Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

"Whenever I’m feeling a bit out of my depth and overwhelmed and confused—which is a lot of the time—Seth really inspires me to go back to basics. We are so overwhelmed at the moment with possibility and choice and options. Because the internet has opened our world up so much, we have so many options that can lead to confusion about what we want with our lives. That’s the downside of the multi-hyphen method, to be honest: we are constantly looking around to what other people are doing. Seth goes back to the core: what do you want to make, why do you want to make it, who do you want to reach, and what is this for? Instead of the other way around, the temptation of immediately longing for the end result, which is often about glory or fame or social media followers. What do you actually want behind all of that? Another thing I love about him is that he inspires me to start new projects, because he really believes that we just need a small audience. We don’t need a million followers on Instagram to be successful. He says we need 1,000 people to believe in our idea at the very beginning, which sounds like a lot of people but over time that’s quite easy to reach online. He believes in starting really small, and that’s something I believe too. We should always start small, and if it starts taking off, then invest. Don’t spend all your money on the latest equipment to start your new shiny project, only to realise it’s not working. I think we have to make sure that we start planting a very small seed and seeing what happens. Linchpin is his most famous book and therefore has received the most attention, but it’s also quite divisive. It might seem outdated, but I believe that we can all make ourselves indispensable. We are all human, and are all quite unique in our offering. I think that the workplace made us feel like we had to be machines. We had to turn ourselves on at 9 am; we had to turn ourselves off 5 pm; we had to work when someone told us to work. In the future, robots will take over the jobs we used to do, so being human in the workplace is becoming more of an asset than it was before. It allows us to be ourselves; it allows us to be a parent in the workplace and be honest about that, not have to lie about it and then leave the office feeling rubbish about ourselves. It means that we can kind of be open about our identity, our background, our orientation in all sorts of different ways. Why can’t we bring our human aspects to work? That’s kind of how I see Linchpin: it’s just about celebrating how we’re all different and our actions matter. Well, that is true. I’m taking the Linchpin approach and moulding it to my own, if that makes sense. I do this quite a lot with books. I take an idea and kind of rejig it in my head. He is talking about working in an office, and obviously I don’t work in an office. I think being a linchpin is making sure you are useful and able to work your way up. If you keep on learning and educating yourself and being a source of knowledge for others, your bosses or clients won’t want to keep you squashed down because you’ll be able to bring so much more to the table in higher positions. Yes. He says that the education system as it stands is really quite outdated. He thinks that school just prepares you to be obedient, and obedience isn’t a metric of success anymore. Being obedient used to get you promotions, it used to get you pay rises—because being obedient just means following the rules and sitting at your desk until midnight. But success (for me) doesn’t mean following the rules any more. It means the complete opposite. It means rebelling in some way. Every single good thing that’s come off the back of my career is from rebelling. It is scary, but I think it’s needed, especially at the moment we’re at in the world. We don’t need more people just following the rules, I think."