Pinchy is not a keystone of the food pyramid, but he sure tastes good.

Consider this another tool on the pegbar of the diffident.

So fear.less contributor and fount of inspiration Seth Godin has this grand new book called Linchpin discussing the indispensable person – someone with vital intellectual capital. You can survive in this sordid economy if you’re too precious to release.

Few people are truly indispensable. People on every level of leadership within an organization may be special, distinguished, and crippling to lose, but rarely will you meet that legendary person whose departure would smother you with regret.

And it’s really hard to show someone (potential employer? eh?) that they honestly cannot live without you within moments of meeting them. Everyone who reads fear.less is clearly an amazing person with a lot to offer, but it’s just a fact of life that often we’re not in positions to say “get like me”, to hold ourselves hostage, to cement our destinies.

I have two fear.less contributors in my head right now: Colleen Wainwright and Leo Babauta. Colleen has been hired by companies that “weren’t hiring” just because they wanted her. Leo’s proven approach for fighting fear can be summed up as “baby steps”.

So much in the same way that I can derive satisfaction from being an “ersatz Jesus” in my attempts to be a good person, I have a new stepping-stone aspiration on my way to being an indispensable linchpin: being a kind of indispensable pinchpin! (I don’t think that’s a real thing.)

What a copout, right? Honestly, I’m not a linchpin though. Not yet. Not to anyone’s tribe but my own embryonic one. I don’t have enough experience and that’s okay, I think.

But what the fearful do more often is underestimate our power – typically to about zero.

If you’re not the head of an organization, you can at least be an arm. You don’t need it but wow, you don’t want to lose it. What I have found on my quest to combat fear is that feelings of inadequacy, of being one white sheep in a cottony sea of thousands, often originate from holding back your personal inner magic. But that magic is what tempts people’s appetites. If they don’t need you, make them want you. Draw them in with an authentic magnetism that they might not even understand, and back it up with honest drive. I will let you know how this goes.

Being invaluable starts with being valuable.

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