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

Artists Ship!

You should click send on your blog, you should ship your creativity, do not delay because the lizard brain will stop you. You should resist the thought that you should not create art. What slows us down is the thrashing, and the coordination. Thrashing is adjusting of ideas as they are being developed, and coordination is the getting everyone to agree to an objective. The reason that a startup has an easier time getting a product to market than a corporation is that it has few people to coordinate. TO overcome the coordination problem you need to be exceptionally secretive which calls for the exclusion of certain people, then you need to appoint one person to run it. Write your ideas down, action them, then ship them. DO not be selfish. Linchpins must be generous…

The Linchpin is An Entrepreneur:

How to become a linchpin:

1)    Hire plenty of factory workers. Scale like crazy. Take advantage of the fact that most people want a map, most peoapl are willing to work cheaply, most people want to be the factory.

2)    Find a boss who can’t live without a linchpin. Do the work. Make a difference.

3)    Start your own gig. Understand that an organization filled with linchpins is itself indispensable.

Richard Branson was in Puerto Rico when his flight to the Virgin Islands was cancelled, so he decided to charter a private flight, and the got a blackboard and wrote “Seat to Virgin Islands, $39.00”. He sold enough seats to make it to the Virgin Islands on time.

Linchpins do two things for the organization. They create emotional labour, and they map out what do next. Being indispensable means:

1. Providing a unique interface between members of the organiszation;
2. Delivering unique creativity;
3. Managing a situation or organization of great complexity;
4. Leading customers;
5. Inspiring staff;
6. Providing deep domain knowledge;
7. Possessing a unique talent.

(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.