The Long Game Playbook: Persistence, Patience, and Purpose in a Fast-Paced World with Dorie Clark

By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed, and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you!

If you enjoy our podcast and find value in our content, please consider supporting the show. By joining our Patreon Community, you’ll receive exclusive content only available on Patreon!  Click here to learn more!!

Episode Transcript:

Automatically Transcribed With Podsqueeze

Dorie Clark 00:00:00  We know we have big projects that we want to accomplish. We know we have big goals that we want to tackle, but we keep putting them off systematically because, oh my gosh, there’s so many emails I need to respond to the emails, or I need to have this meeting or whatever the urgent thing is. And so often our attention turns to that, and we find ourselves with never enough time to do the thing that actually we claim is most important.

Chris Forbes 00:00:33  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living.

Chris Forbes 00:01:09  This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:18  There are so many moments in life where something we want just doesn’t happen. A project stalls out. An opportunity falls through. Something you are excited about doesn’t go the way you hoped. And I think it’s really easy in those moments to make it mean more than it actually does. One of the things that I really liked in this conversation with my guests, Dorie Clark, is that we talked about how often that turns out not to be true. Some things that look like failures are just unfinished. Sometimes what feels like a dead end is just a delay. And if we stay with something long enough, a surprising number of things can come back around in a different form. We talk about what it means to play the long game, how to keep going when results take longer than you want them to. And I assure you, they always will. And why? Long term thinking requires a different kind of faith than most of us are used to.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:07  I’m Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, Dorie. Welcome to the show.

Dorie Clark 00:02:13  Eric, I’m so glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:15  I’m really excited to talk with you about a book of yours. It’s a couple years old at this point, but it is an idea that I think we need now. Probably even more than when you wrote it, which is the long game. How to be a long term thinker in a short term world. And we’ll get into that in a moment. But we’ll start, like we always do, with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf. Whichever sends things like greed and hatred and fear, and the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:04  So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Dorie Clark 00:03:11  One of the reasons that I actually wrote the book, The Long Game, is that the the wolf that kept nipping at me and I think probably is the case for a lot of people, is short term thinking. It is so common that we know we have big projects that we want to accomplish. We know we have big goals that we want to tackle, but we keep putting them off systematically because, oh my gosh, there’s so many emails I need to respond to the emails, or I need to have this meeting or whatever the urgent thing is. And so often our attention turns to that, and we find ourselves with never enough time to do the thing that actually we claim is most important. And by writing the book, I wanted to try to examine that a little bit more and begin to fight back against it. Because if you want to be a long term thinker, you have to fight for it.

Dorie Clark 00:04:05  You have to really make a conscious choice in this world.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:09  The amount of things that can command our interest in the short term are astounding, and many of them need to be taken care of. I mean, there’s that old saw in the business world of focusing on like, what’s urgent versus what’s important. And the reality is we end up with enough urgent and important things going on that it’s not that simple of a delineation. When we draw up a little chart from a seven Habits of Highly Effective People, it makes it seem really easy, but it’s hard to to parcel those out. But one of the big reasons that you say is the heart of this is busyness. Talk to me about busyness and how that gets in our way.

Dorie Clark 00:04:49  So I began to notice a few years ago that whenever I would ask anyone, you know, how are you doing? Their answer wasn’t, oh, I’m great, or oh, I’m not so good. Their answer, actually, bizarrely, was about how busy they were.

Dorie Clark 00:05:06  You’d hear, you know, oh, I’m so busy.

Speaker 4 00:05:09  I’m crazy busy.

Dorie Clark 00:05:10  I thought, you know, what does that have to do with anything? But it became this, this way that people talked about their lives and almost reflexively. And I started to look into it, and I came across a study that was done out of Columbia University by a woman named Sylvia Bellezza and her colleagues. And what I learned, I thought was very surprising, which is in our modern society, part of the reason why so many people default to the oh, I’m so busy answer is that busyness turns out to be a socially accepted form of status, and we certainly may not think of it that way consciously, But what we are telegraphing is I’m so important, I’m so needed. I’m being pulled in a million directions because I am so essential to this enterprise, whether this enterprise is your family, your business, whatever. And so when we’re trying to unravel the mystery of why are we so busy when none of us actually likes to feel that way? A big part of the lure, subconsciously, is that for a lot of us, we’re trying to find a way to feel meaningful or feel important.

