You've probably seen the midwit meme — where the simpleton and the genius arrive at the same conclusion, while the overthinking intellectual gets stuck in the weeds. There's a reason it resonates.
The middle is where things go to die. It's drab, uninspiring, slow, grey. It feels safe because it's neither hot nor cold, just lukewarm. But the trouble with lukewarm is you don't really have anything. You're not pushing in either direction.
Let's take a service business as an example.
The middle looks like a medium-sized retainer. Not cheap, not premium. The problem? You can't afford great talent, so you hire cheap labour. Your clients aren't paying enough to be truly invested, but they're paying enough to care about results. You're stuck in a valley where you don't have the margin to scale, don't have the margin to deliver exceptional work, and winning becomes genuinely difficult.
You can go up. Charge more. When clients pay more, they're more invested in making it work — they help you succeed. You can hire better people, deliver better results, and those results justify the premium. The clients who pay more tend to be better clients anyway — they're running established businesses, they understand value. The downside? It's harder to sell. You need the track record to warrant it.
Or you can go down. Automate aggressively. Productise everything. Deliver the 80/20 — a standardised offering that won't work for everyone, but because you're not charging a fortune, people are happy with the ROI. There's a massive opportunity here for service businesses built on automation and efficiency.
Both directions can work. The middle rarely does.
This applies beyond business too — pricing, relationships, health. The uncomfortable truth is that commitment to an edge usually beats comfortable compromise.