Media spotlight: Linchpin

6 September 2010 | By Robert Thickett

In these days of job cuts, reorganisations and downsizing, keeping your head when everyone around you is losing theirs is a key skill.

So Seth Godin’s book, Linchpin - How to drive your career and create a remarkable future, seemed like a good place to find out how to cultivate staying power.

The book begins with Godin making the case that we’re not merely faceless cogs in the wheels of the global capitalist machine.

He argues that as soon as we enter school we’re indoctrinated via fear to hit prescribed targets, to conform and become passive. As a result we look on work as a mundane activity.

To stand out, he says we need to look on work as an art form - whatever it is.

Whether we’re greeting customers at the door as they walk into a hotel, pouring their coffee or providing their mortgage, if you try to make a personal connection and take pride in the service you provide you can become an indispensable linchpin in an organisation.

Individuals who do stand out are often the ones who have made some sort of emotional investment in their jobs - they’re not just counting the minutes on the clock until their prescribed number of working hours is over.

So far so obvious then - we’ve all no doubt worked with the type of inspiring people who would be included in the first category and carried the dead wood who come into the latter.

But then it gets a bit bizarre. At the start of the book Godin cryptically refers to the thing stopping us all from maximising our true potential as our ’lizard brains’ but doesn’t expand on it any further.

I initially worried that Godin was inspired by the teachings of former sports television reporter David Icke and that he was at some point going to explain how a secret group of reptilian humanoids control the world.

But midway through the book he explains what he means by lizard brain - he’s referring to the part of the brain called the amygdala.

The internet tells me that these are almond-shaped bits in our brains that are involved in processing and remembering emotional reactions.

Godin contends that it’s actually a second brain that’s constantly sabotaging everything we do.

So until we find a way to counter our so-called lizard brains we will be destined to failure. Essentially what Godin is grasping at is fear and, more specifically, the fear of failure.

If you have a part of your brain that remembers every time you were humiliated or put down, that’s what is going to be at the back of your mind when you attempt something new.

Godin argues that society and the way we are educated has been engineered to foster this fear factor and ensure that we are all passive drones as employees. This he expands into a rant about the way society and factories are all structured.

I’m in two minds about this book - and I’m not referring to my lizard one. While he’s got some good points about what makes a good worker stand out from a so-so one, the rants about society seem a little one-dimensional.

But then maybe I am a perfect example of someone who is hopelessly resistant to change and my reptilian brain is in overdrive.

Book review by Robert Thickett

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