My Rating: 7 of 10
Summary
A good philosophy or mindset book to understand how to create value in the workplace today or as an entrepreneur. I think it’s important to read this early on in one’s career, to kill any ideas of entitlement one may have in their minds. With that said, the book probably could have been cut by 100 pages or so, or even be the same length as The Dip.
Notes
Stop settling for what’s good enough and start creating art that matters. Stop asking what’s in it for you and start giving gifts that change people.
NOTE: giving is the secret to tapping your potential
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The educated, hardworking masses are still doing what they’re told, but they’re no longer getting what they deserve.
NOTE: remember this when i start to think about how great it would be to have a 9 to 5
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It might take you more than a few minutes to learn the new rules, but it’s worth it.
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Every day, if you focus on the gifts, art, and connections that characterize the linchpin, you’ll become a little more indispensable.
NOTE: make a list of the skills that make you indispensable and focus on those for the time being
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indispensable employee—I call her a linchpin—is a person who’s worth finding and keeping.
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And you? Your résumé sits in a stack next to plenty of other résumés, each striving to fit in and meet the requirements. Your cubicle is next to the other cubes, each like the other. Your business card and suit and approach to problems—all designed to fit in.
NOTE: do not hope to get picked. stand out
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Someone else is getting better than you at hiring cheap and competent workers.
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Consumers are not loyal to cheap commodities. They crave the unique, the remarkable, and the human.
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Those are the only two choices. Win by being more ordinary, more standard, and cheaper. Or win by being faster, more remarkable, and more human.
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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.
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Be remarkable Be generous Create art Make judgment calls Connect people and ideas . . . and we have no choice but to reward you.
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In a factory, doing a job that’s not yours is dangerous. Now, if you’re a linchpin, doing a job that’s not getting done is essential.
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When work becomes personal, your customers and coworkers are more connected and happier. And that creates even more value. When you’re not a cog in a machine, an easily replaceable commodity, you’ll get paid what you’re worth. Which is more.
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Have you ever purchased a car or consulting services or a house because the person you worked with made a powerful connection with you? If so, then she was the linchpin in the entire process.
NOTE: a linchpin is the reason why you do business with a particular organization
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Doesn’t matter if you’re always right. It matters that you’re always moving.
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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.
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Finding security in mediocrity is an exhausting process.
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Rick Wagoner lost his job at GM because he told everyone what to do (and he was wrong). Far better to build a team that figures out what to do instead.
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Expertise gives you enough insight to reinvent what everyone else assumes is the truth.
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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 indispensable.
NOTE: don’t play to the stats or to the task. do the intangibles
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It means being willing to take intellectual risks and to forge a new path. The fear is about an imagined threat, so avoiding the fear allows you to actually accomplish something.
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The linchpin feels the fear, acknowledges it, then proceeds. I can’t tell you how to do this; I think the answer is different for everyone. What I can tell you is that in today’s economy, doing it is a prerequisite for success.
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How many of your coworkers spend all day in search of perfect? Or, more accurately, spend all day trying to avoid making a mistake?
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As a result of the tsunami of pretty good (and the persistence of really lousy), the market for truly exceptional is better than ever.
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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.
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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.
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You are not your résumé. You are your work.
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The linchpin says, “If I lean enough, it’s okay if I get fired, because I’ll have demonstrated my value to the marketplace. If the rules are the only thing between me and becoming indispensable, I don’t need the rules.”
NOTE: don’t fear breaking the rules or getting fired. the only thing to be scared about is not making an impact.
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If he waits for a job to be good enough to deserve his best shot, it’s unlikely that he’ll ever have that job.
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but how will that help them get a job at a place that requires a résumé? You can’t win both games—not at the same time, anyway. If you want a job where you are treated as indispensable, given massive amounts of responsibility and freedom, expected to expend emotional labor, and rewarded for being a human, not a cog in a machine, then please don’t work hard to fit into the square-peg job you found on Craigslist.
