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

by Scott Belsky

Creative block is the consequence of avoiding the truth.

To conquer creative block, you must ask bold questions and shine the spotlight on the elephants in the room. Perhaps the product is shitty. Perhaps your business model and all the assumptions leading up to it were fundamentally flawed. The truth will hurt, and it may set you back temporarily, but it will ultimately set you free.

To give bold ideas a chance, sometimes you need to act first and then adjust them as necessary.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe that founders should seek lots of input. Then they need to take all the input they received, mix it up, apply a framework for how the information affects your decision and decide. All advice you receive is too generic to help you—you need to decide for yourself in your exact situation.

Once you admit something isn’t working and make the change, you’re liberated. You’re ready to consider solving an entirely different problem with your full mind and extending your energy long enough to make it happen.

Familiarity drives utilization.

maximizers reported significantly lower life satisfaction, happiness, optimism, and self-esteem, and significantly more regret and depression, than satisficers. Maximizers were also more likely to engage in social comparison and counterfactual thinking, experienced more regret and less happiness after making a consumer decision, and experienced a greater increase in negative mood when they didn’t perform as well as their peers.

Don’t fall into the vortex of navel-gazing; keep moving.