October 14, 2022

Big things are a-coming! Are you up for the task?

i’ve been having that feeling ‘midterm overwhelm’ creeping in. It’s a pattern my fellow (recovering) academics will recognize, and one so ingrained in someone who spent half their adult life in educational institutions that it is almost unconscious.

At university both as a student and later on as an instructor, midterm was always the point of paradox—the exact moment when energy is flagging and the assignments are piling up was the exact moment when the extra push was needed to get that essay off the ground, get caught up on the reading, rejig that project in light of looming deadlines… In business, you might call it The DIP, that moment Seth Godin describes as the make-or-break-it moment when things are hardest and you feel most like quitting.

But it is also the most exciting moment.

Sure, there is a gap between what you can do and what you know you are capable of, a gap between what you are doing and what you still need to learn. Sure there is more to do, hard work ahead, and solutions to find that seem beyond the scale of what you have in place right now. Sure, you feel a bit small in the vastness of your vision for the future.

But this time it’s worth it. No cliffs or cul-de-sacs of anxiety this time.

When the work you are doing matters, when it aligns with your values, when it feels like a door has opened and the universe has set a chair our for you, you sit down and listen to the giants who have done this before.

It’s time to buckle up and look up—waaaay up—to the mastery on the other side of the dip.