Linchpin: Are you Indispensable?

Recently, I had the pleasure of joining a company hosted virtual book club. As part of my company's professional development program, each of us are required to invest 40 hours a year on continuing education. The types of classes span from general management related issues to industry learning courses, or even technical skills like Access database modeling. When the opportunity came to join a general management book club to credit those learning hours, of course, the geek in me jumped at the chance! What's more, the company was going to reimburse for the cost of the book and I was going to be able to get 6 hours of learning credits. Needless to say, I was looking forward to reading this book.

However, I retained mixed reviews about the Linchpin: Are you Indispensable? by Seth Godin. My primary frustration probably resulted from his blogger style of writing; whatever hit him in the spur of the moment and piqued his interests, he would write it down. As a result, the snippets of his blog stories created a rather choppy flow to his book, which I did not particularly enjoy. Having read another of his book (We are All Weird), undoubtedly, this was a classic style of his writing - modern, unpolished, and conversational. His success with his books (he has published 14 books to date) probably meant that I am one of the few people unable to really appreciate the "depth" of his writing.

The overall thesis of the book was pretty good though. That as individuals in society, we need to demonstrate autonomy and independence in following our path. It is too easy to jump on the bandwagon and be one of the many identical cogs in the wheel. It requires emotional hardship, passion, and determination to chart our own course and be leaders along the way. Driven by the combination of passion and art, one can become a linchpin - someone who is indispensable.

Godin argues that capitalism has created a self-fulfilling model of compliant workers. Capitalists need compliant workers, who will be productive and willing to work for less than the value that their productivity creates. The gap between what they are paid and what the capitalist receives, equates to profit. Therefore, in the quest to be all efficient and productive, our society has created an over-abundance of workers while the artists in every one of us have lost sight of the quest to create our own "art".

In order to avoid being the cogs in the wheel, one needs to create art by doing things that no one can tell you exactly how to do it. Art is created when one takes personal responsibility, challenges the status quo and changes people. One also become an artist when you give gifts unconditionally. When one is willing to dedicate hours and invest emotional labor (remember the times your head hurts when you need to think so much) and create novel ideas or products, one starts to find the passion. This brings to my mind a concept in positive psychology, proposed by Csikszentmihalyi: The flow - the mental state of completed focused motivation where one becomes fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement and success in the process of the activity - is the perfect combination of art and passion right there.

I support Seth Godin's challenge to every individual reader to rethink their destiny. Don't find excuses for yourself, because you really do have all the potential you want in you. The overall optimism of this theory also coincides in what I believe  - that you are exactly what you believe in yourself to be. Maybe you are not where you would really like yourself to be at this time, but as long as you are "charting" and defining your path in every step of the way you go, one day, you will get there.

"Hope is like a path in the countryside: Originally there was no path.

Yet, as people are walking all the time in the same way, a path appears." 

by Lu Xun, One of the Greatest Chinese Writer of 20th century

However, some of Godin's other arguments do not stick very well with me. Godin argues that the theory of  "I did well in school and therefore will do a great job working for you" is not valid. Along those lines, he also slams education as being completely antithetical, fear-based battlefields that kill the heretical thought we so badly need. Schools only create conformity and kills the artists, entrepreneurs, adventurists, soloists in us. 

While I agree that school GPA performance is not the sole indicator to one's success, GPA scores are one of the best indication of an individual's determination. My take is that determination is the MOST important factor to being a linchpin and that schools are the best grounds for cultivating that environment. You think those Chemistry class, English class, or even art or tennis classes in school could have made you an artist/inventor? Nope, not even close. What school, at least from elementary through high school, does best is to provide the platform for long grueling hours to train an individual to be focused, determined enough to master the material. As we all know, creating novel ideas, or art according to Godin, requires mastery and effort, perhaps also combined with a splash of talent, so I would disagree that art creation is something that we could actually "teach" in school. 

Perhaps this also ties back to the Asian upbringing in me. "Nothing is fun until you're good at it," according to Amy Chua (the infamous tiger mum) in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Her theory is that as kids, you really don't know what you're good at, and through sheer determination, practice, and effort, one will become better at everything you do. That is when things become more enjoyable and you continue to invest more time to become even better at it. 

Overall, if I really had to rate this book, I would give it a 3 out of 5 stars. If Seth Godin had showed some damn effort in performing research for his book and actually polishing up his arguments instead of his nonchalance efforts in thinking his venn diagrams or his brilliance alone would compensate for the lack of everything else, I would have been a bigger fan of this book. He simply closed out his main argument of the need for everyone to chart their own path by stating that because everyone is unique, there was no need for him to spell that out. That was quite the major letdown towards the end of the book. So, my recommendation for this book is: Read it if you think that you want some inspiration in your career, but don't set your hopes too high for it.