Book Review of “Linchpin” by Seth Godin

Every once in a while, one comes across an author who is able to make simple sense out of and articulate clearly the vast technological changes that have occurred and our occurring in our world and how to not only survive but thrive in this internet-driven world. No doubt about it; the old way of doing things is long gone.

“The factory-that system where organized labor meets patient capital, productivity-improving devices, and leverage-has fallen apart. Ohio and Michigan have lost their “real” factories, just as the factories of the service industries have crumbled as well. Worse still, the type of low-risk, high-stability jobs that three-quarters of us crave have turned into dead-end traps of dissatisfaction and unfair risk.” Pg. 8

The problem is that most people are not aware of how things have changed and out of desperation and fear, are still clinging to the old failing models of job security.

“Just over a century ago, leaders of our society started building a system that is now so ingrained, most of us assume that it’s always been here and always will be. We continue to operate as if that system is still here, but every day we do that is a day wasted, dollars lost, an opportunity squandered. And you need to see why. 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’ the scam. Strong words, but true. You’ve been scammed. You traded years of your life to be part of a giant con in which you are most definitely not the winner. If you’ve been playing that game, it’s no wonder you’re frustrated. The game is over. THERE ARE NO LONGER ANY GREAT JOBS WHERE SOMEONE TELLS YOU PRECISELY WHAT TO DO.” Pg. 14

However, the internet has changed everything.

“Today, the means of production=a laptop computer with Internet connectivity. Three thousand dollars buys a worker an entire factory. This change is a fundamental shift in power and control. When you can master the communication, conceptual, and connectivity elements of the new work, then you have more power than management does. And if management attracts, motivates, and retains great talent, then it has more leverage than the competition. It starts with bloggers, musicians, writers and others who don’t need anyone’s support or permission to do their thing. So a blogger named Brian Clark makes a fortune launching a wonderful new theme for Wordpress. And Perez Hilton becomes rich and famous writing on his blog. Abbey Ryan makes almost a hundred thousand dollars a year painting a tiny oil painting each day and selling it on eBay. These individuals have all the technical, manufacturing, and distribution support they need, so they are both capitalists and workers.” Pg. 24

Hence, the solution is not to stifle your individuality by following some retarded formula such as go to a good school, get a job and then just work hard. In this day and age, that’s a pure prescription for complete failure.

“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.” Pg. 29

THE SOLUTION IS TO BECOME AN ARTIST!!! Now what does this mean? It means the absolute opposite of conforming! It means embracing and channeling your individuality out into the world, not for money, but because that’s what you were meant to do! That’s where your passion is.

“THE BOSS’S LIE: ‘What I want is someone who will do exactly what I tell them to do.’ ‘What I want is someone who works cheap.’ ‘What I want is someone who shows up on time and doesn’t give me a hard time.’ So, if this is what the boss really wants, how come the stars in the company don’t follow these rules? How come the people who get promoted and get privileges and expense accounts and are then wooed away to join other companies and get written up in the paper and have servants and coffee boys…how come those guys aren’t the ones who do this stuff? What the boss really wants is an artist, someone who changes everything, someone who makes dreams come true. What the boss really wants is someone who can see the reality of today and describe a better tomorrow. What the boss really wants is a linchpin. If he can’t have that, he’ll settle for a cheap drone.” Pg. 37-38

SCHOOL DOESN'T WORK

“Here’s what we are teaching kids to do (with various levels of success)

Fit in.
Follow instructions.
Use# 2 pencils.
Take good notes.
Show up every day.
Cram for tests and don’t miss deadlines
Have good handwriting
Punctuate
Buy the things the other kids are buying
Don’t ask questions
Don’t challenge authority
Do the minimum amount required so you’ll have time to work on another subject
Get into college
Have a good resume
Don’t fail
Don’t say anything that might embarrass you
Be passably good at sports, or perhaps extremely good at being a quarterback
Participate in a large number of extracurricular activities
Be a generalist
Try not to have the other kids talk about you
Once you learn a topic, move on.

WHAT THEY SHOULD TEACH YOU IN SCHOOL
Only two things:
1. Solve interesting problems
2. Lead”
Pg. 47-48

“School expects that are best students will graduate to become trained trigonometricians. They’ll be hired by people to compute the length of the hypotenuse of a certain right triangle. What a waste. The only reason to learn trigonometry is because it is a momentarily interesting question, one worth sorting out. But then we should move on, relentlessly seeking out new problems, ones even more interesting than that one. The idea of doing it by rote, of relentlessly driving the method home, is a total waste of time.” Pg. 48

“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.” Pg. 51

“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 business woman 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. It might take a lot of tinkering or low-level work or domain knowledge for that brilliance to be evoked, but from the outside, it appears that the art is created in a moment, not in tiny increments.” Pg. 51

