Linchpin - Seth Godin
“Mediocre is merely a failed attempt to be really good.”
The Quotatist is a curation of the best quotes and passages from books written by famous authors.
Notable Quotes of Quotable Notes : That is the question 😊
“The problem with meeting expectations is that it’s not remarkable.”
“Successful people are successful for one simple reason: they think about failure differently.”
“Workers into machines. If we can measure it, we can do it faster. If we can put it in a manual, we can outsource it. If we can outsource it, we can get it cheaper.”
“There’s no shortage of panic and no shortage of people willing to rearrange the truth to preserve their vision of the world as they’d like it to be.”
The very system that produced standardized tests and the command-and-control model that chokes us also invented the résumé. The system, the industrialists, the factory . . . they want us to be cogs in their machine—easily replaceable, hopeless, cheap cogs. If you don’t have a résumé, what do you have?
“It’s not an accident that school is like a job, not an accident that there are supervisors and rules and tests and quality control. You do well, you get another job (the next grade), and continue to do well and you get a real job. Do poorly, don’t fit in, rebel—and you are kicked out of the system.”
“When our responses turn into reactions and we set out to teach people a lesson, we lose. We lose because the act of teaching someone a lesson rarely succeeds at changing them, and always fails at making our day better, or our work more useful.”
“One way to become creative is to discipline yourself to generate bad ideas. The worse the better. Do it a lot and magically you’ll discover that some good ones slip through.”
“Our society is struggling because during times of change, the very last people you need on your team are well-paid bureaucrats, note takers, literalists, manual readers, TGIF laborers, map followers, and fearful employees.”
“We hire for perfect, we manage for perfect, we measure for perfect, and we reward for perfect. So why are we surprised that people spend their precious minutes of self-directed, focused work time trying to achieve perfect? The problem is simple: Art is never defect-free. Things that are remarkable never meet spec, because that would make them standardized, not worth talking about. Rough”
“Art is original. Marcel Duchamp was an artist when he pioneered Dadaism and installed a urinal in a museum.
The second person to install a urinal wasn't an artist, he was a plumber.”
“Great teachers are wonderful. They change lives. We need them. The problem is that most schools don’t like great teachers. They’re organized to stamp them out, bore them, bureaucratize them, and make them average. Why”
“We’ve been trained to believe that mediocre obedience is a genetic fact for most of the population, but it’s interesting to note that this trait doesn’t show up until after a few years of schooling.”
“If you actually work for an organization that insists you be mediocre, that enforces conformity in all its employees, why stay? What are you building? The work can’t possibly be enjoyable or challenging, your skills aren’t increasing, and your value in the marketplace decreases each day you stay there. And if history is a guide, your job there isn’t as stable as you think, because average companies making average products for average people are under huge strain.”
“Schools have figured this out. They need shortcuts in order to successfully process millions of students a year, and they’ve discovered that fear is a great shortcut on the way to teaching compliance.”
“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.”
About Linchpin - Are You Indispensable
Why are some people easily outsourced, downsized, or freelanced into obscurity, while others have their pick of opportunities? In one of his most powerful books, Seth Godin argues that it's more essential than ever to become indispensable - to become a linchpin.