THE WORK BEFORE THE WORK

The early mess matters more than people think.

Everyone loves a good success story. The shiny branding, the big launch, the clean LinkedIn headline. But no one talks about what it looked like three, or even six months earlier, when success was still just a bunch of half-baked ideas, and a wildly optimistic Canva mood board.

The early stages of anything worth building, whether it be a business, a career shift, a new way of leading, rarely look powerful. They look confusing, they feel wobbly, and they run on equal parts caffeine, courage, and mild existential dread. People will see the pitch deck but they will not see the nights you sat in silence staring at a google doc wondering if you were a total fraud. They will hear about the strategy, but they will not see the spreadsheet version 14.3, or the overthinking spiral you rode between empty spaces in your schedule.

What no one says loud enough is that this early-stage chaos is not a problem to be avoided, it is a phase to be respected. Before the strategy is slick, the human has to be doing more than people realise. Before clarity comes commitment and that means saying yes before it is perfect, doing the research, making the decisions, and navigating the dips before anyone else believes in the vision…sometimes including yourself. It looks like answering your own questions, making decisions with partial information, and navigating through 6 different marketing frameworks that all contradict each other.

The rewiring that happens in the early days is what makes the later success sustainable. It is not just about business models or marketing funnels, it is about building the version of you who can lead at the next level. That version is not born from certainty, it is shaped in the middle of all the uncertain moments, when you still move forward anyway. And that version of you is built here, in the mess. Not later, when everything looks polished. 

We live in a culture that rewards the polished, the launch-ready, the confident. But the problem is that expectation keeps a lot of brilliant people frozen, waiting to feel “ready” before they begin. The early stage does not photograph well because it is uncomfortable, quiet, awkward, and often looks like nothing is working, even when everything actually is. Ideas are fragile here, confidence is inconsistent…but momentum is building.

If you are in that stage now, if your project, role, or business feels more like confusion than clarity, don’t panic. That is not a sign of failure, that is what early progress looks like in real time. There is no shortcut through this phase, only a better relationship with it. 

There is no VIP shortcut through this part, no magic template, or secret mentor who can manifest your clarity for you. The leaders who build strong businesses, strong careers, and strong teams just learn how to stay in the fog a little longer without losing their nerve. They get comfortable not knowing and they keep showing up when the reward is just that they have the motivation to keep trying. They get better at asking good questions instead of pretending they already have the answers. And they build muscle, the kind you do not see on social media, but absolutely feel in every future decision.

This is where resilience is built and self-trust forms, where the early groundwork starts becoming real traction. Success, when you finally reach it, will not feel like a lightning bolt, it will be more like a quiet click with all the messy moves finally lining up behind you to reveal a clear path forward. You will look back on the overthinking, the “what on earth am I doing?” days, and realise they were not wasted, that was your training, strategy forming in real time.

So if you are in that stage now, knee-deep in the chaos dressed up as good intentions…keep going, you are not behind or broken. You are building a solid foundation and before anything looks successful, it will almost always look like this, a bit messy, a bit magical, and entirely worth it.