A friend of mine is building a business, and she has been at it long enough to know it works. The product is there, the customers are there, and the next step is clear: go out and raise the investment to scale it. But every time we speak, she finds another reason why she is not quite ready yet. She needs to understand the numbers better and be more polished in her presentation. She needs to know more before she can sit in those rooms.
I understand that feeling. A lot of my career has required me to walk into rooms where I did not have the most obvious background. After years in research and technology, I moved back to Nigeria and found myself in infrastructure finance. I did not have a finance background in the traditional sense, but the work was in front of me, so I learned what I needed to learn and did the work. That pattern has repeated itself many times throughout my journey - business optimisation, communications, corporate services, and now upstream leadership.
Research teaches you that ignorance is a starting point. You begin with very little, you read, ask questions, test your assumptions, and stay with the problem long enough to become useful. Sometimes that means teaching yourself. Sometimes it means finding the people who already know and being humble enough to learn from them. Over time, you stop being embarrassed by what you do not know and become more interested in what it will take to close the gap.
The rooms will teach you what you need to know. You close the gap by being in the conversation, not by waiting outside it until you feel worthy of the invite.