Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

by Seth Godin

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

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

Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.

Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient. An artist is an individual who creates art. The more people you change, the more you change them, the more effective your art is.

A cook is not an artist. A cook follows a recipe, and he’s a good cook if he follows the recipe correctly. A chef is an artist. She’s an artist when she invents a new way of cooking or a new type of dish that creates surprise or joy or pleasure for the person she created it for.

Most artists (in our imagination) interact with stones or canvas or oil or words on paper. They do this before their work hits the viewer, causing an interaction or change to happen. But the most visceral art is direct. One to one, mano a mano, the artist and the viewer. It’s the art of interaction. It’s what you do. The art of running a meeting, counseling a student, conducting an interview, and calming an angry customer. The art of raising capital, buying a carpet at a souk, or managing a designer. If art is a human connection that causes someone to change his mind, then you are an artist.

Art is unique, new, and challenging to the status quo. It’s not decoration, it’s something that causes change. Art cannot be merely commerce. It must also be a gift. The artist creates his idea knowing that it will spread freely, without recompense. Sure, the physical manifestation of the art might sell for a million dollars, but that painting or that song is also going to be enjoyed by someone who didn’t pay for it.

A day’s work for a day’s pay (work <=> pay). I hate this approach to life. It cheapens us.

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.

Passion isn’t project-specific. It’s people-specific. Some people are hooked on passion, deriving their sense of self from the act of being passionate.

People with passion look for ways to make things happen. The combination of passion and art is what makes someone a linchpin.

When a magazine sends a photographer to take a picture of a celebrity, it is paying the photographer for a photo that’s good enough to run in the magazine. The magazine is expecting a certain standard of photograph, and it’s a commercial transaction. Anything the photographer contributes above that is a gift. The inspiration, the lighting, or the surprise—that’s a gift from the photographer to his client and to the readers of the magazine. Annie Leibovitz built her career around this gift. She was hired to do celebrity photographs, but she kept pushing the limits. I would imagine that some of her shots were a hard sell to clients who believed that they were buying yesterday’s version of Annie, not today’s. Over time, the gifts accrue and you have created a reputation.

It’s impossible to make art for everyone. There are too many conflicting goals and there’s far too much noise. Art for everyone is mediocre, bland, and ineffective. If you don’t pinpoint your audience, you end up making your art for the loudest, crankiest critics. And that’s a waste. Instead, focus on the audience that you choose, and listen to them, to the exclusion of all others. Go ahead and make this sort of customer happy, and the other guys can go pound sand.

The future of your organization depends on motivated human beings selflessly contributing unasked-for gifts of emotional labor. And worse yet, the harder you work to quantify and manipulate this process, the more poorly it will work. The most senior levels in organizations have wrestled with this situation for a long time. When you hire a vice president for business development, it’s a given that he’s not going to be your errand boy. You’re not paying all this money for someone who will merely go down a checklist you’ve created and who will ask you before making any decisions. Of course not. It’s his job to innovate, to create new opportunities, to connect with hard-to-reach people, and to follow the long line on the way to success. As we go lower down the totem pole, though, management assumes that less pay=less humanity. The facts belie that assumption. From the U.S. Army to the manager at your local McDonald’s, it turns out that more humanity delivers better results. One of the most difficult tasks the military had in Iraq was to teach soldiers how to treat Iraqi civilians as potential partners, how to vary from the stated mission of the day, how to be human in the face of huge unknown danger. It’s easy to teach someone how to fire a missile, but very difficult to take risks in the face of fear. The digitization of work (measurement, Internet connection, mechanization) makes typical MBAs very happy. This is the sort of thing you can put in a spreadsheet. The challenge i...

Artists understand that they have the power, through gifts, innovation, and love, to create a new story, one that’s better than the old one. 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.

Everyone, every single person, has been a genius at least once. Everyone has winged it, invented, and created their way out of a jam at least once. If you can do it once, you can do it again.

The lizard brain is hungry, scared, angry, and horny. The lizard brain only wants to eat and be safe. The lizard brain will fight (to the death) if it has to, but would rather run away. It likes a vendetta and has no trouble getting angry. The lizard brain cares what everyone else thinks, because status in the tribe is essential to its survival.

The challenge, then, is to create an environment where the lizard snoozes. You can’t beat it, so you must seduce it. One part of your brain worries about survival and anger and lust. The rest of it creates civilization.

The temptation to sabotage the new thing is huge, precisely because the new thing might work.

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. Our sanitized, corporatized society hasn’t figured out how to get rid of the fear, so instead we channel it into bizarre corners of our life.

