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alike.

The ultimate gift you can give, the one that will repay you today and tomorrow and heal

our world, is that gift. The gift of connection, of art, of love--of dignity.

Resilience

You will fail at this. Often.

Why is that a problem? In fact, this is a boon. It's a boon because when others fail to be

remarkable or make a difference or share their art or have an impact, they will give up.

But you won't, you'll persist, pushing through the dip. Which means that few people will

walk in the door with your background, experience, or persistence.

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart. If the young

merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges,

and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of

Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being

disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire

or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a

school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in

successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city

dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not "studying a profession,"

for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred

chances.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Loyalty and Generosity to Yourself

How often do you beat yourself up? How often does the lizard brain set out to slow you

down or wreck your career by highlighting the critics, the failures, the missteps? They get

away with their cheap shots because you allow them to.

We're surrounded by people and organizations that demand our loyalty. Bosses, brands,

and even politicians want fealty and obedience and patriotism. But what about you and

your work? Doesn't it deserve at least as much?

The self-hating artist burns out. The hypercritical lizard brain will pick apart anything we

do in order to preserve its sense of short-term safety. The alternative is to develop a sense

of loyalty to your mission and generosity to your work.

I'm not proposing that you become immune to feedback. In fact, the most generous thing

you can do is open yourself to the feedback that improves your art and helps it spread.

Discerning the difference between feedback that helps and criticism that degrades,

though, will take some time.

In the meantime, ease up on yourself. We need you.

THE CULTURE OF CONNECTION

The Linchpin Can't Succeed in Isolation

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.

And the new media punishes those who seek to mislead. We have ever more refined

truth-telling cues, and if you don't believe in what you're doing, we'll know, and you will

fail. Honest signals are the only signals that travel.

The Five Elements of Personality

Lexical analysis involves collating all the words a culture has to describe something and

grouping them into fundamental pillars. In the case of personality, most psychologists

agree that there are five traits that are essential in how people look at us: Openness,

Conscientiousness, Extra-version, Agreeableness, and Emotional Stability.

Here's the thing: these are also the signs of the linchpin. Work, great work, has been

transformed in just a hundred years from doing things that involve heavy lifting to

leveraging and enhancing your personality. If you hope to succeed because you are able

to connect and work with other people, then that will require you to improve your

personality in each of these five elements.

Do you know someone who is more open to new ideas or more agreeable than you? More

stable