Skills Can Be Taught

From Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (Bloomsbury USA, 2000), chapter “Bigfoot”. The line is Bourdain’s compression of what he learned from the unnamed restaurant manager he calls only “Bigfoot,” who hired and fired by character rather than résumé.

Reliability and character aren’t two things for Bourdain. Showing up on time, never calling in sick, doing what you said you’d do, that’s the whole list. The next sentence makes the split explicit: “those who do what they say they’re going to do,” and everyone else. A résumé could not move you across that bar; a few weeks of arrival times could.