Godin’s ‘Linchpin’ not essential reading

Seth Godin’s “Linchpin” can be interesting and helpful, even inspiring. But too often it comes across as a compilation of platitudes.

The message: Happily do your best, even if it means being different, risking failure and ridicule. (Agreed.) And that’s about it. I’m exaggerating, of course, but not overly so.

Perhaps it’s his approach that is off-putting.

Godin disdains all things he determines to be “ordinary” — ordinary jobs getting ordinary pay for ordinary things. Yet, this ordinariness is often anything but.

People doing everyday jobs, even if not always in a stellar way, are still doing essential work — that is why they are everyday jobs, they’re needed. And it’s these jobs and the people who do them enabling the “artists,” as Godin describes those who live his message.

The artist is free to paint, write software programs, or direct a multi-national company because he is freed from so much else — paint is readily available, a computer turns on when a button is pushed, a CEO is driven or flown to where he needs to go.

He rightly says everyone can be an artist, but claws back on that promise by decrying all those “cogs” in the machine who simply go to work, punch time cards, do their jobs and go home. This portrayal fails to see the dignity in honest work.

It also ignores the belief that, for some people, work is not paramount. Work is important, necessary and can and should be done well, they believe, but it is not the driver of their hearts.

Godin also uses some dubious and incomplete examples as evidence to support his thesis.

Under the officious heading, How to Make the Olympic Ski Team, we find:

Matt Dayton skied Nordic (cross-country) in the 2002 Olympics. He taught me a simple lesson: The person who leans forward the most wins the race.

To that gem he adds,

In a race, sooner or later there’s a moment that separates the winner from those who don’t win.

Why, yes, that’s true. And, sooner or later, the cook is done with preparing the meal and it’s time to eat. When driving a car, sooner or later there comes a time when fuel must be added to the tank.

Then there’s this fawning description of what, apparently, Godin believes is a noteworthy accomplishment.

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.

To which I suppose Godin expects us to respond: Tee hee; followed by a reflective, “Ahhhh, yes.” (For you M*A*S*H fans it’s, “Ahhhh, Bach.”)

But I would argue that Godin has it backwards. Or, rather, upside down. Duchamp’s “urinal” was not art; it was simply shock. Or, schlock

And perhaps the plumber who installed a functioning, usable urinal may have been a “cog.” But if art is the life-changing experience Godin says it should be, I suspect most people, when nature calls, would consider the plumber, not Duchamp, an artist.

By all means, be a linchpin at work, at home, in all you do.

But buy the book? Not so much.