Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? by Seth Godin

Author:Seth Godin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Human Resources & Personnel Management, Employee motivation, Value added, Commerce, Career, Work - Psychological aspects, Business Life - General, Job Opportunities, Careers - General, General, Employees, Job, Attitudes, Business & Economics, Creative thinking, Employees - Attitudes, Careers, Work
ISBN: 0749953357
Publisher: Portfolio
Published: 2010-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

When Did the Resistance Take Over Your Life?

When you were a kid, beautiful art--questions, curiosity, and spontaneity--poured out of you. The resistance was only starting to figure out how to shout out the art coming from the rest of your brain. Then, thanks to disorganized hazing by friends, raised eyebrows from the family, and well-meaning, well-organized, but toxic rules at school, the resistance gained in strength.

Do you think it's an accident that the powers that be wanted the disobedient and creative part of your brain to sit down and shut up?

If you were unlucky enough to get a job in a factory, the resistance was officially put in charge. I've met executives at insurance companies, assembly-line workers, and customer service people who have the resistance so thoroughly entrenched they don't even realize it's there. For them, this is normal. They think they're being mature and realistic when they're actually cowering in fear.

Our society has carved out some professions where one is expected to be creative for a living. And yet, even in the movies, visual arts, and book publishing, the systems we have in place make it far easier to fake the act of creativity than to actually embrace it. The art each of us is capable of creating is relentlessly whittled away. Ask editors and agents in these industries for horror stories, and they're sure to tell you about someone who "went a little too far" and ended up getting laughed out of a job. The thing is, it's always the same story about the same guy, because examples are few and far between.

Our economy has reached a logical conclusion. The race to make average stuff for average people in huge quantities is almost over. We're hitting an asymptote, a natural ceiling for how cheaply and how fast we can deliver uninspired work.

Becoming more average, more quick, and more cheap is not as productive as it used to be.

Manufacturing a box that can play music went from $10,000 for a beautiful Edison Victrola to $2,000 for a home stereo to $300 for a Walkman to $200 for an iPod to $9 for an MP3 memory stick. Improvements in price are now so small they're hardly worth making.

Shipping an idea went from taking a month by boat to a few days by plane to overnight by Federal Express to a few minutes by fax to a moment by e-mail to instantaneous by Twitter. Now what? Will it arrive yesterday?

So, what's left is to make--to give--art. What's left is the generosity and humanity worth paying for. What's left is to take that resistance (the very same resistance we embraced and rewarded for decades) and destroy it.

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