“Where does Apple add value? If all MP3 players play the same music, why is an iPod worth so much more than a generic one? It’s the breakthrough design that pushed through at Apple. In fact, if you consider the relative stock prices and profits of Apple versus companies that hire standard designers to do ordinary work, there’s really no comparison.” Pg. 53

“A great salesperson might deliver a thousand times as much productivity as a mediocre one. It’s the great salesperson who opens an entire region or an account in a new industry, while the ordinary one merely goes down the call list, doing quite average work. A very good senior programmer (who might get paid $200,000) gets paid about the same as a great programmer, who delivers $5 million worth of value for the same price. That’s enough of a difference to build an entire company’s profit around. Do it with ten programmers and you’re rich. Organizing around the average, then, is too expensive. Organizing around average means that the organization has exchanged the high productivity of exceptional performance for the ease and security of an endless parade of average performers. ” Pg. 54

“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.” Pg. 55

“You get paid to go to work and do something of value. But your job is also 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. Every product you make represents an opportunity to design something that has never been designed, to create an interaction unlike any other. For a long time, few people were fired for refusing to understand that previous paragraph. Now, though, it’s not an option. It’s the only reason you got paid to go to work today.” Pg. 57

“GIVE YOURSELF A D! The A paper is banal. Hand in a paper with perfect grammar but no heart or soul, and you’re sure to get an A from the stereotypical teacher. That’s because this teacher was trained to grade you on your ability to fit in. He’s checking to see if you spelled “ubiquitous” properly and used it correctly. Whether or not your short story made him cry is irrelevant. And that’s how school stamps out (as opposed to bakes in) insight and creativity. I say you should give yourself a D. Assume before you start that you’re going to create something that the teacher, the boss, or some other nitpicking critic is going to dislike. Of course, they need to dislike it for all the wrong reasons. You can’t abandon technique merely because you’re not good at it or unwilling to do the work. But if the reason you’re going to get a D is that you’re challenging structure and expectation and the status quo, then YES! Give yourself a D.” Pg. 60

“The challenge of becoming a linchpin solely based on your skill at plying a craft or doing a task or playing a sport is that the market can find other people with that skill with surprising ease. Plenty of people can play the flute as well as you can, clean a house as well as you can, program in Python as well as you can. If all you can do is the task and you’re not in a league of your own at doing the task, you’re not indispensible. Statistics are a dangerous deal, because statistics make it strikingly clear that you’re only a little better than the other guy. Or perhaps not better at all. When you start down the path of beating the competition based on something that can be easily measured, you’re betting that with practice and determination, you can do better than Len Hutton or Jack Hobbs did at cricket. Not a little better, but Don Bradman better. And you can’t. On the other hand, being as charming as Julia Roberts or as direct as Marlon Brando or as provocative as Danny Boyle-that’s way easier than playing cricket better than anyone who has ever lived. Emotional labor is available to all of us, but it is rarely exploited as a competitive advantage. We spend our time and energy trying to perfect our craft, but we don’t focus on the skills and interactions that allow us to stand out and become indispensable to our organization. Emotional labor was seen as a bad thing, a drain on the psyche of the stewardesses studied by Hochschild for her book. The mistake in her analysis was failing to consider the alternative. The alternative is working in a coal mine. The alternative is working in a sweatshop. It’s called work because it’s difficult, and emotional labor is the work most of us are best suited to do. It may be exhausting, but it’s valuable.” Pg. 62-63

“Why do so many handmade luxury goods come from France? It’s not an accident. It’s the work of one man, Jean-Baptiste Colbert. He served under Louis XIV of France in the 1600s and devised a plan to counter the imperialist success of the countries surrounding France, England, Portugal, Spain and other countries were colonizing the world, and France was being left behind. So Colbert organized, regulated, and promoted the luxury-goods industry. He understood what wealthy consumers around the world wanted, and he helped French companies deliver it. Let other companies find the raw materials; the French would fashion it, brand it, and sell it back to them as high-priced goods. A critical element of this approach was the work of indispensable artisans. Louis Vuitton made his trunks by hand in a small workshop behind his house outside of Paris. Hermes would assign a craftsperson to work on a saddle for as long as it might take. The famous vintners of Champagne relied on trained professionals-men who had worked their whole lives with wine-to create a beverage that would travel around the world. At the same time that France was embracing handmade luxury, Great Britain was embracing the anonymous factory. Looms that could turn out cotton cloth with minimal human labor, or pottery factories that could make cheap plates. “Made in France” came to mean something (and still does, more than three hundred years later) because of the “made” part. Mechanizing and cheapening the process would have made it easy for others to copy. Relying on humanity made it difficult-it made the work done in France scarce, and scarcity creates value. “ Pg. 63-64

“Bob Dylan knows a little about becoming indispensable, being an artist, and living on the edge: ‘Daltrey, Townshend, McCartney, the Beach Boys, Elton, Billy Joel. They made perfect records, so they have to play them perfectly…exactly the way people remember them. My records were never perfect. So there is no point in trying to duplicate them. Anyways, I’m no mainstream artist.’ The interviewer then reminded Dylan, ‘But you’ve sold over a hundred million records.’ Dylan’s answer gets to the heart of what it means to be an artist: ‘Yeah I know. It’s a mystery to me too.’” Pg. 68

