This is Sakura and I met her outside Cannon Street train station last week.
She was job hunting - but doing it in a way she'd get noticed. Her marketing was brilliant. It caught the attention of a lot of people who stopped to ask what kind of work she was looking for and how she was getting along.
She did this every day last week and bagged a few meetings as a result. Not surprising when this shows confidence, diligence and great differentiation.
I have nothing but admiration for young people who go out and break the mold like this. Sakura is hustling to get her next job because she knows the job application route is failing her generation.
And right now you need a hustle mindset.
UK youth unemployment (16 to 24) was 16.2% in April 2026, against an overall rate of 4.9%. That makes young people more than three times as likely to be out of work as the wider workforce and is the highest youth rate in over a decade.
A couple of years ago, I was introduced to a graduate - let's call him Tony. "How can I get a job?" he asked.
"Go down to the pubs in Leadenhall Market and talk to everyone for two days," I said. "Go and get a ton of business meetings. Come back to me when you've done that."
Two days later he called. "It was amazing. I met so many people."
How many people do you know who would do this?
I was impressed so I introduced Tony to a company who gave him an internship and three months later he was offered a job at one of their partner companies. Tony is now flying.
Hustle mindset is rare in my opinion.
I often work with companies that are perfectly good in their own right, but have hit a ceiling limit or flatlined. Since Covid, I've met so many teams that have lost their mojo or are kicking the can down the line so they don't have to have difficult conversations.
Hustle and mojo drive businesses. Passion and drive are needed. Young people have tons of this.
They have the secret ingredient that's often missing - raw hunger.
If you know you're not getting food tonight unless you hustle, you'll be out there. And when you're out there, mojo does the rest. They are skills I believe we need to encourage more.
What stops it is a fear of failure, which in the UK we love to chide. But allowing that to take place in your own head leads to inevitable failure.
When I trained to be a journalist, I had to run voxpops, interviews with the public on the High Street. You would of course meet difficult people and you learned how to deal with rejection. The same came from calling a lot of people to ask for comment and getting told to Foxtrot Oscar.
Sakura's resilience will have grown significantly this week.
Now critics could say, it's terrible Sakura has to do this. Well that might be true, but she needs a job today - not when the policy or the economy is fixed.
Owning your problems today and standing up to fix them is leadership. Hats off to her for showing it.
If you can help Sakura, please reach out to her.
And have a good day
Dan
PS - if you're struggling with a lack of mojo, hustle and clarity of direction in your company, check out The Proposition and give me shout.
