The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture

by Scott Belsky

What’s in the middle? Nothing headline-worthy yet everything important. Your war with self-doubt, a roller coaster of incremental successes and failures, bouts of the mundane, and sheer anonymity.

Volatility is good for velocity. The faster you move and the more mistakes you make, the better your chances of learning and gaining the momentum you need to soar above competitors. Moving fast means conducting lots of experiments—many of which will fail—and making quick turns that are liable to leave you and your team dizzy. This volatility can hurt morale and cause anxiety, but you have a better chance of extraordinary results.

As you craft your team’s culture, lower the bar for how you define a “win.” Celebrate anything you can, from gaining a new customer to solving a particularly vexing problem.

Actively seek out the negative trends as well as the positive, as your longevity over time will be determined by your awareness of weaknesses as much as your strengths.

What should you celebrate? Progress and impact. As your team takes action and works their way down the list of things to do, it is often hard for them to feel the granularity of their progress and you need to compensate. Celebrate the moments when aggressive deadlines are met or beaten. Pop champagne when the work you’ve done makes a real impact. Even if it’s just a few customers that make use of a new product or feature, these are the real milestones you want to celebrate.

It’s more important to be collaborative than to be correct.

The future is drafted by people doing work they don’t have to do. You need to be one of those people—and hire them, too. There is too much wondering and talking, and too little doing. So don’t talk: do.