CL192: The Messy Middle and Productive Creativity - Interview with Scott Belsky

Scott Belsky is an entrepreneur, investor and author of the new book 'The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture'. He is currently Chief Product Officer at Adobe, serves as a board member to several early stage companies, and is a Venture Partner at Benchmark, a legendary venture capital firm based in San Francisco. Scott was previously the founder and CEO of Behance, a leading online platform to showcase and discover creative work. He is also the creator of 99U, Behance's think tank and annual conference devoted to execution in the creative world. In addition to 'The Messy Middle', Belsky is also the author of Making Ideas Happen and coauthor of the 99U book series. In this episode, we cover: 2:40 – It's the middle that makes or breaks you 4:48 – Start, Endure, Optimize, Finish, Repeat 5:48 – Breaking your business growth into chapters 8:35 – Build the narrative before your product 9:54 – Building a creative team 10:56 – Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull 11:28 – Short chapters as prompts 14:27 – Make one subtraction for every addition 17:21 – Kevin Rose 20:56 – Getting ignored by Google Resources mentioned in this episode: twitter.com/scottbelsky www.scottbelsky.com themessymiddle.com Tools: Evernote, Wunderlist, Twitter, Adobe Spark Books: Herding Tigers by Todd Henry, Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Album: OK Computer by Radiohead If you enjoyed the show, please rate it on YouTube, iTunes or Stitcher and write a brief review. That would really help get the word out and raise the visibility of the Creative Life show. The post CL192: The Messy Middle and Productive Creativity - Interview with Scott Belsky appeared first on James Taylor .