Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

by Seth Godin

You have brilliance in you, your contribution is valuable, and the art you create is precious. Only you can do it, and you must.

Everyone has a little voice inside of their head that’s angry and afraid. That voice is the resistance—your lizard brain—and it wants you to be average (and safe).

Becoming a linchpin is a stepwise process, a path in which you develop the attributes that make you indispensable. You can train yourself to matter.

Do not internalize the industrial model. You are not one of the myriad of interchangeable pieces, but a unique human being, and if you’ve got something to say, say it, and think well of yourself while you’re learning to say it better. —David Mamet

People want to be told what to do because they are afraid (petrified) of figuring it out for themselves.

Someone else is getting better than you at hiring cheap and competent workers. They can ship the work overseas, or buy more machines, or cut corners faster than you can. The other problem? 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. It’s certainly possible for a shopper to buy food more cheaply than they sell it at Trader Joe’s. But Trader’s keeps growing, because the combination of engaged employees, cutting-edge products, and fun brings people back.

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

Today, the means of production=a laptop computer with Internet connectivity. Three thousand dollars buys a worker an entire factory.

For years (or decades), corporations made average products for average people and routinely interrupted us, hoping we would notice them—and eventually, we stopped paying attention. Now, the only way to grow is to stand out, to create something worth talking about, to treat people with respect and to have them spread the word.

You don’t become indispensable merely because you are different. But the only way to be indispensable is to be different. That’s because if you’re the same, so are plenty of other people.

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.

Take the risk that you might make someone upset with your initiative, innovation, and insight—it turns out that you’ll probably delight them instead.

Consumers say that all they want are cheap commodities. Given the choice, though, most of us, most of the time, seek out art. We seek out experiences and products that deliver more value, more connection, and more experience, and change us for the better. You can learn how to do this if you want to.

If you want a job where you get to do more than follow instructions, don’t be surprised if you get asked to do things they never taught you in school.

If you want a job where you take intellectual risks all day long, don’t be surprised if your insights get you promoted.

If your organization wanted to replace you with someone far better at your job than you, what would they look for? I think it’s unlikely that they’d seek out someone willing to work more hours, or someone with more industry experience, or someone who could score better on a standardized test. No, the competitive advantage the marketplace demands is someone more human, connected, and mature. Someone with passion and energy, capable of seeing things as they are and negotiating multiple priorities as she makes useful decisions without angst. Flexible in the face of change, resilient in the face of confusion. All of these attributes are choices, not talents, and all of them are available to you.

When you’re not a cog in a machine, an easily replaceable commodity, you’ll get paid what you’re worth. Which is more.

If you want customers to flock to you, it’s tempting to race to the bottom of the price chart. There’s not a lot of room for profit there, though. You can’t out-Amazon Amazon, can you?

The architecture of our systems is set up so that the people at the top know more. The goal is to hire as many cheap but talented people as possible, give them a rule book, and have them follow instructions to the letter. Go to a McDonald’s. Order a Big Mac. Order a chocolate milkshake. Drink half the milkshake. Eat half the Big Mac. Put the Big Mac into your milkshake and walk up to the counter. Say, “I can’t drink this milkshake . . . there’s a Big Mac in it.” The person at the counter will give you a refund. Why? Because it’s easier to give her a rule than it is to hire people with good judgment. The rule is, “When in doubt, give a refund.”

If you’re insecure, the obvious response to my call to become a linchpin is, “I’m not good enough at anything to be indispensable.” The typical indoctrinated response is that great work and great art and remarkable output are the domain of someone else. You think that your job is to do the work that needs doing, anonymously.

I’ve been lucky enough to meet or work with thousands of remarkable linchpins. It appears to me that the only way they differ from a mediocre rule-follower is that they never bought into this self-limiting line of thought. That’s it.

After retaining brutal Pinkerton men, trainloads of strikebreakers, and even the National Guard to violently put down strikes, Andrew Carnegie decided that the answer to worker unrest was a limited amount of education. “Just see, wherever we peer into the first tiny springs of the national life, how this true panacea for all the ills of the body politic bubbles forth—education, education, education.”

Is there anyone in an organization who is absolutely irreplaceable? Probably not. But the most essential people are so difficult to replace, so risky to lose, and so valuable that they might as well be irreplaceable. Entire corporations are built around a linchpin, or more likely, a scattering of them, essential individuals who are worth holding on to.

Doesn’t matter if you’re always right. It matters that you’re always moving.

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.

The moment-to-moment insecurity of so many jobs robs you of the confidence you need to actually do great work.

if you do great work you gain the reward of knowing you’re doing great work. Your day snaps into alignment with your dreams, and you no longer have to pretend you’re mediocre. You’re free to contribute.

My heroes Roz and Ben Zander wrote an incredible book called The Art of Possibility. One of the most powerful essays in the book describes how Ben changes the lives of his hyperstressed music students by challenging each of them to “give yourself an A.” His point is that announcing in advance that you’re going to do great—embracing your effort and visualizing an outcome—is far more productive than struggling to beat the curve. I want to go farther than that. I say you should give yourself a D (unless you’re lucky enough to be in Ben’s class). Assume before you start that you’re going to create something that the teacher, the boss, or some other nitpicking critic is going to dislike. Of course, they need to dislike it for all the wrong reasons. You can’t abandon technique merely because you’re not good at it or unwilling to do the work. But if the reason you’re going to get a D is that you’re challenging structure and expectation and the status quo, then YES! Give yourself a D. A well-earned D.

Your restaurant has four waiters, and tough times require you to lay someone off. Three of the waiters work hard. The other one is good, but is also a master at solving problems. He can placate an angry customer, finesse the balky computer system, and mollify the chef when he’s had too much to drink. Any idea who has the most secure job? Troubleshooting is never part of a job description, because if you could describe the steps needed to shoot trouble, there wouldn’t be trouble in the first place, right? Troubleshooting is an art, and it’s a gift from the troubleshooter to the person in trouble. The troubleshooter steps in when everyone else has given up, puts himself on the line, and donates the energy and the risk to the cause.