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When you write a book, you ask us for very little. When you wrote Unleashing the Ideavirus, you asked us to share. When you wrote Purple Cow, you asked us to be remarkable. In The Dip, you asked us to quit when we should (and not when we shouldn’t), and in Permission Marketing, you asked us to, simply, ask.

But in the book being released tomorrow, you’re asking us for a lot more. In Linchpin, you’re asking us to do the work. Not just any work, but the work. Our best work. Maybe even our life’s work. Which wouldn’t be a lot to ask, but you don’t tell us how.

Which, of course, is kinda the point.

In Linchpin, you did as you do. You took everyday words and recoded them with new implications and consequences. Words like map, daemon, [the] resistance, ship, and especially art, are unfamiliar territory now. I still whisper them at the dishes, my laptop, the laundry, and my cat…tasting them for new understanding (and sometimes finding it).

While reading Linchpin, I did what I do. I read bits of it aloud to my husband and respun his thinking. And I read aloud to my online friends in the best way I could: I tweeted. Late Friday evening and into the wee hours of Saturday morning, I tweeted. Saturday lunchtime and again after dinner, I tweeted.

I tweeted as I read, posting whatever rang true, didn’t require explanation, and would fit within the 140. And as you’ve seen on Twitter, I wasn’t alone. But I didn’t tweet through the second half of the book because I was reading fiercely then. Fiercely. And as I chat with folks about it, I find I’m not alone in that, either.

You entrusted your work to 3,000 of your tribe. Not professional reviewers and critics. Your people. Us. And from the tweets, posts, and other bits flying around the Internets, it appears we were worthy of that trust. A wondrous thing. Maybe even, in troubling and uncertain times, a monumental thing.

Then Ishita shared an idea, and I agreed. In Twitter, like any other stream, we can’t ever splash in the same spot twice…for once, we should bottle a bit for later. So Roxy and I plucked moments from the neverendingness, and Reese crafted a vessel to put them in. I hear it may surface in a day or two. Here it is, all bubbled up.

Our assemblage of tweets will be a talisman against my own daemon…for the times she murmurs, as she often does: “No one will care. You’re wasting your time.”

I’ll simply point at those quotes, kudos, and complaints and tell her: “Someone will care. Someone always does.”

And maybe she’ll sleep. Maybe she won’t. Either way, I have the work to do.

So.

Thank you.

Order Seth Godin’s Linchpin

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Photo credit: simone.brunozzi

Graphics credit: @reese