You’re reading The Messy Middle: weekly deep dives on building a business, storytelling, culture, and the hard decisions behind what to pause, prioritize, and pursue.
💡 You Don’t Need Another Good Idea
You know that feeling when you sit down to work on your business, open your laptop, and somehow end up with more things to do than when you started?
You were going to work on one thing. Then you remembered the partnership you need to follow up on, the offer you’ve been meaning to revisit, and the marketing idea you saved from someone’s Instagram post. You ask AI to help you think through one of them, and now you have 25 more ideas, a launch plan, and a landing page you didn’t know you needed to rewrite. It’s 11 am You’ve been working all morning. And you’re somehow less certain about what you should be doing than when you sat down.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, especially as I work with founders who have no shortage of ideas, ambition, or willingness to put in the work. We have access to more information, advice, tools, and data than ever before. And yet, I’m not convinced any of this has made running a business feel clearer.
More information doesn’t necessarily make it easier to decide what matters. Sometimes it just gives us more things to consider. And every new thing we consider creates another decision. Do I pursue this? Put it on the list for later? Say no? Give it another month? Ask for more information?
🧠 The Hard Part Isn’t Having Ideas
Having a lot of options sounds like a good problem to have, and sometimes it is. The problem is that every new possibility comes with a decision attached to it...and a cost.
Should I keep going with this? Have I given it enough time? Should I try something else? Is this opportunity worth pursuing? Is this new idea better than the thing I’m already doing?
The tricky part is that there often isn’t an obviously wrong answer. You might have three genuinely good ideas, two promising opportunities, and five things you could reasonably argue would help grow the business. The work is deciding which one matters most right now.
And I think that distinction is becoming even more important as generating ideas gets easier. AI can give you 25 marketing strategies in seconds. Instagram can show you 15 things other founders swear changed their businesses before you’ve finished your morning chai. None of those ideas have to be bad for them to be wrong for you, or wrong for you right now. Someone still has to look at the business in front of them, the money available, the time available, what has already been tried, what customers are actually saying, and what will have to be sacrificed if this becomes the new priority. A good idea can still be the wrong priority.
That’s also why I don’t think the answer is simply “do less.” I’ve never found that particularly helpful advice. Less what? If you have five things in front of you that all seem important, telling yourself to focus doesn’t magically reveal which four should go. The harder and much more useful work is figuring out what deserves to stay.
That’s where I keep coming back to three things: pause, prioritize, pursue.
🎯 Pause, Prioritize, Pursue
In this season of my work, there’s one question I keep coming back to, both for myself and with my clients: How do you know what deserves your attention right now?
And here’s how I approach it:
⏸️ PAUSE: What’s actually happening? Before deciding what comes next, look honestly at what’s happening now, not what you hoped would be happening or what your business looked like six months ago. Where is your time actually going? What’s working? What keeps getting delayed? What decision have you been avoiding? You can’t make a useful plan for a version of your business that doesn’t exist today.
🎯 PRIORITIZE: What matters most in the next 90 days? Take everything you could do and ask what would actually make the biggest difference right now. Maybe it’s getting an existing offer in front of more people instead of developing a new one. Maybe it’s improving the experience of the customers you already have. There will still be other good ideas on the table, and that’s exactly the point. Prioritizing isn’t about finding the objectively “best” idea. It’s deciding which one makes the most sense for your business right now.
➡️ PURSUE: What are you actually going to do about it? This is where a priority becomes a decision. What are you committing to for the next 90 days? How will you know whether it’s working? And perhaps most importantly, what are you taking off your list to make room for it? We often decide something is a priority without changing anything else about how we spend our time. A priority that doesn’t change how you spend your time isn’t much of a priority.
📝 What Are You Not Doing This Quarter?
So instead of ending this newsletter by asking you what you’re going to do next, I want to ask you the opposite. Open up the list of ideas, projects, opportunities, and half-finished plans you’ve been carrying around. (You know the one...)
It might live in Notion, your Notes app, a spreadsheet, or approximately 37 open browser tabs. Look through it and ask yourself: What’s one thing I already know I’m not going to pursue this quarter, but haven’t officially taken off my list?
Maybe it’s a new product or offer that sounds exciting but would pull attention away from the one you’re trying to grow. Maybe it’s a platform you keep telling yourself you should be on. Maybe it’s an opportunity that is genuinely good, but doesn’t support the thing you’ve decided matters most. You don’t have to decide it was a bad idea, and you don’t have to decide you’ll never do it. You can simply decide that it doesn’t deserve your attention right now, take it off the list, and stop asking yourself to reconsider it every week.
TLDR: We have plenty of good ideas. The harder question is which ones actually get our time, money, and attention. And sometimes, the most important part of your next 90-day plan is what you leave out.
📍 Where To Find Me
Apparently September decided to go out with a bang. 😅 A couple of things happening before we close out the month:
✈️ Sept. 28 – 29: Riyadh! I’m heading to Saudi Arabia for the Women Shaping Wealth Summit, where I’ll be moderating a panel called Backing The Bold about what it takes to back ambitious ideas and the people building them. Given how much I’ve been thinking lately about who gets funded, whose ideas get believed, and how we help people see what we see, the timing of this conversation feels pretty perfect. If you’ll be there (or have Riyadh recommendations!), hit reply!
🍂 Last Call for Fall: Fall enrollment at the School of Radical Imagination closes September 30th! I shared last week that I recently joined the team as Fractional Head of Growth & Partnerships, and now I’m using my newsletter privileges to give you one final nudge :) If you miss school and have been eyeing the classes, this is your sign to take a look before enrollment closes. I'm especially excited about some of the courses around AI.
🥨 Snacks
🎤 Platform Politics: When did celebrities become our moral leaders? Some thoughts on Macklemore, attention, authority, and what we expect from people with a platform.
💰 Rich People Things: One billionaire is trying to buy up all your favorite media.
🤔 Devil's Advocate: “You don’t make that much money, it’s kind of a slog...and there are lots of other ways to get rich.” A refreshingly honest take on whether we really need more brands...
See you in next week's mess,
Arshiya
