Linchpin Book Summary

Book Summary

15 min

Brief Summary

In order to be successful and indispensable in business, you must be someone who is doing more than just following instructions. You must be willing to invest yourself emotionally in your work.

It is important to push past any fears of failure or standing out from the crowd. You must choose to be a linchpin.

Finally, to really succeed, you must not only produce the work, but you must be willing to give genuine gifts with no expectations of reward.

About the Author

Seth Godin is an American author and dot com, business executive. He is the founder of Seth Godin Productions, a book packaging business, which he sold to his employees to focus on his next startup. He and Mark Hurst then founded Yoyodyne, where he promoted the concept of permission marketing. He sold Yoyodyne to Yahoo for about $30 million and became Yahoo’s vice president of direct marketing. In 2006, he launched Squidoo, one of the 500 most visited sites in the world. He eventually sold Squidoo to HubPages. He graduated from Tufts University and Stanford.

Topics

Management & Leadership

Linchpin Book Summary Preview

Forget being a drone at work and make yourself truly indispensable. With the help of Seth Godin’s Linchpin: Are You Indispensable you get all the tips and tricks to learn how to become a linchpin at work by pouring all of your energy into the right things.

By making yourself a linchpin at work, you will find that you enjoy your career, find work more rewarding, and also make a better impression within your company.

How Linchpin: Are You Indispensable will help make you less likely to be replaced at work

In Linchpin, you will learn ways to make yourself irreplaceable at work, while also making your chosen career more rewarding for yourself.

You will also come to realize that if you are simply following instructions all day, you really can be replaced with ease.

Looking back at the Industrial Revolution, we are reminded that highly skilled people are not always necessary to manufacture products that may seem complicated. The production process for many things can be broken into different steps that make the process much easier. In turn, this lets companies hire workers that are unskilled to get the job done.

Because of this, manufacturing jobs are considered relatively simple since employees are only required to show up to work and follow instructions. These workers are just “cogs in a machine.”

For these types of workers, you are easily replaceable because there are plenty of other people who can show up and follow instructions. This also means that you are not in a position where you can potentially ask for more money or benefits.

Today, even jobs that are considered white-collar, and less likely to be outsourced are being threatened. Everyone from secretaries, travel agents, and stockbrokers among others, are finding their jobs being outsourced as they are found to be replaceable.

If a job requires you to simply follow the instructions, it can be done anywhere and by anyone, leaving you easily replaced.

Key Insights

The best jobs go to linchpins who are considered harder to replace

There are a lot of people who simply show up to work in order to get their paycheck. They often find work to be a chore that is tedious and a “necessary evil.”

However, this mindset does not go unnoticed. This apparent lack of motivation is something management pays attention to, and when times are hard, these are the workers that lose their jobs first.

These workers in turn help provide an opportunity for someone who wants to be irreplaceable because they will not be considered unremarkable. It is these people we consider to be linchpins.

One does not need to be a CEO to be a linchpin. In many cases, it is the worker with the most passion for their job that is considered to be a linchpin, because it will not be easy to replace them and the passion they bring to work.

You would almost consider a linchpin to be like an artist because of all the passion and heart they pour into their work.

Not only do linchpins not need detailed instructions to get...