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Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

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Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

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Highlights & Notes

We need original thinkers, provocateurs, and people who care. We need marketers who can lead, salespeople able to risk making a human connection, passionate change makers willing to be shunned if it is necessary for them to make a point. Every organization needs a linchpin, the one person who can bring it together and make a difference.

Artists are people with a genius for finding a new answer, a new connection, or a new way of getting things done.

If a Purple Cow is a product that’s worth talking about, the indispensable employee—I call her a linchpin—is a person who’s worth finding and keeping.

Like scared civilians eager to do whatever a despot tells them, we give up our freedoms and responsibilities in exchange for the certainty that comes from being told what to do.

If you make your business possible to replicate, you’re not going to be the one to replicate it. Others will. If you build a business filled with rules and procedures that are designed to allow you to hire cheap people, you will have to produce a product without humanity or personalization or connection. Which means that you’ll have to lower your prices to compete. Which leads to a race to the bottom. Indispensable businesses race to the top instead.

The difference between what an employee is paid and how much value she produces leads to profit. If the worker captures all the value in her salary, there’s no profit.

Consumers are not loyal to cheap commodities. They crave the unique, the remarkable, and the human. Sure, you can always succeed for a while with the cheapest, but you earn your place in the market with humanity and leadership.

The cheap strategy doesn’t scale very well, so the only way to succeed is to add value by amplifying the network and giving workers a platform, not by forcing them to pretend to be machines.

Those are the only two choices. Win by being more ordinary, more standard, and cheaper. Or win by being faster, more remarkable, and more human.

Any project, if broken down into sufficiently small, predictable parts, can be accomplished for awfully close to free.

first you have interchangeable parts, then you have interchangeable workers.

“By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.”

There are fewer and fewer good jobs where you can get paid merely for showing up. Instead, successful organizations are paying for people who make a difference and are shedding everyone else.

“The web has made kicking ass easier to achieve, and mediocrity harder to sustain. Mediocrity now howls in protest.”

The only way to get what you’re worth is to stand out, to exert emotional labor, to be seen as indispensable, and to produce interactions that organizations and people care deeply about.

Great teachers are wonderful. They change lives. We need them. The problem is that most schools don’t like great teachers. They’re organized to stamp them out, bore them, bureaucratize them, and make them average.

We seek out experiences and products that deliver more value, more connection, and more experience, and change us for the better.

Abundance is possible, but only if we can imagine it and then embrace it.

No, the competitive advantage the marketplace demands is someone more human, connected, and mature. Someone with passion and energy, capable of seeing things as they are and negotiating multiple priorities as she makes useful decisions without angst. Flexible in the face of change, resilient in the face of confusion.

In a world that relentlessly races to the bottom, you lose if you also race to the bottom. The only way to win is to race to the top.

When your organization becomes more human, more remarkable, faster on its feet, and more likely to connect directly with customers, it becomes indispensable.

They do more than they’re paid to, on their own, because they value quality for its own sake, and they want to do good work. They need to do good work. Anything less feels intellectually dishonest, and like a waste of time. In exchange, you’re giving them freedom, responsibility, and respect, which are priceless.

Letting people in the organization use their best judgment turns out to be faster and cheaper—but only if you hire the right people and reward them for having the right attitude. Which is the attitude of a linchpin.

I define a factory as an organization that has figured it out, a place where people go to do what they’re told and earn a paycheck.

School does a great job of teaching students to do what we set out to teach them. It works. The problem is that what we’re teaching is the wrong stuff.

What They Should Teach in School Only two things: 1. Solve interesting problems 2. Lead

Leading is a skill, not a gift. You’re not born with it, you learn how.

Organizing around the average, then, is too expensive. Organizing around average means that the organization has exchanged the high productivity of exceptional performance for the ease and security of an endless parade of average performers.

Expertise gives you enough insight to reinvent what everyone else assumes is the truth.

Emotional labor is what you get paid to do, and one of the most difficult types of emotional labor is staring into the abyss of choice and picking a path.