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We’re not at all surprised when a craftsman sharpens his saw or an athlete trains hard. But when an information worker develops her skills at confronting fear (whether it’s in making connections, speaking, inventing, selling, or dealing with difficult situations) we roll our eyes.
NOTE: keep training. keep your tools sharp. they are all skills.
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The act of the gift is in itself a reward. And second, you benefit from the response of those around you. When you develop the habit of contributing this gift, your coworkers become more open, your boss becomes more flexible, and your customers become more loyal.
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An artist is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artist takes it personally.
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He’s an artist because he takes a stand, he takes the work personally, and he doesn’t care if someone disagrees.
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Art is the product of emotional labor. If it’s easy and risk free, it’s unlikely that it’s art.
NOTE: if it doesn’t hurt its not art
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If art is a human connection that causes someone to change his mind, then you are an artist. What if you were great at it?
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Most of all, art involves labor. Not the labor of lifting a brush or typing a sentence, but the emotional labor of doing something difficult, taking a risk and extending yourself.
NOTE: art takes risk and it takes courage and you should be afraid to stand up for it
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Instead, it’s about finding a way to change you in a positive way, and to do it with a gift. There’s a strong streak of intellectual integrity involved in being a passionate artist. You don’t sell out, because selling out involves destroying the best of what you are.
NOTE: if you continue to give the best and continue to give gifts you will never sell out
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Peter said, “I don’t care what anybody does in the beverage industry. I really don’t. They’re going to do what they’re going to do. We’ve got to do what we’ve got to do. You have to know what they’re doing, but you don’t have to follow what they’re doing.”
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Over time, the gifts accrue and you have created a reputation.
NOTE: reputation is the accumulated good will from going over the call of duty
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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.
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The core thing would be just do something awesome.
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“Back to basics. What do I want? What do I want to see in the world?” And create that.
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Ev and Twitter didn’t succeed at first. People didn’t get it. What’s the point? Where’s the business model? And then, once the word spread, Twitter became the fastest-growing communications medium in history. Not because it followed a model, but because it broke one.
It’s not an effort contest, it’s an art contest.
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Passion is caring enough about your art that you will do almost anything to give it away, to make it a gift, to change people.
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And if the ideas don’t spread, if no gift is received, then there is no art, only effort. When an artist stops work before his art is received, his work is unfulfilled.
NOTE: art without the marketing is jusr effort
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I think it’s fear, and I think we’re even afraid to talk about this sort of fear. Fear of art. Of being laughed at. Of standing out and of standing for something.
NOTE: we fear being laughed at and standing up for something
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As we’ll see, the greatest shortage in our society is an instinct to produce.
NOTE: keep shipping
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I think it is. I think the discipline of shipping is essential in the long-term path to becoming indispensable.
NOTE: shipping reg is about learning discipline to ship what matters
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Shipping something out the door, doing it regularly, without hassle, emergency, or fear—this is a rare skill, something that makes you indispensable.
NOTE: learn to just ship getting past the resistance quickly and effortlessly
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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.
NOTE: as a creator you have to have the discipline to make ppl thrash early. tell the peopl who write the checks ths i how i goes
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2. Appoint one person (a linchpin) to run it. Not to co-run it or to lead a task force or to be on the committee. One person, a human being, runs it. Her name on it. Her decisions.
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The resistance desperately seeks to sabotage your art. A well-defined backup plan is sabotage waiting to happen.
NOTE: there shoul be no backup plan
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When someone says to me, “I don’t have any good ideas . . . I’m just not good at that,” I ask them, “Do you have any bad ideas?”
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It’s the voice that tells you to leave controversial ideas out of the paper you’re writing, because the teacher won’t like them. The resistance pushes relentlessly for you to fit in.
NOTE: this is how i feel with the blog afraid to write stuff down bc the teacher wont like them
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Across the news industry, processes and procedures for news gathering are guided by standardized news values, producing standardized stories in standardized formats that are presented in standardized styles. The result is extraordinary sameness and minimal differentiation.
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So, what’s left is to make—to give—art. What’s left is the generosity and humanity worth paying for.
