PDF Summary:Linchpin, by Seth Godin

Do you feel uninspired at work? Do you dream of making a positive impact on the world but doubt that you’re good enough to do so? According to leadership expert Seth Godin, anyone can choose to create work that changes the world by becoming a “linchpin” whose unique skills hold their organization together. Godin asserts that becoming a linchpin is not only the path to a fulfilling life and career but also necessary for career security in today’s tumultuous job market.

In this guide, we’ll identify what beliefs make up the “linchpin mindset” and explain the steps you can take to become a linchpin and start living your most fulfilling work life. Additionally, we’ll supplement Godin’s advice with counterpoints that will help you implement his ideas wisely as well as tips for bosses who aim to nurture and manage linchpin employees.

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How Entrepreneurs Can Compete With Big Businesses

Purple Cow, which Godin wrote seven years before Linchpin, covers many of these same ideas; however, it’s intended for small business owners rather than employees. The thesis of Purple Cow is that markets are so saturated with corporations selling cheap, convenient goods that the only reliable way to start a profitable business is to offer customers something exciting and new—a “purple cow” in a field of brown cows.

To come up with an idea for such a business, identify one quality of your product that you can push to the extreme. For example, IKEA chose to put more effort into its designs than any of its competitors, making it the most aesthetically pleasing budget furniture brand on the market. Consequently, they quickly claimed a dominant market position worldwide. One main reason linchpins are valuable is that they help organizations reach these extremes by innovating more than other employees (as we’ll see next).

Once you have a remarkable product, you must market it to risk-taking innovators rather than a general audience. The small segment of customers on the lookout for something new is more valuable than anyone else because they spread the word about your product to the rest of the world. Additionally, since they’re passionate about your innovative product, they spend more money than typical customers.

Linchpins Produce Unique Value

Broadly speaking, linchpins create two types of unique value: innovations and relationships.

Linchpins Innovate

Godin explains that because linchpins are intrinsically motivated and take the initiative to discover new ways to solve problems, they’re continuously innovating: They regularly solve problems in new ways, as well as problems that no one else has thought to solve. By doing things no one has done before, linchpins create exponentially more value than if they were trying to get better at doing what’s already been done.

For example, the laser printer was invented by an employee at Xerox named Gary Starkweather. Despite his managers urging him to abandon his research on lasers, which they deemed were too impractical to use in printers, Starkweather continued to innovate because he cared more about the work he was doing than following directions. If Starkweather had followed directions and merely invented a faster photocopier, it wouldn’t have had much of an impact. Instead, the laser printer transformed the industry and became immensely profitable for Xerox.

According to Godin, the innovative nature of a linchpin’s work makes them exceptionally valuable employees that are difficult or impossible to replace. A linchpin’s work involves solving countless unpredictable problems, so it can’t be summed up in a job description or quantitatively measured. Thus, finding a replacement for a linchpin is next to impossible, and bosses will often do whatever they can to retain their one-of-a-kind employee. In contrast, a non-linchpin who works to become the best in their field at only one specific task will find it more difficult to outcompete others who specialize in that same task.

The Real Secret to Innovation?

In Range, David Epstein argues that the key to innovation is to be a generalist. If you want to be a linchpin, it may be worth your while to cultivate experience in a diverse array of skills and activities—a trait that Godin doesn’t mention.

According to Epstein, although many people worry about “starting too late” when switching careers, newcomers to any given field typically have unique life experience that gives them an advantage over those who have stuck with the same career for life. This is because the heart of innovation is coming up with new connections between existing ideas. The more unusual and wide-ranging your background is, the more unique combinations of ideas you come up with, and the more valuable innovations you produce.

If many linchpins are generalists, as Epstein argues, this would also explain why the most innovative linchpins are difficult or impossible to replace. If the reason you’re such a good marketing director is that you’re drawing from past experience as a graphic designer and playwright, it makes sense that there are few people in the job market who can come up with the kinds of ideas that you can.

Linchpins Build Emotional Relationships

Linchpins also create unique value by building emotional relationships. Godin explains that by giving gifts and being authentically themselves, linchpins earn the trust of coworkers, clientele, and anyone else they come into contact with. When you embody the linchpin mindset, the people around you sense that you have their best interests at heart—because, as we’ve established, you truly do.

This trust-building results in genuine friendships that are valuable to the organization. Customers will be loyal to an organization for life if they’re friends with the team. Other employees will enjoy and care more about the job if they’re friends with a linchpin coworker who’s emotionally invested in the work. These valuable relationships are inexorably tied to the linchpin—if you’re a coder, and all you do is write code, your boss could easily replace you with someone of equal skill. But if your friendship inspires all the other coders to work hard and genuinely care about the final product (and they’d be sad and unmotivated if you left), your boss will do everything possible to keep you on the team.