Organizations that can bring humanity and flexibility to their interactions with other human beings will thrive.

Emotional labor is available to all of us, but is rarely exploited as a competitive advantage. We spend our time and energy trying to perfect our craft, but we don’t focus on the skills and interactions that will allow us to stand out and become indispensable to our organization.

The linchpin feels the fear, acknowledges it, then proceeds. I can’t tell you how to do this; I think the answer is different for everyone. What I can tell you is that in today’s economy, doing it is a prerequisite for success.

As you get closer to perfect, it gets more and more difficult to improve, and the market values the improvements a little bit less.

We hire for perfect, we manage for perfect, we measure for perfect, and we reward for perfect. So why are we surprised that people spend their precious minutes of self-directed, focused work time trying to achieve perfect? The problem is simple: Art is never defect-free. Things that are remarkable never meet spec, because that would make them standardized, not worth talking about.

If it wasn’t a mystery, it would be easy. If it were easy, it wouldn’t be worth much.

The problem with meeting expectations is that it’s not remarkable.

Raising the bar is easier than it looks, and it pays for itself. If your boss won’t raise your bar, you should.

It’s damaging to build organizations around repetitive faceless work that brings no connection and no joy.

Great jobs, world-class jobs, jobs people kill for—those jobs don’t get filled by people e-mailing in résumés.

If the game is designed for you to lose, don’t play that game. Play a different one.

If you need to conceal your true nature to get in the door, understand that you’ll probably have to conceal your true nature to keep that job. This is the one and only decision you get to make. You get to choose.

Emotional labor is the task of doing important work, even when it isn’t easy.

An artist is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artist takes it personally.

A day’s work for a day’s pay (work ⇐> pay). I hate this approach to life. It cheapens us. This simple formula bothers me for two reasons: 1. Are you really willing to sell yourself out so cheap? Do you mortgage an entire (irreplaceable) day of your life for a few bucks? The moment you are willing to sell your time for money is the moment you cease to be the artist you’re capable of being. 2. Is that it? Is the transaction over? If we’re even at the end of the day as the formula says, then you owe me nothing and I owe you nothing in return. If we’re even, then there is no bond, no ongoing connection between us.

A day’s work is your chance to do art, to create a gift, to do something that matters. As your work gets better and your art becomes more important, competition for your gifts will increase and you’ll discover that you can be choosier about whom you give them to.

I think art is the ability to change people with your work, to see things as they are and then create stories, images, and interactions that change the marketplace.

Perhaps your challenge isn’t finding a better project or a better boss. Perhaps you need to get in touch with what it means to feel passionate. People with passion look for ways to make things happen.

In everything you do, it’s possible to be an artist, at least a little bit. Not on demand, not in the same way each time, and not for everyone. But if you’re willing to suspend your selfish impulses, you can give a gift to your customer or boss or coworker or a passerby. And the gift is as much for you as it is for the recipient.

It’s impossible to make art for everyone. There are too many conflicting goals and there’s far too much noise. Art for everyone is mediocre, bland, and ineffective.

It’s not an effort contest, it’s an art contest. As customers, we care about ourselves, about how we feel, about whether a product or service or play or interaction changed us for the better. Where it’s made or how it’s made or how difficult it was to make is sort of irrelevant. That’s why emotional labor is so much more valuable than physical labor. Emotional labor changes the recipient, and we care about that.

Your art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it. Your art is the act of taking personal responsibility, challenging the status quo, and changing people.

Optimism is the most important human trait, because it allows us to evolve our ideas, to improve our situation, and to hope for a better tomorrow. And all artists have this optimism, because artists can honestly say that they are working to make things better.

When an artist stops work before his art is received, his work is unfulfilled.

Art, at least art as I define it, is the intentional act of using your humanity to create a change in another person.

The economy is ruthlessly punishing the fearful, and increasing the benefits to the few who are brave enough to create art and generous enough to give it away.

Not shipping on behalf of your goal of changing the world is often a symptom of the resistance. Call its bluff, ship always, and then change the world.

