Linchpin, the newest Seth Godin book is chalk full of different topics.  Here’s the best of the best career related commentary from Seth Godin.

• The new American Dream: Be remarkable; be generous; create art; make judgment calls; connect people and ideas.
• Would your career advance if you could figure out a way to do an even better job of following your boss’s instructions?  Or maybe, would you be more successful if you were more artistic, motivated, aware, and genuine?

If you are working in a job you do not love.  Discover work you truly love is an act of trial and error.  Until you find it do this:

• If you can be human at work, you’ll discover a passion for work you didn’t know you had.   When work becomes personal, your customers and coworkers are more connected and happier.  And that creates even more value.
• Being good at school is a fine skill if you intend to do school forever.  For the rest of us, being good at school is a little like being good at Frisbee.  It’s nice, but it’s not relevant unless your career involves homework assignments, looking through textbooks for answers that are already known to your supervisors, complying with instructions and the, high-pressure setting, regurgitating those facts with limited processing on your part.
• Emotional labor is available to all of us, but is rarely exploited as a competitive advantage.  We spend our time and energy trying to perfect our craft, but we don’t focus on the skills and interactions that will allow us to stand out and become indispensable to our organization.
• The only way to prove that you are an indispensable linchpin — someone worth recruiting, moving to the top of the pile, and hiring — is to show, not tell.  Projects are the new resumes
• Emotional labor is difficult and easy to avoid.  But when we avoid it, we don’t do much worth seeking out.  Showing up unwilling to do emotional labor is a short-term strategy now, because over time, organizations won’t pay extra for someone who merely does the easy stuff.
• When you do emotional labor, you benefit.  The act of giving someone a smile, of connecting to a human, of taking initiative, of being surprising, of being creative, of putting on a show  — these are things that we do for free all our lives.  And then we get to work and we expect to merely do what we’re told and get paid for it.
• This creates a tension.  if you reserve your emotional labor for when you are off duty, but you work all the time, you are deprived of the joy you get when you do this labor.  Now, you’re not giving gifts on duty, but you’re not off duty much at all.  Spend eight or ten or twelve hours a day at work, and there’s not a lot of time left for the very human acts that make you who you are and who you want to be.  So bring that gift to work.
• My fundamental argument here is simple: in everything you do, it’s possible to be an artist, at least a little bit.  Not on demand, not in the same way each time, and not for everyone.  but you’re willing to suspend your selfish impulses, you can give a gift to your customer or boss or coworker or a passerby.  And the gift is as much for you as it is for the recipient.
• Optimism is for artists, change agents, linchpins, and winners.  Whining and fear, on the other hand, are largely self-fulfilling prophecies in organizations under stress.
• As we’ll see, the greatest shortage in our society is an instinct to produce.  To create solutions and hustle them out the door.  To touch the humanity inside and connect to the humans in the marketplace.
• Shipping something out the door, doing it regularly, without hassle, emergency, or fear — this is a rare skill, something that makes you indispensable.
• Of course, the resistance loves school.  If school is about obedience, then you can be soothed thinking that more obedience is better work, and the resistance is fine with that.  If school is about fitting in, the resistance happily agrees.  If school is about postponing the day you have to stand up in front of the world and put yourself at risk, the resistance would like to stay there forever.
• It’s the lizard brain that tells you that you’re not qualified, that your degree isn’t advanced enough, that you didn’t go to a good enough school.  It’s the lizard that tells you not to apply to a great school, because you don’t deserve to get in.  And it’s the lizard that cares deeply about grades, and not a bit about art or leadership or connection.
• When the resistance tells you not to listen to something, read something, or attend something, go.  Do it.  It’s not an accident that successful people read more books.
• The paradox is that the more you hide, the riskier it is.  The less commotion you cause, the more likely you are to fail, to be ignored, to expose yourself to failure.  We tried to set up an economy where you could hide you big ideas, go through the motions, and get what you needed.  That’s not working so well now.
• The only solution is to call all the bluffs at once, to tolerate no rational or irrational reason to hold back on your art.  The only solution is to start today, to start now, and to ship.
• Generosity generates income.  This works whether you are selling paintings or innovation or a service.
• When you cut your expenses to the bone, you have a surplus.  The surplus allows you to be generous, which mysteriously turns around and makes your surplus even bigger.
• The reason these people believe they can’t afford it [to give gifts], though, is that they’ve so bought into consumer culture that they’re in debt or have monthly bills that make no sense at all.
• The linchpin has figured out that we get only a certain number of brain cycles to spend each day.  Spending even on on a situation out of our control has a significant opportunity cost.  Your competition is busy allocating time to create the future, and you are stuck wishing the world was different.
• Here’s the truth that you have have to wrestle with: the reason that art (writing, engaging, leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can’t tell you how to do it.  If there were a map, there’d be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map.
• Getting a New Job Without Leaving: one day Binny Thomas stood up, spoke up, and starting doing a new job.  She started leaning in an seeking out projects where she could make a difference.  Suddenly, Binny was inspired.  The fascinating truth is that the opportunities came after she was inspired — she wasn’t inspired by the opportunities.  Binny’s old job was just fine.  Binny wasn’t in anger of losing her job, but she had already given up her soul.  Six weeks later, she got a huge promotion, even better new job than the new job she had given herself.  All it took was a choice.  Binny didn’t ask for permission to do her job better; she merely decided to.
• If you are working only for the person you report to according to the org chart, you may be sacrificing your future.  Pleasing him may cause you to alienate customers, hide your best work, fit in, and become merely a cog in the system.  The system wants you to fit in, but pleasing the system may not be your real work.
• Conventional wisdom is that you should find a job that matches your passion.  I think this is backwards.  Transferring your passion to your job is far easier than finding a job that happens to match your passion.
• The vivid truth is this: now that we have the freedom to create, we must embrace the face that not all creations are equal, and some people aren’t going to win.  That doesn’t mean you’re a loser.  It might mean that you’re making the wrong art, drawing the wrong map.  If you’re not winning as a stockbroker, perhaps your art lies somewhere else.  The challenge lies in knowing your market and yourself well enough to see the truth.
• The thing is, it’s far easier than ever before to surface your ideas.  Far easier to have someone notice your interpersonal skills or your writing or your vision.  Which means that people who might have hidden their talents are now finding them noticed.