Book Review 1: Linchpin
Some Info on the Author
I’ve come across the work of Seth Godin multiple times. I’ve seen him on Youtube giving a Ted Talk and I’ve taken a Udemy class on leadership from him.
Wikipedia states that Seth has written 24 books and Linchpin is Seth’s 16th book written in 2010. Reading this book 9 years later, does it still resonate with todays world? Absolutely.
I picked up this book by chance. There are several bookshelves sprinkled throughout the Datadog office in New York, and being familiar with Seth Godin’s name, I decided to pick this book up.
How long it Took me to Read the Book
I picked up this book on Monday, April 22nd 2019 and finished the book today Saturday, April 27th 2019. It took me 5 days to read this book!
Two key ideas that I would like to talk about from his book is What is a Linchpin and Metcalfe’s law.
What is a Linchpin?
A linchpin is an unassuming piece of hardware, something you can buy for 69¢ at the local hardware store. It’s not glamorous, but it’s essential. It holds the wheel onto the wagon, the thinger onto the widget. (pg. 49)
Let’s think about this for a second. In a world full of social media, why in the world would you want to spend time reading an article that talks about a linchpin? Much less so, becoming one?
Because in the world of excess, figuring out the essentials can become really difficult.
We get so distracted in the fancy tools, the next big thing, and the fear of missing out, that sometimes we forget that most of the time, all we really need is a good ol’ 69¢ linchpin. This is the main idea of the book.
The value of becoming a linchpin in the modern age? Freedom. Real work. Real value. Real connections. Eliminating everything except the things that you are really good at and sharing it to the rest of the world as a gift, your gift. This is something that nothing else in the universe can create, except you. And Godin calls us out and truly believes that the world needs you to produce this gift.
To share this gift, I originally thought I needed a certain status, a certain level of income to be able to put out good work. My train of thought was “Once I get ..., then I’ll be able to …”. It always seemed like I was waiting for the right time to share my gifts. But then I got to the chapter on the Resistance and I read this:
You don’t need more genius. You need less Resistance.
The resistance is the voice in your head telling you to use bullets in your Powerpoint slides, because that’s what the boss wants. It’s the voice that tells you to leave controversial ideas out of the paper you’re writing, because the teacher won’t like them. The resistance pushes relentlessly for you to fit in. (pg. 117)
When I read the chapter on The Resistance (pg. 102–149), it hit me right in the gutter because what he said was true. The very thing that prevented myself to not put my work out there is fear. Fear that my work will be rejected, that it will fail, and that I’ll be ashamed because of it. We’ve all felt that feeling and Godin calls this feeling, the resistance.
The truth is that the resistance will always be there, it’s there actually to protect us. It calls upon our past memory and says “Don’t do that thing, because last time you did it, you felt really terrible.” Sometimes this is healthy, like don’t touch fire with your bare hands, but when it comes to putting out creative work, we need to overcome the Resistance. And the only way that Godin claims to defeat the resistance is to ship your work. Put your stuff out there. Keep moving forward.
Metcalfe’s Law
Metcalfe’s law says that the value of a network increases with the square of the number of nodes on the network… The more people who use the internet, the better it works… Connections are valuable in and of themselves because they lead to productivity, decreased communication costs, and gifts. (pg. 166)
Being in the tech world, Metcalfe’s law explains why tech can have such an expansive growth at such alarming rates. This might be pretty obvious to others, but this was most definitely a Eureka! moment for me.
When I first joined Datadog in July 2018, I was the 6th Solutions Engineer on hire. My first 2 weeks consisted with less than 4 colleagues in the office (including me). We had a small room in a San Francisco WeWork that fit 6 desks. Now, we are in a room that fills more than 20 employees with a balcony outside. In the span of ~9 months, our team grew by +300%. This can be explained because of Metcalfe’s Law. As more and more customers started to use Datadog, the product itself become a lot more powerful by the theory of Metcalfe’s Law.
The simple idea that Godin makes about Metcalfe’s Law is that connection is powerful. As the network of your product, or you as an individual increases, the more value is created.
Living in the modern day where there are literally websites that serves a platform to get your work out there such as Instagram, Medium, LinkedIn. It’s a no-brainer that what Godin really calls us out to do is write blogs about anything that you’re passionate with and see who in the universe resonates with your point of view.
Conclusion
Linchpin is such an easy read with a rich amount of content. The (hardcover) book spans 236 pages in total and I think Godin did an excellent job tying all of his ideas together in a way that flowed naturally. There were some overlap in the ideas (resistance and lizard brain, connections and gifts) but I personally felt like they “complemented” each other rather than the ideas sounding redundant.
A tldr version of this book can be summed in this picture:
I would highly recommend this book to anyone that feels like they are just stuck in a rut career-wise, or if you want to get a better understanding of what your life work should be.
Pick up the book, it’ll get you closer to understanding that sometimes it’s not about the price of an item, but it’s about the value of what it gives you. A 69¢ linchpin (you can take that figuratively or literally) might be exactly what you need to simplify your life and get ahead to where you need to go.
