The Messy Middle: How to Find Meaning in Madness

The Messy Middle: Monday Motivation🚀

The beauty of problems? They awaken our curiosity and creativity. 🤓

The problem with problems? They awaken our curiosity and creativity. 🤦‍♀️

The search for solutions can bring out the best in us— often inspiring us to dare more greatly in service of innovation. But the unexpected twists and turns characteristic of the messy middle can also batter us and leave us bruised and confused.

In The Messy Middle, Scott Belsky, author and co-founder of Behance, refers to this period as a journey with peaks and valleys that encourage us to “optimize” and “endure,” respectively. As Brené Brown would say: Navigating the creative process requires vulnerability and builds resilience.

To my fellow entrepreneurs, are you fit to handle the messy middle?

What determines whether or not we experience the messy middle as pinballs or as explorers? As objects catapulted in arbitrary trajectories or architects of a path forward?

Meaning.

How to discover the meaning of life?

Viktor Frankl explained it best in his seminal work Man’s Search for Meaning. Drawing upon his experience as a Holocaust survivor, the psychiatrist and father of Logotherapy identified 3 ways to find meaning in life:

1. By creating something

2. By encountering someone

3. By the attitude we take towards suffering

Curiously, Way #1 is, by definition, the purpose of the messy middle.

Way #2 often happens in the messy middle.

And Way #3 takes us back to the introspective “pinball vs explorer” lens: Basically, do we conceive of ourselves as victims or authors with the power to steer our own course? In short, the messy middle contains the elements we need to find meaning… and thus, to push through the problem and come out on the other side with a smile. Dirty and disheveled, but successful and confident!

pLoThoughts on… Optimistic or resentful? Empowered or helpless? Your attitude shapes the outcome of your messy middle. Choose wisely! 🤗