The only purpose of starting is to finish, and while the projects we do are never really finished, they must ship. Shipping means hitting the publish button on your blog, showing a presentation to the sales team, answering the phone, selling the muffins, sending out your references. Shipping is the collision between your work and the outside world.

Thrashing is the apparently productive brainstorming and tweaking we do for a project as it develops.

The reason that start-ups almost always defeat large companies in the rush to market is simple: start-ups have fewer people to coordinate, less thrashing, and more linchpins per square foot. They can’t afford anything else and they have less to lose.

  1. Relentlessly limit the number of people allowed to thrash. That means you need formal procedures for excluding people, even well-meaning people with authority. And you need secrecy. If you have a choice between being surprised (and watching a great project ship on time) or being involved (and participating in the late launch of a mediocre project), which do you want? You must pick one or the other. 2. Appoint one person (a linchpin) to run it. Not to co-run it or to lead a task force or to be on the committee. One person, a human being, runs it. Her name on it. Her decisions. Get scared early, not late. Be brave early, not late. Thrash now, not later. It’s too expensive to thrash later.

The lizard brain is hungry, scared, angry, and horny. The lizard brain only wants to eat and be safe. The lizard brain will fight (to the death) if it has to, but would rather run away. It likes a vendetta and has no trouble getting angry. The lizard brain cares what everyone else thinks, because status in the tribe is essential to its survival.

The lizard brain is the reason you’re afraid, the reason you don’t do all the art you can, the reason you don’t ship when you can. The lizard brain is the source of the resistance.

The challenge, then, is to create an environment where the lizard snoozes. You can’t beat it, so you must seduce it. One part of your brain worries about survival and anger and lust. The rest of it creates civilization. This is part metaphor, part biology. The lizard brain is here to keep you alive; the rest of your brain merely makes you a happy, successful, connected member of society. So the two parts duke it out. And when put on alert, the lizard brain wins, every time, unless you’ve established new habits and better patterns—patterns that keep the lizard at bay.

Why do people do things that are self-destructive? Why work on a paper for a week but never save it or back it up? Why do entrepreneurs get so close to success and then sabotage all the work that they’ve done in a moment of fear? We mess up precisely because of the “we.” There are two, not one, voices in our head, and one of them is closer to the spine and the chemicals that generate our emotions than the other. So it’s often in charge.

Weak managers? Why is it that so many bosses shy away from useful criticism or substantive leadership? Why is it so easy to hide behind an office door or a title instead of looking people in the eye and making a difference? Same answer. The amygdala resists looking people in the eye, because doing so is threatening and exposes it to risk.

In fact, if we go down the list of behaviors that are highly valued because of their scarcity, almost all of them are related to bringing a conscious and generous mind to the work, instead of indulging our lizard brain’s reflexes of fear, revenge, and conquest.

The only hope for our species is that the rest of the brain, the civilized part, will care so deeply about positive outcomes that it will organize to avoid the lizard, and will invest in systems that make the resistance less powerful.

The reason the resistance persists in slowing you down and prevents you from putting your heart and soul and art into your work is simple: you might fail.

Successful people are successful for one simple reason: they think about failure differently. Successful people learn from failure, but the lesson they learn is a different one. They don’t learn that they shouldn’t have tried in the first place, and they don’t learn that they are always right and the world is wrong and they don’t learn that they are losers. They learn that the tactics they used didn’t work or that the person they used them on didn’t respond. You become a winner because you’re good at losing. The hard part about losing is that you might permit it to give strength to the resistance, that you might believe that you don’t deserve to win, that you might, in some dark corner of your soul, give up. Don’t.

Going out of your way to find uncomfortable situations isn’t natural, but it’s essential.

Bosses resist giving direct and useful feedback to employees because it’s momentarily uncomfortable.

The road to comfort is crowded and it rarely gets you there. Ironically, it’s those who seek out discomfort that are able to make a difference and find their footing.

A well-defined backup plan is sabotage waiting to happen. Why push through the dip, why take the risk, why blow it all when there’s the comfortable alternative instead? The people who break through usually have nothing to lose, and they almost never have a backup plan.

