Belsky - The messy middle: finding your way through the hardest and most crucial part of any bold venture

The journey of creating something from nothing is a volatile one. While we love talking about starts and finishes, the middle miles are more important, seldom discussed, and wildly misunderstood.

You survive the middle by enduring the valleys, and you thrive by optimizing the peaks. You will find your way only by reconciling what you learn from others with what you discover on your own. Youll get lost. At times, youll lose hope. But if you stay curious and self-aware, your intuition and conviction will be your compass.

While difficult to withstand and tempting to rush, the middle contains all the discoveries that build your capacity. The middle is messy, but it yields the unexpected bounty that makes all the difference.

When I set off to write a book about the middle of bold projects and entrepreneurial journeys, you might expect that I started with my own. Having endured five years bootstrapping my own business and facing my fair share of challenges as an entrepreneur, this was my chance to share everything I learned. But I couldnt remember anything. It wasnt memory lossit was just all a big blur.

So I turned to the common source of answers to random ponderings these days: my phone. I flicked through years of random photos taken, back to the middle years of building Behance, my first company, hoping to jog my memory. I founded Behance in August 2006 and signed the documents to be acquired by Adobe in December 2012, so I made my way to 2009 on my phone, the absolute middle of my middle. Thousands of thumbnail images showed screenshots taken on my phone of website errors, bad copy, social media mentions of us and competitors, and various product ideas and changes. These screenshots spanned years and, in some months, outnumbered my photos. The sheer volume of them reminded me of falling asleep every night scrutinizing our product, anxiously looking for something but never knowing exactly what.

I also found another type of screenshotcustomer messages and feedback. I remember capturing these insights to share with my team, but also I needed them. I wanted to hold on to and extend some early semblance of reward and significance at a time when nobody seemed to care.

Scrolling a little farther, I saw a reunion with college friends and then a special moment from my honeymoon during which my wife and I encountered elephants in Thailand. I was surprised to see how strained my smile looked. The memory rushed back, and I recalled the tension of wanting to relish this once-in-a-lifetime moment while realizing I had a team at home running on fumes and I was just a few months away from missing payroll. Being away from the team felt utterly irresponsible, and this burden followed me everywhere. Scrolling farther now, I stumbled on a team event at a restaurant kitchen where we all cooked a meal togetherwe couldnt afford it, but I knew the only thing that mattered was keeping the team together. As I scrolled through our team pics, I was struck by how close and dedicated we became despite the circumstances and our differences. When the odds are against you, without revenue or margin to protect you, teams and relationships are different. Its not work; its survival and self-discovery.

These photos reminded me just how exhausted and uncertain I had beenfueled by my relentless determination to make something awesome. Perhaps, in such periods of struggle, our preoccupations and emotions take up so much mind share that the events themselves become a blur? Or perhaps we dont remember the middle because we dont want to?