I Could Never Sell

I went to to a book launch last week, where Seth Godin launched his new book Lynchpin.

Oops. Linchpin. I keep spelling that wrong. A linchpin holds the wheel on the wagon, mile after mile.

Lynch? Why does “lynch” come back again and again?

Some of you have guessed already.

Think this is the wrong question? Wrong!

Think this is a spelling or grammar question, like you hated when you were six and hate now? Just semantics? A quibble about metaphor? A distraction from more important questions? A figure of speech, nothing to get hung up about? A question for the timid, who hide from the hard questions? A question for those whose dream is to maintain a library of civil service manuals somewhere, decade after decade?

No, this is not a question for the timid.

I have read Seth Godin every week for months, maybe years. I heard him talk about Lynchpin for half a day. I sat with him at dinner the night before.  Someone handed out linchpins.  I am staring at mine now.  Have you seen the traps ranchers catch wolves in?  That’s what I see when I look at this lynchpin.  A trap, scaled to 1/12th.

I relive a Youtube video of a rancher standing over a wolf.  She fought a steel-toothed trap all night, on a snowy slope far from any human home (but not far enough), and tried to gnaw her leg free.  At first light, though, she spotted two hunters climbing the slope through deep snow.  For two hours she watched them come.  She left two cubs in a rock den, and will not see them again.  Now she stares back at the camera and sees death just moments away.  In her eyes you see it too, death and a choice.  Yes, in a steel trap she has a choice to make.  Which way to go.  Not which way across the snow, but which way inside.   What view to take.  Not which view of glaring peaks and dark forests to run for, but what view to take of this moment.

At dinner someone asked Godin an eager question: How best to launch a book, after all the books he has launched.

“Don’t go by me, people,” he said. “I don’t make my living from this.”

“You made your living long ago,” I nodded.  Don’t go by here, people.  Could still be a steel-toothed trap in the snow.

When I was naming my company (long ago), I liked “Iron Horse” for an hour or two.  Then I backed away fast.  That name was a trap.  The Indians of the plains called the steam locomotive the “iron horse.”   Picture an Indian on a horse on a ridge, scouting the distance.  With dawn the tracks of the iron horse gleam pink.  The same pink that traced the walls of Troy, one last dawn.  The coral pink of a dead pine, that shatters like hand-blown glass.

Unlike the Indian horse, the iron horse cannot turn, and keeps a schedule.  Good name for a company, maybe, if your company makes staples for staple-guns, and you win by pumping out more staples per hour.   Not a good name if your company scouts a new way for other explorers.  The iron horse could not go exploring.   It clung to the same way every time.  Anything else was a train wreck.

Names matter.  One name traps you like a steel jaw, another carries you anyplace you can see, like an Indian horse.

“If you can write it down,” said Godin, “I can find someone to do it cheaper.”  If your work has a manual, it’s a trap.

Trouble is, Lynchpin is trying to write it down.  Trying to write the manual.  Trying to tell us how.  Trying to lay track across the wilderness, because people are lost and dying in that wilderness.

Yes, we have to try.  But the tracks are a trap.   No one knows this better than the author of Lynchpin.  All tracks are a trap.  Long before tracks came through the wilderness, scouts came through on Indian horses, wandering, looking, turning, sniffing, turning.  Not fast, not on schedule, not making good time, not knowing the next stop.  “Don’t go by me, people.”  I came through here long ago, looking for a way;  looking for something I could catch and eat in the meantime;  looking out for wolves and Indians along the ridges, before they could catch me;  and looking out for bears the size of horses and cats the size of bears and lizards the size of cats and god-knows-what-else that no man had seen before, or no man I knew.

So a “linchpin” is a trap.  The linchpin holds the wheels on the iron horse, and the iron horse on its tracks.

Linchpin is the right name for this book, if Grendel is a better name than Beowulf for their story. The name of the monster, not the name of the hero. Grendel, the monster mysteriously devouring the land and the people, until Beowulf comes, and steps into the dread and mystery that others flee.

The dread monster of Lynchpin is the Lizard, the lizard-brain of fear. It lays waste the land, devours the people:

… a lot of people I care about are in pain because the things we thought would work don’t.   Every day I meet people who have so much to give but have been bullied enough or frightened enough to hold it back.  They have become victims, pawns in a senseless system that uses them up and undervalues them.

All stories are one.  There is only one story, ever.  One story forever.

For this lizard we need a slayer of dragons:

My name is Beowulf, and I have come to kill your monster.

Where shall we find work slaying dragons?  Everywhere.

This is “emotional labor,” as Godin calls it, citing The Managed Heart by Arlie Hochschild:

… management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display.

Stewardesses in the early days of air travel, for example, who had to calm nervous passengers.

The best work: master your fear, then help others do likewise.   Tame your lizard, then theirs.  Slay your dragon, then theirs.

