In one sentence
In a post-industrial economy, security comes less from being obedient at a defined job and more from creating value that cannot be reduced to a procedure. Godin calls this contribution “art”: work involving judgment, emotional labor, connection, and responsibility when no rulebook gives the answer.
Overview
Godin contrasts the old “factory” model—standardized tasks, replaceable workers, and obedience—with organizations that need people who can invent, lead without formal authority, connect others, resolve ambiguity, and improve customer or colleague experience. The central obstacle is “the resistance”: fear, perfectionism, conditioning, and the desire for permission. Becoming indispensable therefore begins with a choice to ship meaningful work and accept the risk of being seen. The book’s contents explicitly move from this choice and the history of “mediocre obedience” through resistance, gifts, connection, seven abilities, and failure conditions.
Core ideas
The factory mindset makes people replaceable
Organizations once rewarded reliably following instructions. Godin argues that automation, outsourcing, and abundant skilled labor weaken that bargain: doing what is specified is valuable, but often not scarce.
A linchpin creates value in ambiguity
A linchpin is not merely a top performer or formal leader. It is someone who notices what matters, makes connections, solves unusual problems, creates order, and acts without waiting for complete instructions.
“Art” means distinctive contribution
Godin uses art broadly: any generous, human contribution that requires judgment and cannot be fully captured by a checklist. It can appear in design, management, sales, service, teaching, writing, or an unexpected improvement to a system.
Emotional labor is part of the work
The book treats care, generosity, attention, courage, and the ability to create memorable interactions as economically meaningful—not optional personality traits. This is especially relevant to marketing and sales, where trust and connection affect whether an idea travels.
The resistance protects the status quo
Fear of criticism, failure, rejection, or success encourages people to hide behind preparation, credentials, rules, and permission. The practical response is not to eliminate fear but to work while it is present and repeatedly ship.
Gifts create connection and reciprocity
Godin frames remarkable contributions as gifts: acts that exceed the minimum exchange and build trust, loyalty, and community. A gift is not necessarily unpaid; it is work offered with generosity rather than only transactional calculation.
Indispensability is not the same as indispensability to one employer
The stronger interpretation of the argument is portable value: develop judgment, initiative, relationships, and a body of contributions that gives you options. Making yourself impossible to replace can also create unhealthy dependence or make leaving harder.
Practical takeaways
- Identify one recurring problem in your organization that has no clear owner; propose and test a solution rather than merely documenting it.
- Replace “What am I supposed to do?” with “What would create the most value here?”—while still respecting legitimate constraints.
- Ship small, visible iterations. Treat feedback and imperfect delivery as part of the work, not evidence that you should wait.
- Add one humanizing act to routine customer or colleague interactions: clarify confusion, make a useful introduction, notice a need, or improve an unpleasant process.
- Keep a record of contributions that demonstrate judgment and outcomes, not just responsibilities listed in a job description.
- Develop a portable combination of skills: domain knowledge, communication, creative problem-solving, relationship-building, and the courage to act without certainty.
Caveats and counterpoints
- Godin’s argument is deliberately exhortational rather than a neutral labor-market analysis. It presents initiative and creativity as broadly available choices, but people’s freedom to take risks varies with income, job security, discrimination, caregiving, disability, and organizational power.
- “Indispensable” can be a misleading goal: healthy organizations should distribute knowledge, support succession, and avoid relying on one overburdened person. The useful target is distinctive, transferable value—not becoming irreplaceable through exhaustion.
- The book can understate structural constraints. Individual initiative cannot compensate for bad management, inadequate resources, exploitative incentives, or a culture that punishes experimentation.
- Advice to give more emotional labor may benefit customers and employers while increasing invisible labor for workers, especially women and marginalized employees. Set boundaries and seek recognition for this work.
- The examples and workplace assumptions date from the book’s 2010 context; use its mental models, not its implied prediction that every modern workplace rewards artistry in the same way. Bibliographic records identify the original Portfolio edition as 2010 and 244 pages, with later Penguin editions listing 256 pages.
Questions worth revisiting
- Where am I being paid to exercise judgment, but behaving as though I need permission?
- What valuable problem do people repeatedly bring to me because I can connect, clarify, or resolve it?
- Which contribution of mine is distinctive, visible, and useful outside my current employer?
- Am I creating genuine value—or merely making myself harder to replace by hoarding knowledge and accepting too much work?
