The Messy Middle summary

If you’ve ever tried your hand at something entrepreneurial or creative, you’ll know that any prosperous venture requires vast amounts of time and commitment. And whether your project involves writing a novel or launching a start-up, you’ll likely face hurdles.

Unfortunately, these hardships are often compounded by the fact that, during your journey to success, you’ll likely receive little to no external rewards. Instead of reaping profits, you’ll be spending money. Instead of adoring customers, you’ll be struggling to inform people that your business even exists.

During your entrepreneurial journey, you’ll inevitably experience both the triumphs and failures and these will have an impact on your project. But what’s less obvious is that these extremes will also have a significant effect on you as a person.

This is where self-awareness becomes indispensable. Why? Because understanding how the highs and lows of an entrepreneurial journey may adversely influence you will help you to remain clear-sighted, even in extreme times.

The human brain is excellent at identifying cause and effect and understanding the short-term consequences of actions. But we often struggle to project chain reactions. Our failure to take into account the long-term means we neglect to lay the foundations for future accomplishments and opportunities.

Playing the long game in business requires you to disregard the usual principles of productivity occasionally. You’ll spend significant time exploring ideas and avenues which offer little hope of any short-term business transactions, but which help you to build the strong working relationships that might yield fruitful collaborations several years in the future.

It might not feel like it sometimes, but the messy middle is not only about getting through the inevitable lows and setbacks that hit you mid-project. Muddling through the messy middle also means using the high points of your journey to accelerate your progress toward the finish line. To leverage these highs, you must recognize and build on the aspects of your venture which are working well. In other words, you’ll need to optimize.

When you try something that works – whether it’s a new habit that boosts your productivity, or an inspired alteration to a product that customers love – you should rigorously evaluate the improvement. Ask yourself: why was it successful, how can we replicate this accomplishment, and how can I spread this improvement through my team?

If you’ve learned from your mistakes and optimized the things you’ve done right, then at some point during your venture, you will make it out of the messy middle and head toward the finishing line. This point of completion will mean something different for every person – it could be getting your novel published or selling your start-up to a bigger company. But as you emerge from the middle of your project, try not to lose the mind-set that helped you get through it.

Interestingly, the only downside to successfully progressing any new venture toward its completion point is that you’ll move past the period of development when you were willing to take bold action. And ironically, it was probably these audacious actions that accelerated your progress.