Go to most drugstores in the US and take a look in the toothpaste aisle. What you’ll see is hundreds of different options. A half dozen brands, each offering dozens of different versions: tartar control, whitening, baking soda-enhanced, breath freshening, the list goes on and on. How do you choose? It would be prohibitively expensive in time and money to try each. Some qualities, such as how well they prevent tooth decay, would take years to determine.

The Concept of Gatekeeping

Given too many choices, people usually employ strategies to quickly eliminate the least likely candidates. I call this Gatekeeping — aggressively disqualifying potential selections by including or excluding those with certain qualities. Usually, this means automatically excluding any choices that lack the qualities you want. In the case of toothpaste, this might mean automatically excluding any item not claiming tartar control. If the list of possible options is still too large, it’s typical to add other qualities it must have. Deciding among various tartar control toothpastes that also offer whitening and baking soda is a much smaller and more manageable selection pool than the entire toothpaste aisle.

Gatekeeping in Everyday Decisions

Much of life, from toothpaste selection to job prospects to finding a life partner, operates largely on Gatekeeping; selecting from a large number of choices by aggressively disqualifying possible selections, often using criteria that is subjective. When I mentioned this to a friend, he responded that this observation is at odds with my post “Anything Worth Doing is Worth Doing Badly.” They argued that my toothpaste example shows that, far from it being ok to do things ‘badly’, in order to make it through the Gatekeeping of life it’s important to do things flawlessly lest one get weeded out.

Learning Through Gatekeeping

I thought about this for a while and came to the conclusion that both are true; many choices are made via Gatekeeping, but learning how to navigate those gates is a learning process that means being willing to do things less than perfectly and then see how they match up against those gates. Only by being willing to undertake the learning process, and being willing to fail, can we possibly learn enough to get through those gates. In other words, it takes a lot of practice and not getting through the gates to have the experience in navigating them.

Gatekeeping in Professional Settings

Gatekeeping comes about in any situation in which there are a great many possible selections to choose from. This aggressive culling must be done because the time and effort involved in carefully vetting each selection would be prohibitive. The least likely candidates are discarded so time and focus can be turned toward the more likely candidates. Take, for instance, well-paying job openings. For each opening, many people would be interested. This is not to say they’d be qualified for the job, just that they would take the job if offered. For instance, when we posted software engineer jobs it was not uncommon for us to see applications from people hoping for a chance to break into the field but with little or no software engineering experience at all.

The Challenge of Choosing Well

The sad truth is that some of these people, given enough time and training, would have made superb software engineers. Most, however, would have struggled and ultimately failed. The problem is in figuring out which ones are more or less likely to succeed and thus which possibilities to concentrate on. The sad truth is that the best way to predict if someone will do something well is if they’ve already done this thing well. This leads to a situation where companies only want to hire people who have been successful in the exact position before.

Navigating Personal Relationships

Another place this shows itself is in seeking a life partner. I constantly hear from both men and women how difficult it is to find a romantic partner. A good friend of mine, for instance, says he can’t find a date no matter how hard he tries. At the same time, he has several women friends who hang around him, go to shows with him, shop with him, and do all manner of things where an outsider might assume they have a romantic relationship. I am certain that many, if not all, of them would enter into a romantic relationship with him if he wished. However, for whatever reason, they don’t meet his criteria for what he wants in a romantic partner.

Consequences of Information Disclosure

This leads to a problem. If more information leads to a higher chance of disqualification, is it unwise to make more information available? Certainly, in the dating world it’s commonplace for people to hide things that might potentially disqualify them. I personally know people who have misrepresented that they were divorced when they were not, because they knew that potential partners might disqualify them because they were still in another relationship. I spoke at length to a man who was telling romantic partners that he was divorced when he was not even separated. I asked him if he didn’t think this misrepresentation would be harmful to both relationships in the long run. His response was women would never date him if they knew he was married. His hope was that he could kindle the new relationship and then conclude the old one.

Embracing Transparency and Trust

I don’t condone this behavior. I think a relationship founded on misrepresentation will forever have less trust than it might otherwise have. I do, however, see his position as rational. Knowing he would be disqualified if he revealed that he was still married, he decided to conceal that information. I think a better long-term choice would have been for him to conclude the existing relationship first, or at least not hide it, but I do see his choice as rational and one that we all make every day, albeit usually in far more minor and less impactful ways. This behavior is hardly limited to relationships. Much of the Marketing industry revolves around highlighting some qualities of products while minimizing others. This is sometimes done purposefully to get around people’s Gatekeeping so as not to get disqualified. For instance, I use a skin care product that used to promote its use of ‘microbeads’. After concerns about the impact of microbeads on the environment made the news, that same product started mentioning the microbeads only in tiny print on the back of the container. Eventually they removed the microbeads entirely. They were making it harder to know that microbeads were being used, knowing that just the mention of them would cause some people to not use the product.

The Importance of Making Informed Choices

It’s clear that there is a real risk in disclosing more information about yourself or about a product. Unless it’s exactly the information the recipient wants to hear, you risk having yourself disqualified from opportunities. There is another option, which is freely sharing most information. For instance, anyone reading this blog will get a good sense of who I am and what I value. For anyone determined to find a reason to disqualify me from anything, they are certain to be able to find something they don’t like in my writings and videos. On the flip side, knowing me better means there will be fewer surprises and more trust for any relationship that does develop, business or otherwise. Given that so much Gatekeeping now is done automatically by algorithm and AI, I run a fair amount of risk by sharing so freely, but I’m confident that time will show it was the right course of action. In the long run, trust is more important than getting through these gates.

Conclusion: Beyond the Gatekeeping

Ultimately, we are talking about far more than just picking the best tube of toothpaste—it’s about how we make choices and how choices are made about us. It’s easy to get bogged down in trying to make the perfect choice each time or being worried about getting through the Gatekeeping of others. The important thing is to recognize that it is occurring. Whether you are choosing or hoping to be chosen, think about the consequences versus the benefits of how much information you share and what the gates are.