Linchpin_ Are You Indispensable_ - Seth Godin [83]
renew your contract.
Precisely how much worrying is appropriate? If you devote an enormous number of
conscious brain cycles to willing, wishing, and wanting the meeting to come out a certain
way, will it help? What if you devote all of your mental power to it? Still doesn't work.
The 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. Your competition is busy allocating time to create the future, and you
are stuck wishing the world was different. 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.
When an angry customer is standing at the counter, we can curse his poor judgment or
the world that brought him to us, but the linchpin has figured out that accepting the
situation and improving it clearly beats the alternative.
Scientists Are Mapmakers
Lab assistants do what they're told. Scientists figure out what to do next.
It's not a surprise when a scientist is surprised. That's what happens when she is doing her
job properly. To explore, to follow hunches, to see the landscape and plot a new course.
Setting yourself up to be surprised is a conscious choice.
Scientists never believe that it's all figured out, totally settled. They understand that
there's always another argument or mystery around the corner, which means that the map
is never perfected.
Craig Venter, who first decoded the human genome, didn't wait for someone to tell him
what to do next.
Figuring out what to do next was his contribution as a linchpin.
The Guild of Frustrated Artists
One of my favorite negative reviews of my book Tribes:
"Godin doesn't explain how to go about doing the actual hard groundwork of leadership.
He makes it sound like anyone with an idea and a cell phone can rally thousands of
people to their cause in minutes if they just realize that it's not hard."
My response: Telling people leadership is important is one thing. Showing them step by
step precisely how to be a leader is impossible. "Tell me what to do" is a nonsensical
statement in this context.
There is no map. No map to be a leader, no map to be an artist. I've read hundreds of
books about art (in all its forms) and how to do it, and not one has a clue about the map,
because there isn't one.
Here's the truth that you have to wrestle with: the reason that art (writing, engaging,
leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can't tell you how to do it. If there were a
map, there'd be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map.
Don't you hate that? I love that there's no map.
The Endless Emergency of Fitting In
It's never possible to fit all the way in. Never possible for everything to be all right.
How can it ever be?
And so we're trapped, always seeking to fit in a little more, always looking for one more
signal that we haven't gotten it just right, that the system is about to be disrupted, that the
rules will change again and that we'll have to adjust (again).
The problem with being outwardly focused is that we have no center, nothing to return to.
The problem with outward focus is that there is no compass, no normal, no way to tell if
we're in balance.
Without a map, how can we know what's next?
In The Lonely Crowd, David Riesman writes, "Americans were ready for the mass media
even before the mass media were ready for them." We needed the cues and instructions,
and yes, the map, in order to figure out who we should be.
MAKING THE CHOICE
Impossible, Yes, So Let's Get to Work
The merest attempt at estimating, the slightest unconscious
recording is shrugged off as an absurd association with some
never-to-be-realized dream . . . as an exercise in futility . . .
I manage to whisper my first thought (whisper, so the demons
won't hear): "I know it's impossible. But I know I'll do it."
At that