Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

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

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

And yet, many (most?) people in organizations handle their interactions as though they are in charge of teaching people a lesson. We make policies and are vindictive and focus on the past because we worry that if we don’t, someone will get away with it. So when a driver cuts us off, we scream and yell. We say we’re doing it so he’ll learn and not e

Professional creators thrash early. The closer the project gets to completion, the fewer people see it and the fewer changes are permitted.

There are no longer any great jobs where someone else tells you precisely what to do.

The self-hating artist burns out. The hypercritical lizard brain will pick apart anything we do in order to preserve its sense of short-term safety. The alternative is to develop a sense of loyalty to your mission and generosity to your work. I’m not proposing that you become immune to feedback. In fact, the most generous thing you can do is open y

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.

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.

And the new media punishes those who seek to mislead. We have ever more refined truth-telling cues, and if you don’t believe in what you’re doing, we’ll know, and you will fail. Honest signals are the only signals that travel.