<p>Who is the author of The Messy Middle?</p>

<p>The author of The Messy Middle is Scott Belsky.</p>

Entrepreneurship

The Messy Middle Book Summary - The Messy Middle Book explained in key points

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Name: The Messy Middle
Rating: 4.2 (70 reviews)
Author: Scott Belsky

Scott Belsky

Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture

4.2 (70 ratings)

19 mins

Brief summary

The Messy Middle by Scott Belsky is a guide for entrepreneurs and leaders on how to survive the difficult and uncertain middle stages of building a successful business. It offers practical insights and advice on navigating through challenges and evolving with your business.

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Success

Table of Contents

The Messy Middle
Summary of 6 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 6

What’s in it for me? Discover how success is forged in the messy middle.

These days it seems impossible to pick up a newspaper or watch the news without hearing about another prosperous start-up, complete with details of their multi-million-dollar valuation and ambitions for world domination. But how much can these incredible stories teach us? Are the glittering press releases giving us the truth about their rise to the top, or are we only getting the sanitized version that they want us to hear?

Understanding how the most successful companies got to where they are today is crucial, given that 90 percent of all start-ups crash and burn before making any impact on the marketplace. When entering into an exciting and uncertain start-up journey of our own, how do we make sure it ends up being one of the successes? While many guides focus on either kicking off or concluding your venture, we’ll discover that the real determinant of accomplishment is whether you can weather the highs and lows after you’ve already gotten your project started and your initial funding secured. In other words, the key to start-up success is found in the messy middle.

Read on to learn

why preparing for long-term accomplishment feels counterproductive;
why you should be focused on fixing what works, not what’s broken; and
why you should never think of your project as finished.

Business success is forged in the difficult middle of any venture.

Beginning a new venture is akin to setting out on an arduous journey. Whether your chosen field is entrepreneurial or artistic, you’ll probably share similar fears and hopes with the other people trying to strike out and plunge into something new. But regardless of what it is you’re attempting to create, you’ll undoubtedly encounter the messy middle.

The messy middle of any worthwhile venture is incredibly volatile – a rollercoaster ride of highs and lows, during which your enthusiasm and your venture itself will expand and contract seemingly without warning. Once you and your new project are out of the initial honeymoon phase – when you’re blissfully unaware of how much you don’t know – you’ll likely feel lost.

Why? Because the middle of a project is all about finding a direction, making progress, and then stumbling and losing your way again. Your task is to weather the lows, enjoy the highs, and keep pushing to ensure each low isn’t as low as the low before, and each high is higher.

When you’re in the thick of it, this mid-section might look like its made of only downhills and uphills, but after a while, you’ll hopefully see an upward-slanted median toward successful completion. This is what the journey to accomplishment looks like.

If you’re not convinced, just consider the author’s path.

After founding in 2006 an online platform called Behance for connecting professionals working in creative industries, Scott Belsky experienced his own messy middle, which lasted for several years. During this time, there were periods when his whole project seemed on the verge of falling to pieces. No one beyond his employees cared for or understood his idea, and if anyone did show an interest in the project, all they expressed were doubts.

During this difficult stage of his business, Belsky was so crippled with worry and self-doubt that he could only maintain an appetite by taking anti-nausea pills. Many entrepreneurs feel uncomfortable talking about this ugly period in their lives, but this is the reality of the messy middle.

Give yourself a much-needed sense of a short-term reward by manufacturing milestones.

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.

It’s crucial to stay self-aware during times of both triumph and hardship.

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.

Preparing for future success is important, but may not always feel productive at the time.

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.

Optimize for success by always trying to do a good thing better.

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?

Maintain your business edge by never thinking of your venture as finished.

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.

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What is The Messy Middle about?

The Messy Middle (2018) lifts the lid on the difficult reality of driving your entrepreneurial venture from conception to completion. Eschewing the conventional fairytale of the incremental rise to glory, Scott Belsky explains how and where start-up success is forged: in the challenging but crucial middle stage of the venture.

The Messy Middle Review

The Messy Middle (2018) by Scott Belsky is a valuable resource for anyone navigating the challenging and often chaotic middle stages of a project or venture. Here's why this book is a worthwhile read:

Full of practical strategies and insights, it provides concrete steps and solutions to help tackle the messy middle and overcome common hurdles.
Incorporating real-life examples and interviews with successful entrepreneurs, it offers relevant and relatable stories that illustrate the author's points effectively.
With its refreshingly honest approach to the messy middle, the book acknowledges the complexities and uncertainties of the journey, making it engaging and relatable.

Best quote from The Messy Middle

Innovation has a nasty headwind, rarely a tailwind.

—Scott Belsky

Who should read The Messy Middle?

Anyone trying to implement a big idea
Entrepreneurs looking for fresh insights
Those struggling to motivate themselves through challenging times

About the Author

Scott Belsky is an entrepreneur, investor and author. He is the founder and former CEO of Behance, the world’s leading digital networking service for creative professionals. He is also the internationally bestselling author of Making Ideas Happen, a book about successfully executing your ideas.

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Entrepreneurship Career & Success

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