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

On an interview for the Song Exploder podcast series, where artists unpack the creation of one of their songs, Weezer front man Rivers Cuomo described the creative process behind the song “Summer Elaine and Drunk Dori,” for which he wrote the original draft of the lyrics and score. I was struck by the handoff he described, in which he let his bandm

For strong companies, financing is a tactic. For weak companies, financing is a goal.

When negotiating a deal, I’ve always aspired to be fair. It’s simple: I have a discussion up front with my counterpart in which I make the case that, philosophically, I am interested in an outcome that sets us up to succeed, and I therefore want to reach the fairest deal for both parties. I explain that I want to avoid any possibility of regret on

In the early days of Behance, I used to write personal emails to a handful of customers every day introducing myself, giving some suggestions for the portfolio they posted on Behance, and offering to answer any questions directly. Many of these exchanges became relationships that lasted years and yielded customer insights that we would have never g

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

Ollie Johnstone and Frank Thomas, two of Walt Disney’s chief animators, once said of Walt Disney himself that “there were actually three different Walts: the dreamer, the realist, and the spoiler. You never knew which one was coming into your meeting.”

Society has a grand immune system designed to suppress new ideas. To keep the water running and sustain life’s other necessities, society’s natural resistance to ingenuity surfaces in the form of doubt, cynicism, and pressure to conform. It takes tremendous endurance to survive such resistance.

In Quartz, Hugo Macdonald, the former design editor of Monocle magazine, made the case for friction: The thought of friction may make us bristle, but it’s not synonymous with difficulty. The standard linguistic definition recognizes this: Friction is derived from the Latin word fricare, meaning “to rub,” and . . . generally means a force that oppos

Finishes come in all shapes and sizes and are never as certain (or desirable) as they seem. In fact, finishing should never be the end goal, and you shouldn’t aspire to ever feel truly “finished”; life loses value when challenge dissipates.