"I want someone who will do exactly what I tell them to. What I want is someone who works cheap, who shows up on schedule and doesn't give me a hard time." Seth Godin's long awaited book, Linchpin, is a rich plum pudding of reflections on how to become indispensible. The preceding sentiments among them, Godin winds through mental weaponry setting-forth ideas and disciplines for changing one's life and career.
 
Godin asks, "If this is what the boss really wants, how come the stars in the company don't follow these rules?" Great question: how come it's the people who get promoted and get privileges like expense accounts and are wooed away for more money, written up in the paper, and have parking spaces and coffee service? Why aren't those people following the boss's rules?
 
Seth rejoins that what the boss really wants is an artist; someone to shake it up, colors outside the lines, changes everything, and makes company dreams come true. "What the boss really wants is someone who can see the reality of today and describe a better tomorrow." Failing that of course, the boss will settle for a cheap drone who shows up on time.
 
Linchpin opines we arrived here through "mediocre obedience." We've been taught to be a replaceable cog in a wheel. We've been taught not to care too much about our job or our customers. And, we've been taught to fit in.
 
I salute the premise and whole-heartedly sign off on it. But the subsequent question must then be asked, "Okay...how do we change this behavior?" And it's here we sail into rocks and shoals.
 
The explanation begins to emerge when we accept that most of our behavior (constructive or otherwise), takes place on the conscious level. Conversely, when we decide to break a habit or change a pattern, we do it in our conscious-self. From losing weight to ending smoking, from exercising more to treating people better, we make pacts with ourselves only to wonder weeks later why we fell off the boat. The answer can be painful and difficult to reach. We do things mainly based on the core beliefs embedded in our subconscious, put there long ago by well-meaning parents, relatives, teachers and other people from whom we recorded our early tapes; only to unknowingly replay them today. Color inside the lines. Go to your room. Children should be seen and not heard. Why can't you be like your sister? You'll never make it. Oh well...maybe you're just not meant to be an 'A' student, along with a thousand others that silently linger there in the sanctity of the subconscious. 
 
People Move to What They Picture
 
If these embedded, limiting subconscious tapes are correct (that some of us have it, some don't), how do we explain that Dr. Suzuki's method teaches scores of little kids to play violin without any pre-screening? Or, that Michael Jordan, cut from his high school basketball team, became the greatest of them all? While the idea isn't very complicated, the process certainly can be. We are what we think we are. Until we change our mental weaponry which in turn creates positive core beliefs, we'll be more likely to be Godin's cog in the wheel settling with a modest "deserve level," stuck doing what the boss wants.