Introduction

Lots of people that I know are forced every day to be something that they’re not. They’re forced to hide their creativity in a world that doesn’t appreciate it. That’s not the case anymore.For so long, the world wanted people to fit in, to be put into a mold and asked to be exactly like others. This worked for a long time, for almost a century. Today, being the same as other people won't benefit you. On the contrary, it’ll get you nowhere.

Imagine going to your daily job, one you’ve been working at for almost 15 years. Suddenly, your boss knocks on your office door and tells you they’re going to let you go. They found a cheaper replacement. What would you do? I don't know how you would react. I know for sure that if you read this summary, you won't have to find out.  You will learn how to be indispensable, instead of being a cog in a machine that can easily be replaced.

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The New World of Work

Put yourself in the employer’s shoes. For example, why would you hire a professional bag designer and pay him a lot if you could hire 10 barely trained bag designers who would do the job faster and make more products in the same amount of time? This is how the world has been for the past 300 years and employers couldn’t have been happier about it. That’s not how work is in the new world anymore.Hector woke up every day at 6 am, went to the corner of his street and waited. Hector was a construction worker.

He waited every single day, with 6 other competitors, for a truck to pass by and pick him up. When the truck finally came, the driver rolled down his window and picked 3 people. He didn’t care which ones, he just picked the cheapest because they were all the same.Whether you like it or not, you're Hector. You send your CV to a company that you want to work for. Your CV lies there on a desk along with hundreds of other CVs, hoping to get picked. Often, you don’t get chosen. Why? Because you're exactly the same as everyone else.

The Law of the Mechanical Turk states that any project, if broken down into little and predictable pieces, can be done almost for free.Take a look at CastingWords.com. This is a website that transforms voice recordings or interviews into written form. How does this website work? It works by breaking the voice recording into several small pieces, and then dividing those pieces amongst several employees. Each employee would transcribe his part, and then all the parts connect to produce the final product.

How much does CastingWords pay those people? They pay 19 cents for every minute transcribed. The average professional charges two dollars for every minute transcribed. It turns out to be much cheaper to apply the law of the Mechanical Turk. Instead of paying an average of 80 dollars per project, the client only pays 15 dollars!Most bosses want you to become the next Mechanical Turk. Is that what you want? The new world no longer compensates those who are just cogs in a machine. What’s the solution to this problem? You need to become a Linchpin.

Linchpins are artists. They don't simply follow rules, and most importantly, they're indispensable.James owned a factory that produced clothes for a reasonable price. While interviewing his workers, he realized that he had 3 choices. He could either hire a perfect worker, who earned him 30$ an hour, hire a good worker who earned him 25$, or hire an average worker who earned him 20$ per hour.

The problem is James won’t know who’s a perfect worker and who’s mediocre until he hires them. He has to pay everyone a set price at the beginning. How much do you think James is going to pay them? Less than 20$ an hour.James paid all workers the same amount of money to compensate for the least amount of profit. The perfect workers were getting paid much less than they deserved. Eventually those perfect workers will quit. This is how the perfect workers get screwed by being a simple part of a huge cog machine.

As humans, we are not usually known in our careers by who we are but rather by what we do. To be indispensable, you need to be different. You have to produce value and emotions that customers and employers care about. You have to stand out and be different than the millions of other employees around you.

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Thinking About Your Choice

Ask yourself one question. Can you be indispensable?Yes, you definitely can. It’s important to know that lots of people already are. It's also important to know that they were not magically born with something that made them indispensable, but instead, they worked hard to earn that title. They worked hard to be indispensable in a world of dispensable people.

There are two choices. You can either become a person who thinks that to succeed in life, someone else has to lose. Option two, you can be a person who always thinks of a win-win situation.Kim Berry, the leader of the Programmers Guild, kept pushing Congress to limit the number of H-1B visas given to foreign talented computer programmers. Kim thought of life as a win-lose situation. He thought that for every foreigner who worked as a programmer in the US, an American loses the opportunity to become one.

Why not think of life as a win-win situation? Why not think of the market as unlimited and expandable? Why not think talented foreigners working as developers to create something good, opens up more opportunities for local talent?You might think that all people who became successful had something extra, something that you don't have. That’s not true. Steve Jobs was adopted. Nelson Mandela changed the entire world from a prison. Lots of other people succeeded with much less opportunities than the ones you have.

The American dream used to be “Work hard, do as you're asked to, and you're going to get rewarded.” That’s not the case anymore. The new American dream is, “Be different, create value, be passionate, and you're going to get rewarded.”Become a Linchpin. Become someone companies can’t replace easily, and you will be rewarded for it. When you become a Linchpin, you become more passionate about your job because you’re more connected to your customers.

As an employer, hire Linchpins. Who do you think is going to make you more profit? Is it a person doing exactly what he's told to do without thinking? Or is it someone who creates art, a person who's passionate about his job and makes products that emotionally connect with the customers?Also, when you hire Linchpins, your business becomes a Linchpin itself. It becomes unique, and it connects to people on a far larger scale than what you were planning for.

Linchpin employees create value and produce more than they get paid for because they love what they do. They’re free spirits who accept nothing but perfection. As an employer, you need Linchpins to become a Linchpin.

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Becoming the Linchpin

Linchpins are essential for any organization. They hold the organization together, and without them everything would fall apart.The more value you create in a job, the fewer hours of labor. That's the law of Linchpin leverage. You get to be creative and do exceptional things with only a few minutes of your time. The rest of the time you’re doing normal average tasks like everyone else. Creativity and exceptionalism only come in short bursts and will shape your work by making the task much easier and more connected with the customers. Eventually, you will get paid more.

Marissa Mayer, one of the people who helped shape Google, is a perfect example of a Linchpin. Marissa knew exactly how to create value at her job. She used her art to create a user interface that connected with customers emotionally. She’s the biggest reason why people prefer Google over other search engines such as Yahoo! or Bing, even though they provide almost the same search results.

Marissa knew that providing optimal search results was important, but not the most important thing in her work. She knew how to connect the customer needs with the programmers. Eventually, they created a user interface that was the best in the world.

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