Embracing the Messy Middle
Sometimes I feel like everywhere I look, there’s some book, podcast, or social media post, touting the keys to success and achieving greatness. With all the content on this topic you’d think we’ve become a society obsessed with success – and not just any success – specifically fast success & fast growth. We don’t want to wait years and endure the challenges along the way; we want greatness now. From diets promising overnight results to experts claiming they have the ultimate hack to business fortunes … our world today seems to be orbiting around this idea that fast success is the aim of life.
Many people would argue that we can thank the influx of AI productivity tools on the market for this – from students delivering pristine assignments far beyond their comprehension levels to social media accounts posting content at prolific rates that defy human ability to absorb information. These examples are mind-bending enough to make you want to blame AI but let me offer you a counter-thought.
As humans we’ve been searching for short cuts to success for ages – let’s not forget the snake oil salesmen of the wild west with their concoctions of miracle serums guaranteed to make you wealthy & wildly attractive.
Sure, AI is a contributing factor, but AI itself is not the cause. AI, like any tool, can be used for good or for evil, and that depends entirely on the character, values and beliefs of the person using it. Yes, generative AI is a force to be reckoned with, but it does not have the capacity to create anything beyond what you put into it. It also doesn’t have the ability to make you into something you’re not – it will only amplify what you already are and do it faster.
I believe the bigger culprit is our growing aversion to the messy middle of persevering through the hard work that’s often riddled with failures on our journey to success. In other words, the messy middle takes time. One of the dangers of AI is its ability to produce fast results. Today it takes very little expertise creating AI prompts to “ChatGPT” a business plan in seconds or create an illustration of a garden. It takes very little effort to skip the messy middle entirely. Why wait months, weeks, days or even hours when you can have what you want in minutes?
But what if we’re missing something? What if the messy middle is more important than we think?
Let’s look at our culture’s fascination with influencers. Ask a group of 10 high school students today what they see themselves doing for work and you’re likely to hear “social media influencer” among the more frequent answers. Yet if you ask this same group what it takes to become a successful social media influencer, they probably won’t have a clue. They just know they want to be successful.
They’re dazzled by the current state of that person’s lifestyle and influence. What they don’t see is the years of hard work and failures along the way. They don’t see the messy middle of researching, learning, doing, failing, and repeating that cycle again and again. They only see that person’s picture of success as it’s presented today. Even Mr. Beast, one of the biggest YouTube influencers, was 6 years in the making before he broke through into success. That’s 6 years of learning, doing, failing on repeat.
And it’s not just students who are falling into this belief. Many of us look at the lives of successful entrepreneurs, CEO’s, VP’s and other leaders in our communities and say, “I want that.” We fixate on the image, comparing ourselves and our achievements (or lack thereof), with other people’s seemingly overnight success, becoming increasingly discouraged with our own lives and wondering why we aren’t “there” yet. It’s like we don’t want to admit there is a messy middle on the road to success, and we’d rather spend our days searching for the magic pill or secret formula, even though the truth is: there isn’t one.
Becoming successful in anything means doing the work.
Doing the work, means knowing that you will have failures. Your first presentation on the job will probably not be great, but after doing 100 presentations it’ll be much smoother, and you’ll be much better at connecting with your audience. It’s the same with anything, like how your first school assignment will be worse than your 10th, your first product launch will be worse than your 5th, your first sale will be harder and choppier than your 100th, and so on.
Failure is the key. Do the Reps.
If there was ever a formula for success in anything, it’s repetition. Fail, get up, and do it again. Strive for consistency over perfection. In fact, I would go so far as to say that failure is the most important prerequisite of success. Said differently, you can’t graduate into success without taking the class on failure. No great work of art has ever been created overnight: Michelangelo took 3 years to sculpt the statue of David. No business or career is successful overnight: Amazon didn’t turn a profit for almost a decade. It’s the failures in the messy middle that shape your success and contribute ultimately to who you are becoming.
“All Overnight Success Takes 10 Years”
It’s in the working at something that greatness is truly achieved, and success is built. Working at your craft, practising your art, putting something out into the world, failing, learning, trying again – until you succeed. The truth is you can’t chase success, because it’s elusive, it’s not something you can actually grab hold of. You can’t find success; success finds you while you’re on your journey and doing the work of becoming who you were created to be.
Here's a list of messy middles to inspire you to embrace failure and keep moving forward.
James Dyson created over 5,000 failed prototypes of his bagless vacuum cleaner before achieving commercial success.
Walt Disney's was fired from the Kansas City Star because the editor felt he "lacked imagination, his first animation company went bankrupt, and his vision of Disneyland was rejected by over 300 bankers.
J.K. Rowling received twelve rejections from publishers before the first Harry Potter book was published.
Colonel Sanders was rejected by over 1,000 restaurants and faced many business failures before founding KFC.
Henry Ford went bankrupt twice before founding the Ford Motor Company.
Steve Jobs was fired from Apple, the company he co-founded, before eventually returning and leading it to new heights.
Soichiro Honda was fired from his first job as a mechanic before founding the automotive giant, Honda.
Thomas Edison failed in 1,000 experiments before perfecting the light bulb.
Dr. Seuss had 27 different publishers reject his first book ‘To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street’.
Amazon, started as as an online bookstore in 1994, barely survived bankruptcy and didn't turn its first profit until the last quarter of 2001, 7 years later.
Airbnb started in 2007, was rejected 7 times before raising $112 million, so their 'overnight success' took 4 years of near bankruptcy.
Failure isn’t something to be avoided, it’s a prerequisite for success.
You can’t succeed if you don’t try, and when you try something new, you’ll invariably fail. So instead of trying to skip the messy middle to avoid the risk of failing, embrace it. Reframe failure and challenges as things to achieve, rather than avoid. Ask yourself on the daily “what did I fail at today”, knowing that the more you fail and work through the failures, the closer you’ll be to achieving success.
#TGIM
