Get Messy: Why Diving In Beats Waiting for Perfection

There’s a curious delusion that haunts modern professionals. The belief that before you start something—anything, really—you must first understand it completely. As if mastery precedes curiosity. As if competence is a prerequisite, not a result.

It’s nonsense, of course. And nowhere is this more obvious than in artificial intelligence, where the technology changes so fast that by the time you’ve “figured it out,” the acronym has already evolved.

But here’s the secret: you don’t need to know everything. You just need to start.

Want to explore AI? Great. Buy some GPUs. (Yes, they’re expensive. So is ignorance.) Install the drivers. Break your Linux kernel. Swear. Fix it. Ask ChatGPT to write the code. It’ll get half of it wrong. Ask again. Try anyway. Repeat until something works—or explodes.

That’s the process. It’s not elegant. It’s not lean. It’s gloriously inefficient. But that’s where the insight lives—in the mess. Theory is tidy. Progress is not.

The same rule applies everywhere else. Want to understand drug regulation? Read the legislation. All of it. Even the footnotes. Especially the footnotes. Want to learn about investing? Pull up the SEC filings and dig into the accounting footnotes. If you feel confused, excellent. That means you're doing it properly.

Most people don’t fail because they’re not smart. They fail because they wait. For the course. The certification. The consultant. The perfect moment. But the truth is, there is no moment when you’ll feel ready. You become ready by doing.

The Silicon Valley crowd calls this “bias to action.” Which is their way of saying: we have no idea what we’re doing, but we’re doing it faster than you.

At Capital for Cures, we try to live this ethos. We didn’t wait for a committee to bless our event strategy. We just booked the venue. Then we figured out how to make it not suck. We launched the blog before the brand book was finished. We talk to investors before the product is perfect. Because perfection is a mirage. Movement is real.

And yes, you’ll break things. You’ll write bad code. You’ll design slides that make your designer cry. But the trade-off is this: you’ll learn more in 30 hours of messy execution than in 300 hours of pristine planning.

This isn’t an argument for chaos. It’s an argument for dirt. For rolling up your sleeves. For asking dumb questions. For making mistakes publicly, rather than failing privately.

So the next time you’re tempted to wait—to finish the course, hire the expert, or schedule the fourth planning call—don’t. Dive in. Open the terminal. Pull the filings. Ask ChatGPT something stupid. Get rejected. Ask again.

Because in the long run, the people who win aren’t the ones who waited for permission. They’re the ones who were willing to look ridiculous, repeatedly, until they didn’t.

Now go. Break something. Just make sure to back it up first.