#49 Are you editing out the best part?

You sit down to write about yourself, and the first thing out is "I deliver results." Which is true. It's also what everyone at your level says, right before they reach for "cross-functional leadership" and "driving impact."

Don't fight it. The generic version always comes out first. It's the reflex — the shape your work takes after years of being measured on outcomes and never once asked to explain how you actually got them.

But your story lives one level down from that sentence: what actually made the thing hard, and what you did when it got hard.

"I delivered the launch" is a result — and any of the fifty people who applied before you can say the same thing.

"The two teams I needed had just been reorged and wanted nothing to do with each other, and the exec who backed the whole thing left six weeks before the date" — and then what you did next — nobody else can say that. It only happened to you.

I get it why it happens. At Amazon, constraints are just in the water. Talking about frozen headcount, a moving date, a peer who wouldn't budge feels like whinging, so you don't narrate it. You operated inside it, shipped and called it 'deliver results'. So, the texture that makes you specific — the judgment, the calls under pressure, the how — is the first thing you cut, because it never felt like the story. It felt like the job.

However, at this level, that's the whole game. Everyone has results, so that's not what folks are buying. They're buying how you think when it's hard, because that's the judgement they'll be listening to and working with for the next three years.

One thing to try this week:

take one thing you're proud of, and don't write the outcome — write the hard middle. What was working against you, where it nearly came apart, the specific move a less experienced person wouldn't have made.

You’re not capturing it as a verbatim narration for an interview, this is an excavation site. Its job is to show you how you actually operate when it's hard: the instinct, the judgment, the call only you would've made. That's the gold — and you usually can't see it until it's on the page.

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Chat soon,

Mel

P.S. The generic sentence is just the lid. The how underneath it is the only part they can't get from anyone else.