Seth Godin's Linchpin

Being a Seth Godin fan boy in marketing circles is like announcing that Frank Lloyd Wright was a genius in a room full of architects -- no one will disagree with you, but you're not going to win any awards for originality either.

I am an ardent fan of Seth's and have written about him before on this blog. While it's hard to quantify exactly what makes him so powerful, he helps articulate it brilliantly in his latest offering, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable.

Godin believes the days of the entitled, overpriced bureaucrat are over. In the twentieth century, many careers were built around skills that can now be done by machines or outsourced for a fraction of the price. Only by passionately producing and "shipping" your unique "art" can you become an indispensable linchpin within an organization or in your own business.

The road to linchpinhood is no walk in the park. First one has to confront a lifetime of conditioning that encouraged us to fit in, or as Godin believes, become replaceable cogs in the system. We must then confront the "lizard brain" -- our own inner voice pleading with us to accept the happy mediocrity of the status quo.

Personally, I found the chapter on "shipping" the most powerful part of the book. Godin points out that Pablo Picasso produced over a thousand paintings, but most of us can only remember three of them. He also reminds us that he himself has written over a hundred books, most of which didn't sell very well, but the process of doing so made his work infinitely more readable. The lesson here is that creativity is an iterative process. Godin truly believes that sheer output, regardless of the ratio of crap to critical, equals progress -- one can't develop and become more valuable if one is standing still. In other words, if you are going to fail, fail forward; fail fast.

This has given me a newfound respect for musicians like David Bowie, bands like Blur and authors like William F. Buckley Jnr. I used to feel that the mountains of crap they produced for every piece of good stuff was revealing -- that a body of work more mediocre than masterpiece was something to be embarrassed by. But now I can see that for most everybody, this dedication to shipping forms the crucible of their creativity. One of my Dad's favorite quotes to us as kids was Thomas Edison's, "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration." This much is becoming clearer by the day.

While Godin is known for his visionary but commonsensical thoughts on marketing, Linchpin is first and foremost a self-help book, but a finer one you will not find. The book is incredibly enlightening, thoroughly readable, and as Forrester analyst and author of Groundswell, Josh Bernoff writes, "You should buy a copy. Unless, of course, you're enjoying that rut you're in."