Week 5: Browned butter chocolate chip cookies and "The Linchpin"

WHY THIS BOOK

So this book looks at the myth around work that if you just show up, work hard, listen and stick it out you will be rewarded. Who else has heard that before? And then remember the time when a colleague received a promotion and you thought to yourself, wait I have more experience.

This book debunks this myth and provides alternatives to how to be indispensable

The author talks about meeting David and how friendly and helpful he was working at a high end coffee chain Dean & Deluca. When asked about his great attitude he said "I work for blessings". I bet if we asked his co-workers who they like working with I bet David's name would be number 1 or 2. Now I don’t work for blessings but I definitely try to bring humour, curiosity and support to the work I do. My role is to support people on their EDI journey….no it doesn’t mean they get a free pass to say any racist or sexist comments but I do take the time to understand.

This book spends quite a bit of time talking about the Lizard brain aka "resistant brain". The lizard brain is focused on anger, sex, revenge and fear. You know the person at work "well I knew it wouldn’t work." This is all because fear takes over and people don’t want to be uncomfortable. Discomfort brings change and with that we have opportunities.

In this chapter Seth Godin says successful people think about failure differently. They don’t feel bad about trying; they look at it as an opportunity for growth to get better and move on to more challenges. Can you imagine if we all could think of failure like this?

So near the end of the book the author says there is no one way to become a linchpin, however you have to make the choice every day to be better. Atomic Habits by James Clear talks about the 1% improvement and how these small improvements are cumulative over time. On page 218 you can read about the abilities of the linchpin. I don’t want to ruin it for you.