The Long Game With Dorie Clark

Posted by John Livesay in podcast0 comments

Think long-term. Plan for the long game and learn to reinvent yourself. Just how important is it to do this when it comes to your career? You are about to find out. Join John Livesay as he sits down with author and executive education professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, Dorie Clark as they discuss long-term strategic planning and how to reinvent yourself for success. Pay close attention and learn the ins and outs of self-assessment and self-improvement.

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Listen to the podcast here

The Long Game With Dorie Clark

Our guest is Dorie Clark, the author of the book The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World. She said, “Just because something is long, it doesn’t mean it’s slow. The effort we put into something compounds over time as interest does with the money.” Enjoy the episode.  

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I welcome back a guest, Dorie Clark. She’s been named one of the Top 50 Business Thinkers in the world by Thinkers50 and was recognized as the number one communications coach in the world by Marshall Goldsmith Leading Global Coaches Awards. Dorie is a consultant, a keynote speaker and an author. She teaches executive education at Duke and she’s the author of a book called The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World. She’s also been a former presidential campaign spokesperson. The New York Times described her as an expert at self-reinvention and helping others make changes in their lives. She speaks for companies like Google and Microsoft. Dorie, welcome back to the show.

[bctt tweet=”Effort compounds the same way interest does with money.” username=”John_Livesay”]

John, thank you. It’s so good to be here.

Let’s tap back in to do a quick refresh for anyone who didn’t get to read your other episode as to your roots. I know you grew up in a small town in North Carolina. We start to get a sense of how you didn’t grow up in Silicon Valley. I’m always interested to hear those stories of people who are in a situation where they go, “This is not the end for me. I’m going to figure out a way to do something else.”

I was thinking about this because there are some interesting accidents of birth. I used to work in politics. I worked at Howard Dean’s presidential race as a spokesperson. Our campaign manager for that race was known for being one of the first people to harness the power of the internet during a presidential campaign. His name was Joe Trippi. Part of his origin story was that he had grown up in California and he went to San Jose State. It’s almost through that accident that he became turned early on into the world of the internet and its possibilities. Even though he went on to be in politics, he had that Silicon Valley orientation and was able to cross-pollinate it. For me, I grew up in a small town in North Carolina, which was most famous as a golf resort. I have not yet found a way to cross-pollinate my work with golf so I fled instead.

I was reading a newsletter from Chip Conley who was talking about that within the word flee if you rearrange it, you can turn it into feel. I’m like, “That’s clever. I hadn’t thought of moving that L around like that.” Sometimes we don’t want to flee something and we want to feel what it is. Sometimes we feel it and go, “It’s still time to leave.” Let’s talk about your book. The reason I was trying to be clever with the pronunciation there is you’ve turned the word Long on the cover into “XOXOXO.” I’m assuming the X is silent. Maybe there’s another way to pronounce that but I thought, “That’s so clever in terms of hugs and kisses.” How did you come up with that long game with all those Xs and Os?

I published the book through a commercial publisher, Harvard Business School Press. As a result, I didn’t have too much control over the initial design. I can’t speak to what the designer was thinking. However, what I think it’s about is sort of bingo’s Xs and Os. It’s about the strategy of the long game. I’m so happy that you liked the cover because one of the challenges that authors with commercial publishing houses often face was a battle royale over the cover. Unfortunately, I tried to be generally a very agreeable person but I made the publishers hate me because this was the fifth cover concept that they gave me. The other ones felt like we’re not doing it. They were not speaking to what the book was. As the author, you want as best as you can for the cover to help add to the message and to convey it. For me, the idea of the strategy of Xs and Os and how you win the game is part of it. When I finally saw this design I was like, “This is the one.”

I’m sure you’re going to be able to give a talk on this and show all the covers that were rejected as part of the process of getting to the right story and right message as a brand since that’s one of your areas of expertise. A lot of people, when they see a finished product or finished talk they assumed that was your first stab at it. I have found that when people take you behind the Wizard of Oz curtain a little bit and you go, “No, this was a journey,” it inspires other people to think, “Maybe I’ll be on a journey and it won’t be my favorite thing right out of the get-go whether it’s something I write or something that I say or even the name of a talk that I give.”

One of the other reasons I love your title so much is the juxtaposition. Anytime there’s something like, “Long-term thinker but this is the short-term world,” that’s an interesting premise for our brain to try and put those two opposites together. If it is a short-term world and people are worried about the next quarter’s results, does it still make sense to be a long-term thinker? Let’s start with that open-ended obvious question of what we know the answer is. I’m curious to know not only what the answer is but what makes it the answer.

The Long Game: One of the best ways to differentiate yourself from the competition is to share your ideas publicly.