- What is the smallest useful thing I can ship this week despite the resistance?
Return to this when…
Return to the sections on “mediocre obedience,” the resistance, gifts, connection, and the seven abilities when you are hiding behind instructions, waiting for confidence, or confusing busyness with contribution.
Highlights
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. 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. 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.
The first thing to realize is that other people have done this before you. Other people have survived the corporate school system, have survived their first job, have survived a mother-in-law telling them what to do—and have still done the challenging work it takes to become indispensable. That’s essential to know, because that means it’s not impossible. The second thing, even more important than the first, is that the people who have made this transition have nothing on you. Not a thing. In every case, the linchpins among us are not the ones born with a magical talent. No, they are people who have decided that a new kind of work is important, and trained themselves to do it.
Explain this: If I make a list of great artists (Alice Waters, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Spike Lee, Eliyahu Goldratt, Muddy Waters, Cory Doctorow, Richard Feynman, Shepard Fairey), not one of the names on this particular list is the product of a school designed to create him or her. A great school experience won’t keep you from being remarkable, but it’s usually not sufficient to guarantee that you will become so. There’s something else at work here.
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.
First, understand that your competition has been building a faceless machine exactly like yours. And when customers have the choice between faceless options, they pick the cheapest, fastest, more direct option. 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? In a world that relentlessly races to the bottom, you lose if you also race to the bottom. The only way to win is to race to the top. 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.
When machines came along, we replicated this process. Teach that robot arm how to spray paint, and have it follow specific rules. Et cetera. Then something fascinating happened. Kevin Kelly first wrote about this ten years ago: it turns out that GM saves $1.5 million a year by letting the robot arms think for themselves! The more GM enables the swarm of dumb machines to make decisions, bid against each other, network, and interact, the better they work. The world works too fast for centralized control. These systems can’t be run by a supervisor at the top of the organizational chart. Bullet trains in Japan run fast and on schedule without a centralized switchboard. It turns out that pushing decision making down the chart is faster and more efficient. So now, having learned from machines, organizations are applying the same logic to people. Letting people in the organization use their best judgment turns out to be faster and cheaper—but only if you hire the right people and reward them for having the right attitude.
The launch of universal (public and free) education was a profound change in the way our society works, and it was a deliberate attempt to transform our culture. And it worked. We trained millions of factory workers. AVOIDING OVERPRODUCTION A huge concern among capitalists at the turn of the last century was that as factories got better and better at making stuff, there wouldn’t be enough people to buy what they made. The problem wasn’t production; it was consumption. The typical household spent a tiny fraction of what we do on everything in our budget. In the 1890s, the typical teenager owned only a few items of clothing, consumed virtually no media, and owned no cosmetics. Only the truly rich had rooms and rooms of belongings they rarely used. One of the wonderful by-products of universal education was the network effect that supports consumer goods. Once one person in your class or your town had a car, others needed one. Once someone added more rooms or had a second or third pair of shoes, you needed them, too. In the space of two generations, we created a consumer culture. There wasn’t one; then there was. Keeping up with the Joneses is not a genetic predisposition. It’s an invented need, and a recent one. The sign in front of your local public school could say: Maplemere Public School WE TRAIN THE FACTORY WORKERS OF TOMORROW. OUR GRADUATES ARE VERY GOOD AT FOLLOWING INSTRUCTIONS. AND WE TEACH THE POWER OF CONSUMPTION AS AN AID FOR SOCIAL APPROVAL. It’s almost impossible to imagine a school with a sign that said: “We teach people to take initiative and become remarkable artists, to question the status quo, and to interact with transparency. And our graduates understand that consumption is not the answer to social problems.” And yet that might be exactly what we need. From Superhero to Mediocreman (and Back Again) Kids can do anything (except fly, which they really truly want to do). Very few of us set out to be average or to be typical. Then, somewhere along the way, the indoctrination kicks in and we start looking for a place to hide. We try to find a place where no one will discover how truly mediocre we actually are. We want steady work, something that smooths out the bumps, a sinecure that will protect us. 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. Of course, this isn’t true, but it’s what you’ve been taught to believe. 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. Perhaps they had a great teacher who lit a lamp for them. Perhaps a parent or a friend pushed them to refuse to settle. Regardless, the distinction between
First, he asked the group to play the piece as well synchronized as possible. Then he had them do it again, asking each person to go to their own personal edge, engaging the music the way they wanted instead of the way the group wanted. To the untrained ears in the room, the two versions were difficult to tell apart. That’s because we teach people to stick within a tiny range. We don’t want the lows to be too low, so we limit the highs as well. The people in this orchestra couldn’t even visualize themselves racing outside the box that had been established for them. Creativity is not choosing to wear a pink shirt to an office where only blue and white are standard. That’s merely window dressing. We see this in organizations of all types. We ask someone to do something wacky or original and they change the tiniest surface element instead of finding the root of a creative solution. That’s no accident. That’s what we taught them to do. The opportunity is in changing the game, changing the interaction, or even changing the question.
