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

The old adage “Friction polishes stones” is true: Friction not only reveals character, it creates it. By avoiding conflict, we don’t smooth out the rough edges of our ideas and plans.

To foster patience for yourself and those you lead, pick a speed that will get you there, and then pace yourself. Celebrate persistence over time as much as the occasional short-term wins you have along the way. Craft a culture in your project or team that values adherence to a vision and continual progress more than traditional measures of product

Process is the excretion of misalignment.

If you hope to scale your success further, you must choose more wisely and decline more opportunities.

I recall Netflix’s Reed Hastings at an event called Founders in Dublin, Ireland, talking about the differences between a family and a sports team. In a family, he explained, you accept people for who they are—and you can’t change them. If you have an uncle who shows up every Thanksgiving and gets inappropriately drunk, for better or worse, he’s sti

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 hu

One of my friends who worked at Apple for a number of years recalled Steve Jobs’s ability to change his mind on the turn of a dime when a better solution was presented—he didn’t get stuck with an operating mode just because it had been one that was working. He had famously strong opinions, but he was also able to detach from them. In this way, Stev

Loewenstein outlines five curiosity triggers that alert people to information gaps. They consist of questions or riddles, unknown resolutions, violated expectations, access to information known by others, and reminders of something forgotten. The best advertisements, and most-clicked headlines, play on most if not all of these triggers.

Tim decided that he needed to become a better manager of his time and, as he explains it, “shifted to what Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, calls Systems Thinking: choosing your projects based on the skills and relationships you will develop.” Tim goes on to explain, “This is important because the skills and relationships you develop persist be