The main premise of Linchpin is that you have to be indispensable if you want to have any sort of job security. You have to do something that cannot be easily commodified.

It’s gotten me wondering what it is I can do that nobody else does. What makes me indispensable?

Just about everything else has been commodified, from products to service. Even graphic design. Especially graphic design. (I won’t get into that now.)

Even fine art has become commodified to some degree. There are assembly-line/sweat-shop paintings available out there. You’ve seen them in little kiosks in the mall, these really bad, kitschy copies of famous works, but they evidently sell or else they wouldn’t be there.

And on the other end of the spectrum, you have rockstar artists who, like normal rockstars, are pressured by galleries to keep putting out “hits,” so they return to the same material that gets more and more watered down as time goes on.

So what can I do that nobody else can, the one thing that can’t be commodified?

I think the thing I’m best at that nobody else is is being myself. Being Brad Blackman. Nobody else is Brad Blackman. I know, it’s almost stupidly simple. Sure, I may have similar tastes, perspectives, and even talents as other people, but I’m uniquely me; no one else is this exact mixture of things.

In short, I want to build my own brand, called Brad Blackman. What I would like to do is make the Brad Blackman brand “internet famous” and leverage that “fame” to sell my art. When people buy art hey are buying the artist (and the story of the artist and the art). Sometimes they’re buying a specific work, but when you get to the big dogs, they’re buying the artist. You buy Picasso, Pollock, Parrish, Peter Max, Warhol, Koons, Hirst, Van Gogh, etc. You get the idea.

My friend Jimmy Benedict has created a brand around his t-shirt art, called jimiyo. He is jimiyo. He’s “internet famous” in the t-shirt community. I don’t know if this was his original goal or if it just happened organically. Either way he’s worked hard for it.

I don’t expect it to happen overnight. Chris Brogan says his “overnight success” took 11 years.

It’ll take a lot of work, a lot of small things. Using my blog as a home base, Twitter as an outpost for that, and slowly feed people little interesting tidbits about myself and my art, and express opinions about things, and just make a general habit of being Brad Blackman and being clearer about what Brad Blackman is about. It’s not so much navel-gazing as it is thinking critically about what I create and why. I doubt it’ll start with a manifesto, although one will probably emerge. (Then again this document is itself a sort of pre-manifesto.)

I just think I’m crazy enough to try this. I just hope it’s not egotistical or self-centered. I don’t think so. Fortunately my wife doesn’t, either. We see it as necessary to survival, and a way to provide for our family as well as pursue my dreams. It’s not fame or celebrity in itself I’m seeking, but as a means to an end. If it sells my art and allows me to be myself by being myself! then by all means, I’ll do it.