“David has been working in the midtown branch of Dean & Deluca for six years. This mini-chain of high-end coffee shops in New York has very high turnover, so six years I quite an achievement. I met David while having coffee with a friend. The first thing I noticed was that he had walked over to a line of tourists and cheerfully said, ‘Hey, guys! We have another bathroom upstairs. No need to wait.’ With a smile, he moved away, energetically cleaning off tables and straightening things that didn’t seem particularly crooked to me. If this was menial labor, no one told David. As the hour wore on, I saw him greet people, help without asking, offer to watch a table or get something for someone. In a coffee shop! I asked him about his attitude. He smiled, stopped for a second, and told me, ‘I work for blessings.’ Almost anyone else would have seen this job as a grind, a dead end, a mind-numbing way to spend six years. David saw it as an opportunity to give gifts. He had emotional labor to contribute, and his compensation was the blessings he got from the customers (his customers). His art was the engagement with each person, a chance to change her outlook or brighten his day. Not everyone can do this, and many who can, choose not to. David refused to wait for instructions. He led with his art.” Pg. 69-70

“WAIT! ARE YOU SAYING THAT I HAVE TO STOP FOLLOWING INSTRUCTIONS AND START BEING AN ARTIST? SOMEONE WHO DREAMS UP NEW IDEAS AND MAKES THEM REAL? SOMEONE WHO FINDS NEW WAYS TO INTERACT, NEW PATHWAYS TO DELIVER EMOTION, NEW WAYS TO CONNECT? SOMEONE WHO ACTS LIKE A HUMAN, NOT A COG? ME?

Yes.” Page. 89

“The reason you might choose to embrace the artist within you now is that this is the path to (cue the ironic music) security. When it is time for layoffs, the safest job belongs to the artist, the linchpin, the one who can’t be easily outsourced or replaced.”
Pg. 91

“Does the technology used by the artist appear on the scene to match what the artist needs, or do artists do their art with the tools that are available. Shakespeare didn’t invent plays; he used them. Salinger didn’t invent the novel; he wrote a few. The technology existed before they got there. I don’t believe that you are born to do a certain kind of art, mainly because your genes have no idea what technology is going to be available to you. Cave painters, stone carvers, playwrights, chemists, quantum-mechanic mechanics-people do their art where they find it, not the other way around. The art that you do when you interact with a customer, or when you create a new use of a traditional system or technology-it’s still art. Our society has reorganized so that the answer to the question “where should I do art?” is now a long booklet, not a simple checklist of a few choices.” Pg. 92

“I’ve found people in every job you can imagine doing art. There are waiters and writers and musicians and doctors and nurses and lawyers who find art in their work. The job is not your work; what you do with your heart and soul is the work.” Pg. 97

Remember, an uneaten cake that sits in the oven whether half-baked or not iis ultimately worthless. So ship dammit!

“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, emergence, or fear-this is a rare skill, something that makes you indispensable.”
Pg. 103

IT AIN'T ABOUT THE MONEY!!!

“Some people think that you can’t be generous until after you become a success. They argue that they have to get theirs, and then they can go ahead and give back. The astonishing fact is that the most successful people in the world are those who don’t do it for the money.”

“One of the reasons people give for not giving gifts is that they can’t afford it. Gifts don’t have to cost money, but they always cost time and effort. If you’re in a panic about money, those two things are hard to find. The reason these people believe they can’t afford it, though, is that they’ve so bought into consumer culture that they’re in debt or have monthly bills that make no sense at all. When you cut you’re expenses to the bone, you have a surplus. The surplus allows you to be generous, which mysteriously turns around and makes your surplus even bigger.” Pg. 166

“Great work is not created for everyone. If it were, it would be average work.” Pg. 171

“Money isn’t the way to show respect. Money is an essential element of making a living in this world, but money is a poor substitute for respect and thanks. Wall Street has learned this the hard way.” Pg. 171

“If you are fortunate enough to find an artist, you should work hard to pay him as much as you can afford, because if you don’t, someone else will.” Pg. 172

“You must become indispensable to thrive in the new economy. The best way to do that are to be remarkable, insightful, an artist, someone bearing gifts. To lead. The worst way is to conform and become a cog in a machine.” Pg. 174

THE TWO REASONS SEEING THE FUTURE IS SO DIFFICULT
“Attachment to an outcome combined with the resistance and fear of change. That’s it.” Pg. 178

Conclusion:
The simple truth is: practically every sentence in this book is a gem and there is no way I could post every paragraph or sentence I found inspiring without having to retype up this whole book on my blog here. Just get the book. I’m planning to read it 10 times at least. It offers a sane and inspiring prescription for thriving in this post-Lehman world we live in today.