By Oluwole Dada
Have you ever imagined a woman in labour, the room tense with anticipation, as the nurses lean in and keep telling her to push? She is exhausted. Her body has been at it for hours. The baby is not coming out as quickly as expected. Can you imagine her stopping to push midway? Just giving up right there, in the middle of it all? That very thought is alarming. It is alarming because instinctively, it is known that stopping midway is the most dangerous point. That is precisely when the midwife’s voice gets louder, her insistence more urgent, and her encouragement fiercer. This is because the baby is almost here, and stopping now is not rest. Stopping now is risk.
I want to write about that moment. That painful, uncertain, and demoralizing midway point. If you have been in leadership any length of time, you would have been there. I certainly have. It is exactly the moment that separates those who eventually birth something great from those who walk away wondering what might have been. James Dyson built a global household brand synonymous with innovation. Dyson produced 5,126 failed vacuum prototypes over five years. Imagine the raised eyebrows from investors. At some point, every rational voice around him probably said: enough, but Dyson understood something fundamental. He was in labour. And the baby was not out yet.
Colonel Sanders is another one. The man who built Kentucky Fried Chicken into a global empire was 65 years old when he drove around America with a pressure cooker and a chicken recipe, sleeping in his car, pitching to restaurants. He was rejected over a thousand times. He was not at the beginning of his journey as he had already run a successful restaurant that closed through no fault of his own. He was squarely in the middle of a fight he had every right to abandon. He kept pushing. The baby eventually came out, and it came out golden.
Are you working on something right now? A project, a strategy, a campaign, a team transformation or a desire for the next level and the results are simply not showing up. You are putting in the work. You are doing the right things, but the numbers are flat, the feedback is lukewarm, and your line manager is starting to ask uncomfortable questions. You must not give up. The middle of anything hard is the most deceptive place to be. At the start, you have energy, vision, and the adrenaline of possibility. At the end, you have results to carry you. The middle is where doubt lives. It is the valley between the mountain you have climbed and the summit you are yet to reach. And it is precisely in that valley where most dreams are abandoned.
There are many line managers reading this. You are not building global consumer brands, but you are running departments. You are managing teams of five or fifteen. You are the person in the middle of an organizational change programme that has stalled. You are having competing priorities, and it is beginning to affect you. The principle is the same. The labour ward looks different, but the rules of pushing apply just as stubbornly. You are closer to the end than you ever thought. Keep pushing and possibly adjust your approach.
There is a very great risk when you stop midway on your quest for something. A woman who stops pushing midway does not simply delay the birth. She puts herself and the baby at risk. Your dreams, your projects, and your leadership ambitions all carry the same logic. Stopping at the midway does not pause the clock. It often sets it back. The momentum you have built dissipates. The team that believed in you starts to waver. The market window that was opening begins to close. The investor who was warming up moves on to the next conversation.
In closing, let me offer you a few honest thoughts from someone who has stood in that same corridor. First, separate exhaustion from failure. They are not the same thing. Exhaustion is a physical and emotional state. Failure is a conclusion. Do not let one masquerade as the other. Rest, if you need to. Breathe. Talk to someone whose opinion you trust. But do not confuse needing a moment with needing to stop. Second, find your midwife. Every great leader who has sustained a long push has had someone in their corner. Indra Nooyi at PepsiCo has spoken openly about the mentors and allies who held her vision steady when the internal politics of a large corporation threatened to erode it.
Oluwole Dada is the General Manager at SecureID Limited, Africa’s largest smart card manufacturing plant in Lagos, Nigeria.
