My latest Kindle read- Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? by Seth Godin. Out of several hundred quotes I marked, here are my top quotes, organized under the categories of leadership, change, and the future:
LEADERSHIP
Leaders don’t get a map or a set of rules. Living life without a map requires a different attitude. It requires you to be a linchpin.
There’s no script for leadership. There can’t be.
“I don’t know what to do”—this one is certainly true. The question is, why does that bother you? No one actually knows what to do. Sometimes we have a hunch, or a good idea, but we’re never sure. The art of challenging the resistance is doing something when you’re not certain it’s going to work.
What does it take to lead? The key distinction is the ability to forge your own path, to discover a route from one place to another that hasn’t been paved, measured, and quantified. So many times we want someone to tell us exactly what to do, and so many times that’s exactly the wrong approach.
CHANGE
Real change rarely comes from the front of the line. It happens from the middle or even the back. Real change happens when someone who cares steps up and takes what feels like a risk. People follow because they want to, not because you can order them to.
Wikipedia and the shared knowledge of the Internet make domain knowledge on its own worth significantly less than it used to be. Today, if all you have to offer is that you know a lot of reference book information, you lose, because the Internet knows more than you do.
The executives in the record business, for example, loved their perfect business model. They were attached to their lifestyles and to the way their artist and fan relationships made them feel. When even a turnip could see that their business model was doomed, they soldiered on, apparently oblivious to the crumbling going on around them. Were they stupid? No. They were blinded by their attachment to the present and their fear of the future.
The newspaper industry can’t untangle news from paper, can’t see the difference between delivering the news around the world for free and putting it on a truck for shipment down the block. As long as each of these elements is seen as inseparable from the others, it’s impossible to untangle the future. That’s why outsiders and insurgents so often invent the next big thing—they don’t start with the tangled past.
THE FUTURE
The diamond cutter doesn’t imagine the diamond he wants. Instead, he sees the diamond that is possible.
The linchpin is able to invent a future, fall in love with it, live in it—and then abandon it on a moment’s notice.
Rockbridge Seminary students that have completed the fully online course “Leading Change,” may be helped by watching two brief videos in which Seth Godin explains WHY he wrote Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
Part 1:
Part 2:
