The Industrial Revolution is over. The factory is closed.
If your job description can be written down in a manual, you are in danger. If you are waiting for instructions, you are a commodity. And in a global market, commodities are a race to the bottom.
Seth Godin saw this coming in 2010. The rules of the game didn’t just change; the board flipped.
There are now only two types of workers:
-
The Cog: Cheap, obedient, replaceable.
-
The Linchpin: Creative, chaotic, indispensable.
The Enemy: The Resistance – Why isn’t everyone a Linchpin? Because of the Amygdala (the Lizard Brain). It screams at you to fit in. To keep your head down. To not speak up in the meeting. To ship average work because “perfect” is scary. Godin calls this The Resistance. The Linchpin feels this fear and ships anyway.
The Currency: Emotional Labor – We don’t get paid to lift heavy boxes anymore. We get paid to do Emotional Labor.
-
It is smiling when the client is screaming.
-
It is finding a solution when the manual says “Error.”
-
It is caring more than you are paid to care.
The Mandate: Make Art – Art isn’t painting. Art is any human act that changes another person.
-
A code commit can be art.
-
A customer support email can be art.
-
A strategic pivot can be art.
If you are just doing your job, you are failing. If you are bringing humanity, connection, and insight to a system that lacks it, you are an artist. You are a Linchpin.
The Choice – Being indispensable is not a talent. It is a choice. You can choose to be a cog and pray the machine keeps running. Or you can choose to be the Linchpin—the one component the machine cannot run without.
#DhandheKaFunda: The system is designed to replace you. Your job is to break the design by being human.