◆ ENTREPRENEURSHIP · 2026-10-08

Pull Your Chair Up to the Table: On Starting Before You Feel Ready

There is a version of you that is waiting. Waiting to know enough, to be credentialed enough, to feel like you actually belong at the table where the interesting work happens. I know that version well, because I have been him more than once.

The chair is right there. You just have not pulled it up yet.

The Feeling Is Not a Sign to Stop

When I decided to start ArtResin, I had no chemistry background. None. I was an artist. I knew what it felt like to pour a resin product over a painting and watch it yellow, or gas off fumes that drove me out of my studio, or cure with a surface full of bubbles. I knew the problem from the inside, the way any working artist would. What I did not know was the science behind fixing it.

The sensible thing, by most measures, would have been to wait. Study up. Get qualified. Come back when I had something resembling authority on the subject. But here is the honest truth about that plan: there would always have been one more thing to learn first. The waiting would have been infinite.

So I pulled my chair up to the table in an industry I had no business being in, at least on paper. I brought what I actually had, which was a precise, lived understanding of the end user. I thought like the artist who would open the bottle, work with the product in a real studio, and care about whether it was non-toxic and clear and forgiving. Then I partnered with people who knew the chemistry. Real chemists who could execute the formulation. My job was not to become a chemist. My job was to stay honest about what the product needed to do and to make sure that vision drove the work.

That combination worked. Not because I erased my inexperience, but because I showed up with it and used it.

Competence Comes After the Start, Not Before

This is the thing I wish someone had said plainly to me earlier: competence is not what earns you the right to begin. Beginning is what builds competence. The feelings of impostorship and inadequacy that you interpret as a signal to wait are, almost always, just the sensation of standing at the edge of something new. They are not diagnostic. They do not tell you whether you will succeed. They only tell you that the thing matters to you.

Years after ArtResin, I decided to learn to code. Not just to understand it in a vague, conversational way, but to actually build something real: a browser game. I did it alongside my son Xavier, which meant I could not coast on bluster or pretend I understood things I did not. Kids have a remarkable talent for noticing when you are faking. We learned together, and there were long stretches where I was genuinely the least experienced person in the room, again. I sat with not knowing. I made mistakes in code the way you make mistakes in any craft, by doing the thing badly until you do it less badly. If you want the longer version of that experience, I wrote about it at building a browser game with my son.

The pattern held. Starting was the thing that made me someone who could do it. Waiting would only have made me someone who almost started.

Permission Is Not Coming

A lot of the waiting I see in people, and in myself when I am honest, is really a waiting for permission. For someone with authority to look at you and say: yes, you belong here now. You are allowed.

That moment is rarely coming. The industries and fields and creative communities worth being part of are not set up to formally admit you. You walk in, or you do not. The table extends when you pull your chair up to it. Belonging is not granted, it is enacted. You feel like you belong after you have shown up enough times that showing up becomes the normal thing.

None of this means ignoring skill gaps or pretending expertise you do not have. I was transparent about what I did not know at ArtResin, and that transparency was part of what made the partnerships work. Honesty about the limits of your knowledge is not the same as disqualifying yourself. One is integrity. The other is self-abandonment dressed up as humility.

Start Ugly, Stay Honest

The work you start before you feel ready will probably not be your best work. That is fine. It is supposed to be a beginning, not a masterpiece. The ugly first version of a thing is not evidence that you should not have started. It is evidence that you did.

There is a separate angle to all of this worth reading, about what being an outsider actually gives you strategically in a new field. I wrote about that at naive entry as an advantage. But that piece is about tactics. This one is about something prior to tactics, the simpler and harder thing of letting yourself show up at all.

Pull your chair up. You do not need more credentials, more time, or more certainty. You need to start, and then to keep going until the seat feels like yours, because it will.

If you want to see where the starting has taken me, my current creative and client work lives at davidzak.com.

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