Tag Archives: Seth Godin

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? Part VI

(II) Conformity = Dispensability (continued)

How to get things done by Bre Pettis:

  1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action, and completion;
  2. Accept that everything is draft, ie not perfect;
  3. There is no editing stage;
  4. Fake it until you make it;
  5. Procrastination must be crushed;
  6. Get it done, so you can get something else done;
  7. Once you’re done, you can throw it away;
  8. Laugh at perfection
  9. Failure counts as done
  10. Doing something makes you right;
  11. Destruction is a variant of done;
  12. Done is the engine of more,
  13. If you have an idea that is published on the internet, that counts as done.

You Need To Push Hard ie. Sprint Towards Innovation.

STOP CHECKING your blog, inbox, online sites that you visit. Stop the bullshit cycle that is slowing down your productivity. You need to pull an all-nighter or two in order to make sure that you project kicks ass. You should write down the due date, post it on the wall. Godin writes down his ideas, prioritizes them, builds them, and ships them out the door. It’s a habit that produces revenue & results.

(This is a series of posts on Seth Godin’s Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?)

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? Part V

(II) Conformity = Dispensability (continued)

The ABC (attendance-base compensation) that we received in school or in work is misleading. In the work world, the average subsidize the mediocre, and the above average get screwed over. The classic Marxist theory is espoused by Godin, the exceptional workers in the factor realise that it does not pay to do factory work at factory wages only to subsidize the boss. This is a fine statement in practice, yes, but how easy is it to create an alternative to the factory? A resume is another way to conform, you do not need a resume but you need to pitch yourself. Do not try to grid it out in business, according to Godin.

Resistance Is Your Lizard Brain Acting Up

Your brain is just an evolved version of that of the lizard’s brain. We are programmed to fear uncertainty, and to not take risks. At work, sharing ideas will always leads to others attacking it because they didn’t create the idea. If they do like it, then they will turn around, and use it themselves. You should not fear failure, you should embarrass failure, and learn from it. You should seek out discomfort in order to grow. The people who break through usually have nothing to lose and almost never have a back-up plan. They are all or nothing. You need to start thinking up bad ideas, in order to create a possible good idea. You should mix the way things work, to challenge how it might actually work. The temptation to sabotage the new thing is huge, precisely because that new thing might work. Godin is betting that you won’t do anything and it won’t really matter because he’s already sold me this book…

Signs that the lizard brain is active:

  1. Don’t shop on time. Late is the first step to never;
  2. Procrastination, claiming that you need to be perfect;
  3. Ship early, sending out defective idealism hoping they are rejected;
  4. Suffer anxiety about clothes to an event;
  5. Make excuses because of lack of money;
  6. Do excessive networking to have only friends around you;
  7. Deliberately isolate yourself from the community;
  8. Demonstrate lack of desire for new skills;
  9. Be snarky;
  10. Start a committee instead of taking action;
  11. Criticizing the work of your peers…

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? Part III

(I) The Race To The Bottom (continued)

When Walmart enters a rural market, businesses close, jobs disappear, and the town declines, according Godin. This is acceptable because Walmart has low prices for every possible item. Macroecomonic theory is irrelevant to people making a million tiny microeconomic decisions every day in a hypercompetitive world. Those decisions repeatedly favour fast/cheap over slow/expensive. Godin accepts that we cannot halt capitalism through the freezing of prices, and industries, so we need to think differently in order to produce a viable solution for the race to the bottom.

Critique of the Race To The Bottom: If you think, as Godin does, like a marketer, then yes, it might appear to be true that the service industry is collapsing but it is instead becoming more specialized, and developing in unanticipated ways. He should be arguing that increased departmentalization needs to be bridged through better on the job training. Human capital is falling for those who do not invest in teaching themselves how to be productive. Self-taught people generate more value. Godin believes that factories in the service industry have collapsed, he is not entirely correct, as new industries have been born.

(This is a series of posts on Seth Godin’s Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?)

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? Part II

(I) The Race To The Bottom (continued)

You need to avoid the race to the bottom. Wikipedia is massive, popular, and built for free thereby destroying the Encyclopedia Britannica. No single person could have created Wikipedia. A team of hundreds of thousands have created it, in fact. But by breaking the development of articles into millions of one-sentence or one-paragraph projects, Wikipedia did not need to rely on a handful of well-paid experts but instead relies on a loosely coordinated massive group of knowledgeable people, contributing small slices to the whole.

CastingWords does transcription for less than fifty cents a minute. John Jantsch took an interview he did with Godin, and posted it to a site that uses a crowd as its labourers. For a few dollars, the site took the recordings of interview, chopped the audio into tiny bits, and parceled it to anonymous labourers who transcribed the interview in little sections. Less than three hours later, it was put back together and the typed transcript was delivered to John Jantsch. Here we see that Jantsch wins, and the transcribers lose. The factory is planned, controlled, and measured, it’s factory work because it is optimizing the productivity of a product. The automation of the jobs of the past has made it so that millions of people are underemployed. Bringing back the human touch is valuable to society.

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? Part I

Seth Godin repeats the same core points over, and over again with variations on the quality of examples over a 225page book. His argument is not very rigorous because most entrepreneurs recognize them as a valid way of thinking:

(I)   The Race To The Bottom In Prices Is Inevitable;

(II) Education = Dispensability;

(III)Workers Are Increasingly Interchangeable;

(IV) The Zero Sum Game Within The Economy Is A Lie;

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

(I) The Race To The Bottom

For over 200 years, Western economies have been standardizing, and automating their work force for increased productivity. In the process of the industrial revolution, a great deal of organization has been built within society to ensure a foundational education, and functionality within the work force. There were managers and labourers in oppositional struggle within factories, and corporations.

The death of the factory in Western economies is certain, according to Godin, as a result of the collapse of these product producing business models. Seth Godin contends therefore that being a functionary is no longer possible. Wages are racing to the lowest levels possible, Amazon is automating its delivery workforce through robotics, McDonald’s has drive thru employees taking orders in a call centre in North Dakota rather than in the localized McDonald’s itself. Technology has driven the cost of employees down, while unions are losing the battle against outsourcing to India, South Korea, China et cetera….In order to avoid being a functionary, you must become your organisation’s Linchpin.

This is a series of posts on Seth Godin’s Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?