There have been a lot of reviews for Seth Godin’s latest book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?(Amazon affiliate link). I know I’m late to the game on this since it has been out a few months (I think it was January?), but I did read it the week after it launched. Since there is a lot of discussion out there already, I promise I’ll try not to add more noise.

I love the way the book is written, with short bites that might very well have started out as blog posts. The tone is very similar to Seth’s Blog, perhaps a little more polished.

When I started reading Linchpin, I realized that it converges with several other major books of the past few years that I’ve read, such as The World Is Flat, The 4-Hour Workweek, Expanded and Updated: Expanded and Updated, With Over 100 New Pages of Cutting-Edge Content., The Rise of the Creative Class , A Whole New Mind, and Free Agent Nation , (which I haven’t read yet, but it’s on my list) and the newly released Rework, in that they all tend to come at a single, main issue from different angles:

“Innovate or die.”

The book is divided into two main parts. The first “half” deals with how the economy got here, going from the Industrial Revolution to a post-industrial society, diving into the future of work, which looks to be largely post-corporate and freelance-driven. Of course, this future economy will require us to make ourselves indispensable, or we will be left behind. The second part of the book talks about the resistance that holds us back from becoming those indispensable linchpins.

The first main premise of Linchpin is that since big corporate factories (blue- and white-collar) no longer have the power they had 100 years ago, there has been a natural rise in smaller shops, and it is necessary for them to differentiate themselves and be distinguishable from everyone else – remarkable, irreplaceable, indispensable. You can do it in a cubicle in a big corporation, but it is necessary to think like a freelancer even then. We’re on the brink of a freelance economy, and some might say we’re already there.

It seems that so many people I know – especially in the Nashville technology community – are already freelancers or at least have a freelance mentality. By that I mean that they have a decent grasp on their own personal brand, and they are known as the go-to guy or gal for whatever it is they do. For example, Mitch Canter is the WordPress guy in town. If you want to know about the future of content, talk to Rex Hammock. (I’ll talk about more linchpins I know in a future post, but those are two examples.)

Nashville is not Silicon Valley, but it is well on its way to becoming a hotbed of innovation, and I’m excited to be surrounded by such amazing, nimble, forward-thinking people.

Note: Wednesday, I’ll get into what for me was the real meat of Linchpin, understanding and overcoming the Resistance that keeps us from being linchpins. Friday, I will wrap up with a little bit about what Godin calls “Shipping.” Next week I will highlight some linchpins I personally know as I mentioned above. Then I will report on my own personal reaction to Linchpin and where I will go from here.