Good Life Project - The Unfortunate Middle

Episode Date: March 2, 2017

We are taught, from a young age, to exist in the middle. Everything in moderation. Don’t be a tall poppy, nor a shrinking violet. Good enough is good enough. The middle way, middle-class, mid-tier. That’s where we want to be. Not so big that we get cut down, and not so small that we can’t […]The post The Unfortunate Middle appeared first on Good LifeProject. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So one of the things that we've learned over the years is that a pretty sizable percentage of our listenership, our community, are what we call conscious business founders, people who are creating something, whether it's a social venture, nonprofit, or for profit, but with a real mission built around it, the desire to serve something or someone bigger. One of the other things that I've learned along the way, being an entrepreneur myself, and also working with and supporting hundreds of others over a period of years, is that it can be a profoundly lonely pursuit. It's the type of thing where even if you have a team and a substantial company, very often you need somebody else to turn to, people who are sort of parallel playing along the way with you. So we've created something for you. It's called the 108, and it's a conscious

business collective of similar founders capped at no more than 108 people, where we're all in. It's a safe, protected space, a place where you can get true, confidential, uplifting advice, wisdom, input, and no longer travel this road alone. So if that sounds interesting to you, check out the details at goodlifeproject.com slash the 108. That's T-H-E and then the number 108. You can also just click the link in the show notes. And if you're listening to this in real time at the end of February, just a super quick heads up that we're down to about the final 25 spots. So if you've been thinking about this and listening for a while, probably a good idea not to wait a whole lot longer.

On to our show. So when it comes to the way we earn our living, whether you're an entrepreneur, an employee, we tend to get stuck in this place I call the unfortunate middle. And truth is, this actually isn't just the way we earn our livings. This is the way we live our lives. We're taught pretty much from a young age to exist in the middle. Everything in moderation. Don't be a tall poppy nor a shrinking violet. Good enough is good enough. The middle way, middle class, middle tier, that's where we want to be. Not so big that we can get cut down and not so small that we can't stand up. Just you, kind of well, you know, average. That's the goal. Build a career that's okay, not amazing, not terrible. Launch a

company that's cruising along, not struggling, not leading. Build relationships that are, well, solid, not empty, nor deeply passionate. The middle, the coasting life, that's where life is meant to be lived. That's our aspiration. Except it's not. It's just not. With rare exception, the middle is not easier. It's not the more comfortable place to be, but rather the hardest to sustain and the least rewarding on nearly every level. I mean, sure, it protects you from the anxiety of growth and the stress of survival, but it also ends up feeling like the worst of both worlds in most scenarios. So this is true in nearly every domain of life. But interestingly, it presents itself in a pretty profound and often massively painful way in the world of careers, the way we earn our living, and especially in the world of business and entrepreneurship. So I'm going to use that as an example to really make this crystal clear, but then I'm going to circle back to how this concept applies to life.

So even if you're not an entrepreneur here, just stay with me for a few minutes. So let's take starting and building a business, for example. So you start with an idea and you test it and people respond and they're digging it and so are you. So you begin to put resources and effort into it. And in the beginning, it's just you, maybe a partner and a few people working, in no small part out of love and for the cause. And you get to a point where things are humming along and people, they want what you're doing. And maybe it's just you and an assistant. If you have a team, it's small and tight and everyone does what's necessary and you work hard, but nothing's overly complicated.

And you're only growing your costs when your revenue covers it. And everything is pretty optimized because there's not a whole lot to optimize. And capacity is being fully utilized. If anything, people are working way more and giving you more than they're really even capable of. And you're generating a nice bit of income and living well and contributing meaningfully to the world. And many people can and truth is probably should stay in this place. You can live an extraordinary life here, do great and meaningful work. And sure, there are always day-to-day grumbles and things that you have to fix.

But for the most part, life is good. I call this phase simple grace. And for many, it's wonderful. But for others, at some point, we fall prey to what I call the relative success virus. We judge how successful we are and how good our lives are in relation to those around us. It's just the way that our brains are wired. And without fail, the comparisons that we make, well, it's to folks who are earning a lot more or who've built something substantially larger that's affecting a lot more people. And fulfilled as we may be, we convince ourselves that we should be playing a much bigger game and we choose shallow and wide over narrow

and deep. And whether we should or should not make that choice, that's a conversation for a whole another riff, I think that I'll probably go into. But for now, let's just say that you catch that virus. You're looking at the, quote, relative success, relative reach, relative impact, relative income of others around you. And you decide, oh, hell no, I'm not staying small. I need to go where they are. So you begin to ramp up in preparation of your push to grow. And to do that, you need more and maybe different people. Ones, you know, who've got more operating experience and who also need to get paid more. You start to hire and pay people to help you get to that, quote, next level.

