Joni Mitchell was one of a kind. A sensation. A record-selling machine, with legions of fans.
And then she made Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. A personal, idiosyncratic album that marked the final gold record of her bestselling streak.
She knew exactly what she was doing. She knew that the crowd wasn’t going to follow her, just as Dylan knew what would happen when he went electric, then gospel.
She had a choice: to make the records her fans had decided in advance that they wanted to hear, or to make the music that she was proud of.
After this, she was free.
Free to make the music she heard in her head, the music she wanted to share.
In a post-Top 40 world, the irony is clear: your Reckless Daughter might very well be the breakthrough you need to reach your true audience and to do the work you’re most proud to do.
The challenge is in accepting that the masses might not cheer you on.
December 11, 2018
As the fossil fuel era comes to an end, gas station attendants (those few that remain, as well as the unpaid pumpers who are filling their own tanks) persist in topping off the tank.
After the automatic switch senses the tank is full, they add ten or twenty cents more gas, to reach a round number.
Why?
It’s not faster. It takes time to manually do this.
It’s not more profitable. The extra ten cents on a $40 tank is hardly worth the time.
It’s not more efficient. The number of miles before the next fill-up as a result is tiny.
It’s not even easier. Most people are paying with a credit card, so rounding up does no good.
And…
It’s way more likely to damage the car (gas on the auto body) and hurt the health of the pumper (fumes).
So, why do it?
Three reasons:
- Tradition.
- Showing the boss and the customer that you’re working hard.
- The appearance of control.
It’s the third that’s the real lesson. Human beings trade enormous amounts of agency in exchange for convenience. But not too much agency. Too much agency makes us feel like automatons. Even (especially) when working with cars, those symbols of freedom and control.
What else are we busy topping off?
December 10, 2018
Their own fears.
Their own narrative.
Their own drama.
You’re not the only one.
On any given day, your thing is smaller than their thing.
And when things aren’t going the way you expect, it’s worth focusing on that.
December 9, 2018
You will encounter real limits. You can’t turn yourself invisible, bench press 3,000 pounds or do a heart transplant with a steak knife.
But real limits are easy to identify. We rarely have a problem discovering them.
The false limits, the ones that others put on us, those can be a real problem. Even when the limiter means well–they’re often trying to save us from heartbreak or wasted effort–those limits can become a habit, not something useful.
I got a note from a teacher at York Community College yesterday. He wrote, “Encouraging anyone to become a Linchpin is seriously bad advice for an individual to pursue and for a company to allow….think these things through before you put them out there.”
I’m frustrated and saddened on behalf of the eager students in his class. The ones who are paying out of their pocket, taking time away from work and family, doing the work, pushing themselves to level up… and encountering a teacher who doesn’t believe it’s possible for them to make a difference.
Without a doubt, an industrialist can profit mightily by building jobs that can be done by interchangeable workers at the lowest possible skill and pay. But that doesn’t mean you need to sign up to be one of those interchangeable cogs.
And, without a doubt, there’s work to be done by organizations that simply do what they did yesterday, but perhaps a bit faster or cheaper. But that doesn’t mean that this has to be your work.
The goal of the Linchpin is to make things better by making better things. To dance on an edge, to see what’s possible, to create and contribute, to learn and to ship.
Does it always work? Nope. Hardly. But it’s the path of possibility. And if you’re trusting someone to teach you to make things happen, it helps if they believe it’s possible. That you’re capable of bringing your best self to a problem and doing the difficult work of solving it.
The future is defined by those that change the past. We need you to make a ruckus.
December 8, 2018
[We’re launching a new free project today. Read on for the details…]
Industry offered a deal to the worker:
Here’s a job. We’ll pay you as little as we can get away with while still being able to fill the job. We’ll make sure it’s easy to find people for this job, because we don’t want you to have much in the way of power or influence. We’ll use software to read the resumes, and we’ll do it in huge batches.
In return, you’ll work as little as you can get away with. That’s the only sane way to respond to the role of being a cog. If the system is going to squeeze you, no need to volunteer.
It’s hard to over-estimate the impact that this deal has had. The whole idea of mass advertising for mass jobs. The compliance-based school and resume system. The apparent power of the big companies to dictate the culture of work…
But, over time, the economy has changed. Now, the most cog-like jobs are done by machines. Now, cog-like work doesn’t create nearly as much value as truly human work. Now, if the opportunity is right, the pay is fair and the cause is a good one, it’s possible to create a culture where people choose to contribute as much as they can, not as little as they can.
This requires a shift.
Two shifts, actually.
The first shift is for the employer. It means not only paying more compensation to capture the attention and focus of the people who are willing and able to do Linchpin work, it also means investing in a culture that supports that sort of work. Compliance isn’t as important as contribution. But it’s frightening, because turnover costs more when you’re dependent on people who bring special magic to work.
The second shift is on the employee. It means caring enough to walk away from a cog job. It means being brave enough to make assertions and to lead. It means telling the truth about your background and your future. And it means keeping your end of the bargain, even when the work feels scary.
Here’s our experiment:
A weekly email newsletter with one or two jobs a week in it. That’s all.
Even if you’re not looking for a Linchpin job, you probably have peers who are. After all, that’s the sort of person you are–you know how to spread good ideas. So feel free to forward the email to people when you think it might be a good fit.