Building Emotional Relationships as a Boss

In Leaders Eat Last, Simon Sinek also advocates building trusting relationships in the workplace. While Godin emphasizes how important it is that you build emotional relationships as an employee, Sinek focuses on the importance of building relationships as a boss.

According to Sinek, empathetic emotional relationships are necessary for your employees to feel safe, which helps them perform their best work. If they see you, their boss, as a fellow human who has their best interests in mind, they’ll feel comfortable taking risks at work without worrying about being punished for making mistakes. This leads to innovation, which, as we discussed earlier, is the most profitable kind of work.

Although valuable inter-employee relationships rely on the linchpins holding them together, as Godin explains, Sinek argues that such camaraderie among coworkers can only exist if the boss has already built solid relationships with the employees. When you form empathetic relationships with your employees, they don’t have to worry about earning your approval and support—you’ve already given it to them. In contrast, if you see your employees as machines and make your approval and support strictly conditional on their performance, your employees will see each other as competitors, and you’ll sow distrust and deprive your organization of valuable collaboration.

While Godin claims that you can build relationships just by being authentic at work, Sinek asserts that to build trusting relationships, leaders must regularly put their subordinates’ needs before their own.

How to Adopt a Linchpin Mindset

So far, we’ve explained what a linchpin mindset is, and why having a linchpin mindset is necessary to thrive in today’s economic landscape. Now, we’ll cover Godin’s practical tips for building this linchpin mindset.

Face Your Fears and Overcome Them

If being a linchpin is so fulfilling, why do so few people act like linchpins? Godin explains that embodying the linchpin mindset and acting accordingly is terrifying, and this fear dissuades most people from trying.

When you see your work as a gift and genuinely care about its impact, failing to make that impact and letting down the people you want to help is painful. When you commit to following your own rules rather than someone else’s directions, you must take responsibility for your failures and mistakes. When you choose to be your honest, authentic self, you become vulnerable to the judgment and mockery of others. Godin asserts that the most primitive parts of your brain perceive this failure and social disapproval as life-threatening dangers, and they urge you to avoid these risks at all costs.

These fears cause most people to seek comfortable jobs where they can follow directions and avoid the scrutiny of others altogether. However, obeying this fear in the short term causes you to suffer in the long term, as you miss out on the fulfillment and security of being a linchpin.

Resolve Fear by Conquering Shame

You may find it easier to overcome these fears if you examine them through the lens of shame. In The Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown explains that the main thing holding you back from a joyful, authentic life is shame—the feeling you get when you believe that you’re not “good enough” to deserve love.

In all of the painful situations Godin describes, you feel shame for failing to live up to a specific ideal: You feel shame when you fail to help others, when it’s your fault that things go wrong, and when you act authentically and are judged negatively by those around you. These situations force you to confront the fact that you’re not a perfect person, making you feel like you don’t deserve the love of others.

If you regularly remind yourself that you deserve love even if you’re imperfect, Brown argues that it will give you the inner strength you need to act in the face of these fears. You don’t need to live up to the standards set by the people around you or the culture at large—you’re a valuable human being, worthy of love, no matter what you do.

Like Godin, Brown acknowledges that the human brain is wired to need social acceptance, which is why rejection and failure feel so dangerous. However, she asserts that refusing to be your authentic self further disconnects you from the people around you, intensifying your feelings of shame and making it harder to fill this psychological need. You can’t just “play it safe,” hide yourself, and expect to feel connected to others, as those seeking faceless non-linchpin jobs try to do—connection requires showing others your flaws and risking rejection.

Godin offers a couple of tips for how to overcome your fear of being a linchpin and act in spite of it.

Tip #1: Accept Fear Instead of Trying to Soothe It

Godin explains that many people react to fear by trying desperately to make it go away. They obey their fearful impulses and do anything they can think of to protect themselves from future pain. However, these efforts inevitably end up making things worse, in a couple of ways.

First, actions you take while gripped by fear are often irrational and ineffective, and they make your problems worse. For example, imagine you’ve agreed to go on a skiing trip with friends, but you’re terrified of getting hurt while skiing. You let that fear dictate your actions by staying up the night before your trip watching skiing tutorials to learn how to keep yourself safe. The next day, sleep deprivation makes you less alert while skiing and more likely to injure yourself.

