指尖阅读—我的生涯我做主（十六）

A billboard that sat along the 101 highway in the Bay Area in 2009 put it bluntly:”1000000 people overseas can do your job. What makes you sospecial?” While one million might be an exaggeration, what’s not an exaggeration is that lots of other people can and want to have your dream job. For anything desirable, there’s competition: a ticket to a championship game,the arm of an attractive man or woman, admission to a good college, and every solid professional opportunity.

Being better than the competition is basic to an entrepreneur’s survival. In every sector multiple companies compete over a single customer’s dollar. The world is loud and messy; customers don’t have time to parse minute differences. If a company’s product isn’t massively different from a competitor’s – as Do Something CEO Nancy Lublin says, unless it’s first, only, faster, better orcheaper – it’s not going to command anyone’s attention. Good entrepreneursbuild and brand products that are differentiated from the competition.They are able to finish the sentence, “Our customers buy from us and notthat other company because…”.

Zappos.com,the online shoe retailer founded in 1999, has a clear answer to that question: insanely good customer service. While other online shoe stores like shoebuy and onlineshoes.com offered 30-day return windows, Zapposmade a name for itself by being the first to offer a 365-day return policy on everything they sold. While retailers like L.L.Bean and J.Crew expected customers to pick up the shipping costs each time they returned something from an online order, Zappos offered free shipping on all returns, no questions asked. And even when giants like The Gap mimicked the free shipping and free returns offer in their online shoe store, they buried a customer service phone number in small print at the bottom of the page. Zappos’s 1-800 number,on the other hand, is displayed”proudly,” in CEO Tony Hsieh’s words, on every single page of its website. Moreover, local employees working at corporate headquarters in Nevada answer every call. There are no scripts and notime limits on such calls – virtually unheard of in an age of quota-driven,outsourced customer service centers. Zappos massively differentiated itself from its competition by building a culture that is customer-centric in every way imaginable. This is what has made Zappos a trusted destination for millions of loyal online shoppers (and it’s also why it was a acquired by Amazonfor close to a billion dollars).

Yes,you are different from an online shoe store. But you are selling your brainpower, your skills, your energy. And you are doing so in the face of massive competition. Possible employers, partners investors, and other people with power choose between you and someone who looks like you. When a desirable opportunity arises, many people with similar job titles and educational backgrounds will be considered. When sifting through applications for almost any job employers and hiring managers are quickly overcome by thesameness. It’s a blur.