The thing is that we need a school organized around teaching people to believe, and teachers who are rewarded for doing their best work, not the most predictable work.
You could do Richard Branson’s job. Most of the time, anyway. I spent some time with Sir Richard, and I can tell you that you could certainly do most of what he does, perhaps better than he does it. Except for what he does for about five minutes a day. In those five minutes, he creates billions of dollars’ worth of value every few years, and neither you nor I would have a prayer of doing what he does. Branson’s real job is seeing new opportunities, making decisions that work, and understanding the connection between his audience, his brand, and his ventures. 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. A brilliant author or businesswoman or senator or software engineer is brilliant only in tiny bursts. The rest of the time, they’re doing work that most any trained person could do.
People who tell you that “I could paint a painting like that” are missing the point. The craft of the painting, the craft of writing that e-mail, the craft of building that PowerPoint presentation—those are the easy parts. It’s the art and the insight and the bravery of value creation that are rewarded.
Wikipedia and the shared knowledge of the Internet make domain knowledge on its own worth significantly less than it used to be. Today, if all you have to offer is that you know a lot of reference book information, you lose, because the Internet knows more than you 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. Knowledge alone, though, I’d rather get faster and cheaper from an expert I find online. If I need a great direct mail letter, it’s far cheaper and faster to hire a great direct mail writer to write me a letter than it is to hire someone and have him on staff for the one letter I need every month, right?
She didn’t get assigned either of those jobs. She just did them. If you could write Marissa’s duties into a manual, you wouldn’t need her. But the minute you wrote it down, it wouldn’t be accurate anyway. That’s the key. She solves problems that people haven’t predicted, sees things people haven’t seen, and connects people who need to be connected.
This is controversial, but here goes: if you’re remarkable, amazing, or just plain spectacular, you probably shouldn’t have a résumé at all. If you’ve got experience in doing the things that make you a linchpin, a résumé hides that fact. A résumé gives the employer everything she needs to reject you. Once you send me your résumé, I can say, “Oh, they’re missing this or they’re missing that,” and boom, you’re out. Having a résumé begs for you to go into that big machine that looks for relevant keywords, and begs for you to get a job as a cog in a giant machine. More fodder for the corporate behemoth. That might be fine for average folks looking for an average job, but is that what you deserve? The very system that produced standardized tests and the command-and-control model that chokes us also invented the résumé. The system, the industrialists, the factory . . . they want us to be cogs in their machine—easily replaceable, hopeless, cheap cogs. 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.
The only way to prove (as opposed to assert) that you are an indispensable linchpin—someone worth recruiting, moving to the top of the pile, and hiring—is to show, not tell. Projects are the new résumés. If your Google search isn’t what you want (need) it to be, then change it. Change it through your actions and connections and generosity. Change it by so over-delivering that people post about you. Change it by creating a blog that is so insightful about your area of expertise that others refer to it. And change it by helping other people online. The long tail that Chris Anderson wrote about doesn’t apply only to CDs and books. It applies to people, too. Sure, there are “hits” like rock stars or politicians or CEOs. But there’s also room for everyone who wants to make a difference. It doesn’t matter where you live on the long tail, as long as the tribe of people you connect with are eager to seek you out and help you succeed.
thirty-eight factors that 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 Only one of these is a clearly extrinsic motivator (#4, money). The rest are either things we do for ourselves or things that we value because of who we are.
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.
Art is the product of emotional labor. If it’s easy and risk free, it’s unlikely that it’s art.
There are two reasons why it’s vital to know whom you are working for. The first is that understanding your audience allows you to target your work and to get feedback that will help you do it better next time. The other reason? Because it tells you whom to ignore. 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.
