Dorie Clark, Speaker and Bestselling Author
Dorie Clark has been named one of the Top 50 business thinkers in the world by Thinkers50. She is a keynote speaker and teaches executive education at Duke University. She is also the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Long Game, Entrepreneurial You, Reinventing You and Stand Out, which was named the #1 Leadership Book of the year by Inc. magazine. A former presidential campaign spokeswoman, she writes frequently for the Harvard Business Review.
I had the opportunity to interview Clark recently. Here are some of the highlights of that interview:
Jill Griffin: Let's talk about The Long Game. What inspired you to write that?
Dorie Clark: I saw so many instances in contemporary society where it seemed like people were being pushed toward the short term. This is not new in the sense that human nature pushes us toward the short term, but I felt that the trend was accelerating because of things like the push for quarterly earnings on Wall Street, and the poor decisions that get made as a result. On a smaller scale, so often people these days feel a sense of stress, and sometimes distress, based on the comparison group that they have on social media. The problem is, with this globalized era, that your point of comparison is not people in your community. Your point of comparison is the entire world.
What I saw in my own clients, is that oftentimes, people were too quick to give up or too quick to want to give up because they would see others' success and assume that their feeling of not making progress indicated that they were on the wrong path or that things would never work out. I kept having to caution people, "No, that's not right. Things often take way longer than we want, especially if it's a worthwhile goal." And so, I wanted to create a framework to help ensure that good people did not give up too quickly on ideas that could be transformational.
Griffin: Can you give me an example of that?
Clark: In The Long Game, I actually tell one story about a woman, a wonderful executive coach who was very successful in her profession. One of the things that she did, as she should, to build her brand and platform, was begin writing for high profile publications. She was writing for a couple and there was one publication that she wrote for, for free, for six months. She did 35 free articles for them on her nights and weekends. And at the end of six months, her editor, two years out of college, told her that she was not creative enough and they were firing her from her unpaid position.
This is the kind of thing that would be upsetting for anyone, but the real question of your mettle is, what do you do with that? She did the right thing, which was to reach out to friends and colleagues and ask for their advice, and find out what they did. One answer that she got really shook her. She reached out to a colleague and explained what had happened and said, "Has this ever happened to you? What did you do?" And the person that she reached out to said, "Oh, yes, that happened to me and I never wrote again." And so, she realized, "Wow, I don't want that to be me." And so, she got back on the horse and within a couple of months, she had landed another writing position, which she continues to this day.
Griffin: That’s a terrific example of what to do when disappointment happens. So tell me more about The Long Game. What are some other tenets or bullet points?
Clark: Essentially, The Long Game is a book about how we can make choices today that will enable tomorrow to be better and easier. It's not always clear in the moment what those choices are. It requires stepping back and adopting a strategic lens. But once you do that, the steps themselves are not necessarily that hard. We often assume that we are going to have to make huge, hard, terrible choices down the road that are going to be really disruptive. But actually, much like stock market investing, the far better and easier course of action is to make small, consistent changes now, which lead toward the best outcome. We all know that you're busy and you don't have 10 hours a week to devote to some new activity or to learn something or to do something. But most people could find an hour or could find 20 minutes. And yet, we don't even do that.
I will just mention one more point, which is a theme that I cover in The Long Game is what I call keeping the faith. An essential ingredient when it comes to long term goals is being resilient, because it is actually far more likely than not, if you are crafting a five year or 10 year goal, that it will not work out precisely the way you predict. That's really not how life often works. But nonetheless, people often get so deterred and so discouraged when they get a rejection or when there's a twist in the road that they didn't anticipate. I think it is really important for us to understand that that is more likely to happen than not, and we need to be prepared for it and prepared to move past it so that we can stay the course sufficiently enough to get to the other side and be able to make the contribution we want.
Griffin: I love the concept of a 10 year goal. Give me an example.
Clark: One of my favorite examples of a 10 year goal is one that I created for myself in 2016, which I write about in The Long Game. I'm now, of course, halfway through this goal. My goal was to learn to write a show that would make it to Broadway. I was starting cold. I had no training in musical theater, none. And I decided to muscle my way through it. So, I'm now at the halfway point and I have been accepted into and completed a rather prestigious musical theater training program run by BMI, the music publishing company. I have completed a musical called Absolute Zero, which I am now working to get into the workshop phase. Next month I have a 10 minute musical that's going to be performed at Symphony Space in New York.
Griffin: That is amazing. Most people would go, "There's no way in the world." I mean, you have to think big and that's a really neat example. My last question is, for people that are just beginning their careers, what are a couple of pieces of advice that you would have for them?
Clark: If I was advising someone new in their career, I would say an especially valuable activity is to focus on accruing social proof. Meaning, what are the well-known brands or institutions that you can affiliate yourself with early on? Because number one, once you have some kind of an affiliation, let's say you've been quoted in such and such publication, no one can take it away from you. And it goes in your bio. And additionally, it just makes everything else easier downstream because people will be more likely to listen to you and your ideas.
