Reading time – 7 minutes

If you are reading this, there is a very good chance you fall into the category I call a LIG: low-income smart guy.

That means you are smarter than average. You know a lot. You think a lot. You process a lot. You read a lot. You analyze a lot. You make spreadsheets. You compare options. You research endlessly. You consider every variable from every angle.

And then you do nothing.

Or, if you do make good money, you are probably doing it as an employee. You are sitting in a respectable nine-to-five job, making decent money for somebody else, while telling yourself that one day you will start your own business when everything is more clear, more stable, more planned out, safer, and more perfect.

That day never comes.

The number one thing you need to do when you start your first business is not figure out a perfect niche. It is not building a website. It is not choosing the perfect business name. It is not get your LLC. It is not made sure your pricing model is polished and elegant and optimized.

The number one thing you need to do is become emotionally comfortable with two things: imperfection and incompleteness.

Those are the two things you hate the most.

And that is exactly why you are stuck.

You were trained your entire life to believe that incomplete is bad and imperfect is bad. You were raised in school systems, family systems, and work systems that punished mistakes and rewarded neatness, certainty, and obedience. You were trained to think that if something is not ready, then you should not proceed. You were trained to think that if there is still ambiguity, then the intelligent move is to wait.

That mindset works fine if your goal is to be a good employee.

It is terrible if your goal is to become free.

If you want to build your first location-independent consulting business or service business, you must get comfortable executing on plans that are not complete and taking action before everything feels finished.

That is how business works.

You do not wait until you know everything. You move when you know enough.

That is a very different standard.

Most smart men are waiting until they are 100 percent sure. That is why they stay employees forever. They think they are being rational, but what they are really doing is hiding fear under the disguise of intelligence.

They are not being careful. They are procrastinating in a highly sophisticated way.

The truth is that you need to get your first client before you know exactly how every piece of the puzzle will work. That does not mean you have zero clue what you are doing. It means you do not need total certainty. If you are 30 percent there, 50 percent there, 70 percent there, that is enough to move.

You will figure out the rest as you go.

And yes, that sounds terrifying to a LIG because LIGs are addicted to certainty. They want every answer in advance. They want to know exactly how they will solve the client’s problem, exactly how long it will take, exactly what every step will look like, exactly how to phrase the sales call, exactly where the time will go in the calendar, exactly how the pricing will work, and exactly how to avoid every possible mistake before they begin.

That is not entrepreneurship. That is paralysis.

When you get your first client, you will figure things out very quickly because now the game is real. Now money is on the line. Now you are committed. Now you are motivated. Now you are no longer sitting around fantasizing about business. You are in business.

Those changes everything.

I have seen this over and over again, and I have lived it myself. I have been a consultant for decades. I have taken on clients when I was not 100 percent sure exactly how I was going to solve every little part of the problem. I had a strong idea. I had enough. And then I moved. And once I moved, I figured the rest out.

You will too.

The same thing applies to sales.

A lot of you will say, “I do not know exactly what to say on the phone.” Great. Welcome to the club. Nobody knew exactly what to say on the phone when they first started. You learn by doing. You do not learn by thinking about doing. You do not learn by reading ten books and making a beautiful spreadsheet about the ideal sales process. You learn by getting on the phone and sounding awkward and stumbling and improving.

That is how this works.

When I first started making sales calls in my twenties, I was not smooth. I was not polished. I was not some natural-born closer. I sounded weird. I was hesitant. I was awkward. I still made money. Then I got better. And you will too.

But you will not get better sitting there rehearsing for six months.

You also need to stop hesitating once you get your first client. This is another classic LIG problem. You finally get one client and instead of using that success as momentum, you freeze again. You tell yourself you should not get a second or third client too quickly because you want to make sure you serve the first client properly.

No.

Get the second client. Get the third client. Get them as quickly as you can.

Will it be a little messy? Yes. Good. It is supposed to be a little messy in the beginning. That is part of the process. You are learning how to operate as a business owner. You are building the machine while the machine is running. That is normal.

A smart employee mindset says, “I need to make sure every system is fully built before I expand.”

An entrepreneurial mindset says, “I need to move, make money, make adjustments, and improve under real conditions.”

That is why entrepreneurs make money. Not because they are perfect. Not because they never make mistakes. Not because they always know exactly what they are doing.

They make money because they act.

They make money because they are willing to be wrong in public, fix things fast, and keep moving.

If you study any serious entrepreneur, not the fantasy version, but the real version, you will see mistake after mistake after mistake. Bad decisions. Wrong hires. Wrong offers. Wrong timing. Confusing execution. Missteps. Rebuilds. Restarts. That is not an exception. That is the pattern.

The reason successful entrepreneurs get rich is not because they avoid mistakes. It is because they make a lot of mistakes and keep going.

Meanwhile, LIGs are sitting safely on the sidelines making none.

You need to understand something very important: perfectionism is not a strength. In many cases, it is low self-esteem.

When you say, “I just want to make sure this is perfect before I move,” what you are really saying is, “I do not trust myself to handle reality unless I can create the illusion of total control first.”

That is not confidence. That is fear.

A confident man says, “This is good enough. I will move now and adjust later.”

A fearful man says, “I need another three months to refine this.”

That second man stays in his job forever.

And that is a disaster, especially now.

You are not operating in a calm, stable world where you can take your time for the next five years and slowly get around to maybe starting a business someday. You are operating in an era of AI disruption, economic instability, collapsing Western systems, and rapidly shrinking employee security.

This is not the era for perfectionists.

This is the era for speed.

That does not mean recklessness. It means speed. It means acting once you have enough information instead of waiting for complete information that will never arrive.

It means doing outreach even if your pricing is not perfect yet.

It means taking calls even if your script is not perfect yet.

It means getting clients even if your implementation plan is not perfect yet.

It means making adjustments after motion begins, not before.

By the time you get to client number four, a lot of this emotional resistance disappears anyway. That is the funny part. The fear feels enormous when you are at zero. It feels massive when you are thinking about the first call, the first offer, the first client, the first pricing decision, the first real implementation. But once you are actually in motion and you have a few clients and money is coming in, this whole obsession with perfection and completeness loses its power.

You stop caring so much.

You get better.

You trust yourself more.

You realize the thing that scared you was never the business itself. It was your own discomfort with being imperfect while you learned.

That is why the real first step in business is emotional, not tactical.

You do not need another spreadsheet.

You do not need another six weeks of thinking.

You do not need another book.

You need to get comfortable being incomplete.

You need to get comfortable being imperfect.

You need to take action before every variable is solved.

That is the shift.

You do not have to like imperfection and incompleteness. I do not care whether you like them. But you do need to become okay with them. You need to become functional in their presence. Because if you cannot operate until everything feels neat and finished, then you will never build anything important.

Your first business will not be built by a perfect version of you.

It will be built by the version of you who finally decides to move before he feels ready.

That is the man who gets free.

Bottom of FormAI did NOT write this article. The article comes 100% from me and is 100% my content. However, AI was used to transcribe this content from some of my other social media which is why the voice is a little different. It’s still 100% my content and not written by AI. AI will never “write” my content!  Remember that you can always go to calebjonesblog.com and subscribe to my Substack if you want articles physically written by me with no AI involvement whatsoever.

Leave your comment below, but be sure to follow the Five Simple Rules.