Finding good ideas is surprisingly easy once you deal with the problem of finding bad ideas.

One way to become creative is to discipline yourself to generate bad ideas. The worse the better. Do it a lot and magically you’ll discover that some good ones slip through.

What do you say to your board of directors? You don’t scare them with bold plans, you hunker down, give in to the lizard, and die slowly instead.

You’d think that the biggest self-doubt would be that something you’re working on might fail. And no doubt, many of us lie awake, filled with anxiety about big failures. Consider the argument that it’s just as likely you hold back out of fear that something might work. If it works, then you have to do it. Then you have to do it again. Then you have to top it. If it works, your world changes. There are new threats and new challenges and new risks. That’s world-class frightening.

In a contest between the rational desire to spread an idea by giving a speech and the biological phobia against it, biology has an unfair advantage.

If there is no sale, look for the fear. If a marketing meeting ends in a stalemate, look for the fear. If someone has a tantrum, breaks a promise, or won’t cooperate, there’s fear involved. Fear is the most important emotion we have. It kept our ancestors alive, after all. Fear dominates the other emotions, because without our ability to avoid death, the other ones don’t matter very much.

Our sanitized, corporatized society hasn’t figured out how to get rid of the fear, so instead we channel it into bizarre corners of our life. We check Twitter because of our fear of being left out. We buy expensive handbags for the same reason. We take a mundane follow-the-manual job because of our fear of failing as a map maker, and we make bad financial decisions because of our fear of taking responsibility for our money. It turns out that we’re even afraid to talk about fear, as if that somehow makes it more real.

The resistance would like you to curl up in a corner, avoid all threats, take no risks, and hide. It feels safe, after all. The paradox is that the more you hide, the riskier it is. The less commotion you cause, the more likely you are to fail, to be ignored, to expose yourself to failure. We tried to set up an economy where you could hide your big ideas, go through the motions, and get what you needed. That’s not working so well now.

So, the resistance is wily. It works to do one of two things: get you to fit in (and become invisible) or get you to fail (which makes it unlikely that positive change will arrive, thus permitting you to stay still).

Criticize anyone who is doing something differently. If they succeed, that means you’ll have to do something differently too.

Your work is to do the work, not to do your job. Your job is about following instructions; the work is about making a difference. Your work is to ship. Ship things that make change.

If you want to produce things on time and on budget, all you have to do is work until you run out of time or run out of money. Then ship. No room for stalling or excuses or the resistance. On ship date, it’s gone.

The goal is to quit the tasks you’re doing because you’re hiding on behalf of the lizard brain and to push through the very tasks the lizard fears.

Overcoming excuses and social challenges isn’t easy, and it won’t happen if the end result isn’t worth it. Trivial art isn’t worth the trouble it takes to produce it.

By forcing myself to do absolutely no busywork tasks in between bouts with the work, I remove the best excuse the resistance has. I can’t avoid the work because I am not distracting myself with anything but the work. This is the hallmark of a productive artist. I don’t go to meetings. I don’t write memos. I don’t have a staff. I don’t commute. The goal is to strip away anything that looks productive but doesn’t involve shipping.

The difference between a successful artist and a failed one happens after the idea is hatched. The difference is the race to completion. Did you finish?

Reality is the best reassurance of all.

When I put myself on an Internet diet (only five checks a day, not fifty), my productivity tripled. Tripled.

The best way to overcome your fear of creativity, brainstorming, intelligent risk-taking, or navigating a tricky situation might be to sprint. When we sprint, all the internal dialogue falls away and we focus on going as fast as we possibly can. When you’re sprinting, you don’t feel that sore knee and you don’t worry that the ground isn’t perfectly level. You just run. You can’t sprint forever. That’s what makes it sprinting. The brevity of the event is a key part of why it works.

You can’t sprint every day, but it’s probably a good idea to sprint regularly.

Little thoughts are ephemeral. They come, and inevitably, they go. We don’t remember them an hour later, never mind a week or a month later.

