“The messy middle” by Scott Belsky

The author 🖋

Scott Belsky is an American entrepreneur, bestselling author and early-stage investor.

He co-founded the online portfolio platform Behance in 2006 (used by over 50 million people today) and was an advisor/early investor into companies like Uber, Carta, Airtable, Pinterest (to name a few).

Behance was acquired by Adobe in 2012 where Scott still serves as the Chief Strategy Officer.

Key takeaways 🎓

1. Embrace the mess

The journey of creating something meaningful is often chaotic.

The middle stretch is where most people give up because it's filled with numerous ups, downs and uncertainty.

Belsky suggests embracing this inherent volatility rather than fighting against it - stay calm during the "peaks" and don't give up in the "valleys" - those who are able to just keep going are the ones who come out the other end of success.

2. Optimize for strengths

Belsky advises focusing on what we're good at instead of worrying about our weaknesses.

Doing what we’re naturally good at makes us more productive and motivated.

This approach also helps in building a strong, effective team where we can leverage what everyone does best.

3. Iterate (but focus on what's working)

Success rarely comes from a single brilliant idea.

Belsky stresses the importance being flexible because to survive the messy middle, we need to do only two things:

1. make things better
2. keep moving forward

To do that he advises focusing on "fixing what works, not what's broken" - this gives us momentum to progress even when other parts are giving us trouble.

Closing thoughts 🧠

The book offers practical advice for navigating the middle, often most challenging phases of any project or venture.

With hundreds of lessons about enduring the low points, facing failure and keeping our venture alive during the “messy middle”, I think this is a great manual by someone who’s done it himself and has had a first row seat witnessing many successful/unsuccessful attempts.