While some artists manage to work for years or decades and actually ship something important, 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. There’s no doubt that another hour, day, or week would have added some needed polish. But over time—rather quickly, actually—you’ll see that shipping becomes part of the art and shipping makes it work. Saturday Night Live goes on each week, ready or not. The show is live, and it’s on Saturday. No screwing around about shipping. There are no do-overs, no stalls, no delays. Sometimes the show suffers, of course, but on balance, it’s the shipping (built right into the name) that actually makes the show work. 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, and while the projects we do are never really finished, they must ship. Shipping means hitting the publish button on your blog, showing a presentation to the sales team, answering the phone, selling the muffins, sending out your references. Shipping is the collision between your work and the outside world. The French refer to esprit d’escalier, the clever comeback that you think of a few minutes after the moment has passed. This is unshipped insight, and it doesn’t count for much. Shipping something out the door, doing it regularly, without hassle, emergency, or fear—this is a rare skill, something that makes you indispensable. 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.
The point of getting everyone involved early is simple: thrash late and you won’t ship. Thrash late and you introduce bugs. Professional creators thrash early. The closer the project gets to completion, the fewer people see it and the fewer changes are permitted. Every software project that has missed its target date (every single one) is a victim of late thrashing. The creators didn’t have the discipline to force all the thrashing to the beginning. They fell victim to the resistance.
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.
Your real work, then, what you might be paid for, and what is certainly your passion, is simple: the work. The work is feeding and amplifying and glorifying the daemon. Your work is to create art that changes things, to expose your insight and humanity in such a way that you are truly indispensable. Your work is to do the work, not to do your job. Your job is about following instructions; the work is about making a difference. Your work is to ship. Ship things that make change.
The habit that successful artists have developed is simple: they thrash a lot at the start, because starting means that they are going to finish. Not maybe, not probably, but going to. If you want to produce things on time and on budget, all you have to do is work until you run out of time or run out of money. Then ship. No room for stalling or excuses or the resistance. On ship date, it’s gone.
Actor John Goodman was interviewed about his role in Waiting for Godot. He had planned to spend the spring fishing and watching TV with his family in New Orleans, and he was prepared to turn the gig down. Here’s his take on challenging the resistance: “You’re an idiot. This is a once-in-a-lifetime deal. It will never come by again . . . I didn’t think I was up to it all. I had no confidence in myself. So it’s just a matter of throwing myself under the bus and crawling my way out.” This posture of always challenging the resistance is what makes him a star. “Right now, I’d rather be here than anywhere. I’d rather be here, trying to find the goddamn part, and I hope I never do find it, because I don’t want to slide into complacency. What would I do then? Start cockfights in my dressing room?”
By forcing myself to do absolutely no busywork tasks in between bouts with the work, I remove the best excuse the resistance has. I can’t avoid the work because I am not distracting myself with anything but the work. This is the hallmark of a productive artist. I don’t go to meetings. I don’t write memos. I don’t have a staff. I don’t commute. The goal is to strip away anything that looks productive but doesn’t involve shipping.
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.
Anxiety is needless and imaginary. It’s fear about fear, fear that means nothing. The difference between fear and anxiety: Anxiety is diffuse and focuses on possibilities in an unknown future, not a real and present threat. The resistance is 100 percent about anxiety, because humans have developed other emotions and warnings to help us avoid actual threats. Anxiety, on the other hand, is an internal construct with no relation to the outside world. “Needless anxiety” is redundant, because anxiety is always needless. Anxiety doesn’t protect you from danger, but from doing great things. It keeps you awake at night and foretells a future that’s not going to happen.
My friend Jon likes it when an airplane hits heavy turbulence. His insight is worth sharing. “The odds of a plane crashing from turbulence are essentially zero, so I sit and enjoy it. It’s like a ride at an amusement park.”
can do this forever. It’s like adjusting a pair of sunglasses. It never ends. Artists never do this while they’re being artists. When I put myself on an Internet diet (only five checks a day, not fifty), my productivity tripled. Tripled.
The Grateful Dead puzzled industry pundits for a long time. Why didn’t they want to sell more records? Why didn’t they want a gold record? Why didn’t they want to get their music played on the radio? The answer is simple: they were playing a different game, a different tune. Instead of buying into a system that would tear them down and corrupt their vision, they built their own system, one that was largely resistance-proof. One concert a night, night after night, for decade after decade. Play only for people you like, with people you enjoy. How can the lizard brain object to that?