The work of leadership begins in each doorway, as you pass through;  each time you enter a crowd or cluster of people and, instead of taking their mood, hold out your own mood, offer your mood to them: your courage, not their fear, for example;  or your laughter, not their dread;  or your shrewdness, not their reckless sentimentality;  or your openness to connection, not their secrecy and suspicion.

The first fight is inside.  Before Beowulf can fight a monster, he must fight his own fear, and then the fear of his men, as they sing loudly into the night, of love, lust, and victory, to summon the monster down the mountain upon them.

The mead hall was closed, cold and silent, to mourn over this monster.  Hmmm, hints Beowulf, what if we open it, and build a roaring fire, and sing in celebration of our victory over this monster, our coming victory?  Then our monster will come.

The slayer of dragons celebrates to bring the victory.  Before, not after.  Managing feeling to make a public display, as Hochschild might put it.  Tame the lizard fear that way.

Your monster, says Beowulf, knowing not even its name.  He has come across the ocean to the edge of the known world without knowing his odds.  Is this reckless?  Yes, except in the case of monsters and dragons.  No one can write this job description or manual, or calculate this risk.  By the time you know the first thing about Grendel, one of you is dead.

The king and the queen begin to quarrel dangerously at the end of the evening.  Come to bed, the king demands.  No, says the queen, watching Beowulf.  All stories are one.  This is Arthur and Guinevere, divided over Lancelot, with Camelot in the balance.  “Your highness,” Beowulf addresses the king, looking up from the bottom of the steps, “perhaps your lovely wife could give us one last song, before we all retire for the night.”

The slayer of dragons is a peacemaker.  Knowing how to fight, he knows how not to fight, and when.  He knows what passes for victory in the mind of each person.  He devises a victory for all.  Face-saving, we call it.  If dragons are scarce where you are, quarrels are not.

With the hour of the monster near, the warriors tighten the straps of their armor again and again while they sing.  They nudge the angle of their helmets.  They finger the shafts of their swords and spears.

This is shenpa, the pillbug rolling himself into a fist at the vibration of someone’s shout, or at the slightest breath.  If you never hunt dragons, hunt pillbugs.  The work of leadership begins at shenpa, our first twinge of wariness inside, and every hour of every day offers us a dozen dozen such opportunities.  Shenpa is the blink of the lizard’s eye, or the flick of his tongue, almost too quick to see.  Almost.  Search out the blink of the lizard, and the flick of his tongue.

While his warriors tighten their armor, Beowulf sheds his.  He will fight the monster naked.  Why?  I have no weapons for killing a monster, he says.  He gets false preparations and false assurances out of his way.  When you fight a dragon, a monster, or the lizard fear inside, don’t bury yourself before the fight, in the weight of your armor and your protections.  They can bury you in your armor afterwards, if it comes to that.  Go naked against your monster.

The monster Grendel comes, pained and enraged by their songs of joy.  He is like nothing they have seen before.  What to do?  Beowulf’s brave warriors face him, oppose him, hack at him, stab him, as they would any enemy.  But Grendel looks like a long-dead corpse, and how can you kill a corpse?   Grendel looks as if he were made by sword and axe, so how can sword and axe make him worse?

Beowulf watches instead, studying the monster.  He has sixty seconds or so to find the monster’s weakness.  The monster turns towards a screaming woman, screaming himself.  A warrior roars as he charges, and the monster turns towards the roar.  Beowulf nods as Grendel chews the warrior’s skull like a grape.  He has gotten inside Grendel, felt Grendel’s fear.

When you have studied your own fear well, you recognize the fear in others.   If you know your weakness before others do, you know their weakness before they do.  Stare the lizard down, the lizard of fear.  Know the people around you better than they know themselves, by your fears and theirs.

Beowulf sings to the monster, and Grendel’s ballooning eardrum quivers in pain.  Beowulf does not face him, but climbs onto his back, facing the way Grendel faces.  To beat your enemy, become your enemy, destroy your enemy from inside.  The better you know your fear, the better you know your enemy.  Beowulf punches out that eardrum, and then won’t let Grendel get out the door.  The door that was chained against fear now chains fear in, where it can be defeated.

You have been searching for something your entire life.  Could that thing be near you at this very moment, in plain sight, just behind the thing you have dreaded and avoided your entire life?  There where you turn away from the blink of the lizard and the flick of his tongue?  He was warning you away, you were sure.  What if you were wrong?  What if he was calling you?  “Here it is!  I found it!  Your heart’s desire.  Over here, over here!”

Go where the lizard warns you away.

Do we outsmart the lizard to get on with our work?  No.  The lizard is our work:

Lizards Tamed, 5¢

You are the dragon slayer:

I am Ron Dixon, and I am here to kill your monster.

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