means that a new project, perhaps a great project, will appear pretty soon, because your restless energy can’t permit you to only sit and do nothing.

In the case of personality, 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. Here’s the thing: these are also the signs of the linchpin. Work, great work, has been transformed in just a hundred years from doing things that involve heavy lifting to leveraging and enhancing your personality.