I’ve been digging into Linchpin, by Seth Godin (it’s my first Kindle formatted book) and I’ve been enjoying it immensely. As usual Seth delivers the goods. I’ll be providing a full review like I did for Tribes, once I’ve finished it. However, I came upon a truly powerful passage that I felt compelled to write about.

In a section titled, “Saying No” Seth riffs on the power that comes from being the person who can say, “No.” Now think about that for a second. We usually demonize these people. After all, we want the “can do” person…the person for whom no mountain is too tall. Check out the passage and then I’ll offer up some thoughts.

“There are two ways the linchpin can use ‘no.’

The first is to never use it. There’s a certain sort of indispensable team member who always finds a yes. She always manages to find a way to make things happen, and she does it. It’s done. Yes.

Those people are priceless.

Amazingly, there’s a second kind of linchpin. This person says “no” all the time. She says no because she has goals, because she’s a practical visionary, because she understands priorities. She says no because she has the strength to disappoint you now in order to delight you later. When used with good intent, this negative linchpin is also priceless. She is so focused on her art that she knows that a no now is a worthy investment for the magic that will be delivered later.”

I was always the yes person. This isn’t to say i was a “yes man.” No, what I mean is, I believed that anything was possible. And why not? I enjoyed delivering the impossible. There is a thrill that comes from that. But, of late, I’m leaning that sometimes you need to say no. Saying no allows you to focus. It allows you to prioritize. It allows you to make even more progress than you could have from saying yes to every request.

It took my roughly 14 years in this business to learn that sometimes saying no leads to better productivity and better results.  But, I’m finding now that I’ve learned it, I’m becoming a much more useful cog in the wheel.

Where The Suckers Moon should be at the top of your list if you work in marketing and advertising.  This quote is so remarkably appropriate given the troubles plaguing the U.S. auto industry.

Subaru of America had learned the lesson of advertising. Advertising did not work by entertaining or assaulting the intellect of its audience, as the company’s previous agencies had believed. Nor did it work through subliminal manipulation, as so many Americans, ever on the lookout for conspiracies, misguidedly thought. Instead, advertising, as the great ad man Bruce Barton had acknowledged decades before, was “something big, something splendid, something which goes deep down into an institution and gets hold of the soul of it.” To succeed, advertising cannot seek to invent a new soul. Instead, it must reinforce and redirect the existing image. It must serve as a form of mythology, providing the corporation’s various and often competing constituencies – of which consumers are only one of many – heroes, villains, principles, rules of conduct and stories with which they can rally the faithful to remain true to the cause. Only then, with luck and effort, can they win new converts.