Belsky, The Messy Middle

We’ve all been there. We start a project with great enthusiasm. Then, as we proceed, the goal seems farther and farther away. We have self-doubts, we are mired in the mundane, we are on a roller coaster of successes and failures. The journey to make something great is definitely not linear.

In The Messy Middle: Finding your way through the hardest and most crucial part of any bold venture (Portfolio/Penguin, 2018) Scott Belsky, an entrepreneur and venture investor who is now chief product officer at Adobe, explores the ups and downs between a project launch and its (sometimes) successful conclusion.

“The middle,” he writes, “makes and breaks you, and ending up on the right side of this line depends on how you manage everything in between. It requires immense perseverance, self-awareness, craftsmanship, and strategy. It also requires luck, harvested whenever you encounter it.”



Belsky draws on his experience with Behance, his first company, which he founded in 2006 and sold to Adobe in 2012. He gives advice in two- or three-page bites. Among his words of wisdom: attempt a new perspective of it before you quit it; just stay alive long enough to become an expert; moving fast is great, so long as you slow down at every turn; too much scrutiny creates flaws; data is only as good as its source, and doesn’t replace intuition; the science of business is scaling, the art of business is the things that don’t.

There’s a lot of sound advice in this book. And since it’s laid out like a huge smorgasbord, you can read it that way as well, picking and choosing your way through it. And you can go back for seconds when you’re at a different stage of your endeavor.