Second, Godin argues that if you start instinctively reacting to your fears, you’ll never stop—such actions typically do nothing to reduce the fear you feel. This is because trying to soothe your fears reinforces your belief that you need to soothe your fear. Instead, if you allow yourself to feel afraid without taking action to reduce that anxiety, the feeling eventually goes away on its own. Every time you refrain from reacting to fear and notice that something bad doesn’t come to pass, you’ll believe a little more that you can safely ignore the fear you feel.

Unlike Fear, Acting to Soothe Stress Helps

While seeking to take action to resolve fear is often self-defeating, this isn’t necessarily the case for all negative emotions. Unlike fear, stress typically doesn’t just go away if we fail to act on it.

In Burnout, Amelia and Emily Nagoski explain that when our ancient ancestors experienced stress—for example, when they encountered a deadly predator—they would take intense physical action: running and screaming. They would also tap into their social bonds in response to stress: They would intensify their bonds with others with emotional and physical intimacy.

Our brains are still wired to de-stress when we take these actions. However, when we experience stress in the modern world, we usually neglect to take the actions necessary to resolve it. Returning to the strategies of our ancestors can help us resolve stress: When you’re feeling stressed, release that energy through exercise, or through intense, solitary emotional outbursts. Additionally, share affection with loved ones through friendly conversation or physical touch. Unlike actions you take while gripped by fear, such strategies will clear your mind and better equip you to solve problems in the future.

Tip #2: See Fear as a Guide

Beyond simply accepting fear as a necessary discomfort, Godin advises that you embrace fear as a guide pointing you toward your most valuable opportunities. Even if you’ve embraced the linchpin mindset, it can be difficult to discern what career choices would be the most generous and authentic. In these cases, the choice you’re most afraid of making is likely the one that you need to pursue.

For example, imagine you’re an entrepreneur who’s torn on whether to sell your startup. If the idea of continuing to lead the business scares you more than selling, it’s likely a sign that you think your company’s mission is important, and you should probably stay in control. However, if you’re more afraid of the idea of living up to your potential without this business taking up your time, it’s probably a sign to sell and move on to your next venture.

(Shortform note: If you’re having trouble intuiting the purpose you should be working toward by listening to your fear, you may find it helpful to try a more logical method of identifying your next move. Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, argues on his blog that if you feel lost or indecisive in life, you can find direction by clarifying your personal values. By thinking deeply about what you believe a meaningful life looks like, you can come up with a list of the specific things you care about. Then, you can make life decisions based on whatever gets you closer to what you value.)

Avoid Perfection

Most people strive to do their work perfectly. However, Godin argues that perfection is actually a bad thing—it’s a sign that you’re not being innovative enough. If you’re able to do a task perfectly, it means that you’re meeting someone else’s specific ideal expectations. However, the work that truly impacts people (and therefore is truly valuable) is that which hasn’t been done before. Instead of seeking perfection, try to do something original and impactful, even if it’s flagrantly “imperfect” by traditional standards.

(Shortform note: Forgoing perfection doesn’t necessarily mean you should completely discard existing standards of quality. As Brian Christian and Thomas Griffiths explain in Algorithms to Live By, the most successful works of art are often the result of a brainstorming phase of completely uninhibited creativity, followed by a refinement stage in which you select the “best” ideas from that brainstorming and discard the rest. This process can help you produce work that’s innovative enough to catch people’s attention, yet familiar enough for people to recognize it as high-quality.)

Here are a couple of tips on how best to overcome an obsession with perfection.

Tip #1: Force Yourself to Finish Imperfect Work

According to Godin, the rarest skill—the primary one that distinguishes linchpins from non-linchpins—is the ability to regularly finish projects and present them to the world on a predetermined schedule, no matter how “good” they turn out to be. Set a deadline for every single project you set out to create. Then, even if your work doesn’t turn out how you wanted it to or it doesn’t feel finished, release it into the world when the deadline arrives.

This skill is vital because most people are afraid of presenting imperfect projects. Consequently, they spend too long working on their projects and usually never finish them at all. Regularly sending out imperfect work is surprisingly effective, as imperfect projects often unexpectedly turn out to be a complete success despite their flaws. The proof of this process’s efficacy is all around us: We can see that people who create truly influential work typically do so only after publishing a massive amount of other work.

(Shortform note: In Show Your Work, Austin Kleon takes Godin’s argument a step further: Don’t just share your work with the world on strict deadlines—share your work with the world every day, letting people see your creative work in progress. By sharing your unfinished work, you can attract an audience and make valuable professional connections immediately, rather than waiting until you have something “perfect.” These resources will help you get to the point where you can make a living with your art, so the sooner you can accumulate them, the better.)

