I’m Right on Top of That, Rose

The Career Benefits of Being Just Unqualified Enough

If you are an elder millennial like me, you already get it. If not, please stop what you're doing and stream Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead immediately. This blog will still be here when you return.

Sue Ellen’s magical phrase—“I’m right on top of that, Rose”—is basically waiting for a narrator to add, “And folks, she was absolutely not on top of that.”

It is less a status update and more a verbal smoke bomb. Rose asks a question, Sue Ellen deploys the magic phrase and everyone moves along before realizing she is working from the CliffsNotes version of the assignment.

Relatable? Yes.

To be clear, I am not encouraging teenagers—or grown adults—to invent a résumé and talk their way into a fashion job. Sue Ellen has no degree, no experience and only a loose understanding of what her job actually entails. What she does have is nerve, taste and an increasingly urgent need to figure things out before anyone asks a follow-up question.

Oh, and Warner Bros. So, there’s that.

But here is the part that matters: she actually learns. She rises to the challenge, develops the skills and becomes good at the job she was not technically qualified to have.

That is where the movie logic becomes surprisingly useful career advice.

“Fake It Till You Make It” Has a Branding Problem

“Fake it till you make it” sounds like advice from someone selling a suspicious online course from the front seat of a rented Lamborghini.

It suggests bluffing your way through meetings, pretending to understand things you do not and hoping no one notices that your strategic plan is three Canva templates wearing a trench coat.

That is not what I am recommending.

There is a difference between misrepresenting your abilities and trusting yourself to grow into a challenge.

One is deception.

The other is development.

Most real career growth requires us to accept some responsibility before we feel completely ready for it. Your first leadership role happens before you have years of leadership experience. Your first packaging project happens before your portfolio is full of packaging. Your first presentation to senior executives happens before you stop feeling like a child who wandered into the conference room looking for a juice box.

You can’t become experienced at something without first being inexperienced at it.

At some point, somebody has to let you try.

Sometimes that somebody has to be you.

Being Slightly Under-qualified Can Be Useful

The safest jobs are often the ones we already know how to do.

They are also the ones least likely to change us.

When you step into a role that stretches you, you become more resourceful. You ask better questions. You research. You watch the tutorial. You learn the software. You seek feedback. You uncover skills you might never have developed if you had stayed neatly inside your existing job description.

Creative careers, in particular, are built through assignments that initially feel a little beyond us. You take on the campaign before you feel like a campaign expert. You direct the shoot before you feel like a director. You build the brand system, write the brief, present the concept or manage the project because someone needs to do it.

Somewhere between “What have I gotten myself into?” and the final deliverable, your abilities expand.

You do not fake the work.

You do the work while your confidence catches up.

Creativity Dies in the Comfort Zone

Doing what you already know how to do feels efficient. You know the shortcuts. You know what will work. You can predict the feedback before it arrives.

That can be useful.

It can also become creative autopilot.

When every project feels familiar, we tend to reach for the same solutions. The same layouts. The same references. The same ideas wearing slightly different shoes.

A stretch assignment interrupts that pattern. It forces you to learn a new process, understand a different audience or solve a problem you have never encountered before.

That discomfort is not always evidence that you are failing.

Sometimes it is evidence that your brain is awake.

Growth rarely feels like growth while it is happening. It usually feels like confusion, awkwardness and a browser with 47 tabs open.

Then, one day, the thing that once terrified you becomes another skill you know how to use.

Or, in other words: Figma.

The Sue Ellen Principle

Sue Ellen’s real advantage was not that she had every answer.

It was that she kept moving.

When a problem appeared, she did not immediately decide it proved she did not belong. She adapted. She found help. She used what she already knew and learned what she did not.

Resourceful is kind of an understatement.

Her lack of traditional experience even allowed her to see possibilities that more established people had overlooked. Should we be looking to Gen Z for this? Oof girl, I am not ready for this.

That happens in real careers, too.

Someone moving from social media into a broader brand role may bring a sharper understanding of audience behavior. A designer stepping into strategy may notice practical problems that never appear in the presentation deck. Someone entering a new industry may ask the obvious question that everyone else stopped asking years ago.

A personal fun fact: I initially became a designer because I could never find a job with an advertising title on my résumé. I had to teach myself new skills and pivot if I wanted to buy wine and pay rent. This new skill was design. Now I can't imagine a world in which I wasn't a designer.

That pivot was the best thing I ever did. And it would have never happened if someone hadn’t given me a chance.

I was lucky.

Experience gives us expertise.

Unfamiliarity can give us perspective.

