The Long Game

Dorie Clark: Well, broadly speaking, the way that I see the benefit is that if you really don't care where you end up then it doesn't really matter, you can end up lots of places, you can be a short-term thinker and just be responding to external circumstances and responding to stimuli. But for most of us, we actually do care where we end up, we do have ambitions about where we want to go and what we want our lives and our careers to look like, and it is really hard to get there if we are constantly in reactive mode, just responding to what's in front of us.

We have to get a little bit more proactive about setting the vision so that we can begin to take the steps that move us in that direction. That's not to say there won't be interruptions or detours along the way, but we need to know where we're going so we can actually strive to be directionally correct in getting there.

Rachel Salaman: But while we're looking long-term trends and technology continues to evolve really, really quickly. How can we keep our eye on the long game without being left behind by all the things that are happening in the meantime?

Dorie Clark: Well, I actually think that keeping our eyes on the long-term is actually, ironically, perhaps the most valuable when it comes to moving in the direction that we want and ensuring that we're responding to trends. There's a concept that I talk about in my book, "The Long Game," which I call "heads up and heads down thinking," and one of the key points is that, in order to be successful, we can't just have one or the other.

You know, if you're constantly heads up, looking for shiny new objects, that's exciting but you're not actually going to execute or get things done. Similarly, if you're heads down all the time you are going to miss the signals from the marketplace or from your own internal conscience that you are moving in the wrong direction. So, you have to toggle between them and get good at both skills so that you can keep the balance.

Rachel Salaman: What I didn't mention when I introduced you was that you're also an author, and your previous books are about standing out from the crowd and reinventing yourselves. How does this new book fit in with your others?

Dorie Clark: Well, the way that I think about my works fitting in together is that in many my previous three books, I kind of think about them as a trilogy, there was "Reinventing You," which is about how to professionally reinvent yourself to get yourself to the place that you want to be, to get yourself to the job or the career that fulfills you.

Then "Stand Out," the second one, is about how to make a mark in your company or in your field, how do you actually get known and recognized for your expertise, and then, finally, there's "Entrepreneurial You," which is about how to monetize that expertise.

You know, it's different, we might assume that just becoming known for your expertise is enough and the money will take care of itself. In the modern economy that's actually not true, expertise is often decoupled from monetization, and if you are the person in question, you really want to recouple them, so I help explain how to do that.

But ultimately, "The Long Game" is a little bit of a continuation of those themes but it's taking a broader look, it's helping people to say, "All right, you've built the career that you want for yourself, well how do we make sure we built the life that we want for ourselves, how do we fit the pieces together and make sure that 10 or 20 years from now we are happy with the choices that we've made?"

Rachel Salaman: That brings me to a larger question about your book, which is, how do we define success? I notice that in your book a dominant metric of success is about achieving recognition. I wondered if this was a reflection of your own career and work, or is recognition a metric for all and any success, in your view?

Dorie Clark: Well, I don't necessarily think that everybody needs to strive for recognition, and certainly, to clarify for any skeptics out there, this is not about what I would call the shallow forms of recognition, like, "Oh, I have X thousands of followers on Instagram," that's not really what we're talking about.

Recognition, you're right, is a theme that gets threaded through my work, but really what I'm aiming at is, first of all, the respect of your peers, the respect of your colleagues, which I think most professionals would in fact strive for.

And secondly, it's a question of impact, because, while it is true that not everyone would strive for broader recognition, for people who are hungry to make some kind of an impact with their ideas, they want to influence the discourse somehow.

Whether it's a policy area that they believe in or if they're creating a company that they want to go somewhere, or even within a company... if there's an initiative that you're backing, that you really feel like is important to the future of the company or can really be helpful to consumers... you want more people to know about that. And your impact is limited if your scale and scope and recognition is limited.

So, for the people who find that beneficial, and I think, frankly, there's a lot of them, because I think most people in some way would like to make an impact, I try to unpack the strategies that enable them to be able to come closer to that.

Rachel Salaman: So, who is the target reader of this new book?

Dorie Clark: Well, for "The Long Game," I mean, I can say in general the people who are... my audience broadly, the kind of people that I am striving to write for and who I think of as kind of my community, I would say, in general, they are people who are mid-career to senior professionals who are in fact striving to make a bigger impact.

