We love beginnings. There is a whole genre of writing about starting: the first day, the leap, the bold decision, the blank page. We love endings too, the triumph, the launch, the publication, the finish line with its raised arms. The long, ordinary stretch in between rarely gets a mention, which is a shame, because it is where nearly all of life actually happens.
I have started to think of the boring middle as the real substance of a working life, and of our dislike of it as one of the most expensive habits we have. People who cannot tolerate it spend their lives chasing beginnings, and wonder why nothing ever quite adds up.
Where the work actually lives
Think of any skill you admire in someone else: a pianist, a surgeon, a good teacher. What you are looking at is a very large number of unremarkable days. Nobody saw the Tuesday afternoon in year six when the pianist practised the same four bars forty times. Nobody applauded. But that afternoon, and thousands like it, is where the ability came from.
The glamorous moments, the debut, the award, the breakthrough, are the visible tip. The middle is everything underneath, and it is mostly made of repetition, small corrections, and the decision to turn up again.
Routines are not the enemy
Somewhere along the way we decided that routines are dull and spontaneity is life. I used to believe that, and I organised my work around moods and flashes of inspiration. The result was a great many beginnings and very few finished things.
A good routine does the opposite of what we fear. It frees attention for the things that matter, by removing small decisions: when to start, where to sit, what to do first. Nobody admires a pilot for improvising the checklist. The checklist is what allows the interesting judgement to happen when it is needed.
Celebrate the unremarkable
One of the best habits I have picked up is noticing the quiet wins that never make a story, and saying so, at least to myself.
- The draft that was simply finished on the day it was due
- The week you did the dull work on time and nothing went wrong
- The habit that survived a holiday, a cold, and a bad month
- The email you answered kindly when you were tired
- The ordinary Tuesday on which you did your job well
None of those would make a good anecdote, and that is exactly why they are worth noticing. They are the actual material of a life, and we skip past them looking for something more exciting.
A good life is mostly made of Tuesdays.
The baker down the road
There is a bakery near me that opens at six every morning, and I have been walking past it for years. The owner, a man in his sixties, is always the same: flour on his forearms, a quiet nod through the window. He has made roughly the same loaves, in roughly the same way, for as long as I have lived here. It would be easy to describe this as a lack of ambition. I think it is closer to the opposite.
Last winter I stopped in and asked him whether he ever got bored. He thought about it properly, the way people do when the question is a fair one. “The dough is never quite the same,” he said. “That is what keeps it interesting. You are always paying attention to something small.” It struck me as the best description of the boring middle I had heard. It is boring only to someone who is not looking closely.
Staying in the middle when your feelings object
Of course, understanding this does not make it easy. There are weeks when the middle feels like wading through wet sand, and every instinct says to abandon the project for something shinier. I have found a few things that help.
- Shrink the day. Decide the one small thing you will do, and let that be enough.
- Look for the fine detail. Boredom often dissolves when you attend to something small and specific.
- Keep a record of what you have done. Evidence of accumulated work is a surprisingly effective antidote to the feeling that nothing is happening.
- Tell someone. The middle is lonelier than the beginning, and a regular check-in with a friend can make it bearable.
- Rest on purpose. A day off is not a failure of the middle. It is part of how people survive it.
None of these removes the tedium. They make it workable, and they remind you that the tedium is not a sign you are doing it wrong. It is simply what the work feels like when it is going well.
Learning to like the middle
The middle is hard because it offers none of the usual rewards. There is no novelty, as at the start, and no resolution, as at the end. You simply do the thing, again, with little feedback, in the faith that it is adding up.
What helps me is a change of question. Instead of asking whether I am excited, I ask whether I am doing the work well today. Excitement is unreliable. Doing the work well is something I can influence, and over time, it turns out to be quietly satisfying in a way that excitement never was.
If you can learn to enjoy the middle, you will probably have a long and steady career, and a life that feels like your own. If you cannot, you will spend it chasing beginnings, which are lovely, but cannot be the whole of anything.