Fear of living without a map is the main reason people are so insistent that we tell them what to do. The reasons are pretty obvious: If it’s someone else’s map, it’s not your fault if it doesn’t work out. If you’ve memorized the sales script I gave you and you don’t make the sale, who’s in trouble now? Not only does the map insulate us from responsibility, but it’s also a social talisman. We can tell our friends and family that we’ve found a good map, a safe map, a map worthy of respect.

Leo Babauta’s brilliant little book Zen Habits helps you think your way through this problem. His program is simple: Attempt to create only one significant work a year. Break that into smaller projects, and every day, find three tasks to accomplish that will help you complete a project. And do only that during your working hours. I’m talking about an hour a day to complete a mammoth work of art, whatever sort of art you have in mind. That hour a day might not be fun, but it’s probably a lot more productive than the ten hours you spend now.

Shenpa is caused by a conflict between the lizard brain (which wants to strike out or to flee) and the rest of our brain, which desires achievement, connection, and grace. Oscillating between the two merely makes things worse. It seems that you have two choices for ending the cycle: you can flee or you can stay. There’s nothing inherently wrong with fleeing. If you can’t handle a certain kind of interaction or event, don’t do it. Avoid it. Some people weren’t born to be baseball umpires. The other alternative is to stay. If you believe that it’s important enough, then your challenge is to overrule the resistance. Not to flee and return, flee and return. No, you must stay. Sit with it. Give the resistance no quarter. Just stay.

Here’s how I make stuff. I’ve used this technique to launch multimillion-dollar software projects, write books, plan vacations, work in teams, work solo, and write a blog. All projects that ship on time. The first step is write down the due date. Post it on the wall. It’s real. You will ship on this date, done or not. The next step is to use index cards, Post-it notes, Moleskine notebooks, fortune cookies, whatever you can embrace. Write down every single notion, plan, idea, sketch, and contact. This is when you go fishing. Get as much help as you like. Invite as many people in as you can. This is their big chance.

This is where the thrashing and dreaming begin. It’s very hard to get the people you work with to pay attention at this moment. Since the deadline is so far away, their lizard brains are asleep and there’s no fear or selfish motivation available. People focus on emergencies, not urgencies, and getting yourself (and them) to stop working on tomorrow’s deadline and pitch in now isn’t easy. A big part of the work, then, is to get yourself (and your team, if you have one) to step up and dream. On a regular basis, collate the cards and read ’em aloud to the team. This process will inevitably lead to more cards. Then, put the cards into a database. I use FileMaker Pro, but you can use any simple database. (You can even use a pad of paper.) If you have a group, try to find a group database for the Web. Every card gets its own record. The record can include words, images, sketches, and links to other cards. The idea is that this is your thrashing playground. Let the team play along. Rearrange. Draw. Sketch. Make sure everyone understands that this is the very last chance they have to make the project better.

One person (that would be you) then goes through the database and builds a complete description of the project. If it’s a book, then you’ve got a forty-page outline. If it’s a Web site, then you have every single screen and feature. If it’s a conference, then you have an agenda, a menu, a list of venues, and so on. It’s the blueprint. Take this blueprint NOT to everyone, but to the few people who have sign-off control, the people with money, your boss. They can approve it, cancel the project, or suggest a few compromises. Then say, “If I deliver what you approved, on budget and on time, will you ship it?” Don’t proceed until you get a yes. Iterate if you must, but don’t get started simply because you’re in a hur...

Great bosses and world-class organizations hire motivated people, set high expectations, and give their people room to become remarkable.

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.

You must become indispensable to thrive in the new economy. The best ways to do that are to be remarkable, insightful, an artist, someone bearing gifts. To lead. The worst way is to conform and become a cog in a giant system.

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.

The only successful way to live in a world of honest signals is to give the genuine gift. Genuine gifts, given with the right intent and a respectful posture, meet our sniff test. All our senses are on alert, and the giver passes the test. We believe. Now that we believe, a different relationship can occur. One about “us,” not just “you.” But only if you cease to manipulate me and stop doing your job. Do your art instead. Let me restate this because it’s so important: We have everything we need, so we’re not buying commodities. We’re not even buying products. We’re buying relationships and stories and magic. Our business, our politicians, our friends—it’s all the same; it’s about figuring out whom we can trust and work with and who must be kept at bay.

Linchpins do two things for the organization. They exert emotional labor and they make a map. Those contributions take many forms. 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

If you want to be a linchpin, the power you bring to the table has to be very difficult to replace. Be bolder and think bigger. Nothing stopping you.

Humility is our antidote to what’s inevitably not going to go according to plan. Humility permits us to approach a problem with kindness and not arrogance.

The challenge, then, is to be the generous artist, but do it knowing that it just might not work. And that’s okay.