Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

by Seth Godin

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

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.

The system we grew up with is based on a simple formula: Do your job. Show up. Work hard. Listen to the boss. Stick it out. Be part of the system. You’ll be rewarded. That’s the scam.

In Purple Cow, I made a simple argument: Corporations have no right to our attention. 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. Now I want to make a similar but much more personal argument: You have no right to that job or that career. After years of being taught that you have to be an average worker for an average organization, that society would support you for sticking it out, you discover that the rules have changed. The only way to succeed is to be remarkable, to be talked about.

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.

Exceptional insight, productivity, and generosity make markets bigger and more efficient.

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

Only two things: 1. Solve interesting problems 2. Lead

Leading is a skill, not a gift.

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.

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.

Expertise gives you enough insight to reinvent what everyone else assumes is the truth.

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.

Krulak’s law is simple: The closer you get to the front, the more power you have over the brand.

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.

Ten percent of the applications to Harvard are from people who got a perfect score on their SATs. Approximately the same number are from people who were ranked first in their class. Of course, it’s impossible to rank higher than first and impossible to get an 820, and yet more than a thousand in each group are rejected by Harvard every year. Perfection, apparently, is not sufficient.

Personal interactions don’t have asymptotes. Innovative solutions to new problems don’t get old. Seek out achievements where there is no limit.

Art is never defect-free. Things that are remarkable never meet spec, because that would make them standardized, not worth talking about.

If it wasn’t a mystery, it would be easy. If it were easy, it wouldn’t be worth much.

Emotional labor is the task of doing important work, even when it isn’t easy. Emotional labor is difficult and easy to avoid.

It turns out that digging into the difficult work of emotional labor is exactly what we’re expected (and needed) to do. Work is nothing but a platform for art and the emotional labor that goes with it.

Volunteering to Do Emotional Labor

“The gift is to the giver, and comes back to him . . .” —Walt Whitman

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 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.

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

from the heart. Certain sorts of art make us cry without embarrassment.

If you can do it once, you can do it again.

Poet Bruce Ario said, “Creativity is an instinct to produce.”

far more often we find the dreams of art shattered by the resistance. We give in to the fear and our art ends up lying in a box somewhere, unseen. When you first adopt the discipline of shipping, your work will appear to suffer.

Not shipping on behalf of your goal of changing the world is often a symptom of the resistance. Call its bluff, ship always, and then change the world.

The only purpose of starting is to finish,

Why is shipping so difficult? I think there are two challenges and one reason: The challenges: 1. Thrashing 2. Coordination And the reason: The resistance.

Get scared early, not late. Be brave early, not late.

The daemon is the source of great ideas, groundbreaking insights, generosity, love, connection, and kindness.

about the daemon when Elizabeth Gilbert talked about hers at TED

Daemon is a Greek term (the Romans called it a “genius”). The Greeks believed that the daemon was a separate being inside each of us.

The War of Art, Steven Pressfield calls our inability to easily free the daemon “the resistance.” Pressfield says that the daemon’s enemy is the resistance.

1. Brain Stem—breathing and other unconscious survival functions 2. Limbic System—the lizard brain. Anger and revenge and sex and fear. 3. Cerebellum—coordination and motor control 4. Cerebrum—the newest and most sophisticated part of our brain, and also the one that is always overruled by the other three parts. There are four lobes to the cerebrum, and their functions are the stuff to be proud of: Frontal Lobe: reasoning, planning, parts of speech, movement, problem solving Parietal Lobe: movement, orientation, recognition, perception of stimuli Occipital Lobe: eyesight (and the essential, overlooked, and underrated orbitofrontal cortex, which integrates the lizard brain with your rational mind) Temporal Lobe: hearing, memory, and speech

Looking busy is not the same as fighting the resistance. Being productive at someone else’s task list is not the same as making your own map.

Successful people are successful for one simple reason: they think about failure differently. Successful people learn from failure, but the lesson they learn is a different one. They don’t learn that they shouldn’t have tried in the first place, and they don’t learn that they are always right and the world is wrong and they don’t learn that they are losers. 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. Don’t.

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

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.

The closer you get to surfacing and then defeating the resistance, the harder it will fight you off. If shipping were easy, you would have done it already.

The Internet Is Crack Cocaine for the Resistance

Where do you hide your insight?

Am I some sort of prodigy? I don’t think so. I ship. I don’t get in the way of the muse, I fight the resistance, and I ship.

The goal is to strip away anything that looks productive but doesn’t involve shipping.

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.