It came up on a team meeting call, almost as a side thought. We were a global team in an international company, and the call was about each team member sharing what they would present to the wider department about their role and what they work on. The team manager was still fairly new then, and it didn't cross his mind to include me. New or not, he could have asked. It wasn't until a teammate spoke up on the call and said I had a role on the team too, that I worked on projects and was actively in the middle of something, that I should be included, that it even came up. Then the manager agreed, absolutely, I should be involved.
I got added at the end, an afterthought to an afterthought. Simply put, I was overlooked.
I had the least time to prepare of anyone on that call. When the day came, it turned out the manager was running the deck with the first draft I'd sent, not the finished version, because no one had paid enough attention to swap it in. So I did the only thing I could. I pulled the presentation up on my own screen and ran my part from there, live, in front of the whole department, offices around the world watching.
Then something I didn't expect. My part landed. Not "fine," not "good enough for the time you had." People on the call singled it out as the best part of the whole thing. One of my own teammates texted me after: very well done, very smooth. I still have the screenshot. I sat there looking at it a little stunned, because I'd been the afterthought, and the afterthought had just delivered the best part of the presentation.
Here's what I've come to understand about that, and it took me years. I don't get the same opportunities other people get. I never have. I'm not the loudest voice in the room. I do the work, I do it well, and part of me has always believed the work should speak for itself. I don't go to the powers that be with look at me, look at what I did. But doing the work quietly doesn't get you noticed, so I usually watch from a distance as doors swing open easily for other people.
It isn't only me, though. Think about the person everybody's cool with who somehow never makes the invite list. The whole crew makes plans, invites the usual people, and only finds out that person was left off when someone asks, wait, are they not coming? Or the birthday that comes and goes with barely a word, from people whose own birthdays that person never once forgot. Liked by everyone, thought of by no one. A specific kind of overlooked, and a lot of people know exactly how it feels.
For a long time, that ate at me. You look around, and everyone seems to be getting waved through doors you're standing outside of. But then I finally caught the part I'd been missing. The chances I do get, the ones I've had to wait for, tend to be the ones that matter most. When the rare chance finally comes, I don't waste it. I make it count in a way that leaves people wondering how they overlooked me in the first place.
Here's the lesson: being overlooked is not the same as being incapable, and the two get confused all the time, mostly by the people doing the overlooking. If the chances are coming slower for you than for the people around you, it is not a verdict on what you're worth. It just means your proof is going to arrive later, and louder. So when the door finally cracks, the afterthought, the thing nobody expected much from, you take it, and you pour everything into it, because that is the moment the room finds out what you already knew. That there's no one who does it like you.
See you next Sunday.
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