Ultimately, most of us can probably agree that the world has been getting more and more short-term oriented. We see it in businesses where many corporations are focused sometimes excessively to bad ends on short-term results and choosing stock market returns, in consequence making some poor decisions. We also see it in a lot of people’s lives. As we get more and more inundated with the internet culture, social media, constant comparisons and looking around, a lot of people are driven to distraction by what other people are doing and accomplishing. It does create pressure about, “Why are they succeeding? Why am I not succeeding? What do they know that I don’t? What am I doing wrong?” That leads to a frenzied rumination that is not the optimal way of being.

We know intellectually the things that are worthwhile in our careers and also in our personal lives are usually things that you have to work out for a long time but it can be hard. The biggest thing that I wanted to address in the book is that we all know intellectually that success does not come overnight but in practical terms, we don’t know what not overnight is. Maybe it’s a week. Shouldn’t it be a week? Often, it takes a lot more than that. This is a book about how to gird yourself for that uncomfortable period of time where you’re working hard towards something meaningful but you are not yet seeing outward signs of success. In order to get to that success, you have to persevere, which is not an easy thing to do. This book wants to give you the ammunition to be able to do it.

Let’s talk about creating online courses because I know you’ve done that and I went through that whole process as well. I remember, when I first started it, it seems so daunting. I thought, “Was anyone going to want this or buy this?” Don’t worry about that now, worry about creating something that you think is valuable and that you see as needed. As opposed to well, “When’s the payoff on this investment?” That is a great example of you’re not only an author and a speaker. You’ve decided, “Let’s create another source of revenue but more importantly, another source or way for people to consume our content that can be packaged with a talk.” When that happens, then you’re not just waiting for that once-a-year meeting that they need a speaker for.

I am a big fan of trying to think strategically about these questions and about building up multiple revenue streams. This was the topic of my book Entrepreneurial You, which was about how you create passive income. How do you create multiple revenue streams in your business? COVID showed us all pretty vividly that if we only have one income stream, certainly if you have a day job, but even if you’re an entrepreneur, but you only do one thing or one type of thing, COVID or any disruption like that, you don’t see it coming. It can be swift and dramatic. The more legs you can have on the table, the more different things, ventures or things that you have your hands in, the better because it provides you with a lot more stability and solidity if something changes in the marketplace. It also enables you to capture more upside.

It’s ironic because you’re talking about taking the long view or the long game of something, yet you have this wonderful marriage of saying, “There is a way to create rapid content for a masterclass because so many people get so overwhelmed with writing anything.” In one of your courses about that, you say, “I’m going to show you how to quickly come up with some ideas to get your message starting to flow. There is a happy medium and you are straddling both sides of it to keep the big picture and still take action.” Would that be a fair assessment?

[bctt tweet=”Be a long-term thinker in a short-term world.” username=”John_Livesay”]

Absolutely. In terms of the long game and the big picture, one of the drums that I like to beat is if you want to become a recognized expert in your field if you want to differentiate yourself from the competition. One of the best ways to do this, and this applies across industries, is to share your ideas publicly. If you don’t do that self-evidently, people don’t know what your ideas are unless they’ve worked with you directly. That is always going to be a small number of people.

It inhibits the virality of you as a person if the only people who know you are the people who personally know you and have worked with you directly. Whereas if you’re creating content, writing articles, doing podcasts like this or what have you, it enables a ton more people to see who you are and what you’re about. It’s shareable content so the word can spread and that enables you to grow much faster and make a big impact. That is an essential component of playing the long game in your career. With that being said, long doesn’t mean slow.

One of the covers that were proposed to me by my publisher that I was vehemently opposed to was they wanted to put a snail on the cover. I said, “First of all, snails are ugly. Second of all, the long game means strategic. It does not mean inherently that things have to be pokey or take a long time. You can be swift. You can move with alacrity. It’s about choosing the right things to do.” Similarly, that’s why I created a course, the Rapid Content Creation Masterclass. It is in your long-term interest to create great content and share your ideas but that doesn’t mean it has to be a painstaking process.

We know success takes a while. We start getting impatient and comparing ourselves to other people. That’s such a rabbit hole. First of all, imposter syndrome and resentment can kick up. Your resilience can go down. Much like the pandemic when it started, we didn’t know when it was going to end. For many of us, myself included, that was one of the hardest parts of it. More than eighteen months, let me try to wrap my head around that. It’s the same thing, “When is this success coming? Is it coming?”

I would love to hear what you do but what I’ve done is I think of myself as a stock. If I invest money in this stock called Me, I know my work ethic. I know a sense of some talent and some previous successes that I could say, “If that was a stock, I would invest in it. It might have some dips and not get profitable right off the get-go but it’s going to get there.” Do you use a metaphor like that for yourself? Do you have other ways of looking at things and helping other people see themselves in a way where they don’t get so impatient?