And you're counting on them to create the bump in growth and sales needed to first cover their salaries and then exceed them. But you're not there yet. And you may not be for some time. And this starts to add a new level of stress to your work and life. So you breathe in and you breathe out and you figure, we'll get through this. It's temporary. And for the first time, then usually right around this window, some variation of the phrase financial runway enters the conversation. This is basically

how much money you've got left in the bank. So you've got a certain amount of money to pay your new staff. And if they don't help you grow, they have to go. And that might put not only your vision, but your entire business in jeopardy now. Plus, it would just plain suck. I mean, for them and for you. So you work even harder than before. And you push your new team even more fiercely because as much as you all want to be all chill and love everybody up, you also know every minute of every day, you've now got a drop dead date in your head, a Monday, a Tuesday, a Thursday in the not too distant future when you're going to wake up with no money in the

bank. And along with the new people and capacity comes the need for new and better solutions and systems and processes and relationships and technologies. And this includes management protocols and sales training and marketing strategies and financial controls, talent development, information management and training, along with manuals and policies. And on the one hand, the buildup is a necessary foundation for that scalable impact, that growth you're looking for. It sets you up for growth so that if and when you reach that next level, you don't utterly melt down. You'll be ready to just hum along. It becomes your new sustainable plateau, setting the table for a

potential new experience of dropping back into ease, but at a much higher level of operation. I call that state sustainable complexity. But until you get to that next level, even if a high level automation happens along the way, getting all these people, products, and systems developed and in place is often brutally hard, fraught with missteps, implosions, and real hard costs. And all the while, you're racing against money and stress. It puts fierce pressure on resources and amplifies a level of complexity that's crushing. You've got all this capacity now and you're paying for it, but you don't have enough new business to utilize it

and in turn generate the money needed to actually pay for it on a going forward basis. You've got massive amounts of money going out, not enough coming in. Thing is constantly breaking and stifling levels of stress and sleepless nights. Thing is, this is the point that so many founders and creators end up taking outside investment. Not so much because they want to, but because they can't breathe anymore. They bounce almost violently between being pumped up at the prospect and proximity of that next place and feeling like you're just drowning in stress and complexity. Visions of curling up in a ball and binge watching Phineas

and Ferb dance through that sleep-deprived, stress-addled brain, and now more people are looking to you to take care of them. Your job, in no uncertain terms, is to not run and hide. You're stuck in the utterly untenable space between simple grace and sustainable complexity. It's a glorious, catastrophic, and sublimely consuming cocktail of possibility and pain. I call this place the unfortunate middle. And tech entrepreneurs also call it the dark night of the soul. There are all sorts of different sort of namings of this. And that coincides also with the part of Joseph Campbell's hero's journey where you've committed to the grand adventure, left the safety of the ordinary world, everything becomes hard, and you're being tested furiously, yet haven't found the allies or the answers or the way back

home. This is the place that exists purely for the purpose of forging you. It is a place that is designed to be moved through, yet far too often, it's the place we end up settling into. Never doing what's necessary to propel ourselves forward into that sustainable complexity, buoyed by structure, resources, and momentum, or to release ourselves back into the lightness of simple grace. The unfortunate middle becomes something of a set point. We just keep reverting back to it no matter how much pain living in this place brings with it. We dwell and toil and suffer every day. We die a little bit more. This same spectrum, by the way, simple grace, the unfortunate middle, and sustainable complexity. It isn't just about business. It

isn't just about entrepreneurship. This has been one example. It's also about every domain of life that matters. Careers at the top have extraordinary benefits. Careers devoted to simplicity and craft bring their own extraordinary benefits. Very often, those in the middle are defined not by the best of, but by the worst of both. Relationships, personal relationships that stay simple and light can add great joy and fun and lightness without the baggage of complexity and commitment. They are relationships that are about simple grace and relationships that grow out of a long and sustained, fierce commitment to self-discovery

and building pathways and mechanisms for conversation and connection, engagement, understanding, support, and joy. They can become astonishingly nourishing sources of meaning and life that move into but never move through that place we call the unfortunate middle. The unfortunate middle, in fact, it defines far too much of the daily experience of so many, not because we want it to, but because we don't know we're there, and we don't know how to get to the other side.