Linchpin Work Is Purposeful Practice

Godin emphasizes that creative masters succeed because they’ve created so much work (and if you work enough, some of it will be successful). However, it’s likely that these artists become masters because this quantity of work serves as purposeful practice.

In Peak, Anders Ericsson explains that practice alone isn’t enough to improve your skills to an advanced level: You must practice in a particular way. One of the key features of practice that actually improves your skills is that it stretches you past your comfort zone and is consistently difficult. Godin’s linchpins who finish work on a schedule are doing this: By innovating and pushing the boundaries of what their work can be, linchpins are constantly challenging themselves rather than repeatedly creating the kind of work they’re comfortable with.

Tip #2: Calmly Embrace Negative Outcomes

As we’ve discussed, being a linchpin means seeing your work as a gift and becoming emotionally invested in the effect it has on others. However, Godin also offers the paradoxical advice to remain emotionally indifferent if your work is rejected by those around you or fails at positively impacting others.

If you’re only emotionally invested in a single positive outcome while you work, you’re preparing to be upset if it doesn’t happen. This emotional lens warps your perception of the world and causes you to make harmful mistakes. Often, people who hope for a specific outcome deny the unpleasant realities in front of them to avoid negative emotions, causing them to ignore problems that they normally would be able to solve. For example, if you really want to believe that your boss has you in mind for a promotion, you may convince yourself that they’re more impressed with your work than they really are and neglect to put in the effort needed to get their attention.

Additionally, Godin argues that if you’ve already failed and there’s nothing you can do to fix it, spending time and energy worrying about that fact will only make it harder for you to work on your next project. To cultivate indifference in the face of failure, remind yourself that accepting what you can’t change and moving on is both the rational and productive thing to do.

How Ancient Stoics Embraced Tragedy

How is it possible to care about your work while you’re doing it and to celebrate if it succeeds, but simultaneously be able to remain unshaken in the face of total failure? In The Obstacle Is the Way, Ryan Holiday draws on ancient Stoic philosophy to argue that no event is necessarily good or bad—rather, it depends on the meaning you attach to it. Additionally, he states that you have the power to choose for yourself whether you’re going to interpret an event as good or bad. By choosing to see the upside and opportunity of a tragedy, you can decide to be grateful for it rather than entirely distressed by it.

If you practice focusing on the positive aspects of an ostensibly terrible outcome, you’ll find it easier to stop worrying about it and move on. For example, if you’re heartbroken by the death of a grandparent, you can use the tragedy as a reminder to treasure the time you still have with your parents. Shared grief may bring you closer to your emotionally distant siblings. You could even use this event as a reminder of your own mortality and start living life to the fullest.

Holiday also offers advice on how to think clearly while you work and avoid clinging to a single outcome: Intentionally visualize what could go wrong. As Godin mentions, many people try to avoid thinking about potential disasters, leading them to ignore problems they have the power to solve. Viewing these disasters neutrally rather than with anxiety will help you prepare for the worst without being a hopeless pessimist.

Remember That Anyone Can Be a Linchpin

Last, Godin emphasizes that anyone has the potential to become a linchpin—you don’t need to be particularly creative or talented. As children, we all naturally use our imaginations to create, and any of us can choose to tap into that same instinct. Talent and inborn creativity aren’t what set linchpins apart. Rather, people who become linchpins are those who are the best at continuously acting in the face of fear, as we discussed earlier. Conquering this fear is challenging, but Godin is adamant that doing so is the path to a fulfilling, generous life.

How to Regain Childlike Creativity

Research supports Godin’s assertion that we all possess valuable problem-solving creativity as children. In his TEDx talk, George Land recounts how NASA approached him to develop a test to determine which of their employees were the most creative (and therefore capable of discovering solutions to their toughest challenges). In later research, Land gave this same creativity test to a group of 5-year-olds and found that 98% of them possessed “genius-level” creative skill. However, when Land tested the same children five years later, only 30% of them were “genius-level” creatives. When the children were 15, only 12% were creative geniuses.

Land asserts that children lose touch with their creative skills because schools teach them to judge the quality of their ideas while brainstorming and before sharing those ideas. This kind of quality assessment is called “convergent” thinking, and research shows that it directly inhibits creative “divergent” thinking if we try to do both at once.

Land asserts that we never forget how to practice divergent thinking, even when we become adults—we just habitually sabotage ourselves with convergent thinking. Therefore, all we need to do to regain childlike levels of creativity is to learn how to entirely withhold judgment while coming up with ideas. Godin would likely argue that doing so requires conquering fear—for example, overcoming the fear of producing bad ideas. Even taking this obstacle into account, this understanding frames creativity as a much more attainable goal than many assume it is.