I love that metaphor, John. You’re exactly right. There are a couple that I would use. The first is your effort compounds the same way that money compounds over time. I’m a big fan. To go back to our previous example about writing articles for instance, which is something that I’ve done a lot in my business and in working to get my ideas better known. It is a process where you can’t just write one article and assume, “I’m done.” It doesn’t have to be onerous. You start where you start. Maybe it’s an article a month. If you can, maybe it’s an article a week. If you do that over enough time, eventually, you have built a body of work that is substantial. People do begin to know who you are because of those small efforts. It’s deploying an hour a week towards something meaningful.

Another financial metaphor that I like a lot, which I share in The Long Game comes from a gentleman that I interviewed. He’s a friend of mine named Jonathan Brill and I wrote a piece with him in Harvard Business Review. He talks about the way that he thinks about structuring his career portfolio. He says that his first goal is to create what he calls Heartbeat Income. It’s like, “What is the amount of money you need to cover the basics, pay the mortgage, pay the health insurance, get your food and whatever?” He always says, “That’s the first part.” After that, you can afford to be a little bit riskier. He said, “You need to take 20% of your effort and ask yourself, ‘What’s a bond and what is SpaceX stock?’” It’s good to have things that are secure to take care of the needs that you need to be met. It’s also good to have a little bit of something risky in the portfolio in a small way that could pay off exponentially. It’s true in our stock portfolios but it’s also true in terms of our career bets and where we’re investing our time.

Everyone’s aware that technology is changing at a rapid rate that no one’s experienced before in their careers, which requires people to stay in a learning mode. You can’t go, “I know how to be an engineer. I know how to be an accountant now. I don’t need to learn anything new.” With artificial intelligence coming along and a lot of professional services industries and things like and even computers doing radiology and reading X-rays. There are many things now that you would think you know what you know and you’re good now. You can coast for 40 years. What you’re saying is no matter what you’re doing, you need to be this long-term thinker and say, “What else could I be doing with my career to keep myself relevant or ahead of the curve?”

The Long Game: It is in your long-term interest to create great content and share your ideas. But that doesn’t mean it has to be a painstaking process.

All of us can probably think of examples. I have a person I know whose father has been long-term unemployed. This is an educated guy who had a great career but he was an architect that refused to learn AutoCAD. That’s what architecture is now. It’s using this software and not drawing things by hand. For years, he hasn’t been able to get a job because of his unwillingness to do this. You can say, “He’s pursuing other things,” which is great but he doesn’t have a job. It is incumbent upon all of us to be thoughtful. If we decide, “This is intolerable. I don’t want to do this.” Fine. Pick something else. Reinvent your weight into it but the problem comes when there’s not a goal and a thing that we’re reinventing ourselves into. Instead, “I’m not doing that thing anymore,” and there’s a void.

I remember when I was selling advertising for magazines back in 2008. It was the first time I got laid off. Someone said to me, “This reminds me of what happened to the silent movie stars. Some made it to talkies and some didn’t.” You’ve got to figure out if you’re willing to learn how to sell digital ads instead of print. Yes, it’s a whole other language and a whole other set of things but it is an ongoing choice we are continually making. It’s like, do I want to understand blockchain and what an NFT is? Do I want to say, “This is where I check out. I’m not going to learn anymore?”

I don’t necessarily think I’m going to run and invest in one but at least I’m going to understand the language. I think what you’re saying is to stay relevant, you have to speak the language. I remember listening to Lisa Gibbons being interviewed. She said, “I agreed to appear on Dancing with the Stars because that’s the language that a lot of people are speaking these days for actors or hosts to stay relevant.” She’s not a professional dancer but you’ve got to be willing to stretch out of your comfort zone and go, “If this is what people are talking about and I get invited to play the game, I’m going to learn how to dance enough to do the Mamba for two minutes.” Those were a couple of examples in addition to that architect that you said.

At a certain point, it’s like someone said, “I have a flip phone so I don’t text.” You’re like, “What?” Maybe if you’re a grandparent and you have checked out and you’re like, “I stopped with the flip phone. I’m not going to use Dropbox. I don’t know how to get this to you then.” We don’t realize that we’re constantly saying yes and learning and adapting to new things, including Zoom versus Skype and Blackberry versus iPhone.

This is what I want your opinion on. I see so many companies thinking, “We’re at the top. We’re going to stay here forever,” Kodak, Blackberry, Blockbuster, on and on. The irony was there’s a documentary on Netflix about the demise of Blockbuster. What advice do you have because you work with such big companies? They hire you to come in as a speaker and consultant on making sure that they are not just chasing after every new shiny thing but are having some long-term thinking when it’s hard with all the demands on them.