They may be very educated, sometimes over-educated, and it can become really frustrating for people who want to do something, you know, they want to be advancing in their careers or if they're starting their own venture, consulting or coaching or whatever it is, they want to get clients, they want to help people.

You know, if they're in a company they want to get promoted and have a bigger reach, and the pathway to that is often very mysterious, and I am frustrated by that, because this is important information, people need to know this, because otherwise a lot of really smart and talented people with a lot to offer are just not able to.

You know, it's just this gap between your potential and what you're doing, or this gap between the contribution you could make and the contribution you are making, and I really want, in all of my books but especially "The Long Game," to try to help people close that gap so that they can self-actualize a little bit more.

Rachel Salaman: Well, perseverance and patience are key to playing the long game, you can't have everything really quickly if you're talking about the kind of success and impact that you've just described. Why do so many people find being patient difficult, do you think?

Dorie Clark: What I have seen, you know, time and again with professionals that I work with is, you know, all of us have goals of some kind. Maybe it's that you want to write a book or you'd really like the opportunity to run the blah-blah-blah office at your company. You know, there's different metrics for all of us, but oftentimes they can really take a while, and in the moment, one of the key themes of "The Long Game" is that in the moment it is very, very hard to tell the difference between "it isn't working" and "it isn't working yet."

In that gap so many people fall off, they quit, and it's understandable that they quit because they feel like, "Ah, well, you know, I tried, it didn't work," but they don't necessarily really know that it didn't work, all they know is that it feels like they're in a dark tunnel and OK, fine, but the truth is, often the problem is just that things take a lot longer than we want, and if you kept persisting longer it may well work out.

So I wanted to create a framework in "The Long Game," my hope was that it would be helpful for smart and talented people to be able to persevere and to understand when it's the right move to persevere. Because the problem is not necessarily that people can't or won't do it: I think that what is more often the problem is that people don't necessarily know in advance what the scope is of something. They just don't know, they have no idea how long it's supposed to take, quote-unquote, or what's normal, what's common.

So, laying out the framework so people can really understand what's involved, and therefore, hopefully, be motivated to keep going when it's the right thing to do, that's what I'm interested in.

Rachel Salaman: How do you know if you will never succeed or you just haven't succeeded yet?

Dorie Clark: That's always the question, and there are a couple of things that I think are important here.

The first is that we have to recognize, honestly, that when we are in the thick of things we often have very poor judgment about that question, it's really hard to tell, and people tend to get very emotional one way or another; they either swing to one end and they catastrophize and say, "Oh, it's never going to work, this is terrible, I should just quit now," or they swing to the other end, where they're overly persistent, you know, they're like clinging to the life raft and saying, "No, but it's just around the corner."

You know, we don't really want to be at either extreme, so we need external judgment. So this is why it's so important I think (this is a theme that I sound both in "The Long Game" and especially in my first book, "Reinventing You") to assemble what I call a "mentor board of directors." And ideally these are people who of course are both supporters of yours, they care about you, but also it's really important that they understand your business or your industry, so that they can help you make those sometimes subtle distinctions about strategies and about what you're doing and what's working and what's not working. That's number one.

The second piece that I think is critical here is what I call in "The Long Game" "looking for the raindrops." And what I mean by that is that often, in our own judgments, we are waiting for the big score, the big success, and we tend to dismiss the kind of small signs or the small pieces of evidence as like, "Oh well, that doesn't matter. Oh well, that's just... you know, who cares about that?" But oftentimes I think that those are really critical signals.

You know, it might be something as simple as clients are sending positive notes about you to your boss, or it might be something like more people are starting to friend you on LinkedIn or sign up for your newsletter because more people are hearing about you. You might say, "Oh, well that's five people a day, who cares?" but it means that traction is starting to happen, and we have to look for those small pieces of evidence because they can help guide us.

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Rachel Salaman: Now of course we need to have goals, you've mentioned goals, and in the book, you point out that we can't set the right goals unless we have space to think about them, headspace, and that often means saying no. And you have a lot of useful advice on this, one that I thought was particularly useful was asking people for more information about a request before we say yes. What are the benefits of this, and could you just explain to people how it works?

