Linchpin – Seth Godin

Takeaways
● We have been brainwashed to be average by two places
○ By school and by the system into believing that your job is to do your job and follow instructions.
○ 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).
● You weren’t born to be a cog in a giant industrial machine. You were trained to be one.
● People want to be told what to do because they are petrified of figuring it out for themselves.
● There are two choices. Win by being more ordinary, more standard, and cheaper. Or win by being faster, more remarkable, and more human.
● The Law of the Mechanical Turk: Any project, if broken down into sufficiently small, predictable parts, can be accomplished for awfully close to free.
● Most white-collar workers wear white collars, but their still working in the factory. It’s factory work because it’s planned, controlled, and measured, because you can optimize for productivity.
● 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 about.
● The New American Dream
○ Be remarkable
○ Be generous
○ Create art
○ Make judgement calls
○ Connect people and ideas
● We’ve been taught to be a replaceable cog in a giant machine. We’ve been taught to consume as a shortcut to happiness. We’ve been taught not to care about our job or our customers. And we’ve been taught to fit in.
● What they should teach in school: 1. Solve interesting problems 2. Lead
● 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. 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 judgement is worth a lot. Knowledge alone is worthless
● Your job is a platform for generosity, for expression, for art. Every interaction you have with a coworker or customer is an opportunity to practice the art of interaction.
● The linchpin feels the fear, acknowledges it, then proceeds.
● If it wasn’t a mystery, it would be easy. If it were easy, it wouldn’t be worth much.
● Projects are the new resumes.
● Top ten factors that motivate best work
○ 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
● An artist is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. An artist takes it personally.
● Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient.
● The easier it is to quantity, the less it’s worth.
● The job is what you do when you are told what to do. Your art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it. The job is not the work.
● Your mind has two distinct sections, the daemon and the resistance. The resistance spends all its time insulating the world from our daemon. The resistance lives inside the lizard brain.
● It’s those who seek out discomfort that are able to make a difference and find their footing.
● When you have a great backup plan, you end up settling for it. As soon as you say, “I’ll try my best”, instead of “I will,” you’ve opened up the door for the lizard.
● The resistance abhors bad ideas. It would rather have you freeze up and invent nothing than take a risk and have some portion of your output be laughable. One way to become creative is to discipline yourself to generate bad ideas. The worse the better.
● Freedom feeds the resistance. It means no one is looking over your shoulder, no one is using as stopwatch on you. Freedom makes it easy to hide, easy to find excuses, easy to do very little.
● Fear is the most important emotion we have. If there is no sale, look for the fear. If a marketing meeting ends in a stalemate, look for the fear. If someone has a tantrum, breaks a promise, or won’t cooperate, there’s fear involved.
● If the resistance tells you not to listen to something, read something, or attend something, go. DO IT.
● Signs that the lizard brain is at work:
○ Don’t ship on time. Late is the first step to never.
○ Procrastinate, claiming that you need to be perfect.
○ Ship early, sending out defective ideas, hoping they will be rejected.
○ Suffer anxiety about what to wear to an event.
○ Make excuses involving lack of money.
○ Do excessive networking with the goal of having everyone like you and support you.
○ Engage in deliberately provocative behavior designed to ostracize you so you’ll have no standing in the community.
○ Demonstrate a lack of desire to obtain new skills.
○ Spend hours on obsessive data collection.
○ Be snarky
○ Start committees instead of taking action.
○ Join committees instead of leading.
○ Excessively criticize the work of your peers, thus unrealistically raising the bar for your work.
○ Produce deliberately outlandish work product that no one can possibly embrace.
○ Ship deliberately average work product that will certainly fit in and be ignored.
○ Don’t ask questions.
○ Ask too many questions.
○ Criticize anyone who is doing something differently. If they succeed, that means you’ll have to do something differently too.
○ Start a never-ending search for the next big thing, abandoning yesterday’s thing as old.
○ Embrace an emotional attachment to the status quo.
○ Invent anxiety about the side effects of a new approach.
○ Be boring.
○ Focus on revenge or teaching someone a lesson, at the expense of doing the work.
○ Slow down as the deadline for completion approaches. Check your work obsessively as ship date looms.
○ Wait for tomorrow.
○ Manufacture anxiety about people stealing your ideas.
○ When you find behaviors that increase the chances of shipping, stop using them.
○ Believe it’s about gifts and talents, not skill.
○ Announce you have neither.
● It’s interesting to say out loud, “I’m doing this because the resistance.” “My lizard brain is making me anxious.” “I’m angry right now because being angry is keeping me from doing my work.” When you say it out loud (not think about it, but say it) the lizard brain retreats in shame.
● Every day find three tasks to accomplish that will help you complete a project. And do only that during your working hours. An hour a day
● 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% about anxiety, because humans have developed other emotions and warnings to help us avoid actual threats. It is an internal construct with no relation to the outside world. It is always needless.
● Two ways to deal with anxiety: Seek reassurance or sit with the anxiety, don’t run from it. Acknowledge it, explore it, befriend it. It burns itself out.
● Shenpa  is a Tibetan word that roughly means, “scratching the itch”. A spiral of pain as a small itch gets scratched, which makes it itch more, so you scratch more until your in pain.
● The more you want to give in to the inner voice of anxiety, the more resilient you become.
● The Resistance gets its next excuse ready in advance and the only solution is to call all the bluffs at once. Start today, start now, and ship.
● The powerful culture of gifts: First, the Internet has lowered the marginal cost of generosity. Second, it’s impossible to be an artist without understanding the power that giving a gift crates. And third, the dynamic of gift giving can diminish the cries of the resistance and permit you to do your best work.
● Human beings have a need for a tribe, and the makeup of the tribe has changed. It is now composed of our coworkers or best customers.
● A loan with interest is a gift. A gift brings tribe members closer together. A gift can make you indispensable.
● If you accept that human beings are difficult to change, and embrace (rather than curse) the uniqueness that everyone brings to the table, you’ll navigate the world with more bliss and effectiveness.
● Opportunities come after your inspired, not when your inspired by opportunities.
● “If only” is a great way to eliminate your excuses. “If only” is an obligator, because once you get rid of that item, you’ve got no excuse left.
● Linchpins do two things for the organization. They exert emotional labor and they
make a map. What makes you indespensible:
○ 1. Provide a unique interface between members of an 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’re not the best in the world (the customer’s world) at your unique talent, then it’s not a unique talent. Which means you have two choices:
○ Develop the other attributes that make you a linchpin
○ Get a lot better at your unique talent.
● “The act of deciding is the act of succeeding