The challenge is in being alert enough to write them down, to prioritize them, to build them, and to ship them out the door. It’s a habit, it’s easy to learn, and it’s frightening.

Inventing a gift, creating art—that is what the market seeks out, and the givers are the ones who earn our respect and attention.

the new form of marketing is leadership, and leadership is about building and connecting tribes of like-minded people.

As soon as it is part of a system, it’s not art.

The only way I know of to become a successful linchpin is to build a support team of fellow linchpins. The goal is to have an impact, and while it starts with the person (this is my gift, my effort), it works only when it is gratefully accepted by your team and your customers.

It’s difficult to be generous when you’re hungry. Yet being generous keeps you from going hungry. Hence the conflict.

For the last five hundred years, the best way to succeed has been to treat everyone as a stranger you could do business with.

Real gifts don’t demand reciprocation (at least not direct reciprocation), and the best kinds of gifts are gifts of art.

Generosity generates income. This works whether you are selling paintings or innovation or a service.

The power lies in the creation of abundance. A trade leaves things as they were, with no external surplus. A gift always creates a surplus as it spreads.

As we’ve seen, if there is no gift, there is no art. When art is created solely to be sold, it’s only a commodity.

Gifts don’t have to cost money, but they always cost time and effort.

When you cut your expenses to the bone, you have a surplus. The surplus allows you to be generous, which mysteriously turns around and makes your surplus even bigger.

Manipulated art (even the art of service) ceases to be art.

Great bosses and world-class organizations hire motivated people, set high expectations, and give their people room to become remarkable.

Great work is not created for everyone. If it were, it would be average work.

When someone in your organization starts acting like a linchpin, order in lunch for the team, in his honor. When someone delivers more than you asked, give her more trust, more freedom, more leeway next time.

If you are fortunate enough to find an artist, you should work hard to pay him as much as you can afford, because if you don’t, someone else will.

The greatest artists do just that. They see and understand the challenges before them, without carrying the baggage of expectations or attachment.

No one has a transparent view of the world. In fact, we all carry around a personal worldview—the biases and experiences and expectations that color the way we perceive the world.

None of us knows the absolute truth, of course, but the goal is to approach a situation with the least possible bias. So the manager and the investor seek out an employee with discernment, the ability to see things as they truly are. A Buddhist might call this prajna. A life without attachment and stress can give you the freedom to see things as they are and call them as you see them. If you had this skill, what an asset you would be to any organization.

Seeing Clearly Isn’t Easy It’s difficult work, which is why it’s so rare and valuable. Seeing clearly means being able to look at a business plan from the point of view of the investor, the entrepreneur, and the market. That’s hard. Seeing clearly means being able to do a job interview as though you weren’t the interviewer or the applicant, but someone watching dispassionately from a third chair. Seeing clearly means that you’re smart enough to know when a project is doomed, or brave enough to persevere when your colleagues are fleeing for the hills. Abandoning your worldview in order to try on someone else’s is the first step in being able to see things as they are.

Equanimity is easy when we’re dealing with a random event. Stuff happens. We don’t get angry at birds chirping or even a thunderstorm occurring during a play. But if a cell phone goes off, that’s an entirely different story. We need to sit and seethe, as if that seething is magically sending horrible vibes to the offender and he will never do it again.

If you accept that human beings are difficult to change, and embrace (rather than curse) the uniqueness that everyone brings to the table, you’ll navigate the world with more bliss and effectiveness. And make better decisions, too.

Fire is hot. That’s what it does. If you get burned by fire, you can be annoyed at yourself, but being angry at the fire doesn’t do you much good. And trying to teach the fire a lesson so it won’t be hot next time is certainly not time well spent. Our inclination is to give fire a pass, because it’s not human. But human beings are similar, in that they’re not going to change any time soon either.

The ability to see the world as it is begins with an understanding that perhaps it’s not your job to change what can’t be changed. Particularly if the act of working on that change harms you and your goals in the process.

