My exhibit list got better when I stopped treating it like storage
My final EB-1A petition had 40 exhibits. That number only tells half the story.
Topic
EB-1A
A collection of 13 issues
Prestige is context. Responsibility is proof.
A famous venue is not proof. A famous company is not proof.
The first thing my EB-1A had to explain was my field
Before my EB-1A petition could explain why I was extraordinary, it had to explain what field I was extraordinary in. That sounds obvious. It was not obvious to me at the start.
The 13-year timeline I drew before I wrote a word of my final merits section
Before I wrote my final merits section, I drew a timeline.
Not in a fancy tool. A list, in a Google Doc, by year, from 2011 to 2024.
For each year, one line for every concrete thing on record: a press piece, a launched program, a judging invitation, an award,
I had Forbes coverage from 12 years ago. Here's how I used it as EB-1A evidence.
In December 2011, Forbes ran an article called "Can't meet Eric Schmidt in Paris at LeWeb'11!? No Worries." It covered an event I had organized called the LeWeb Student Warm-up, held just before the main LeWeb conference in Paris. I was 22.
Seven months
Your lawyer sees bullet points. You see the whole journey.
When people hire an EB-1A lawyer, they expect the lawyer to find the story.
That is not what happens.
A lawyer reads what you give them. A few pages of CV, a list of achievements, maybe a LinkedIn URL. From that, they have to reverse-engineer a long career into a
7 things I did before writing a single paragraph of my petition
7 things I did before writing a single paragraph of my petition
Most people think petition writing starts with writing.
It does not.
The writing was the easy part. Everything that made the writing easy happened before I typed a single paragraph of my cover letter.
Here are the seven
One line that tells you if your evidence is ready
One line that tells you if your evidence is ready
Here is a test I used for every single exhibit in my petition.
Before I included a document, I wrote one sentence next to it:
"This proves ______ because ______."
If I could fill in both blanks clearly, the exhibit
The claim-proof map that saved my petition
The claim-proof map that saved my petition
Before I started drafting my EB-1A petition, I had documents everywhere.
PDFs in folders. Screenshots in my downloads. Links bookmarked across three browsers. Recommendation letters in email threads. Evidence I was "pretty sure" I had somewhere.
It felt productive. It was
The 3 types of EB-1A candidates I keep meeting
Since sharing my full EB-1A petition and getting hundreds of messages, clear patterns started to emerge.
Most serious EB-1A, EB-2 NIW, and O-1 candidates fall into one of three archetypes. This post is to help you figure out which one sounds most like you, and what that means for your