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We check Twitter because of our fear of being left out. We buy expensive handbags for the same reason. We take a mundane follow-the-manual job because of our fear of failing as a map maker, and we make bad financial decisions because of our fear of taking responsibility for our money.
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6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
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The resistance will help you find the thing you most need to do because it is the thing the resistance most wants to stop.
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I had no confidence in myself. So it’s just a matter of throwing myself under the bus and crawling my way out.”
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There’s a big part of our psyche that wants to touch and be touched. We want to be connected, valued, and missed. We want people to know we exist and we don’t want to get bored.
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At the end of the year, he has some great blog posts and a pile of Twitter tweets to show for it. What if he harnessed even one of those ideas and fought the resistance hard enough to actually make something of it? At the end of the year, he could show us a multimillion-dollar company, or a movement that changed the world. By the end of the year,
NOTE: posts are great. so are tweets. but the’yre not worth a whole lot unless you package into a product not just a soundbyte. if you ship and package and make products what will you accomplish in a year.
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I think of it as a spiral of pain, something that is triggered by a small event and immediately takes you totally off the ranch.
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overly busy, cash-poor, and generally unable to do some art, please add to the list “and people will laugh at me if I try.”
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If there’s an infrastructure (like a publisher) in place to amplify your insights, that’s great. Often, though, it’s not there.
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I’m trying to sell you on the idea of building a platform before you have your next idea, to view the platform building as a separate project from spreading your
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What does the success of your project look like?
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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?
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Power used to be about giving, not getting. In the linchpin economy, the winners are once again the artists who give gifts. Giving a gift makes you indispensable. Inventing a gift, creating
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As I wrote in my previous book, Tribes, the new form of marketing is leadership, and leadership is about building and connecting tribes of like-minded people.
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The only way I know of to become a successful linchpin is to build a support team of fellow linchpins.
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Gifts not only satisfy our needs as artists, they also signal to the world that we have plenty more to share.
NOTE: this is why you have to give freely you learn more have more to give after giving
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Transactions distance parties from each other.
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The restaurant owner who sends out a few special dishes to a regular customer and refuses to charge for them. In each case, the lack of a transaction created a bond between the giver and the recipient, and perhaps surprisingly, the giver usually comes out even further ahead.
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If I give you a piece of art, then you can’t and shouldn’t be busy assigning a monetary value to it.
NOTE: what about my idea for the kindle book.well the pdf is free. the kindle book is three the real book after kickstarter is 8
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They say, “Pay me.” Artists say, “Here.”
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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.
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If bad news changes your emotional state or what you think of yourself, then you’ll be attached to the outcome you receive. The alternative is to ask, “Isn’t that interesting?” Learn what you can learn; then move on.
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We assign motivations and plots and vendettas where there are none. Those angry customers didn’t wake up this morning deciding to ruin your day, not at all. They’re just angry.
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But she’s unable to accept the world as it is, so she has a meltdown. Instead of calmly looking at the situation, quickly switching to a different airline, and moving on (which would have led to her arriving in Palm Beach only ten minutes late), she needs to deny the truth about her flight and the motivation of the person who canceled it.
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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.
NOTE: this is how i need to see hw.dont take shit personally it is not about you.
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That’s why outsiders and insurgents so often invent the next big thing—they don’t start with the tangled past.
NOTE: hw you can see outside the box a bit more and so you can create new thins. dont get suckedin.
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want to upset the status quo. You fear the wrath of your peers when they hear you say that the emperor is actually naked. You hesitate because you’ve been taught that this is not the work of a team player; it’s the work of a rabble-rouser.
NOTE: how i feel about hw
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The linchpin has figured out that we get only a certain number of brain cycles to spend each day. Spending even one on a situation out of our control has a significant opportunity cost. Your competition is busy allocating time to create the future, and you are stuck wishing the world was different.
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The fascinating (and universal) truth is that the opportunities came after she was inspired—she wasn’t inspired by the opportunities.
NOTE: be generous and you will see opportunity come to you. be inspored and you will find opportunity.
