The Messy Middle

The Messy Middle challenges the notion that projects grow slowly and smoothly toward success by outlining the rocky but important intermediate stages of any journey and how to survive them.

No matter what type of journey you are setting out on, whether it’s entrepreneurial or a personal project, the messy middle is inevitable. Whenever you initiate a new endeavor, you need to give a significant amount of initial energy. While this power is necessary to get your project off the ground, it also isn’t as hard to find because the puppy-love phase has you enamored with your new idea. With fairytale-like wonder, we often only see the beginning or the end of ventures.

What we fail to recognize is all of the hard work and pain that occurred in the space between the founding and end. In the middle portion of your project, you’ll experience a rollercoaster of challenges. Your endeavor itself and your own emotional connection to it will go through many highs and lows. At times you may lack enthusiasm and feel lost. This portion of the journey will make or break you. Whenever we persist through this challenging part, however, we later see an upward trending curve, even if that graph has multiple highs and lows along the way.

The author, Scott Belsky, is no stranger to the laborious center of any project. His online platform and company Behance struggled through a messy middle for years. At times no-one cared about his idea, many expressed doubts, and he felt like the entire company would fall apart. Belsky’s struggles through the middle of Behance’s journey helped him learn to keep going when times get tough in the middle.

Inevitably, you will go through numerous moments of success and failure along your journey, especially in the intermediate portion. What does it take to survive the messy middle? Belsky says that to come out on top, we should maintain self-awareness amid the lows and the highs. We don’t realize that both the ups and the downs impact us personally in ways that can hinder our progress. When we are going through a great time, we let our ego take charge. This hinders our ability to make decisions effectively because our psyche makes us overconfident. Good advice falls on deaf ears when shared with one who thinks they’ve got it made and that they don’t need to improve. On the flip side, when our venture is struggling, we grow insecure and vulnerable. This leads to leaders blaming others for the difficulties the company is experiencing, which can undermine the effectiveness of the team. Self-awareness can be as simple as remaining open to feedback. From the experience of the author, leaders who…