The awkward middle is where most of life happens. Stop trying to skip to the good part.

Beginnings and endings are short. Everything in between is the unglamorous stretch where you are not new any more but not good yet, and that stretch is most of the time you will ever have. Treating it as a corridor between the real rooms means treating the majority of your life as something to get through.

Pick the thing you are currently in the middle of and stop measuring it against where you want to end up. Ask instead what today’s version actually involves and whether any of it is decent. The middle does not become the good part by being finished. It becomes the good part by being noticed.