The only work worth doing has no roadmap, no guidance for success, and is not made to be marketable. In other words, according to author and blogger Seth Godin, your real work in life is making art.

Art is not necessarily something painted or sculpted or written. You can exhibit your art in any job by expressing yourself and connecting with those you encounter. If you perform these expressions and connections in a genuine manner, giving of yourself without expectation of return, you can inspire others to new understandings of themselves and the world.

Create art, make connections, and inspire change and you will become a linchpin—a part on which an enterprise depends and cannot easily replace.

The alternative is to be a cog in the machine, doing a job with specifications, directions, and no responsibility for the overall outcome. On the upside, you’ll get paid for your time regardless of how much you improve a company’s profits (or deepen its losses). On the downside, cogs, doing jobs set out for them, are easily replaced. Consequently, cogs have no real job security and make little money.

Linchpins are leaders and inspire others, but this happens by example, not by policy:

You can’t say, ‘Get more excited and insightful or you’re fired.’ Actually, you can, but it won’t work. The front-desk worker at a hotel who runs out in the middle of the night to buy gym shorts for a guest isn’t doing it out of fear of being reprimanded. He does it because he was inspired to do so by a leader who wasn’t even in the hotel when the clerk decided to contribute (Linchpin, p. 221).

Working without guidelines? Encouraging people to perform without metrics to determine raises, promotions, or continued employment? These are foreign, even threatening, concepts to most employers and most labor organizations. They will lose control. Without control, they will cease to be relevant because both are designed to keep workers from being independent or self-reliant.

Godin explores many facets of the issues he raises. What stops people from expressing their art? A concept named “resistance” that Godin roots in the fight-or-flight response of human’s primitive “lizard brain,” the limbic system (pp. 109–110).

How is our innate creativity stomped out to prepare us for cog-style work in a factory—which have both blue and white collar uniforms? Godin offers an insightful critique of the US’s education system that prepares students for a life of compliance to established systems and acceptance of materialism to salve the hurt of limited choices in our work (pp. 39–48).

The twentieth century’s economic expansion—more goods produced more efficiently and sold to wide swaths of consumers at ever-lower prices—has reached its end. If you want work that has meaning, that engages you fully, and that continues regardless of economic conditions or a company’s shifting direction, then you need to become a linchpin.

In sum, linchpins:

• express their art in spite of resistance
• give of themselves to others without expecting reciprocity
• see the world as it truly is from many different perspectives
• don’t attach their hopes (energy) to a specific future that may never be