If you wait until you’re sure, someone less qualified who wasn’t sure will go first.

Opportunities get handed out in the order people step forward, not in order of who deserved them most. Certainty takes a long time to arrive, and while you are collecting it somebody with half your preparation is already in the room learning on the job. They are not braver or better; they simply had a lower threshold for going. Being qualified matters, and it loses to timing more often than it should.

Lower your own threshold by one notch this week. Apply for the thing you are seventy percent ready for, and put the other thirty percent in after you have asked.