The Magic is in the Middle
Van Gogh, Pink Floyd, Steve Jobs, The Alchemist
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A couple of housekeeping items before I get into today’s article:
I’m getting back on social media to promote the work I’m doing. I’ll mainly be on Twitter but occasionally IG as well. You can follow me here and here. This is the vibe:
I’m launching a new podcast with my mentor and friend, Annie Lalla, called Matters of the Heart. We’re talking about how to better love ourselves and the people we closest to us. I believe Annie’s message will contribute significantly to how the world views love and relationships, and I’m excited to be a part of sharing it. We don’t have a set launch date yet but we’re getting pretty close.
Ok now on to The Exhale…
I haven’t slept in my bedroom in months because it’s being redesigned. The other day I walked in, and it looked like a war zone.
I cracked some jokes about it looking like shit, and my wife told me half-joking-half-serious about a common saying in the home building/design world:
"Don't judge it in the middle."
It dawned on me that many things in life suck in the middle of the process. We have to keep building, tweaking and pruning to create something we're proud of.
There are two common thinking errors that we tend to make:
1. We assume all great art (and businesses and careers) start out great.
2. We assume progress is always linear.
It's counterintuitive, but it's often precisely the messiness that makes something great. And sometimes, if we can stay in that messiness for long enough, constantly honing our craft and our work, things fall into place “overnight.”
Great artists know not to judge their work in the middle.
We'd all do well to learn from them. They can teach us about creating things, as well as how to better perceive our relationships, careers, and life.
2nd Act
David Mamet, who wrote Glengarry Glenn Ross (“always be closing”), says that writing the first act is easy. It's predictable. Great stories, he says, are written in the later acts. The writer writes their characters into a spot where even the writer doesn't know how they will get out. Only then can the resolution be surprising and entertaining.
The magic is in the messy middle.
Van Gogh spent his whole life obsessed with art, but didn't have any success until his late 30s. He was poor and had terrible mental health issues. He cut off his own ear because his roommate wanted to move out. When he finally became a successful painter, it was because he was able to express his profound depth of emotion and inner turmoil. His struggles made him successful.
When Pink Floyd started working on "The Dark Side of the Moon," they experimented with some unconventional recording techniques and intricate, weird sounds. Midway through, the band members started to fear that the album wasn't cohesive, was too abstract, and it wouldn't resonate with their audience.
But they stuck with it anyway, and their crazy attention to detail helped them shape it into the album it became. It sat on the Billboard 200 chart for a record-breaking 917 weeks.
When we go to the movies, we just see the finished product. We don't see the hours the writers spent testing and tossing out ideas, or the self-doubt they had about their project until they finally found a way to tell the story.
Because we only see the final masterpiece, we assume the work must have been amazing right off the bat. We assume the screenwriter must have had the amazing idea from the get-go. We assume that the musicians we love were always world class. And we believe that because we don't have a fully fleshed out idea that's that remarkable or because we're not already world class then we should give up.
Great writers know it's not about writing a perfect first draft. It's about the editing.
Prolific author Anne Lamott suggests in her book Bird by Bird: "write a shitty first draft as fast as possible."
A related principle is “Diverge, then Converge.”
In the beginning of something, we want to get all of the ideas on the table. Like brainstorming. We want to have more material to work with than we’ll need. We want to create as many options, to keep as many doors open as possible.
Then we start to organize and cut away anything that we don't want.
There was a piece of career advice I heard one time that struck me as true: "In the beginning of your career, you want to take a shotgun approach. Say yes to everything. Seize every opportunity. Then, you want to take the rifle approach. Cut away everything you don't love until you find the one thing that you can focus on and be great at."
In the late ‘90s, Apple was struggling and on the verge of bankruptcy. At the time, they sold computers, printers, digital cameras, and even gaming consoles. When Steve Jobs took over as CEO in '97, he decided to streamline their products and focus solely on developing and marketing the Mac.
It worked out.
Most novice creators do the opposite. The article isn't great immediately, the business isn't successful fast enough, etc… so they quit.
Before you give up on that thing that really matters to you and the people you want to serve, consider that you might be in a pruning phase.
The Alchemist
Before he published The Alchemist, Paulo Cuelho was rejected by several publishers. He finally found one that would print only 900 copies. It fell flat with very few sales. But he kept looking for publishers. He finally found a larger Brazilian publisher, 3 years after he had released it. Reaching a wider audience, it suddenly exploded through word-of-mouth and has gone on to become one of the most popular books of all time.
Everything I write, somewhere in the middle, I think to myself, "This fucking sucks." Including the exact moment I'm writing these words. I feel this way, sometimes for hours, until everything rapidly clicks into place.
Some things get gradually better, in a linear fashion, until the final masterpiece is revealed. But many don't. Many things are absolute shit until the very end, when suddenly all of the pieces fit together in just the right way. Before then, you’re likely thinking, “This is pointless.”
Image by Visualize Value
You never know when all of the learnings from your "failed" relationships will pay off to attract your soul mate.
You never know when that project you've been slowly chipping away at will suddenly crystalize into something elegant that you're proud to share with the world.
You never know when the thousands of hours you've put into honing your craft will finally be rewarded by money, recognition, opportunities, or best of all—the personal satisfaction of doing work that is both fun and meaningful.
Don't judge it in the middle. And don’t give up in the middle either.
Loved reading this, thank you. It takes the pressure off of doing an epic first draft when writing. Very helpful!