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• Author: Rundles, Jeff

MY SISTER, A PROSECUTING ATTORNEY IN NEW HAMPSHIRE, told me a story the other day that got me thinking about timing in life, and about goals.

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She has been talking for years about joining a private law firm because she believes she might make more money than she does as an elected official, and she was discussing a new job with a local firm when her contact there told her she was overqualified for the attorney openings they had at the moment. They told her: Check back later.

I can't tell you how many times this scenario, or its opposite, has happened to me.

I remember being around 25 and landing a job interview with the then-city editor at the Rocky Mountain News. It turned out that there was no job available at the News, but that this particular editor liked very much to bring in young people and burst their bubbles. He was mean. Creating uncontrollable sobs in reporter hopefuls, I later learned, was one of the great pleasures of his life, and I suppose the only plus you could put on my ledger was that I didn't cry.

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The bottom line, he went to great pains to point out, was that I lacked the requisite experience.

Over the years I have had the great fortune to advance in my field, but at the same time I was told many, many times, that one job or another was out of reach because I was too young or too inexperienced.

Then later in life, I had many, many people tell me I was overqualified for a position in question. This is always said with a great deal of respect, like the speaker was actually honoring me by denying me the chance to take a position that was beneath me.

I never really thought about it until recently, but I have spent my whole career, more than 30 years now, either being not qualified enough or overqualified. I got out a calculator and a perpetual calendar over the weekend and I figured out that the very moment when these two phenomena converged--that is, the perfect instant I was very qualified for almost any job in my chosen field--was at precisely 12:14 p.m. on Tuesday Sept. 17, 1991. I was at lunch. As it happened, I did have a job on that day, and even at lunch was in the process of becoming overqualified.

For two very distinct reasons, I have been around a lot of people lately looking for work or looking for a better job. First, I know a lot of people who work for corporations, and second, having...