A note on comparing your case to other people's posts here

Noticed myself doing this early on and want to name it directly: reading other people's approval stories or strong evidence files here and measuring my own case against theirs point-by-point wasn't actually useful, and at times was actively discouraging in a way that didn't reflect anything real about my own case's actual strength. Every case is built from a different career, a different field, and a different specific mix of evidence — someone else's approval with a stack of major awards doesn't mean you need major awards too if your case is genuinely built well around a different, equally valid combination of criteria. The regulation asks whether the totality of your evidence shows sustained acclaim, not whether your evidence matches someone else's shape. What helped me instead: using other people's posts for concrete, transferable tactics (how they organized evidence, what documentation worked for a specific criterion) rather than as a yardstick for whether my own case was "good enough" relative to theirs. Those are two different, and not equally useful, ways to read the same posts.