My daughter is 19 and looking to work at a cafe or restaurant. Her job search is not going well.
She worked for a few weeks at a cafe up the road, but the owner was a bit loose with his adherence to wage laws so she left. That counts as experience but not much. She’s basically in the same position as everyone else applying. That's the problem. A cafe posting an ad for an opening gets over 100 applications and most of them look identical. Same lack of experience. Same generic cover line about being a "people person" and a “fast learner”.
So I told her to do two things. Get her Responsible Service of Alcohol (RSA) certificate, and learn how to actually make coffee.
The RSA takes about 7 hours online and is required for any staff who will be serving alcohol.
The coffee is the bigger one. Cafes get slammed during a shift, and no cafe owner wants to stand next to a new hire explaining how to steam milk while the queue's out the door. If she can't already pull a shot, she's just another name in the pile of 100 who also can't. No differentiator, no reason to pick her over anyone else. If she walks in already knowing how to pour a perfect espresso and steam creamy, velvety milk, she’s put herself at the front of the applicant pool.
Neither of these things would take more than a few hours to learn. But almost nobody applying next to her will have bothered with it. Easy things are easy to avoid cause most times, they’re boring.
Eight years ago, for me, that thing was posting on LinkedIn. Almost nobody was doing it. I built a great business for myself simply by showing up consistently while others were looking for clients down well-trodden paths.
Today it might be learning to better leverage AI, instead of just getting it to write your emails. Building automations, custom tools or workflow that save hours every week. It might be writing the book everyone says they'll write one day. It might be as simple as reading again.
None of these things are hard. That's why they work.
Look at what you want and then find the low bar nobody's bothered to clear.
And jump before everyone else does.
* * * * *
Four things that made me write this:
- Mr Miller, my Year 8 English teacher, used to say your writing doesn't need to be the best. It just needs to be a bit better than the next guy's. Focus on the differentiator.
- I remembered an old Monty Python movie, Life of Brian. Brian tells the crowd "you're all individuals." They all shout back in unison, "yes, we're all individuals." Except one guy, who says "I'm not." That's the guy you want to be.
- I started creating quotes-on-wall images using Photoshop years ago and posting them on LinkedIn. At the time, no one else was doing it. Now they're everywhere. That's my cue to find something new.
- My daughter hates Apple products. I asked why she prefers a Samsung over an iPhone. She rattled off five features Apple doesn't have, like better battery and split screen. Nobody wants the me-too option when the original is right there too. Be different.
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