I have been reading Seth Godin' work for around three years now, this book is the perfect exhibit of his best writing and advice. It mostly focuses on what you need to do to become indispensable at your job, to become someone who is irreplaceable.

If you have a job right now, I really think following the advice in this book can lead to some amazing results.

-- You weren't born to be a cog in the giant industrial machine. You were trained to become a cog.

There's an alternative available to you. Becoming a linchpin is a step wise process, a path in which you develop the attributes that make you indispensable. You can train yourself to matter. The first step is the most difficult, the step where you acknowledge that this is a skill, and like all skills, you can (and will) get better at it. Every day, if you focus on the gifts, art, and connections that characterize the linchpin, you'll become a little more indispensable.

-- If you're insecure, the obvious response to my call to become a linchpin is, "I'm not good enough at anything to be indispensable." The typical indoctrinated response is that great work and great art and remarkable output are the domain of someone else. You think that your job is to do the work that needs doing, anonymously.

Of course, this isn't true, but it's what you've been taught to believe.

-- "I've been lucky enough to meet or work with thousands of remarkable linchpins. It appears to me that the only way they differ from a mediocre rule-follower is that they never bought into this self-limiting line of thought. That's it.

Perhaps they had a great teacher who lit a lamp for them. Perhaps a parent or a friend pushed them to refuse to settle. Regardless, the distinction between cogs and linchpins is largely one of attitude, not learning."

-- Finding security in mediocrity is an exhausting process. You can work only so many hours, fret only so much. Being a slightly better typist or a slightly faster coder is insufficient. You're always looking over your shoulder, always trying to be a little less mediocre than the guy next to you. It wears you out.

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.

-- Troubleshooting is never part of a job description, because if you could describe the steps needed to shoot trouble, there wouldn't be trouble in the first place, right? Troubleshooting is an art, and it's a gift from the troubleshooter to the person in trouble. The troubleshooter steps in when everyone else has given up, puts himself on the line, and donates the energy and the risk to the cause.

-- The challenge of becoming a linchpin solely based on your skill at plying a craft or doing a task or playing a sport is that the market can find other people with that skill with surprising ease. Plenty of people can play the flute as well as you can, clean a house as well as you can, program in Python as well as you can. If all you can do is the task and you're not in a league of your own at doing the task, you're not indispensable.

--If you seek to become indispensable, a similar question is worth asking: "Where do you put the fear?" What separates a linchpin from an ordinary person is the answer to this question. Most of us feel the fear and react to it. We stop doing what is making us afraid. Then the fear goes away.

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.

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. It won't change the recipient of your work, and it's easy to emulate(which makes you easy to replace). As a result of the tsunami of pretty good (and the persistence of really lousy), the market for truly exceptional is better than ever. That's what I want if I hire someone for more than what the market will bear-someone exceptional.

--When someone says to me, "I don't have any good ideas . . I'm just n good at that," I ask them, "Do you have any bad ideas?"

Nine times out of ten, the answer is no. Finding good ideas is surprisingly easy once you deal with the problem of finding bad ideas. All the creativity books in the world aren't going to help you if you're unwilling to have lousy, lame, and even dangerously bad ideas.

The Work

Your real work, then, what you might be paid for, and what is certainly your passion, is simple: the work. The work is feeding and amplifying and glorifying the daemon.

Your work is to create art that changes things, to expose your insight and humanity in such a way that you are truly indispensable. 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.