The Invisible Progress Nobody Tells You About
Prefer to listen rather than read? Listen to the podcast episode covering this same topic here → Quietly Disruptive Podcast
Today I want to talk about the messy bit. The bit not many founders want to share out loud because it feels a bit weird. Starting gets the limelight. Taking that first step, making the leap, doing that first domino, is tough. It is like committing to climb a mountain and taking the first step. That takes a huge amount. But the middle bit, the actually walking up the mountain step by step, is the harder bit. The start had a moment to it, that excitement, the what if, the expectation and imagining the view from the top. But as you walk forward, boots crunching on the path, the pack on your shoulders, the reality kicks in that you actually have to climb this thing to reach the top.
That middle bit is often called the messy middle. But I want to share a different way to look at it. I call it the marvellous middle, because it is where all the seeds get planted for the harvest to come.
When Silence Feels Like Failure
The middle is called messy because it feels all over the place. You have been consistent, you have shown up, you have had the conversations, created the content, made the connections, done the things everybody tells you to do, and it looks like absolutely nothing is happening. No new clients knocking at the door, no messages flooding in, no big breakthrough moment where everything clicks. Just silence. And that silence, when you are in it, feels a lot like failure. It feels like evidence that what you are doing is not working, that maybe you should try something different, change direction, start again. This is the point where so many founders either quit or change course, not because the thing was not working but because they could not see that it was.
Seeds Grow in Silence Before a Single Shoot Breaks Through
It’s like planting seeds. When you plant a seed in spring, nothing happens for weeks. The soil looks exactly the same as it did before you put the seed in. You water it, you tend to it, you check on it, and there is nothing to show for any of it. If you did not know how seeds worked, you would genuinely conclude that nothing was happening and that the seed was a dud. But underneath the surface, everything is happening. Roots are forming, the structure is building, the thing is growing in the exact direction it needs to grow, and it is doing all of that in complete silence before a single green shoot breaks through the soil.
Business works the same way. The conversation you had in January, the content you posted in March, the connection you made in June, all of those things are working underneath the surface of your business right now. They are forming roots. They are building something. But you cannot see it yet, and because you cannot see it, it is easy to conclude that none of it mattered. But it does.
Seven Months of Silence and Then the Call
Back in August, a founder booked a call with me. She was someone I had connected with on LinkedIn back in January. We had exchanged a few messages, had a genuine conversation, and I had said I would be happy to chat more about her business when the time was right. After that, there was silence. Seven months of it. If I had been measuring the success of that connection by quick results and immediate responses, I would have written it off months ago. But she had not gone anywhere. She had been watching, thinking, waiting for the right time. And when the right time arrived, she came back. That is invisible progress. It was happening the entire time. I just could not see it.
So here is the question to sit with before you plan anything for autumn. What have you planted this year that you have not seen the results of yet? What conversations have you had, what connections have you made that felt like they went nowhere? Before you conclude that they did not work, ask yourself whether it is possible that they are still growing underneath the surface, putting down roots, building something you cannot see yet. The next post gets into the practical side of this, how to measure what matters, how to find the signs that you are going the right way, and how to keep moving when every instinct says stop.
About the Author: Becky Benfield Humberstone partners with Quietly Disruptive founders to build businesses that change their corner of the world, on their terms. If you started your business because you believed things could be done differently, and you're ready to make that vision real, she gets it. Based in the UK and working globally via Zoom and in person, she's done this work herself, more than once.
Ready to Take the Next Step?
If this resonated, Sign the Pact and join the Quietly Disruptive movement. Every week, Field Notes lands in your inbox with one honest idea, the real story of building differently, and the kind of clarity that comes from 25 years of doing things the unconventional way.