Dorie Clark 00:06:29  And it’s a lonely world. And so that’s one of the things that a lot of us latch on to, but it ends up having deleterious consequences.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:38  Yeah, I think about that a lot because if you ask me how I’m doing, that is often a response I will give. And I’ve thought a lot about this. I do think there is the social aspect that you’re talking about. It is a signaling sort of thing, like I yeah, look at everything I’ve got to do. I also think, though, that it is the reflection of how our life feels. I’ve often got so much to do. And you talk about this also that busyness can function as sort of an anesthetic, right? It crowds everything else out. So if you ask me how I’m doing, I don’t really even have any idea. All I’m conscious of a lot of times is that I’m doing a lot. I did a lot. I have a lot to do. Like, that’s the emotional world that my head inhabits.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:22  A lot of the time, if I’m not being really conscious about it.

Dorie Clark 00:07:26  Yeah, I think you’re really right, Eric. And in fact, I did a TEDx talk about that topic. You know, the real reason you’re so busy and what to do about it. And one of the points that I raised in there was the issue of busyness as an anesthetic. There are a lot of things that we don’t necessarily want to feel that we might be feeling in a given situation, Maybe, you know, like your job actually. And it is kind of hard to face that because that means all of the struggle of getting another job or oh my gosh, how am I going to get a job? How am I going to pay the bills that I need to do? Maybe you’re not really happy in your relationship. And so you are traveling a lot or working a lot because that is a again, a societally acceptable excuse. Oh my gosh, I, I couldn’t possibly spend time at home because I have to do all these other things.

Dorie Clark 00:08:23  In my case, about, gosh, a dozen years ago now, I had, I had this, this pet, this cat that I was super, super close to who died. And I think anyone who’s a real animal lover can relate to that. we had been together for 17 years, and when he died, I was, you know, I was living on my my own besides him. And it was just this enormous loneliness every time I went home into the apartment. And you just expect him to be there and he wasn’t. And so I started really, like, working like a maniac, because I didn’t want to have to feel the feelings that were associated with that. And, you know, it’s better than some forms of emotional relief, you know? You know, we have choices and work is a better choice. But, but still, you’re you’re masking the feelings.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:17  Yeah. As a former homeless heroin addict, I am I am cognizant of the times in life that I have let work be the better coping choice, and it is by a long shot.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:26  And as you say, anything that is a coping device that you use too much becomes problematic. I also love the way that you quote Derek. Is it Sivers? I never know. I’ve seen the guy’s name seven times, but I don’t know if I’ve ever heard it, Sivers says. Don’t think of it as a status marker. Think of it as servitude and lack of control. I mean, that’s a sobering thing to say, and it is really a valuable way to think about it. I mean, you and I were talking before we started about, I’m in a season where, like, I’ve got a book coming out and that is very front and center, and I’m making a conscious decision that, like, the next three months are going to be a little out of the ordinary for me in how much I work. Like as I’ve gotten older, I’ve been able to do I really treasure my space and my free time and for a couple for a couple month period. Now I’m going to sort of say I’m going to give in to that for a little while, but I, I want to keep remembering all the way through.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:24  I am choosing to do that. That is a conscious choice versus it just being the autopilot. I’m so busy. I’m so busy. I’m so busy as if I can’t catch a breath.

Dorie Clark 00:10:35  Yeah, I think that’s a really wise way to look at it, because being totally heads down and busy all the time obviously is not a tenable solution for how we live our lives, but to consciously choose a season of it is perfectly reasonable because you have a goal, in your case, your book, that you want to move forward, and it’s only going to move forward if you have a really concerted focus on it. But the the important part is that it needs to have an end date and it needs to have a rebalancing. So it’s like, how do we build in so that after the launch is over, there’s a time, you know, kind of an equal and opposite reaction where you can recover and reset the balance. I mean, I’m curious, Eric, leaving aside this moment right now with book, if we’re thinking about a kind of I see an air quotes like a more normal time for you.