Elements of Attachment The first sign of attachment is that you try to use telekinesis and mind control to remotely control what other people think of you and your work. We’ve all done this.

The second sign of attachment is how you handle bad news. If bad news changes your emotional state or what you think of yourself, then you’ll be attached to the outcome you receive. The alternative is to ask, “Isn’t that interesting?” Learn what you can learn; then move on.

When our responses turn into reactions and we set out to teach people a lesson, we lose. We lose because the act of teaching someone a lesson rarely succeeds at changing them, and always fails at making our day better, or our work more useful.

The Two Reasons Seeing the Future Is So Difficult Attachment to an outcome combined with the resistance and fear of change. That’s it. You have all the information that everyone else has. But if you are deliberately trying to create a future that feels safe, you will willfully ignore the future that is likely.

The essential question of prajna is what to do about the ref. If you filter the calls through your partisan point of view, of course you’ll be upset. Who wouldn’t be? The challenge is determining if that filter is helping you thrive. If you’re able to look at what’s happening in your world and say, “There’s the pattern,” or “Wow, that’s interesting, I wonder why,” then you’re far more likely to respond productively than if your reaction is “How dare he!”

One of the fascinating aspects of business and organized movements is that there’s some correlation between the passion and effort that people bring to a project and the outcome. This isn’t true for the weather. Accept the day’s forecast for what it is, because there’s nothing you can do about it. But market share, innovation, negotiations, human relations—they can be shifted with the right sort of insight and effort.

The challenge is in understanding when our effort can’t possibly be enough, and in choosing projects and opportunities that are most likely to reward the passion we bring to a situation. If there’s no way in the world you can please that customer with a reasonable amount of effort, perhaps it’s better to accept the situation than it is to kill yourself trying (and failing) to change that person’s mindset.

Forty years ago, Richard Branson, who ultimately founded Virgin Air, found himself in a similar situation in an airport in the Caribbean. They had just canceled his flight, the only flight that day. Instead of freaking out about how essential the flight was, how badly his day was ruined, how his entire career was now in jeopardy, the young Branson walked across the airport to the charter desk and inquired about the cost of chartering a flight out of Puerto Rico. Then he borrowed a portable blackboard and wrote, “Seats to Virgin Islands, $39.” He went back to his gate, sold enough seats to his fellow passengers to completely cover his costs, and made it home on time. Not to mention planting the seeds for the airline he’d start decades later. Sounds like the kind of person you’d like to hire.

Just because you want something to be true doesn’t make it so.

Scarcity creates value, and what’s scarce is a desire to accept what is and then work to change it for the better, not deny that it exists.

The attachment to a worldview changes an artist’s relationship to what’s happening and prevents him from converting what he sees or interacts with into something that belongs to him, that he can work with and change.

his ability with words, his willingness to see the truth and reflect it to people who might not want to hear it.

Things are the way they are, and it’s difficult to perceive that they could be any other way.

The truth behind your customer’s situation is no different. Your organization may have a history with this customer; you may have a visceral memory of something that happened between or with your organization and the customer. Keep these ideas tangled and there’s no way you’ll be flexible enough to partner with this customer for the future. You’ll be too busy defending the past.

Most people who see the truth refuse to acknowledge it.

The few who can see the truth and become aware of it often hesitate to speak up. You don’t want to upset the status quo. You fear the wrath of your peers when they hear you say that the emperor is actually naked. You hesitate because you’ve been taught that this is not the work of a team player; it’s the work of a rabble-rouser.

It’s human nature to defend our worldview, to construct a narrative that protects us from uncomfortable confessions.

linchpin has figured out that we get only a certain number of brain cycles to spend each day. Spending even one on a situation out of our control has a significant opportunity cost.

We’re attached to a certain view, a given outcome, and when it doesn’t appear, we waste time mourning the world that we wanted that isn’t here.

The fascinating (and universal) truth is that the opportunities came after she was inspired—she wasn’t inspired by the opportunities.