Some of the best advice about corporate strategy comes from my friend, Rita McGrath, who I profiled in one of my earlier books, Stand Out. I talked a bit about Rita and her ideas. Her book is called Seeing Around Corners. She shares a lot of interesting information about how companies can begin to see inflection points as they’re happening or before they’re happening so that they have time to pivot if needed. To a certain extent, it’s asking yourself simple questions like, “If you work for a company, are you noticing that you don’t buy its product anymore? If you are working at a company, are headhunters trying to poach your talent?” It’s a good thing that headhunters are trying to poach your talent because it means that you are seen as a leader in your industry. If they are not circling, that’s ominous. It’s looking for little things like that.

I love the concept of if your family is not using film and everyone’s taking digital pictures or your family’s not going to Blockbuster every weekend anymore and renting these little red things from Netflix or starting to stream. That process is fascinating to me to watch. Eventually, it’s going to be every studio and network. We now have NBC streaming. That whole demise of cable in a weird way. Do you remember when people were talking about, “I’ve cut the cord to cable?” I thought to myself, “Is that a few people doing that? How would you figure out how to watch what you want?” I don’t know many people who are still paying for all that.

[bctt tweet=”We all know intellectually that success does not come overnight, but in practical terms, we don’t really know what not overnight is.” username=”John_Livesay”]

I remember my mother coming to visit me at my house and being upset that I didn’t have cable because she’s like, “I’m turning on the television and what do I watch?” She was upset by this whole situation. She demanded that I order a cable subscription for when she came to my house. I’m like, “This is dumb, mom.”

We can get Jeopardy on YouTube. It’s pretty funny. I sold my place in LA before I moved here to Austin. I was talking to one particular real estate person that I’d worked with for a while. I said, “There’s a competitor that’s a lot more digital than what you’re doing. I’m interested to hear what your strategy is to sell the house now that it’s been ten years since I bought it.” They’re like, “We run an ad in the LA Times on Saturday and a magazine.” I’m like, “If there’s anybody I know that still gets the LA Times, it’s on a Sunday only not a Saturday. You’re putting a magazine in a Saturday thing and someone’s got to flip through that magazine to see an ad for my house and I’m paying you for that? That doesn’t make any sense at all.” That’s horse and buggy time.

Here, they also deploy some pigeons.

It is fascinating to watch the resistance of industries like real estate, which has been so much the same for decades of how people get paid and how things are marketed. They do a virtual tour of the house and they even have a thing where you can measure to see if your sofa will fit. I’m like, “Do you guys do anything like that besides pictures?” They’re like, “No. We can’t do everything.” How our brain justifies not evolving. I wasn’t in complete shock that I got laid off because you could see print was dying but it is a death of anything. There’s that denial like, “Did it really happen? I thought it might, but it did?” That’s the psychology of what you’re doing that I find fascinating. You’re encouraging people to get out of this frenetic of putting out flyers every day. I’m sure the people at Blockbuster were busy up until the point where they realized, “This isn’t going to work anymore.”

You do need to zoom out and by the time they did, it was too late because they didn’t have the money to go after the subscribers the way Netflix did. It’s a fascinating little nuance in that documentary I watched. You watch all these other people try to join the party. He has an advantage and they bought Fox on top of it. Isn’t that interesting? Talk about a long-term view of something. Disney doesn’t have enough content that they have to buy those premises. Looking at that can help us look at our career. That’s what you’re saying in the book as well.

Something that I’ve striven to do in all of my books is essentially take the way that we think about corporate strategy and apply it to our personal lives. I got my start doing consulting for organizations in enterprise-level consulting. All of my books have been aimed at individual professionals. It’s fundamentally the same analysis. It’s the same way that we ought to be thinking about these questions.

The Long Game: Long game means strategic. It does not mean that things have to be pokey or take a long time.

That’s why I kept toggling back and forth because I knew that was your specific area of expertise. You have your niche and that’s a great place to wrap up this wonderful interview. When you have a brand like Dorie Clark, people know you, all of the books have a thread, all the talks and courses are all connected, then we know we’re in Dorie’s world. What a wonderful place to be in. It makes the momentum and the energy pull in because you know where you’re going. Any last thoughts or quotes you want to leave us with? We can get the book, The Long Game on Amazon and your website DorieClark.com.

Thank you so much, John. I appreciate it. I’ll also mention that for people that are interested in doing more of a deep dive on strategic thinking. I do have a free resource that people can download, which is The Long Game Strategic Thinking Self-Assessment, which is at DorieClark.com/thelonggame.

I saw that. It even pops up for me when I went there. What a great tool that is and what a great person you are sharing your warmth and wisdom, which is a wonderful combination. Thanks, Dorie.

John, thank you so much.

Important Links

• Dorie Clark
• The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World
• Episode – Dorie Clark Past Episode
• Entrepreneurial You
• Rapid Content Creation Masterclass
• Harvard Business Review – Jonathan Brill and Dorie Clark Article
• Stand Out
• Seeing Around Corners
• Amazon – The Long Game
• DorieClark.com/thelonggame
• Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course

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