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🔥 And now, for your weekly spark.

Nobody warns you about this part.

Not the part where nothing is working. The part where some things are — and it's still hard.

Progress is happening. A few things are clicking. The vision is starting to feel less abstract. And somehow your to-do list is longer than ever, the weight of what's required keeps growing, and the gap between what you've built and what still needs building feels enormous.

That's the messy middle. Not failure. Not arrival. Something harder than both.

I've been sitting in it. And I shared what it actually looks and feels like for me — the unfiltered version, not the polished one. Drop a comment if you've been there too. I know I'm not the only one.

Here's what makes this stage particularly disorienting for people like us: it doesn't look like struggle from the outside. There's no clean narrative to tell.

You're not failing — but you're not coasting either. And leaders from the rising majority have been conditioned to project composure, to walk in like we've already arrived, to never let the weight show.

So when it gets heavy — not from collapse, but from volume, from motion, from the sheer number of things requiring your attention simultaneously — we go quiet. We wait for a cleaner story before we show up again.

But that silence is a tax we can't afford to keep paying.

When I spoke with Kickstarter’s CEO Everette Taylor for the In Community podcast, he said something that stayed with me: "Life will try to break you in so many ways. I just had a will that would not break." This is a man who went from homelessness to leading a platform that's funded over $9 billion in creative projects. He didn't get through his messy middle by waiting until things were cleaner. He got through it by refusing to stop.

Reputation compounds after reps. Not before. Every post, every follow-up, every showing up when it would be easier not to — it adds up in ways you can't always see in real time.

💬 I'm building the In Community YouTube channel as a deeper extension of this work — longer conversations, real stories from leaders who look like all of us, and the kind of thinking this newsletter is built on.

If this newsletter has ever given you something to stand on — subscribe to the channel. Five seconds. It genuinely moves this mission forward.

👉🏽 Subscribe here. Bringing you all with me.

Here's what I've noticed — both in my own experience and watching other leaders navigate this — about how community actually functions when things get heavy:

📌 How Community Works in the Messy Middle

It absorbs what you can't carry alone. 

The messy middle is isolating by design — you're deep in execution, often heads-down, and it's easy to convince yourself nobody else would understand. But your community has been here too. Not the curated version of your network. The real one — the people you can send the honest text to. Protect that. Use it. Don't let pride or performance keep you from the people who can actually help you stay whole.

It reminds you what you're building toward. 

When you're inside the weight of it, it's hard to see the shape of what you're creating. Community acts as a mirror — people who reflect your vision back to you when your own signal gets noisy. The leaders I've watched navigate this stage best aren't the most self-reliant. They're the most connected. They let people who believe in the work remind them why it matters.

It compounds the reps you're putting in. 

This is the part we underestimate. Every time you show up in community — imperfectly, honestly, in motion — you're not just building credibility for yourself. You're signaling to the people watching that it's possible to be in the hard part and still move. That matters more than a polished post. Your consistency in the middle is someone else's permission slip to keep going in theirs.

The reality:

The messy middle isn't a gap in the story. It is the story. And the only way through it is the same way Everette got through his — not by waiting for conditions to improve, but by having a will that wouldn't break.

Keep moving. Keep showing up. The compound effect doesn't announce itself — it just arrives, one rep at a time.

We're in this together.

📝 Pro Tip: Try this Writing Partner

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💰 GET PAID: 2026 Marketing Salary Guide

ICYMI: I’ve developed the Marketing Salary Guide to bring visibility to reflect real pay ranges for different levels and roles — so your path to growth can be less messy than it was for me.

👉🏽 Get the guide.

✅ Now Hiring

What you asked for, delivered.

Is someone you know considering what’s next for them? Here are a few roles with people hiring across the network. I’ll be adding roles here every week, so stay tuned and make sure to spread the word.

💥 VP, Brand Studio — NowThis

💥 Sr Director, Consumer Strategy — Visa (multiple other roles)

💥 Sr Director, Brand Strategy & Platform Marketing — Hilton

💥 Director, Marketing — Carnegie Hall

💥 Director, Brand Partnerships — Vacation

💥 Director, Social Media — Vuori

💥 Sr Manager, CRM — Pfizer (multiple other roles)

💥 Sr Manager, Integrated Media Planner — DuckDuckGo

💥 Integrated Digital Marketing Manager — Nvidia

ICYMI last week:

💥 Chief Digital Officer — UFCU

💥 AVP, Marketing — The Lip Bar

💥 Managing VP — Marriott

💥 Sr Social Marketer — Hubspot Media

💥 Sr Manager, Social Media — Sesame Workshop

💥 Sr Manager, Retail Marketing — Vans

And before you go, consider who else might value this newsletter and what’s coming up on YouTube. Make sure to fwd this newsletter onward to them too. They can subscribe here for more directly in their inbox. 🔁 

In community,

Fahad