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in her book The Managed Heart. She described it as the "management of feeling to create

a publicly observable facial and bodily display." In other words, it's work you do with

your feelings, not your body.

Emotional labor is the hard work of making art, producing generosity, and exposing

creativity. Working without a map involves both vision and the willingness to do

something about what you see.

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.

Your Job Is a Platform

You get paid to go to work and do something of value. But your job is also a platform for

generosity, for expression, for art.

Every interaction you have with a coworker or customer is an opportunity to practice the

art of interaction. Every product you make represents an opportunity to design something

that has never been designed, to create an interaction unlike any other.

For a long time, few people were fired for refusing to understand that previous paragraph.

Now, though, it's not an option. It's the only reason you got paid to go to work today.

Degrees of Freedom

This is important.

One of the easy things about riding the train is that there aren't many choices. The track

goes where the track goes. Sure, sometimes there are junctions and various routes, but

generally speaking, there are only two choices--go or don't go.

Driving is a little more complicated. In a car you can choose from literally millions of

destinations.

Organizations are far more complex. There are essentially an infinite number of choices,

endless degrees of freedom. Your marketing can be free or expensive, online or offline,

funny or sad. It can be truthful, emotional, boring, or bland. In fact, every marketing

campaign ever done has been at least a little different from every other one.

The same choices exist in even greater number when you look at the microdecisions that

go on every day. Should you go to a meeting or not? Shake hands with each person or

just start? Order in fancy food for your guests or go for a walk together because the

weather is sunny. . . .

In the face of an infinite sea of choices, it's natural to put blinders on, to ask for a map, to

beg for instructions, or failing that, to do exactly what you did last time, even if it didn't

work.

Linchpins are able to embrace the lack of structure and find a new path, one that works.

Marissa Mayer

What can she do that you can't?

Marissa has created billions of dollars' worth of value in her time at Google. Yet she's not

the key brain in the programming department, nor is she responsible for finance or even

public relations.

Marissa is a linchpin. She applies artistic judgment combined with emotional labor. She

makes the interfaces work (the user interface and the interface between the engineers and

the rest of the world) and leads the people who get things done.

Google works because the way the site takes your query and returns your results has such

discipline and a clarity of vision that people prefer it even when the search results aren't

any better than those provided by Yahoo or Microsoft. Google's now-cherished user

interface is actually more valuable than their search technology. Marissa led the way in

forcing Google's start page to be as spare as it is. She counts the number of words on that

page and fights to keep the number as low as possible.

Google also works because the interface between the engineers and what the public wants

and needs is so tight. Someone at Google has figured out how to help the company solve

our problems (problems we didn't even know we had). Marissa is often in the position of

being that interface.

She didn't get assigned either of those jobs. She just did them.

If you could write Marissa's duties into a manual, you wouldn't need her. But the minute

you wrote it down, it wouldn't be accurate anyway. That's the key. She solves problems

that