Linchpin
Seth Godin
Introduction
Stop settling for what’s good enough and start creating art that matters. Stop asking what’s in it for you and start giving gifts that change people. Then, and only then, will you have achieved your potential. For hundreds of years, the population has been seduced, scammed, and brainwashed into fitting in, following instructions, and exchanging a day’s work for a day’s pay. That era has come to an end and just in time. You have brilliance in you, your contribution is valuable, and the art you create is precious. Only you can do it, and you must. I’m hoping you’ll stand up and choose to make a difference.
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You might be the hardworking secretary, the one with institutional knowledge, the person who has given so much and deserves security and respect. And while you might deserve these things, your tenure is no guarantee that you’re going to get them.
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The educated, hardworking masses are still doing what they’re told, but they’re no longer getting what they deserve.
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You weren’t born to be a cog in the giant industrial machine. You were trained to become a cog. There’s an alternative available to you. 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. The first step is the most difficult, the step where you acknowledge that this is a skill, and like all skills, you can (and will) get better at it. Every day, if you focus on the gifts, art, and connections that characterize the linchpin, you’ll become a little more indispensable.
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THE NEW WORLD OF WORK - We Are Surrounded by Bureaucrats, Note Takers, …
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. What we want, what we need, what we must have are indispensable human beings. We need original thinkers, provocateurs, and people who care. We need marketers who can lead, salespeople able to risk making a human connection, passionate change makers willing to be shunned if it is necessary for them to make a point. Every organization needs a linchpin, the one person who can bring it together and make a difference. Some organizations haven’t realized this yet, or haven’t articulated it, but we need artists. Artists are people with a genius for finding a new answer, a new connection, or a new way of getting things done. That would be you.
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The easier people are to replace, the less they need to be paid. And so far, workers have been complicit in this commoditization. This is your opportunity. The indispensable employee brings humanity and connection and art to her organization. She is the key player, the one who’s difficult to live without, the person you can build something around.
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Instead, you recognize the opportunity of becoming indispensable, highly sought after, and unique. If a Purple Cow is a product that’s worth talking about, the indispensable employee—I call her a linchpin—is a person who’s worth finding and keeping.
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The PERL (Percentage of Easily Replaced Laborers) In the factory era, the goal was to have the highest PERL. Think about it. If you can easily replace most of your workers, you can pay them less. The less you pay them, the more money you make.
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Here’s the problem, which you’ve already guessed. If you make your business possible to replicate, you’re not going to be the one to replicate it. Others will. If you build a business filled with rules and procedures that are designed to allow you to hire cheap people, you will have to produce a product without humanity or personalization or connection. Which means that you’ll have to lower your prices to compete. Which leads to a race to the bottom. Indispensable businesses race to the top instead.
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The original Mechanical Turk was a chess-playing “computer” built in the same year that the Encyclopaedia Britannica was founded. Invented by Wolfgang von Kempelen, the Turk wasn’t actually a computer at all, but merely a box with a small person hidden inside. A person pretending to be a computer.
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The essence of mass production is that every part is interchangeable. Time, space, men, motion, money, and material—each was made more efficient because every piece was predictable and separate. Ford’s discipline was to avoid short-term gains in exchange for always seeking the interchangeable, always standardizing. It only follows, then, that as you eliminate the skilled worker, the finisher, the custom-part maker, then you also save money on wages as you build a company that’s easy to scale. In other words, first you have interchangeable parts, then you have interchangeable workers. By 1925, the die was cast. The goal was to hire the lowest-skilled laborer possible, at the lowest possible wage. To do anything else was financial suicide.
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Now, success means being an artist. In fact, history is now being written by the artists while the factory workers struggle. The future belongs to chefs, not to cooks or bottle washers. It’s easy to buy a cookbook (filled with instructions to follow) but really hard to find a chef book.
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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. Just about anyone can be trained to show up. Anyone can unlock the door of the local coffee shop in the morning or monitor the dials at the power plant. What does it mean to make a difference? 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.
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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.
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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. But when it comes to a person, what do we talk about? People are not products with features, benefits, and viral marketing campaigns; they are individuals. If we’re going to talk about them, we’re going to discuss what they do, not who they are.
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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.
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THINKING ABOUT YOUR CHOICE
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.
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In a factory, doing a job that’s not yours is dangerous. Now, if you’re a linchpin, doing a job that’s not getting done is essential.
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When your organization becomes more human, more remarkable, faster on its feet, and more likely to connect directly with customers, it becomes indispensable. The very thing that made your employee a linchpin makes YOU a linchpin. An organization of indispensable people doing important work is remarkable, profitable, and indispensable in and of itself.
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INDOCTRINATION: HOW WE GOT HERE - Mediocre Obedience
We’ve been trained to believe that mediocre obedience is a genetic fact for most of the population, but it’s interesting to note that this trait doesn’t show up until after a few years of schooling.
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BECOMING THE LINCHPIN
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.
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If you don’t have a résumé, what do you have? How about three extraordinary letters of recommendation from people the employer knows or respects? Or a sophisticated project an employer can see or touch? Or a reputation that precedes you? Or a blog that is so compelling and insightful that they have no choice but to follow up? Some say, “Well, that’s fine, but I don’t have those.” Yeah, that’s my point. If you don’t have these things, what leads you to believe that you are remarkable, amazing, or just plain spectacular? It sounds to me like if you don’t have more than a résumé, you’ve been brainwashed into compliance. Great jobs, world-class jobs, jobs people kill for—those jobs don’t get filled by people e-mailing in résumés.