There are many forms of equity,
Great work is not created for everyone. If it were, it would be average work.
you appreciate a gift, consider saying, “thank you and . . .” Thank you and I dog-eared forty of the pages. Thank you and I told your boss what a wonderful thing you did. Thank you and here’s a record my band and I recorded last week. Thank you and you made me cry. Thank you and I just blogged about what you did.
Equanimity is easy when we’re dealing with a random event. Stuff happens. We don’t get angry at birds chirping or even a thunderstorm occurring during a play. But if a cell phone goes off, that’s an entirely different story.
Fire is hot. That’s what it does. If you get burned by fire, you can be annoyed at yourself, but being angry at the fire doesn’t do you much good. And trying to teach the fire a lesson so it won’t be hot next time is certainly not time well spent. Our inclination is to give fire a pass, because it’s not human. But human beings are similar, in that they’re not going to change any time soon either.
Forty years ago, Richard Branson, who ultimately founded Virgin Air, found himself in a similar situation in an airport in the Caribbean. They had just canceled his flight, the only flight that day. Instead of freaking out about how essential the flight was, how badly his day was ruined, how his entire career was now in jeopardy, the young Branson walked across the airport to the charter desk and inquired about the cost of chartering a flight out of Puerto Rico. Then he borrowed a portable blackboard and wrote, “Seats to Virgin Islands, $39.” He went back to his gate, sold enough seats to his fellow passengers to completely cover his costs, and made it home on time. Not to mention planting the seeds for the airline he’d start decades later. Sounds like the kind of person you’d like to hire.
And that leaves the top right, the quadrant of the Linchpin. The linchpin is enlightened enough to see the world as it is, to understand that this angry customer is not about me, that this change in government policy is not a personal attack, that this job is not guaranteed for life. At the same time, the linchpin brings passion to the job. She knows from experience that the right effort in the right place can change the outcome, and she reserves her effort for doing just that. The linchpin has no time or energy for whining or litigation. Instead, she’s obsessively focused on the projects that have a likelihood of changing the outcome.
Worldview and attachment always color perceptions. Ask people in the customer service department about the biggest problem the company faces, and they will almost certainly define the challenge in terms of customer service. Ask the same question of the guys in finance, and of course, the answer will be based on the financial lens they use to see the world.
You don’t want to take initiative or responsibility, so you check your incoming mail, your Twitter stream, and your blog comments. Surely, there’s something to play off of, something to get angry about, some meeting to go to. I know someone who goes to forty conferences a year and never seems to actually produce anything. And you can repeat this process forever. Forever. It never ends. The alternative is to draw a map and lead.
During the Q&A after my talk, an enforcement officer raised his hand and said, “They want us to invent a new future and to lead tribes and to make a difference, but we don’t have any authority. I can’t get anything done without authority.” This from a man who wears a uniform and carries a badge. I said, “How much bigger do you need your badge to be?” The fact is, a bigger badge isn’t going to help at all. People aren’t going to follow you because you order them to. They’re not going to seek out a new path because you tell them that they must. Linchpins don’t need authority. It’s not part of the deal. Authority matters only in the factory, not in your world. Real change rarely comes from the front of the line. It happens from the middle or even the back. Real change happens when someone who cares steps up and takes what feels like a risk.
Patients who were given colostomies (an operation in which a large portion of the colon is removed) were measured on their long-term happiness. The patients who were told that the situation was permanent, that they would need to live with a bag their entire lives, ended up being happier than those who were told that there was a chance they’d recover use of their colon. The stressful part is the hoping. Hoping against hope that your plane will arrive, that you won’t miss it, that your seat won’t be given away, that you won’t crash, that you’ll land close to on time. Hoping that the surgery will turn out okay. Hoping that your boss won’t yell at you. All of this is nerve-racking for many people. And the reason is your nostalgia for the future. You’ve fallen in love with a described outcome, and at every stage along the way, it appears that hope and will and effort on your part might be able to maintain the future quo.
If you can do it brilliantly once, just once, then of course you can do it again. I’m not proposing you play a perfect round of golf or conduct a symphony. Instead, success lies in being generous or understanding someone or seeing a route that others don’t see. You’ve done this already, done it brilliantly. You’ve calmed yourself in the face of anxiety, or done something for no compensation, or solved a problem with an insight. Then, most of the time, the world steps in and relentlessly unteaches you how to do it again. If you’ve done it once, you can do it again. Every day.
