Why I stopped trying to make every criterion equally strong

Spent a long time trying to build all four of my criteria up to roughly equal strength before realizing that wasn't actually the right goal, and that uneven strength across criteria is completely normal and fine. The final merits determination looks at the totality of the evidence — it doesn't require every individual criterion to independently look equally strong. My awards criterion was genuinely my strongest, with well-documented, clearly selective recognition. My leading-role criterion was real but comparatively more modest. Once I stopped trying to force the weaker one up to match the stronger one artificially, and instead focused my remaining time on making the strong ones as strong as possible while presenting the modest one honestly, my overall file read as more credible, not less. An unevenly strong file with one or two clearly excellent criteria and others that are real but modest reads better than a file where everything is stretched to sound equally impressive and, as a result, nothing quite holds up to scrutiny.