First-generation professional in my family navigating this process alone

Posting this less for the technical content and more because I didn't see anyone in this community talking about the specific experience of going through EB-1A without any family or close personal network who'd been through US immigration before, and I suspect I'm not the only one in that position. The practical effect for me: every unfamiliar term, every process step, every "obviously you'd want to..." piece of advice that assumes some baseline familiarity — none of that was obvious to me starting out, and I had to build that baseline understanding from scratch, mostly through exactly this kind of community and the Criteria Library. That's a real, if invisible, extra cost on top of the case-building work itself. If you're in a similar position: it's genuinely fine to ask what might feel like a basic question here. I found people generally patient about exactly that kind of question, and asking early saved me from some confused assumptions I'd have otherwise carried much further into the process before catching.