The goal is not to remain unqualified. The goal is to recognize that your existing skills may be more transferable than you think—and that the missing pieces can often be learned.

For example, living with men may give you valuable skills in patience. Not really a résumé highlight, but still a skill.

You Are Probably More Qualified Than You Think

Job descriptions have a way of making every role sound like it requires one human being to possess the combined abilities of an entire creative department, a data scientist and a cheerful woodland wizard.

You may read the list and focus immediately on the two things you have never done.

Meanwhile, you ignore the eighteen things you have done repeatedly because they feel ordinary to you.

They are not ordinary. Jeff in finance is not an expert in typography or negative space.

You may not have worked in that exact industry, but you know how to build a visual system. You may not have used that exact platform, but you have learned six others. You may not have held the title, but you have already been doing pieces of the role for years.

Experience does not always arrive in a perfectly labeled box.

Sometimes it shows up as adjacent skills, unofficial responsibilities, side projects, emergency problem-solving and all the work you absorbed because nobody else knew how to do it.

The question is not always, “Have I done this exact thing before?”

Sometimes the better question is, “What have I already done that proves I can learn this?”

There was a time when I couldn’t keep water from boiling over, and now I make my own pasta.

Shamless skill plug.

Confidence Is Sometimes a Temporary Loan

We tend to imagine confidence as something we earn before taking action.

Usually, it works the other way around.

You take the meeting while nervous. You accept the assignment while uncertain. You open the unfamiliar program, make several alarming mistakes and eventually produce something that works.

Then confidence appears, carrying receipts.

Until that happens, you may need to borrow a little confidence from your future self—the version of you who has already solved the problem.

And so, to that I say: “You’re right on top of that, Rose.”

That does not mean announcing expertise you do not have. It means resisting the urge to disqualify yourself before anyone else has even evaluated you.

In fact, I have always been comfortable saying, “I don’t know if I can do this, but I’ll try.”

Usually, those attempts became some of my coolest creative solutions and I wonder why I was so scared. I get wanting to under promise and overdeliver but at some point you are just being self deprecating.

Waiting for the magical day when you feel 100% ready is not especially useful, because that day often arrives approximately six months after you should have applied.

When I entered art school, I was late to the game. I must have been the only person there who had never touched Photoshop or Illustrator. Who could have even afforded it back then??

My first Illustrator class was much less introductory than I had expected. Our first assignment was to create a design using curved and straight lines. I had no idea how to use the program, so I panicked and simply typed out:

“Type is made of curved and straight lines.”

I was the only person in the class to earn an A.

My professor said that in all her years of giving that assignment, no one had ever come up with that solution.

That was my “right on top of that” moment.

I knew I was in the right place and the skills will come.

Know the Difference Between a Stretch and a Free Fall

There are limits to this philosophy.

A healthy stretch role asks you to build on abilities you already possess. You may know 80% of the job and need to learn the remaining 20%. You have a foundation, even if the structure above it is still under construction.

A free fall is accepting responsibility where your lack of knowledge could cause real harm—or where you have no intention of learning and simply expect other people to cover for you.

You can learn a new design platform.

You should not pretend to be a structural engineer.

The useful version of “fake it till you make it” is not about faking credentials.

It is about practicing courage before courage feels natural.

Sometimes the Job Teaches You Who You Are

Career pivots rarely arrive with a neat little sign announcing that they are the correct next step.

They often look like extra responsibility, an intimidating project, a temporary opportunity or a role that sits just beyond the edge of your experience.

A new challenge can reveal skills that your old environment never required. It can force you to become more strategic, more decisive, more technical or more comfortable speaking up.

Sometimes we do not discover what we are good at by carefully examining what we have already done.

Sometimes we discover it by agreeing to do something new and then frantically figuring it out.

Get on Top of It, Rose

Sue Ellen’s phrase is funny because it is so obviously premature.

But perhaps that is also why it works.

“I’m right on top of that” is not always a factual statement.

Sometimes it is a decision.

It is the moment you stop hovering nervously around the problem and begin taking ownership of it.

You may not know the answer yet or have the perfect background. But you can get on top of it—not by pretending forever, but by learning quickly, working honestly and refusing to treat temporary inexperience as a permanent limitation.

The comfort zone may protect your ego, but it rarely expands your portfolio.

So apply for the role. Volunteer for the project. Learn the skill. Make the first imperfect attempt.

And when opportunity asks whether you can handle what comes next, perhaps the answer is not, “I have already mastered it.”

Perhaps it is simply:

“I’m right on top of that, Rose.”