Linchpin_ Are You Indispensable_ - Seth Godin [66]
They don't spend a lot of time teaching you about the power of unreciprocated gifts,
about the long (fifty thousand years) tradition of tribal economies being built around the
idea of mutual support and generosity. In fact, I don't think the concept is even mentioned
once. We've been so brainwashed, it doesn't even occur to us that there might be an
alternative to "How much should I charge, how much can I make?"
There are three reasons why it's now urgent to understand how gift culture works. First,
the Internet (and digital goods) has lowered the marginal cost of generosity. Second, it's
impossible to be an artist without understanding the power that giving a gift creates. And
third, the dynamic of gift giving can diminish the cries of the resistance and permit you to
do your best work.
The very fact that gift giving without recompense feels uncomfortable is reason enough
for you to take a moment to find out why.
Giving, Receiving, Giving
In the beginning, there was the culture of potlatch and gifts. Cave-man culture has a long
tradition of reciprocity, and as Marcel Mauss has written, this reciprocity was used to
build relationships and power. In the Pacific Northwest, Native American tribe leaders
established their power by giving everything away. They could afford to give everyone a
gift, because they were so powerful and the gifts were a symbol of that power. Any leader
who hoarded saw his power quickly diminish. Mauss argued that there is no such thing as
a free gift. Everyone who gives a gift, he asserts, wants something in return.
Then, quite suddenly, this ancient tradition changed. Money and structured society
flipped the system, and now you get, you don't give. Author Lewis Hyde reminds us that
for the last few centuries, our society has said that the winner was the person who
received the most gifts. To receive a gift made you a king, a rich person, someone worth
currying favor with. It feels totally appropriate that people in power are pandered to. It
turns out, though, that this is a fairly recent behavior. Power used to be about giving, not
getting.
In the linchpin economy, the winners are once again the artists who give gifts. Giving a
gift makes you indispensable. Inventing a gift, creating art--that is what the market seeks
out, and the givers are the ones who earn our respect and attention. Shepard Fairey didn't
seek to monetize the Obama Hope poster. He gave it away with a single-minded
obsession. The more copies he gave away, the closer he came to achieving his political,
personal, and professional goals.
Part of the reason for this flip is the digital nature of our new gift system. If I create an
idea, the Internet makes it possible for that gift to spread everywhere, quite quickly, at no
cost to me. Digital gifts, ideas that spread--these allow the artist to be far more generous
than he could ever be in an analog world.
Thomas Hawk is the most successful digital photographer in the world. He has taken tens
of thousands of pictures, on his way to his goal of taking a million in his lifetime. The
remarkable thing about Hawk's rise is that his pictures are licensed under the Creative
Commons license and are freely shared with anyone, with no permission required for
personal use. Thomas is both an artist and a giver of gifts. The result is that he leads a
tribe, he has plenty of paid work, and he is known for his talents. In short, he is
indispensable.
When users of the online review site Yelp ganged up on a pizzeria in San Francisco,
management didn't sue. Instead, they got creative and gave generously. Pizzeria Delfina
outfitted its servers with T-shirts emblazoned with the most ridiculous one-star criticisms
the place had received. The idea spread, and the T-shirts have shown up online around
the world. They cost next to nothing, but millions got a smile. Delfina gave a gift to its
loyal customers by making fun of itself.
We Can Never Repay Keller Williams
Keller Williams is a maestro, a