Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

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.

Ten percent of the applications to Harvard are from people who got a perfect score on their SATs. Approximately the same number are from people who were ranked first in their class. Of course, it’s impossible to rank higher than first and impossible to get an 820, and yet more than a thousand in each group are rejected by Harvard every year. Perfec

Wal-Mart wins because it’s cheap and close. Everyone else who wins must do it by being generous. And for that, you must be an artist and you need to mean it.

Expertise gives you enough insight to reinvent what everyone else assumes is the truth.

People who tell you that they don’t have any good ideas are selling themselves short. They don’t have ideas that are valued because they’re not investing in their art.

I’ve never met someone who had no art in them, though it’s buried sometimes. Markets are crying out. We need you to stand up and be remarkable. Be human. Contribute. Interact. Take the risk that you might make someone upset with your initiative, innovation, and insight—it turns out that you’ll probably delight them instead.

(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.)

Picasso painted more than a thousand paintings, and you can probably name three of them. As we’ll see, the greatest shortage in our society is an instinct to produce. To create solutions and hustle them out the door. To touch the humanity inside and connect to the humans in the marketplace.

If you can’t be remarkable, perhaps you should consider doing nothing until you can. If your organization skipped a month’s catalog because you didn’t have anything great to put in it, what would happen the next month? Would the quality and user delight of your product line improve? Raising the bar is easier than it looks, and it pays for itself. I

By forcing myself to do absolutely no busywork tasks in between bouts with the work, I remove the best excuse the resistance has. I can’t avoid the work because I am not distracting myself with anything but the work. This is the hallmark of a productive artist. I don’t go to meetings. I don’t write memos. I don’t have a staff. I don’t commute. The