Ishita Gupta wrote, Every day is a new chance to choose. Choose to change your perspective. Choose to flip the switch in your mind. Turn on the light and stop fretting about with insecurity and doubt. Choose to do your work and be free of distraction. Choose to see the best in someone, or choose to bring out the worst in them. Choose to be a laser beam, with focused intention, or a scattered ray of light that doesn’t do any good. The power of choice is just that. Power. The only thing we have to do is remember that we control the harnessing of that power. We choose. Don’t let your circumstances or habits rule your choices today. Become a master of yourself and use your willpower to choose.
Corporations are tempted to squeeze as much apparent productivity as they can out of each employee. That’s the factory mindset at work. If you work on an assembly line, of course it matters how many hours a day you stand there. This new model is very different. Ji Lee is a provocateur and artist famous for his street art. He also happens to work at Google. I have no doubt that he’s added millions of dollars in value to the company through his orthogonal thinking and big ideas. And I also have no doubt that if he stopped doing his external projects and showed up at work more often, his productivity would plummet.
How often do you beat yourself up? How often does the lizard brain set out to slow you down or wreck your career by highlighting the critics, the failures, the missteps? They get away with their cheap shots because you allow them to. We’re surrounded by people and organizations that demand our loyalty. Bosses, brands, and even politicians want fealty and obedience and patriotism. But what about you and your work? Doesn’t it deserve at least as much? The self-hating artist burns out. The hypercritical lizard brain will pick apart anything we do in order to preserve its sense of short-term safety. The alternative is to develop a sense of loyalty to your mission and generosity to your work. I’m not proposing that you become immune to feedback. In fact, the most generous thing you can do is open yourself to the feedback that improves your art and helps it spread. Discerning the difference between feedback that helps and criticism that degrades, though, will take some time. In the meantime, ease up on yourself. We need you.
Frank Eliason has been featured on the front page of The New York Times, on television, and online about a million times. Frank is the online face of Comcast Cable, the occasionally loved, frequently hated cable behemoth. Frank figured out that angry customers were often using Twitter to vent their rage about Comcast and their service or lack thereof. One day, Frank tweeted back. He showed up. Not because it was in the manual or because someone told him to, but because he wanted to help. It was a gift, not his job. Frank was honestly interested in connecting, and his generosity came through. And you know what happened? The tweeters rejoiced. They were so stunned that a real person (with a name!) was listening that they instantly became fans. In less than a minute, they were converted from enemies and trolls into raving fans. That’s how desperately we want to be touched by another person. That’s how much the gift of attention from a person means to us.
Moby, multiplatinum recording artist with a great haircut, had this to say about art: Ideally, the market should accommodate art, art shouldn’t accommodate the market . . . I know, it sounds idealistic. I had been trying to make myself happy and make radio happy and make the label happy and make the press happy . . . and it made me miserable. I also don’t really aspire to selling too many records. See, my friends who are writers sell 20,000 books and they’re happy. My friends who are theater directors sell 5,000 tickets during a run and they’re happy. I like the idea of humble and reasonable metrics for determining the success of a record. And I like the idea of respecting the sacred bond that exists between musician and listener.
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
In a story so good that it should be apocryphal, Zappos offers graduates of their two-week paid training school $2,000 if they will quit their new jobs. Why would Zappos offer to pay great people to quit? Tony Hsieh, CEO, does this because he wants to be sure that every person at the company is there for the right reasons, not because she’s getting paid. If you’re willing to leave for a few thousand bucks, good riddance.
Here’s an artist’s dream: The Art Institute of Chicago hires world-famous architect Renzo Piano to build an extension to their building. Together, they reach you on the phone by conference call. “Ellsworth, we’d like you to create a huge mural for our new museum. You can do what you want, call us when it’s done, and we’ll send a check today.” Artists want their bosses to act like this. And perhaps, when you’re famous and eighty-six years old as Ellsworth is, it will happen. Until then, understand that your boss is unlikely to come through. The system we work in is changing, but it’s an evolutionary change, not a revolutionary one. Organizations rarely give linchpins all the support and encouragement they deserve. Which means that your efforts won’t always get what they need to succeed.
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.
The only thing keeping you from being one of these artists is the resistance. The loud voice of the lizard brain telling you that you can’t possibly do it, that you don’t deserve it, that people will laugh at you. We don’t have a talent shortage, we have a shipping shortage. Anyone who makes the choice to overcome the resistance and has the insight to make the right map can become a successful linchpin.