And we don't know that this is a place to be moved through, not to play and stay. And because while it's relatively easy to settle into the place of simple grace as a solitary creator or maker or lover or leader, nobody, let me repeat that, nobody gets through the unfortunate middle and into sustainable complexity alone. We need people to help us get there, to hold us, to guide us, to work with us, to collaborate and co-create with us, to even lead us. And that means we have to surrender, to be vulnerable, and to welcome others into our adventure. Or else we risk subsisting somewhat mercilessly, often for years, in the crush of the unfortunate middle in all parts of life. Until either we give in, fall apart, or the thing we've sacrificed so much to create simply crumbles under its own weight, be that a business or relationship or our

own bodies. Because as we know, this is not a place to be inhabited. It is a place to be passed through. So my invitation today is this. Ask yourself, in which of these three domains am I currently dwelling? In work, in relationships, in health, in life. Simple grace, sustainable complexity, or the unfortunate middle. If it's simple grace, well, that's fine. We all need some of that in our lives. And if you yearn to make the leap to sustainable complexity, to the depth and juice and meaning of sustainable complexity,

then ask yourself if you're willing to endure the journey through the unfortunate middle. Are you equipped emotionally and physically? Do you have access to the resources and people needed to make it through? And are you willing to step into the space of vulnerability needed to receive help if and when you open yourself up to asking for it. If you're in that oft-sought place of sustainable complexity already, well, then congrats. That's fantastic. But know too that this is not sustainable indefinitely either. There will come a time, there always comes a time, when we are tasked with moving to the next level or contracting backwards. There is no sideways in business, relationships, health, and life.

Only expansion or contraction. And when that happens, we will re-enter a different yet equally challenging unfortunate middle. So we've got to own that, expect it, and prepare for it, both on a personal level and by ensuring that we've surrounded ourselves with the right people. If we find ourselves currently operating in that unfortunate middle, know too that often is, but must also be moved through. So ask if you still want what is potentially on the other side. Knowing what you now know, you may or may not. There's no judgment either way. We all start relationships, work, businesses with a blend of assumptions, leaps of faith, and actual

information. And if along the way, the assumptions get replaced with information that no longer makes you believe that that thing that you're working so fiercely towards is possible, or that it is possible, but you would have to change so much of who you are to make it possible, you would no longer want to make it happen. It's okay to let that go. There's no judgment either way, but be honest about it because your honesty is do or die. If you do not want it, then start thinking about what might need to be done to move back into a place of simple grace. If you do, ask yourself if you're equipped with the resources and the people,

both in your adventure, in your life, and outside of it, that you'll need to get through this gauntlet. And ask if you're willing again to be vulnerable. Own your unknowing. Ask for help and then receive it. Then make assembling those people who can help you a priority. So each of these phases, simple grace, the unfortunate middle, and sustainable complexity come without judgment. They're the simple reality that they are moments along a path of growth. How far you're willing to travel is a decision only you can make.

So the question is, as we wrap up today's conversation, where are you now? And what, if anything, might you do about it? Something to think about as we kind of all move into a new season filled with aspirations and plans and figure out which direction am I going to move from here. Hope you found that useful. As always, I'm Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If the stories and ideas in any way moved you, I would so appreciate if you would take just a few extra seconds for two quick things.

One, if it's touched you in some way, if there's some idea or moment in the story or in the conversation that you really feel like you would share with somebody else, that it would make a difference in somebody else's life. Take a moment and whatever app you're using, just share this episode with somebody who you think it'll make a difference for. Email it if that's the easiest thing, whatever is easiest for you. And then, of course, if you're compelled, subscribe so that you can stay a part of this continuing experience. My greatest hope with this podcast is not just to produce moments and share stories and ideas that impact one person listening, but to let it create a conversation, to let it serve as a catalyst for the elevation of all of us together collectively, because that's how we rise. When

stories and ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change happens. And I would love to invite you to participate on that level. Thank you so much, as always, for your intention, for your attention, for your heart. And I wish you only the best. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.