The middle is where most ideas get muddy.
It’s the moment when a story, a message, or a piece of content stops letting the audience discover the idea and starts explaining it instead.
Your ideas aren’t bad. But your explanations might be.
That’s what we’re uncovering today.
Issue #007
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One late night this week, I opened a manuscript I haven’t touched in years.
This was intended to be book four in a five-book series. I even have the cover designed for it.
But I let it sit on that proverbial dusty shelf for far too long because I felt stuck.
When work sits that long, you assume the problems will be something structural.
Something LARGE.
Plot holes.
Character arcs.
Complicated enough that you’d have to tear half the story apart to fix it.
I’ve feared that for years.
In fact, every time I opened the book to figure it out, I ended up in the same place.
Stuck in what writers call the Muddy Middle. It’s the section of the story where most of the details happen, after the story has kicked off and before you get to the cliffhanger and outcome. It’s easy to get lost in.
But this week when I opened that draft, something different happened:
I knew.
I saw what was wrong in the story.
And the funny part is that I recognized the problem because I’ve been seeing the same exact pattern in expert content and brand stories.
The problem turned out to be remarkably simple, and it has everything to do with our tendency to over explain …well, everything.
This book (100,000 words already written, mind you) had stopped letting the reader discover things. It had started explaining them.
Once I saw it, the fix became obvious. Thankfully, I don’t need to rewrite the entire damn thing.
I just have to stop explaining my way through the middle.
Now, it might be simple.
But simple is rarely easy.
And that’s why you may not recognize it when it shows up in your own work.
Your brand story has a muddy middle, too.
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🔎 Under the Magnifying Glass
One of the clearest examples of this comes from the launch of the iPod.
I know. Apple is a very well cited brand example.
But there’s one line in particular that perfectly shows how badly this could have gone if they’d stayed at the level of expertise and explanation.
Apple could have explained the technology behind the iPod:
Storage capacity.
Digital audio formats.
File compression.
And it would have been technically correct.
They could have said something like:
“The iPod is a portable digital music player capable of storing thousands of MP3 files.”
Accurate. Also completely forgettable.
(It’s probably buried in product data sheets somewhere.)
Instead, they said something else:
“1,000 songs in your pocket.”
That line worked because it translated technical capability into a human moment.
To understand why that mattered, you have to remember what listening to music looked like at the time.
Road trips meant heavy binders full of CDs.
Portable CD players skipped every time the car hit a bump.
You swapped discs constantly while driving if you wanted to listen to something else.
Apple didn’t explain the technology, they showed the moment where the experience changed.
You didn’t picture gigabytes.
You pictured your entire music collection in your pocket.
That’s where the insight landed.
🏛️ The “Rule” This World Runs On
Rule #1: People understand ideas faster when they can experience them.
Experts naturally lead with explanation.
List of services.
Frameworks.
Definitions.
Systems.
The desire to break it all down in 3,000 LinkedIn characters in a post is strong. I know, I’ve done it. (The number of times I’ve hit that limit is… embarrassingly high.)
But audiences don’t understand ideas through systems.
They understand them through moments.
The explanation isn’t wrong.
It just works better after the audience can see why the idea matters.
When the middle of a message fills up with explanation, the audience loses that moment of discovery.
That shift, from explanation to experience to insight, has a structure. I’ve been mapping it across brands, books, and client stories.
I call it the Insight Bridge, and I broke it down in more detail here:
→ How to Turn Expertise Into a Story (And Why It Makes Ideas Instantly Clear)
🧠 Why Your Brain Calls This Magic
There’s a neurological reason this works.
When someone explains an idea, your brain has to translate it. It has to take abstract words, build a mental model, and figure out why the information matters.
That’s a lot of cognitive work. (And we already know cognitive load is a thing.)
But when someone gives you a moment you can picture, the brain processes it very differently.
Researchers call this mental simulation.
When you hear a concrete experience — like 1,000 songs in your pocket — the brain activates many of the same neural systems it uses when you imagine doing something in real life.
You’re not analyzing the idea.
You’re running the scene.
That’s also why explanation creates friction even when it’s accurate. The brain isn’t translating anymore; it’s doing double the work. First it has to decode the abstraction, then it has to figure out why it matters.
Putting the experience first removes that friction entirely.
The brain arrives at the insight already convinced.
🕳️ Watch Out for The Trap Door
There’s always a trap door, and here, it’s this:
the muddy middle doesn’t have a fixed address.
It’s not always in the middle.
I found it buried in chapter twelve of my book, every time I tried a rewrite.
But I’ve also seen it in the first line of LinkedIn posts, the third slide of a pitch deck, the opening paragraph of an about page.
The muddy middle moves.
But no matter where it’s placed, it always does the same thing:
It replaces a moment with the explanation.
The most dangerous version shows up at the beginning. Because when it lives there, your audience skips the rest entirely.
🧡 One Thing To Do Differently
Take one idea you explain often. It could be a feature, a framework, a plot twist that needs backstory to build it. Write out how you’d normally write it.
Then ask this:
Where would someone actually experience the outcome of this idea?
What moment would make the insight obvious?
Write that down.
Then let the explanation flow after.
If you want to see a step by step way to build that moment, I walk through the full method here: → The Insight Bridge Method: How to Turn Complex Ideas Into Clear Moments
It sounds simple.
I know it’s not always easy. Hooks are the bane of my existence. 🙂
But when you can spot this pattern, the muddy middle becomes much easier to fix.
📌 Put This on the Post-It
Ideas click when people can experience them.
Not when we explain them better.
Until next time,
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This last week, we tore apart my entire office, took out the old desk and I’m in the process of rebuilding it all. The dogs were very dissatisfied about the change (any change really.:))
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