When it comes to activities, we tend to want to jump to the end. I just opened to the first chapter of “Introduction to Algorithms,” and I want to immediately get to the end of the chapter. I’m in lecture and I’m thinking to myself “damn...how much longer is he going to go for?” The clear problem with wanting to be done immediately with a task we initiated is that all the value in the task occurs between the beginning and the end.
In other words, all the value in the activity occurs between the beginning and the end--the middle.
All the value in a relationship happens in the middle. All the value in your college education occurred between the beginning and end of your college experience. When you go to the gym, all the value you receive comes from all the stuff you do between the beginning and ending of your time at the gym. This observation points to the importance of how you spend the time during the activity. If you flip through a dense textbook on biomedical engineering, not even skimming the pages, the value of that process would be unsurprisingly zero. The same would be true if you jumped directly to the end of a relationship, if you jumped directly to the end of your college education, or if you jumped directly to the end of your workout in the gym. It’s clear in these examples that you’d be getting nothing out of these experiences if the time between the beginning and the end didn’t exist or wasn’t well spent.
Whenever you feel the urge to jump to end of something, know that all the value of whatever you’re doing is in all the “middle stuff.” If you don’t give the middle stuff its appropriate attention, you won’t be extracting as much value out of the experience as you can. Thus, the next time you find yourself wanting to jump to end of something, remember: all the value is in the *middle.*
Photo credit: Ramzi Hashisho
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