On Becoming a Linchpin

Odds are you work in a factory. Not a traditional factory, with an assembly line and a cartoon-like whistle blowing at each shift change (although you might). Seth Godin’s new book, Linchpin, sets forth the idea that the majority of us do factory work: we do routine, average anonymous tasks for routine, average, anonymous wages. Even white-collar work is factory work.

Godin explains that both Karl Marx and Adam Smith were right. Most organizations have two levels: labor and management, and labor is a commodity. Like most commodities, if you’re average like everyone else, then cost becomes the only differentiator…and cost spirals downward.  Godin’s solution isn’t for all of us to work ourselves into management (middle management is a commodity too).

Godin’s solution is to become an artist.

“Art is a gift that changes the recipient,” Godin writes. If you work for money, you’re involved in a transaction and transactions can always be cheaper. If you give art to your customers, your organization or your peers, then you give something that can’t be paid for, something priceless. If you continue to give art freely, you become indispensible to those same people.

You become a linchpin.

I read Linchpin over a weekend while snowed into my house. Godin’s work really affected me. It made me realize that if I want to continue to enjoy work, I need do more than show up and pull levers. I need to make some changes and I need to become an artist. I need to give gifts. On some level, that is why I started LeaderLab. I wanted to give a gift to others, the gift of understanding leadership theory. Like most art, it inspired more art and now LeaderLab is already growing from the initial podcast idea to a community of resources. My hope is that you are changed somehow by the art I’m creating as much as I am changed by creating it.

Thank you for letting me give it. Thank you for helping me become a linchpin.

Tags: godin, personal development