Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

by Seth Godin

There are no longer any great jobs where someone else tells you precisely what to do.

Abstract macroeconomic theories are irrelevant to the people making a million tiny microeconomic decisions every day in a hypercompetitive world. And those decisions repeatedly favor fast and cheap over slow and expensive.

Some jobs are likely to remain poorly paid, low in respect, and high in turnover. These are jobs where attendance (showing up) is all that really matters. Other jobs, the really good jobs, are going to be filled with indispensable people, people who make a difference by doing work that’s really hard to find from anyone else.

Let’s say you’re the boss, the guy with the map, the person generating jobs and taking profits. You have a business model that allows you to hire people to manipulate data or make sales or do some other task that you can write down in a manual. An exceptional performer earns you $30 for every hour he works. A good employee is worth $25 an hour, and a mediocre worker can contribute about $20 an hour in profit. If you can’t tell who’s mediocre and who’s exceptional when you do the hiring, and you want to pay everyone a standard rate, how much should you pay? Well, other than “as little as possible,” the answer is certainly less than $25 an hour. Probably less than $20 an hour. You want every employee to make money, even the mediocre ones. Which means that all your other employees are getting paid less to make up for the ones who contribute the least. The exceptional performers are getting paid a lot less, which is why they should (and will) leave. Exceptional performers are starting to realize that it doesn’t pay to do factory work at factory wages only to subsidize the boss.

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.

Be remarkable Be generous Create art Make judgment calls Connect people and ideas . . . and we have no choice but to reward you.

It’s unprofitable to establish a career around the idea of doing what the manual says.

motivated them to do their best at work. The top ten, ranked in order: 1. Challenge and responsibility 2. Flexibility 3. A stable work environment 4. Money 5. Professional development 6. Peer recognition 7. Stimulating colleagues and bosses 8. Exciting job content 9. Organizational culture 10. Location and community

If you need to conceal your true nature to get in the door, understand that you’ll probably have to conceal your true nature to keep that job.

You can work for a company that wants indispensable people, or you can work for a company that works to avoid them.

You become a winner because you’re good at losing.

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

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.

It’s impossible to be a linchpin if you agree to feed your anxiety.

When I put myself on an Internet diet (only five checks a day, not fifty), my productivity tripled. Tripled.

You can’t sprint every day, but it’s probably a good idea to sprint regularly. It keeps the resistance at bay.

linchpin thinking is about delivering gifts that can never be adequately paid for.

When U2 goes on tour, the tour is an opportunity to do new art every night. The moment the band turns the tour into a cookie-cutter system to earn money, it ceases to be art and becomes a souvenir factory.

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

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.

In the bottom right is the Fundamentalist Zealot. He is attached to the world as he sees it. There is no prajna here, no discernment. Change is a threat. Curiosity is a threat. Competition is a threat. As a result, it’s difficult for him to see the world as it is, because he insists on the world being the way he imagines it. At the same time, he has huge reservoirs of effort to invest in maintaining his worldview. Fundamentalist zealots always manage to make the world smaller, poorer, and meaner.

Scarcity creates value, and what’s scarce is a desire to accept what is and then work to change it for the better, not deny that it exists.

It’s never possible to fit all the way in. Never possible for everything to be all right.

The fascinating (and universal) truth is that the opportunities came after she was inspired—she wasn’t inspired by the opportunities.

The linchpin is able to invent a future, fall in love with it, live in it—and then abandon it on a moment’s notice.

If you can do it brilliantly once, just once, then of course you can do it again.

Every day is a new chance to choose.

What will make someone a linchpin is not a shortcut. It’s the understanding of which hard work is worth doing. The only thing that separates great artists from mediocre ones is their ability to push through the dip. Some people decide that their art is important enough that they ought to overcome the resistance they face in doing their work. Those people become linchpins.

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.

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 is one way to think about the list of what makes you indispensable: 1. Providing a unique interface between members of the organization 2. Delivering unique creativity 3. Managing a situation or organization of great complexity 4. Leading customers 5. Inspiring staff 6. Providing deep domain knowledge 7. Possessing a unique talent

Delivering Unique Creativity

That’s why linchpins are so valuable during times of great complexity (which is most of the time). Linchpins make their own maps, and thus allow the organization to navigate more quickly than it ever could if it had to wait for the paralyzed crowd to figure out what to do next.

Organizations obey Newton’s laws. A team at rest tends to stay at rest.

The linchpin changes that. Understanding that your job is to make something happen changes what you do all day.

The front-desk worker at a hotel who runs out in the middle of the night to buy gym shorts for a guest isn’t doing it out of fear of being reprimanded. He does it because he was inspired to do so by a leader who wasn’t even in the hotel when the clerk decided to contribute.

You want your pretty safe skill to be enough. Enough to make you valued, enough to make you fairly paid, enough to make your life stable. But it’s not. It’s not enough because in a very connected, very competitive marketplace, there are plenty of people with your pretty safe skill. The “super” part and the “power” part come not from something you’re born with but from something you choose to do and, more important, from something you choose to give.

If you’re not the best in the world (the customer’s world) at your unique talent, then it’s not a unique talent, is it? Which means you have only two choices: 1. Develop the other attributes that make you a linchpin. 2. Get a lot better at your unique talent.

What happens when the conversation doesn’t happen, the product doesn’t sell, the consumer is not delighted, your boss is not happy, and the people aren’t moved? Make more art. It’s the only choice, isn’t it? Give more gifts. Learn from what you did and then do more. The only alternative is to give up and to become an old-school cog. Which means failing. Trying and failing is better than merely failing, because trying makes you an artist and gives you the right to try again.

If you actually work for an organization that insists you be mediocre, that enforces conformity in all its employees, why stay? What are you building? The work can’t possibly be enjoyable or challenging, your skills aren’t increasing, and your value in the marketplace decreases each day you stay there. And if history is a guide, your job there isn’t as stable as you think, because average companies making average products for average people are under huge strain.

Maybe you can’t make money doing what you love (at least what you love right now). But I bet you can figure out how to love what you do to make money (if you choose wisely). Do your art. But don’t wreck your art if it doesn’t lend itself to paying the bills. That would be a tragedy. (And the twist, because there is always a twist, is that as soon as you focus on your art and leave the money behind, you may discover that this focus turns out to be the secret of actually breaking through and making money.)

Now that you understand that society rewards you for standing out, for giving gifts, for making connections and being remarkable, what are you going to choose to do with that information? You have a genius inside of you, a daemon with something to share with the world. Everyone does. Are you going to continue hiding it, holding it back, and settling for less than you deserve just because your lizard brain is afraid? There lies regret.

If all online products at all online stores are the same, then of course I’ll use a price-shopping Web site to find the cheapest product. If all employees are nothing but a résumé, and résumés can be scanned, then why are we surprised that our computers end up finding us anonymous average people to fill our anonymous average jobs? If every restaurant on the highway will give me precisely the same cheery service from the same robotic staff, at the same prices, then why does it matter where I stop?

We don’t have a talent shortage, we have a shipping shortage.

You can’t fake it, though, because human beings are too talented at sensing when a gift is not a gift, when we’re being played or manipulated.