You can either fit in or stand out. Not both. You are either defending the status quo or challenging it. Playing defense and trying to keep everything “all right,” or leading and provoking and striving to make everything better. Either you are embracing the drama of your everyday life or you are seeing the world as it is. These are all choices; you can’t have it both ways.

But the new rules mean that even if you’ve got all the right background, you won’t make it unless you choose to.

Investors know what to look for: return on investment. For every dollar invested, they want to calculate how much money they can expect in return. Most organizations focus on return on machines. I don’t mean only big, noisy, industrial machines. I am talking about the infrastructure of the organization. They have a system, a factory, a set of desks or buildings or computers or Web sites, and the goal is to extract maximum value from the machines they’ve got.

The sales force exists to keep the machines busy. The IT department services the machines. The human resources department makes sure that the people staffing the machines (they are part of it, after all) are obedient, reliable, and cheap.

One day a system works; the next, it’s underwater. The challenge here is that we can see the changes coming and we try to deal with them by making incremental changes, by being timid, by waiting to see what happens. So by the time what is going to happen happens, we’re toast.

Transferring your passion to your job is far easier than finding a job that happens to match your passion.

You don’t want your head of business development to have serious nostalgia for a particular future. If she does, she’ll hold on to the deals and structures that make that future appear, and undervalue alternatives that could dramatically improve your organization, at the same time that her future vision is threatened.

When your people do what they do because they love it, it works. Even if they’re not as technically adept as the competition.

The power of choice is just that. Power. The only thing we have to do is remember that we control the harnessing of that power. We choose. Don’t let your circumstances or habits rule your choices today. Become a master of yourself and use your willpower to choose.

Dignity is more important than wealth. Everyone needs “enough.” But once we have enough (and enough may be less than you think), what we crave and want is dignity. Given a choice between dignity and “more,” most people choose dignity. Respect matters. Respect in all things—for your employees, coworkers, and customers alike.

If you can’t sell your ideas, your ideas go nowhere. And if you lie about your ideas, we will know and we’ll reject them. The Internet amplifies both of these traits. The new media rewards ideas that resonate. It helps them spread. If your work persuades, you prosper.

The same autosuggestion that heals bodies also changes minds.

  1. Providing a unique interface between members of the organization 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

Mentoring is rarely about the facts of the deal (the facts are easily found), but instead is a transfer of emotion and confidence.

When you meet someone, you need to have a superpower. If you don’t, you’re just another handshake. It’s not about touting yourself or coming on too strong. It’s about making the introduction meaningful. If I don’t know your superpower, then I don’t know how you can help me (or I can help you).

Humility is our antidote to what’s inevitably not going to go according to plan. Humility permits us to approach a problem with kindness and not arrogance. But humility is not the same as compliance. Humility doesn’t mean meekness or fitting in at all costs. Compliance feels like a shortcut to humility because it permits us to deny responsibility for whatever goes wrong. But compliance deprives you of your superpower; it robs you of the chance to make something better. The challenge, then, is to be the generous artist, but do it knowing that it just might not work. And that’s okay.

Trying and failing is better than merely failing, because trying makes you an artist and gives you the right to try again.

Maybe you can’t make money doing what you love (at least what you love right now). But I bet you can figure out how to love what you do to make money (if you choose wisely). Do your art. But don’t wreck your art if it doesn’t lend itself to paying the bills. That would be a tragedy.

But I am certain that if you give enough, to the right people in the right way, your gifts will be treasured and your journey will be rewarded. Even if that’s not why you’re doing it.

The act of deciding is the act of succeeding. The barrier to success is a choice. Up to you.

You can do it. You can embrace a new path and take it. Don’t settle. You’re a genius and we need your contribution. Do the work. Please.

Every successful organization is built around people. Humans who do art. People who interact with other people. Men and women who don’t merely shuffle money, but interact, give gifts, and connect.

The result of this art, these risks, the gifts, and the humanity coming together is both wonderful and ironic. The result of getting back in touch with our pre-commercial selves will actually create a post-commercial world that feeds us, enriches us, and gives us the stability we’ve been seeking for so long.

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