Dorie Clark: Yeah, absolutely. So, this actually sounds like it's maybe counterintuitive advice, because... if someone's asking you for something and you're feeling overwhelmed, you know, (what should you do about it?) oftentimes the tendency is just to dispatch the request in one way or another. You might say "no" to it, but actually a lot of people honestly have trouble saying no. So even more likely, even if you don't totally want to do it, you might just be like, "Oh, OK, fine, fine, I'll do it," just to kind of get it out of your inbox. So, the last thing that you might want to do is to engage further and like, "Oh, let's email them again, let's extend the correspondence," but I think actually that is one of the best things you can do, and here is why.

We often assume, erroneously, that other people put time and care into their requests. But there are a lot of people that really almost thoughtlessly make asks. They're slinging it out to you, they have no idea. Maybe someone told them once, "Oh, you should really talk to Rachel," [but] they have no idea why.

So, if you just simply... you know, this is not about being mean or forcibly deflecting people, this is just enquiring... if you send a message back saying, "Oh thank you so much for reaching out. I'd love to be helpful if I can. Can you tell me a little bit more about why you'd like to meet and what you'd like to talk about?"...

Well, that is super important, because if they say, "Oh, Rachel, great. Well, I know you have a podcast, so I'd really like you to introduce me to Tim Ferris, he has a podcast too." Like, you could immediately say, "Oh gosh!" OK, you know, good thing I didn't spend an hour with you, like, "Sorry, that's not going to be possible, can't help you there," and you're able to fend that off and you did it with a three-minute email exchange rather than spending half an hour or an hour on somebody who, frankly, doesn't deserve your time because they haven't thought it through.

Whereas, if someone sends you a thoughtfully and meticulously crafted message explaining why you, Rachel Salaman, you're the one they want to talk to and they want to learn this and this and this, and they've been listening to your show for X amount of time, well that's the kind of person that is worth getting through the filter, and you say, "Oh wow, this person seems really thoughtful, they seem really together, let's do that."

Rachel Salaman: So, with tactics like that we get a bit more headspace and we can identify our long-term goals. And you mention in the book that, although it might be something that most people think that they have, often they don't, they have to actually formulate those long-term goals, and you suggest we "optimize for interesting." Why do you say that, and can you give me an example of what it looks like?

Dorie Clark: Yeah, absolutely. So, when it comes to optimizing for interesting, there is so much cultural pressure to know your passion, follow your passion, you know, have a life of meaning, and those are great things but it's often very high stress for people who are just not sure. A lot of people don't necessarily know, "Oh, it's been planted in my heart that this is my mission from the heavens." I mean, this is a lot more rare than people might assume. Lots of people are trying to figure it out, and if often just makes people feel bad to have to admit, "Well, I don't really know."

So instead of putting this super high stakes frame on it, like, "Oh sorry, you can't actually do anything, you actually can't take any action in your life until you figure out what your passion is," I like to suggest we optimize for interesting. Because that, I think, first of all, is a gentler frame, but secondly, you might not know what your passion in life is, but certainly you know things you find interesting. And just the more we can gravitate toward that, the more it gives us an opportunity to learn by doing, which in fact is how we learn.

Rachel Salaman: And somewhat related, you discuss at length in the book the idea made famous by Google, that 20 percent of our time could, or even should, be spent pursuing projects unrelated to our day jobs. Could you talk about some of the ways to do this, and what value it brings in the long game?

Dorie Clark: In "The Long Game," I do talk about the concept of 20 percent time, which basically is about experimental time, right.

What's magic, I think, about the 20 percent frame is that if you are pursuing something with just 20 percent of your time, if it doesn't work out it's actually OK, you have not been betting so much that your life or your business will be devastated if it doesn't work. And that's important because, as we've seen with various financial crises over the years, it's not really good when something is too big to fail, because sometimes it does fail and it creates some serious problems.

But 20 percent, nobody's going to go bankrupt if they spend 20 percent of their time, or even 20 percent of their money, exploring something that they think, "You know what, this might not work, but it could." And if it does work, 20 percent of your time and effort is enough that, if you actually work on it for a while, if you work on it for a number of months or a number of years, depending on the scope of it, you actually really can get somewhere.