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If the store you visit gives you the unmeasurable and unrequired gift of pleasant service, connection, respect, and joy, then you’re a lot less likely to switch to the big-box store down the street to save a few dollars.
NOTE: do i do this with all my work that i do.am i doing it with my art.am i doing it with casting.am i doing it with restaurants.why not.
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A concert isn’t merely about the music, is it? And a restaurant isn’t about the food. It’s about joy and connection and excitement.
NOTE: honestly do i bring that to everything i do. think about what projs im doing right now think about when i feel good about working on other ppls projs.horror. casting. marketing on youtube. gen text. walter. my enthusiasm for a proj should be independent of results and others.
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When you answer the phone or greet me at your office or come to a meeting or write something, don’t bother if all you’re going to do is do it. Sing it or stay home.
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Nora Roberts writes three books a year, writing six hours a day, every day. She’s putting in the hours
NOTE: how many of your own projs are you going to churn out this year. how many blog posts and how many videos. focus on the writing of course.
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But you won’t, you’ll persist, pushing through the dip. Which means that few people will walk in the door with your background, experience, or persistence.
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abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not “studying a profession,” for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances.
NOTE: stop postponing life. live already and know that you have 100 chances.
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you know someone who is more open to new ideas or more agreeable than you? More stable or extroverted? More conscientious? If so, then you better get moving.
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key point of distinction between vendors calling on a company is rarely price. It’s the perceived connection between the prospect and the organization.
NOTE: its not a question of price but connection.
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consumers are seeking connection more than ever. In short, we’re looking for people to follow, and for others to join us as we do.
NOTE: ppl want to follow. what is crucial is ppl to lead them.
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So things slow down. The linchpin changes that. Understanding that your job is to make something happen changes what you do all day. If you can only cajole, not force, if you can only lead, not push, then you make different choices.
NOTE: the lp goal is to push forward when deliverables are unmeasurable and unclear
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When you meet someone, you need to have a superpower. If you don’t, you’re just another handshake. It’s not about touting yourself or coming on too strong. It’s about making the introduction meaningful. If I don’t know your superpower, then I don’t know how you can help me (or I can help you).
NOTE: what is your super power. niche story telling. shipping. low budget.
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from something you choose to give.
NOTE: that can be your super power what you gave.
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The challenge, then, is to be the generous artist, but do it knowing that it just might not work. And that’s okay.
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Make more art. It’s the only choice, isn’t it? Give more gifts. Learn from what you did and then do more.
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A cornerstone of your job is selling your boss on your plans, behaving in a way that gives her cover with her boss, being unpredictable in predictable ways.
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simply being in the record business didn’t mean he had anything at all to do with music. Instead of finding a job he could love, he ended up being in proximity to, but nowhere involved with, something he cared about.
NOTE: find a job you love. then spend all your time working on something you care about
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Instead, he’s a frazzled publicity hound, working twice as many hours for less money and doing no music at all. Maybe you can’t make money doing what you love (at least what you love right now). But I bet you can figure out how to love what you do to make money (if you choose wisely).
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But don’t wreck your art if it doesn’t lend itself to paying the bills. That would be a tragedy. (And the twist, because there is always a twist, is that as soon as you focus on your art and leave the money behind, you may discover that this focus turns out to be the secret of actually breaking through and making money.)
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Understand that there’s a difference between the right answer and the answer you can sell.
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2. Focus on making changes that work down, not up. Interacting with customers and employees is often easier than influencing bosses and investors. Over time, as you create an environment where your insight and generosity pay off, the people above you will notice, and you’ll get more freedom and authority. Don’t ask your boss to run interference, cover for you, or take the blame. Instead, create moments where your boss can happily take credit. Once that cycle begins, you can be sure it will continue.
NOTE: delight with the little things so that people see what ur capable of doing. over time generosity pays off. ppl above you will notice. ull be given free reign
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If all employees are nothing but a résumé, and résumés can be scanned, then why are we surprised that our computers end up finding us anonymous average people to fill our anonymous average jobs?
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