Like Rock for Five , my previous TRMusings blog entry, Linchpin talks about how to do something that matters. It’s about how to make yourself unique and indispensible.
Everyone who reads my blogs knows I am a HUGE fan of Seth Godin --- one that sometimes begins to border on the creepy. OK, I admit it. In fact, I have often said that “…you can’t spell Godin without god…” Oh brother.
Not surprisingly, his newly released book Linchpin was a joy for me. Subtitled “Are you Indispensible?” it describes a linchpin as “…a person we can’t live without—the indispensable person who does work that matters, the person who is trying to stand out as opposed to fit in, the one who’s not easily replaceable…it’s the person we seek out.”
Are you a linchpin? “Anyone who is at the edge of what they can be doing is doing that on purpose. They are going through the pain and the difficult work and the risk necessary to create their art, to stand out, and to not just be a noisemaker.”
Everyone can (should) do work that matters. “If you look at what you do as a platform for doing art, for being generous and for making changes in people, then you’re both getting paid and stretching yourself to become indispensable.”
But often what Godin calls your “lizard brain” creates resistance to doing work that matters. It’s the part of the brain that is afraid, that doesn’t want to get laughed at and doesn’t want to make a mistake. It’s the part of the brain that wants to fit in. Fitting in, though, is never part of being a linchpin.
However another important element of becoming a linchpin is the art of the gift. A gift in this sense is not a gift if you give something to someone hoping they will give you something back. That is sort of an unequal transaction. It is not a gift. A gift is something you give because you can, with no expectation of any return.
His argument is that linchpins make art. And art is a generous gift that changes other people.
So ask yourself, “What did I do today that was important? What did I do today that no-one else can do?” If you spend a little bit more time on that kind of work, you’ll discover that for a linchpin, it should be your only job. Pretty soon, you’ll discover that you have enough money to hire people to do all the other stuff.
So “Fight the lizard brain. Fight the resistance. Whatever it is you’re working on, ship it out the door. Ship often. Put things out there and fail. The more you fail, the more you learn. The person who learns the most wins.”
A full transcript and audio file of a recent interview with Seth Godin by The Social Examiner is linked here.
“If you want to make more than $12/hour in life, you need to make maps, not follow them.” ---- Seth Godin