Being Qualified for Absolutely Nothing

Have you ever made a list of the things you’re good at and a separate list of your knowledge gaps? I have. It’s humbling.

The list of things I’m good at includes making lists, being visually literate, making up tasty recipes, remembering peoples’ food preferences and restrictions, working well with difficult people, calming down babies, being optimistic, and being hard to offend. And while I’ve been able to leverage some of these traits in the past to maintain various jobs, they’ve led me on a meandering professional path to where my most important trait is being great at building a team that fills my many gaps.

During these uncertain times, I’m in the middle of fundraising for my startup. I drained my entire savings and part of my retirement to start it, and raised almost 400k in investment to support two and a half years of R&D. Over the last three days, with potential investors backing out, I’ve been forced to acknowledge that without capital, I can’t pay a team or manufacture a product.

While feeling particularly disappointed and fearful, I started considering finding another job while still making time to fundraise. And, in an act that was simply frosting on my cake of depression, I opened up Craigslist. Looking at job postings is perhaps even more humbling than making my initial list.

As a former curator who made less working at the institution that educated me than my annual tuition, my other jobs include making temporary public murals out of tape, and doing various tasks at small, creative consulting firms. I’m going to hazard a guess that these are not listed qualifications for any job on Craigslist or anywhere else.

The jobs that I am qualified for on Craigslist are rather unsavory, and the ones I found on more legitimate job sites for which I might get a call back, pay minimum wage. There were some interesting ones out there, but on the laundry list of qualifications, I maaaaybe tick two or three boxes at most.

During my hour-long search around 4am Sunday morning, I began fantasizing about the hilarious cover letters I could write that would perhaps garner enough attention for someone to consider me for a job that I have no experience to support.

Half way through the day, fueled only by two hours of stress-dream filled sleep, I remembered another skill. I am an expert at not knowing what I’m doing and trusting that I will figure it out. I will figure this out and I will call on all the people who fill my gaps to help me create a strategy.

While I may be qualified for literally no job that currently exists, I am qualified to create a unique path to the kind of success that suits me.