Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

I think art is the ability to change people with your work, to see things as they are and then create stories, images, and interactions that change the marketplace. So, yes, I do think you need to be an artist to market tofu, if you want to be any good at it.

When you focus on the second circle, when you work to charge more people more often, your art suffers. Instead, we profit most when we make the first and third circles as big as we can. Generosity generates income. This works whether you are selling paintings or innovation or a service.

Creativity is personal, original, unexpected, and useful. Unique creativity requires domain knowledge, a position of trust, and the generosity to actually contribute. If you want to create a unique guitar riff, it sure helps if you’ve heard all the other guitar riffs on record. Unique implies that the creativity is focused and insightful. Deliverin

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. The only way to get what you’re worth is to stand out, to exert emotional labor, to be seen as indispensable, and to produce interactions that organizations and p

What will make someone a linchpin is not a shortcut. It’s the understanding of which hard work is worth doing. The only thing that separates great artists from mediocre ones is their ability to push through the dip. Some people decide that their art is important enough that they ought to overcome the resistance they face in doing their work. Those

The resistance would like you to curl up in a corner, avoid all threats, take no risks, and hide. It feels safe, after all. The paradox is that the more you hide, the riskier it is. The less commotion you cause, the more likely you are to fail, to be ignored, to expose yourself to failure. We tried to set up an economy where you could hide your big

When you feel the resistance, the stall, the fear, and the pull, you know you’re on to something. Whichever way the wind of resistance is coming from, that’s the way to head—directly into the resistance. And the closer you get to achieving the breakthrough your genius has in mind, the stronger the wind will blow and the harder the resistance will f

Am I some sort of prodigy? I don’t think so. I ship. I don’t get in the way of the muse, I fight the resistance, and I ship. I do this by not doing an enormous number of tasks that are perfect stalling devices, ideal ways of introducing the resistance into our lives.

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in bei

Anxiety, on the other hand, is dangerous paralysis. Anxiety is the exaggeration of the worst possible what-if, accompanied by self-talk that leads to the relentless minimization of the actual odds of success. Anxiety makes it impossible to do art, because it feeds the resistance, giving the lizard brain insane power over us. It’s impossible to be a