I think that this is very important for us, certainly for companies, but I would say also for our own careers, our own lives, because it's a way, first of all, of optimizing for interesting – you're able to pursue something that seems cool, that keeps you fresh, that enlivens you in some way. But also, we know, certainly COVID taught this to us, that life is unpredictable. So having a new skill, a new possibility in your back pocket, is not a bad thing to have. So that's sort of how I think about 20 percent time.

Rachel Salaman: Another really interesting concept in your book is "thinking in waves," which helps people start planning their long-game strategy. Could you explain that?

Dorie Clark: Yes. So, thinking in waves is basically the idea that, if we want to have a fulfilling career, we need to recognize that a key element of it is: you cannot get away with just doing the same thing over and over and over again.

In clients that I work with, people that I have as part of my online recognized expert course in community, I often see that, when people come to me and they're feeling stuck somehow, they're feeling a little bit like they're in a rut, often it's because they have been trying to optimize too hard on like one particular thing that they're good at or one particular thing that works. And that is great, you know, yay!, but it can't be the only thing that you do. So, we have to understand what the waves are and how to transition between them.

So, I create a framework in "The Long Game," where the waves are as I've laid them out. First is "learning," of course, because when you're entering a new field or a new company you want to start there, you want to get the lay of the land and understand what's what. But then, at a certain point, you need to shift into what I call "creating mode," which is, how do you add your own value back once you understand how things work? All right, well what's your opinion, what's your take on it? You need people to know that, so that you're not just like a fly on the wall but you're actually adding something.

You then need to shift into "connecting mode," which is, how do you build relationships, how do you network? Because again, to the point about impact, if you are actually striving to get your ideas heard and to somehow make a difference, it can't just be you and like the three people that know you. You want to have broader connections in the organization or in your field, your industry, so that people can hear your ideas, and also so you can, frankly, learn from them, and just benefit from having your take sharpened by them.

Then finally there's what I call "reaping mode." But reaping mode, the key: this is not a destination, this is a circle. Reaping mode is where you've kind of hit your stride in your company or you've hit your stride professionally, like, "Yeah, things are going well." People respect you, people are listening to you, you're making good money, all right, we're rocking and rolling.

It sounds good, certainly we want to enjoy it, but also some people stop there and it becomes very dangerous to stop there, because at a certain point, if all you're doing is just milking your reputation or milking your asset, eventually you're going to run out of milk because the world is moving on. That's why it's so important, proactively, to disrupt ourselves and to go back into learning mode, so that we can begin to start the process again and say, "All right, well what's the next thing I can tackle?"

Rachel Salaman: You mention networking there, and you are a recognized expert on networking, and you also include a chapter in this new book about it. What kinds of networking should we be looking to do for long-term success, and what kinds are best avoided, do you think?

Dorie Clark: Well, the kind that I recommend avoiding, as you might imagine, is what I just call "short-term networking." And I think, frankly, that's the kind that gives networking a bad name. This is the caricature that we all envision, where someone sidles up to you, you know: "Blah-blah-blah, hi, Rachel, blah-blah-blah, got something for me?" And we're just like, "Oh no!" It's like a networking sneak attack, you know?

They want a job, they want an introduction, they want this, "Oh, can I be on your show?" whatever it is, but they're seeking something. That is really just... obviously it's not the way to be, and it's not what networking is. I think a lot of good people avoid networking because they assume, "Oh, I don't want to be like that," but that is not the only form of networking. I mean, basically that's just bad networking.

So good networking looks very different. Good networking I actually divided into two subcategories. One I just call long-term networking, and that's really where you're networking with what I would say are good intentions, about being friends with someone, building a relationship. You go into it saying, "You know what, I don't know what I can do for them, I don't know what they can do for me, but they're interesting, they're a good person, they're somebody that I like, that I want to get to know, that I respect. OK, let's be friends."

So, you do that and you really think long-term: eventually you're going to help each other. I mean, when you become friends that's what happens, but you're not going into it with a specific sneaky desire.

Then also, (this is the one that I feel like is often underappreciated or underutilized,) there is what I call "infinite horizon" networking, and this is networking deliberately with people who, on the surface, you might think, "Oh my gosh, what do I have in common with this person?" or "Why would this person ever be helpful to me?"

You know, they could be in a completely different field, they could be in a completely different geography, it might seem really random, but those are actually the connections that can sometimes be the most valuable. Because they're surprising, they're legitimately the ones that might teach you things you don't know or introduce you to concepts or people or frameworks that you've never even heard about, and you would never hear about, because people in your field have no idea. So that's really what can be transformative sometimes.

Rachel Salaman: We won't always succeed, of course, as we've mentioned, and in the book, you're frank about some of the setbacks and challenges that you've actually experienced yourself. Could you share one of those and how you responded?

Dorie Clark: Yeah, certainly. In "The Long Game"... In fact, you know, you're generous to say, "Can you share one?" because there's lots! In "The Long Game," I actually start out a chapter basically just relating my experiences over the course of 2019. So, this is a pre-pandemic year, totally untouched by the mishigas [that is, craziness] of the pandemic, but even then, my hit rate was not amazing.

(You know, I felt like it was important to share this because, on some levels, I'm very successful compared to how I was when I started my business, and I feel very fortunate. I have a good business, I get to write for good, high-profile publications and publish books and things like that.

Sometimes people might assume, "Oh, well, once you've reached a certain level of success then everything becomes easy," and the truth is, absolutely not. You continue to get rejected all the time because we continue striving for new things, and in those areas, those people haven't heard of you, those people don't respect you. And you just have to keep going and continually swallowing your ego and persisting. So that is something that I definitely do.)

So, over the course of 2019, I set five stretch goals for myself, and they were things that were... you know, it was not a crazy stretch goal, like all of them were at least theoretically attainable, but they were just a bit outside of what I had accomplished previously. And over the course of the year, four of them, four out of the five, literally, up through the end of November, every single one fell through, even though they seemed very much within my grasp.

The fifth one finally worked out and that was very exciting, but yeah, we often have to accept an 80 percent miss rate if we're going to get anything out of what we want. It feels undignified, but, you know, that's life, and if we want the good stuff, we have to be willing to muddle through all of that.

Rachel Salaman: What keeps you going, what motivates you to believe, I suppose, that you are going to have that 20 percent hit rate when you're faced with so many setbacks?

Dorie Clark: I think for all of us we need to have a certain degree of self-confidence. I think one of the most important points in "The Long Game" is that we are doing ourselves a major disservice if we are too quick to believe other people. If one person, you know, if 100 people tell you that something is not right, then OK, fine, I'm willing to believe the wisdom of crowds, but if one or two or even half a dozen people don't like something, that is their opinion. There are always statistical anomalies, and we need to keep pushing through.

My colleague, Jeffrey Pfeffer, has a great book that came out about a decade ago called "Power." And one of the points that he raises that I think is really important is, you know, if you are not thriving at a particular company that doesn't mean you're not good. It just means, if you are legitimately a high caliber person, it is possible that you have found yourself in an inopportune circumstance, where people do not appreciate your talents.

So, one of the themes that I try to hammer in "The Long Game" is that what we need is "at bats" [that is, our chance to have a go]. That is the only thing that is going to show us what we're able to do. Because one person rejecting you, I mean, they could be having a bad day, they could not like you because you look like their ex, there's a million things. We need enough people to look at our stuff, but if we do and if we actually are good, then statistically that will prevail over time.

Rachel Salaman: So, do you have any final words, Dorie, for people who may find themselves leaning toward short-term wins rather than taking the more challenging long-term view?

Dorie Clark: When it comes to playing the long game, one of the most important things that we can be thinking about really is putting parameters on our time. Because, it's not that it takes a huge amount of time to be a long-term thinker, it doesn't, it takes almost the same amount of time as being a short-term thinker, but no one is going to give us that time. We have to force, forcibly carve it out, for ourselves.

So, I close the book actually by sharing a story about my friend, Dave Crenshaw, who's a time management expert. And he talks about just simple things, like training ourselves to stop work at a certain time every day.

It's like writing poetry: constraints make us more creative, and when we enforce those constraints diligently, it actually forces us to think in a different way, and that creates more space for all the good things that we want to try to do.

Rachel Salaman: Dorie Clark, thanks very much for joining us today.

Dorie Clark: Thank you, Rachel.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Dorie's book again is "The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World." I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview, until then, goodbye.