Linchpin

**Are You Indispensable?**

By Seth Godin

**Estimated Reading Time:** 45 minutes

**What You'll Learn:** * Why following instructions is no longer a viable career strategy * How to become someone your organization cannot afford to lose * The real reason most people hold back their best work * How to give gifts that transform your professional relationships * A new way of thinking about work that makes you indispensable

**Who This Book Is For:** The person who senses they have more to offer than their job description allows. The professional who suspects playing it safe is actually the riskiest move of all. The manager who wants to build a team of extraordinary contributors. And anyone who has ever wondered why some people seem irreplaceable while others remain anonymous.

Something has shifted in the world of work, and most people have not noticed yet. For most of the last century, the deal was straightforward. You showed up, you followed instructions, you kept your head down, and in return you received a paycheck, benefits, and a gold watch at retirement. The system was designed to produce compliant workers who could execute predictable tasks in predictable ways. Schools trained you to fit in. Factories and offices rewarded you for fitting in. The entire economy ran on interchangeable parts, and interchangeable people were part of that machinery. That world is gone. Today, a reasonably competent worker following a manual can be replaced by someone cheaper overseas, or by a piece of software, or by a machine. The jobs that remain purely about compliance and following instructions are racing toward commoditization. If your work can be written down in a manual, someone or something will eventually do it for less. This is not a book about job security in the traditional sense. Traditional job security was always an illusion, a temporary arrangement that lasted only as long as the factory needed your particular set of compliant skills. Real security comes from a different place entirely. It comes from being indispensable. Seth Godin calls this kind of person a linchpin. A linchpin is the small pin that holds a wheel onto its axle. Remove it, and the wheel falls off. The mechanism stops working. In organizational terms, a linchpin is the person who holds things together, who brings unique value that cannot be easily replaced, who makes everything around them work better simply by being there. The problem is that most of us have been trained since childhood to avoid becoming linchpins. We learned to follow the rules, to color inside the lines, to wait for instructions, to fit in rather than stand out. We learned that standing out was dangerous, that making art was risky,…