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IS IT POSSIBLE TO DO HARD WORK IN A CUBICLE?
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. 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.
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THE RESISTANCE
“Real Artists Ship”
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Shipping isn’t focused on producing a masterpiece (but all master-pieces get shipped). I’ve produced more than a hundred books (most didn’t sell very well), but if I hadn’t, I’d never have had the chance to write this one. Picasso painted more than a thousand paintings, and you can probably name three of them. As we’ll see, the greatest shortage in our society is an instinct to produce. To create solutions and hustle them out the door. To touch the humanity inside and connect to the humans in the marketplace.
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The reason that start-ups almost always defeat large companies in the rush to market is simple: start-ups have fewer people to coordinate, less thrashing, and more linchpins per square foot. They can’t afford anything else and they have less to lose.
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Successful people are successful for one simple reason: they think about failure differently.
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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.
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Going out of your way to find uncomfortable situations isn’t natural, but it’s essential. The resistance seeks comfort. The resistance wants to hide.
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The road to comfort is crowded and it rarely gets you there. Ironically, it’s those who seek out discomfort that are able to make a difference and find their footing.
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Discomfort brings engagement and change. Discomfort means you’re doing something that others were unlikely to do, because they’re busy hiding out in the comfortable zone. When your uncomfortable actions lead to success, the organization rewards you and brings you back for more.
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You’ve probably guessed what happens when you have a great backup plan: You end up settling for the backup. As soon as you say, “I’ll try my best,” instead of “I will,” you’ve opened the door for the lizard.
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The people who break through usually have nothing to lose, and they almost never have a backup plan.
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In difficult economic times, the resistance explains that we’d better get a steady job, because the world is fraught with uncertainty and this is no time to do something crazy like starting a company. And in great times, of course, the resistance persuades us not to start a company because competition is fierce and hey, salaries are high. “Don’t be stupid,” it says.
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Over time, drip by drip, year by year, the manual was written, the procedures were set, and people were hired to follow the rules. The organization gets extremely efficient at producing a certain output a certain way . . . and then competition or change or technology arrives and the old rules aren’t particularly useful, the old efficiencies not so profitable.
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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.
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“I don’t have any good ideas”—actually, you don’t have any bad ideas. If you get enough bad ideas, the good ones will take care of themselves. And as every successful person will tell you, the ideas aren’t the hard part. It’s shipping that’s difficult.
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“I don’t know what to do”—this one is certainly true. The question is, why does that bother you? No one actually knows what to do. Sometimes we have a hunch, or a good idea, but we’re never sure. The art of challenging the resistance is doing something when you’re not certain it’s going to work.
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“I didn’t graduate from [insert brand of some prestigious educational institution here]”—well, MIT is now free online, for anyone who wants to learn. The public library in your town has just about everything you need, and what’s not there is online. Access to knowledge used to matter. No longer.
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The Cult of Done Bre Pettis wrote this manifesto on his blog: 1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion. 2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done. 3. There is no editing stage. 4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it. 5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it. 6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done. 7. Once you’re done you can throw it away. 8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done. 9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right. 10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes. 11. Destruction is a variant of done. 12. If you have an idea and publish it on the Internet, that counts as a ghost of done. 13. Done is the engine of more.
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There’s not a lot to fear when you’re stuck in the dip, not a lot that can threaten your standing. You’re just a hardworking guy, doing your best; how dare someone criticize you? The people who have experienced this and fought back—by quitting when they were stuck—tell me that the feeling of liberation and new potential is incredible. Suddenly, they can get back to doing the work, to making a difference, and to engaging with a community. The hard part is distinguishing between quitting because the resistance wants you to (bad idea) or because the resistance doesn’t want you to (great idea). The goal is to quit the tasks you’re doing because you’re hiding on behalf of the lizard brain and to push through the very tasks the lizard fears.
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THE POWERFUL CULTURE OF GIFTS
If I give you a piece of art, you shouldn’t be required to work hard to reciprocate, because reciprocation is an act of keeping score, which involves monetizing the art, not appreciating it.
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Metcalfe’s law says that the value of a network increases with the square of the number of nodes on the network. In English? It says that the more people who have a fax machine, the more fax machines are worth (one person with a fax is useless). The more people who use the Internet, the better it works. The more friends I have who use Twitter, the more the tool is worth to me. Connections are valuable in and of themselves, because they lead to productivity, decreased communication costs, and yes, gifts.
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MAKING THE CHOICE
The Choice You can either fit in or stand out. Not both. You are either defending the status quo or challenging it. Playing defense and trying to keep everything “all right,” or leading and provoking and striving to make everything better. Either you are embracing the drama of your everyday life or you are seeing the world as it is. These are all choices; you can’t have it both ways.
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THE SEVEN ABILITIES OF THE LINCHPIN
When you meet someone, you need to have a superpower. If you don’t, you’re just another handshake. It’s not about touting yourself or coming on too strong. It’s about making the introduction meaningful. If I don’t know your superpower, then I don’t know how you can help me (or I can help you).
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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.
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