When we started working on this project, we reached out to a few possible employers to get us started. We specified that it had to be a special job for a special kind of work, and we insisted that the employer make a personal video, one that described what the job entailed.
I knew we were on to something when one said, “oh, it’s not worth the effort, we just posted the job on a job board and got five people who were good enough.”
That’s precisely the jobs we don’t want to post.
If you’re interested in checking out our first job and signing up for the newsletter, here’s the link.
We’ll never sell you anything or rent or share your information. The newsletter is sponsored by the altMBA. Over time, we hope that our subscribers will also be our best source for the jobs we list.
Inspired by my book Linchpin.
December 7, 2018
The first 250 copies of my new book were shipped to bookstores with some of the pages upside down.
How does this happen? It’s a 500-year-old technology… What does it mean to do work in a shop where your clients are pitched on perfect and you are expected to provide it?
Some thoughts to consider:
- If you traffic in perfect, it pays to turn your perfect into a system, not simply wing it. In the last fifty years, thanks to Deming and Crosby and others, we’ve gotten significantly better at creating perfect outputs that don’t rely on heroism and luck. Design a better system, you’ll get better outputs.
- If those you compete against also promise perfect, perfect is no longer sufficient. That’s one reason why it’s so difficult to be a book printer. Since perfect = all the same, then why not buy the cheapest version of perfect?
- I’m grateful every day for the nearly invisible perfect things that I count on. My car starts every single time. The water in my tap doesn’t make me sick, ever. The thing in the jar is the same thing that was in the jar the last time I bought it… but, and I feel spoiled to say this, I take the perfect for granted. I’m way more interested, and spend far more time and money on the imperfect things, the things that might not work, the ideas and services and products that dance around the edges. If you’re going to offer something that’s imperfect, by all means, make it as good as you possibly can, but embrace the fact that you’re not selling perfect. You’re selling interesting. You’re selling possibility. You’re selling connection.
PS if you got one of the 250 books, my publisher is delighted to replace it and include a bonus. Or you could sell it on eBay, who knows, maybe it’s a collectible.
December 6, 2018
When the people we serve present themselves, when they offer us their attention and their trust, we need to work to see two things:
- Who they are. What do they fear, what do they believe, what do they need?
- Who they can become. Which doors can we open, how can we support them, what will they leave behind?
December 5, 2018
Consider:
You’re on the plane, headed home after a conference. The flight attendant says, “This flight is oversold, and we’re paying people $300 to take the flight that leaves in an hour.” Do you stay in your seat?
You’re at the gate, different city, different flight. The gate agent says, “for $300 more, I can put you on a flight that leaves an hour earlier.” Do you pay the money?
You’re at the car dealer, about to buy a $50,000 car. The salesperson asks if you want the $300 rustproofing. Do you buy it?
What’s the difference between a bank that pays you just a little bit less interest (costing you $300 a year in lost income) and one that slaps on a $300 charge because you didn’t check a box on a form?
Money is a story.
December 4, 2018
A friend is getting ready to publish a video. She worked hard on it, for months and months, and she wants it to be seen by the right people.
The traditional SEO strategy is to be sure to title it and describe it with magic words that will help her get ‘found.’ And so, words like ‘visualize’, ‘learn’ or even ‘transform’ are high on the list, because, after all, that’s what a lot of people search for. (‘LOL cats’ is high on the list as well, but irrelevant to the topic at hand).
And the same thing goes for websites. The traditional advice is to make sure that your keywords reflect what the mass of searches that might be interested in you would line up with.
So, name your plumbing company, “Emergency cheap plumbing”…
Here’s the problem: You’re not going to win that search.
You’re not even going to come in 1000th place.
For most of the magic words that nascent marketers seek to do well on, there are millions and millions of matches in the search engines. And many of the folks on top are bending more rules and working harder on this trick than you’re likely to be able to match.
The alternative?
Own your word.
If you search for ‘purple cow’ or ‘seth godin’ or ‘seth’s blog’ you’re way more likely to find me than if you search for something generic.
That’s intuitive. But it’s not obvious because it flies in the face of what we hope the search engines will do for us, which is to expose us to people who didn’t know we existed.
Accepting that this is unlikely opens the door to a better strategy.
After all, they’re not called ‘browsing engines.’
The hard part is showing up in the right way, in the right places, for enough time that people decide to seek you or your word out in the first place. The hard part is in doing the deliberate, slow work of earning permission, building a tiny circle, the smallest viable audience. Over time, the tribe embraces you, the word (your word) becomes the shortcut to get more of what you offer.
And so, if you’re Acumen, Afya or BuildOn, that’s your word. Or Fuller, Kiva or LongNow. A word that someone who seeks you will use to get to you.
FEO–Find Engine Optimization. Because it’s more reliable to seek to be found by people who were looking for you all along.
December 3, 2018
It’s entirely possible that you’re better. Better by some axis you’ve invented, fallen in love with and decided is the most important thing to be better at.
But if people aren’t choosing you, talking about you, asking you for more… it’s either because you picked the wrong axis, or because you’re not better enough.
Not better enough to be worth the fear and hassle and stress of switching for.
Better’s not up to us. It’s up to those we seek to serve.
December 2, 2018
