(V) The Linchpin Is More Emotional, Gift-Giving, Visionary, and Mature.

“I don’t care to belong to any club that would have me as a member.” – Groucho Marx

Be Passionate/Stand Out/Emotional Labour & Anticipate What Is Next/Have Vision

Figure out what to do next before your boss does. That’s what being a linchpin is about. Do not conform, but swim upstream. You need to become an artist in your own right. You need to persevere, be talented, be charming, and only then can you be the linchpin. You can be a linchpin if you agree to that you can do it. You need your company to rely on you as a particular employee. The law of linchpin leverage: the more value you create, the fewer hours you actually need to work. Most of the time, entrepreneurs are doing administrative work. Marissa Mayer at Google is a linchpin because she solves problems that people haven’t predicted, haven’t seen and connects people who need to be connected. Nobody cares how hard you worked on something, it’s not an effort contest, but the measure is whether it is good art.

The Gift Economy

You need to be emotionally involved in your company because if you don’t care you will not be a linchpin. You should not be a cog according to Godin. JetBlue invests in its flight attendants. Godin calls for a generousity of labourers. This is a marketer’s thinking that generousity will be the future, a gift based economy. Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient. You must create art, you must choose to create art. Do not become of the could have, should have, didn’t persons. Art is creative, is not commerce, is unique, involves labour… The problem is that he aspouses an emotional labour that is self-less which means low paying anyway. MBAs want to put everything in a spreadsheet while Godin wants to contact the emotional self. Our gift culture has collapsed in exchange for a money based system, instead of sharing a cab with a stranger, you might just go alone. This is the wrong way to live your life. The Metcalfe Law: the more people have a technology the more valuable that technology becomes. This was invented by Bob Metcalfe who created the Ethernet cable. The more people have facebook, the more useful it can be.