The Unwritten Checklist

Nagging at the back of your skull is the flickering blue light of a monitor at 2:46 AM, a time when the world feels thin and every insecurity grows teeth. You are staring at a job description that reads less like a career opportunity and more like a ransom note for a person who does not exist. It demands 16 years of experience in a software that has only been on the market for 6 years. It asks for the strategic mind of a CEO and the task-oriented endurance of a pack mule. You have checked 16 of the 26 boxes, yet you are frozen. The mouse cursor pulse mimics a heartbeat. You are more than capable. You have done this work, in the trenches, for 6 years straight, yet the gap between your reality and their demands feels like a 506-foot drop without a net.

The Fluke Fallacy

I recently managed to parallel park my car perfectly on the first try, a feat that usually takes me 6 attempts and a lot of quiet swearing. For a split second, I felt like a god of the asphalt. Then, almost instantly, I told myself it was a fluke. The wind must have pushed the car into place. The curb must have been lower than usual. We do this with our careers every single day. We achieve something massive and then look for the external factor to credit, while we hoard our failures like precious stones.

The Wind Turbine Technician

Take Pearl J.-P., for instance. She is a wind turbine technician who spends her days 326 feet in the air, dangling by ropes and high-tensile steel to patch composite blades that have been whipped by 66-mile-per-hour winds. She is, by any objective measure, a certified badass. Yet, when Pearl sat down to apply for a senior site lead position-a role she had essentially been performing for 16 months without the title-she stalled. She stared at the requirement for ‘Advanced Thermodynamic Modeling’ and convinced herself she was a pretender. She forgot that she had literally saved a $466,000 component from total failure just 6 weeks prior. Pearl J.-P. wasn’t suffering from a lack of skill; she was suffering from a system that demands we be 106% certain before we dare to claim space.

“The system is designed to make you blink first.”

Bravado vs. Competence

This hesitancy isn’t a bug in your personality; it’s a feature of a modern economy that values self-promotional bravado over quiet competence. We are told to ‘lean in,’ but leaning in feels a lot like falling when you’re standing on the edge of a career shift. The gatekeepers have moved the goalposts so many times that we’ve lost sight of the field. We see 6 ‘preferred’ qualifications and treat them as 6 mandatory hurdles. We see a salary range ending in 6 and assume we only deserve the bottom 6 percent. It is a psychological war of attrition where the prize is a cubicle and the cost is your self-worth.

There is a strange contradiction in the way we view our own abilities. We can see the brilliance in our friends-I can tell you exactly why my colleague deserves a 26 percent raise-but when I look in the mirror, all I see are the 6 mistakes I made in 2016. We are our own most biased historians. We edit out the triumphs and leave the blooper reel on a loop.

The Algorithm Gatekeeper

I often find myself wandering into tangents about why we trust the ‘Required’ section of a job post more than our own resumes. It’s because the document is static, but the doubt is dynamic. You can update your CV 6 times in 16 minutes and still feel like it’s missing the ‘soul’ of your expertise. The automated tracking systems (ATS) don’t help. They are the digital equivalent of a bouncer who only lets people in if they are wearing a very specific shade of 6-carat gold. If your experience is nuanced, if your career path has 6 different turns, the algorithm marks you as ‘unqualified.’ We then internalize that rejection as a personal failure of talent rather than a failure of the software’s 66 lines of code.

The Vulnerability of the Ask

Let’s talk about the ‘66 percent‘ rule. Research often suggests that men apply for jobs when they meet only 60 percent of the criteria, while women often wait until they meet 100 percent. But even that data feels a bit hollow because it ignores the emotional weight of the ‘Ask.’ To ask for a job is to invite a stranger to judge your entire existence based on a 26-kilobyte PDF. It is an act of vulnerability that we mask with jargon. We use words like ‘synergy’ and ‘optimization’ because we are afraid to say, ‘I am smart, I work hard, and I can figure this out in 16 days.’

The Unquantifiable Value

Climbing the Fence

Pearl J.-P. eventually applied for that lead position. She did it because a mentor pointed out that the man currently in the role didn’t know how to calibrate the 6-axis sensors, something Pearl could do in her sleep. She realized that the ‘Requirements’ were a fence, not a wall. You can climb a fence. You can even cut a hole in it if you have the right tools. She stopped looking at the 6 things she didn’t have and started looking at the 16 things she did. The turbine didn’t care about her imposter syndrome when she was 326 feet up; it only cared that she knew which bolt to turn.

The hiring process is fundamentally broken because it tries to quantify the unquantifiable. How do you measure the way a person calms a room during a 6-figure budget crisis? How do you put a metric on the intuition that tells a technician the gearbox is vibrating at 46 hertz instead of 36? You can’t. So they ask for years of experience and degrees as a proxy for trust. But trust is something you have to give yourself first. You have to believe that your 16 years of ‘non-linear’ experience is actually a 16-course feast of problem-solving skills.

“Your value isn’t a calculation; it is a fact.”

The Gaslighting of Merit

I’ve spent the last 46 minutes thinking about that parallel park. Why did I immediately doubt it? Perhaps because we are taught that excellence should be difficult, so when it comes naturally, we assume we’ve cheated. We apply this to our jobs. If we are ‘pretty sure’ we can do the work, we think the work must be too easy, or that we are overestimating ourselves. We’ve been gaslit by a culture that equates ‘struggle’ with ‘merit.’ If you aren’t sweating through 16 interviews, do you even deserve the role? Yes. You do. You deserve the role because you’ve already done the sweating in the years leading up to this moment.

The Arc of Experience

The Business Proposal

We need to stop treating job applications like a confession of our sins and start treating them like a business proposal. You are offering a solution to a problem. If the company has 16 problems and you can solve 12 of them, you are a miracle worker, not a failure. The 4 missing skills are just things you haven’t been interested in yet. They are the ‘extras’ that you will pick up in your first 6 weeks on the job while everyone else is still trying to find the breakroom.

Is the fear still there? Probably. It’s been there for 16 years. But fear is a terrible career coach. It wants you to stay in the 6-foot-deep rut where it’s safe. But the view is better from 326 feet up, and you already know how to climb.