Dorie Clark 00:11:25  Yeah. What what is a good rhythm? Like what do you want your life to look like in terms of being the right amount of busy but not too busy?

Eric Zimmer 00:11:33  I like to have my work stay within certain bounds of time. I carve out kind of. Here’s when I plan to work and try and keep it more or less within there. Now, of course, doing something like I do or I guess any of us, right? Oftentimes we’re thinking about work even when we’re not doing it. So that’s a slightly different animal. I have nuanced thoughts on that. So for me it’s keeping some some work within constrained hours so that I spend time with my partner so that I play guitar, so that I take care of my health so that I see friends. And then for me, over the last really four years, it’s also become about taking bigger chunks of time off. I spent the first 52 years of my life, so I started working in a restaurant. I had a paper route when I was 12, so let’s call it 40 years of my life.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:27  I don’t think I was ever off more than seven days ever. And so I’ve really tried to correct that over the last 3 or 4 years and say, like, I want time off. It started with two weeks. I’m going to take two weeks off. That was such a huge like, I can’t, I can’t believe I’m going to do this, you know? And then it became I took a month off. So I’m into that kind of thing, like work hard, constrained hours for a period of time, and then with the intent of being able to take chunks of time off completely. Now I’m in a semi privileged situation that I own my own business, that I can do that. But it is a choice that comes with consequences, right? Like, I would make more money if I didn’t do that. Yeah, right. I would make more money if I didn’t consciously say, I want to take two months a year off. That has economic implications for sure. It’s just a question of my priorities at this point.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:18  And so that is more important to me than money right now. But I’m in a position where I’m not fighting to keep the lights on either. I don’t have so much money that it doesn’t matter either. So yeah, it’s very conscious. And I think this kind of leads to the next part of your book, which is saying no even to good things. Right? Like, it’s really easy, I think for some of it. Well, not everybody. Some people say yes to everything, but but at a certain point, you can say no to the things that clearly don’t make sense. But there are so many good things that you could say yes to. And, you know, delineating that. So for me, that’s the this is the exact same thing. Am I saying yes to a month off work, or am I saying yes to two more workshop opportunities that generate more revenue? Like what am I saying yes to? And it’s, it’s it’s hard to say no to good things. Talk to me about that in your own life.

Dorie Clark 00:14:09  Yeah, I would love to. I just have a quick follow up, if you don’t mind, because I’m curious when you’re taking a month off, when you’re taking two months off, how do you set the boundaries around that? Are you, like, not checking email at all? Like, you hand it to an assistant and you’re like, don’t even bother me unless the house is on fire.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:25  Pretty much.

Dorie Clark 00:14:26  Okay.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:27  That’s the goal. Now, there are variations on this. There are like a month completely off. Please don’t bother me unless you have to. And, I mean, I spent time designing the business that way. And I spend money hiring somebody that does things that I technically could do, but if I have to do them, then I can’t. I can’t leave like that. So these are choices that have consequences as far as like, okay, yes, I’m going to have somebody who’s good enough that I can say, here’s the keys for the business for a month, and I have to work really hard beforehand recording a bunch of interviews, all of that sort of stuff.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:04  But but yes, that’s my goal. But then there are other periods, like we spent five weeks in Portugal in the fall. We were lucky enough to we have friends there and they were away for three weeks, so we got to stay. I wasn’t like completely off, but that was a little bit of a downshift. Okay, I need to keep working. I’m going to be working, but I’m going to I’m going to downshift it a little bit because I’m in a slightly different position. So it depends. But I do really work hard to take concentrated breaks that it is off. Off. I feel like that’s where I do best. I can either be really engaged or I found I can totally turn it off. There’s a middle ground in between that is a little bit less satisfying for me. I’m not really in it and I’m not really out of it. And so for me, I found that it’s being able to totally turn off, and I didn’t know if I actually would be able to.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:57  That was my first like, can I? Is that even possible? And it turns out, yes, very capable of if I know that, you know, Nicole has got it and she’ll text me if there’s a problem. I am very capable of being like, well, it’s time to think about something else for a month, because I’ve thought about this a lot for the other 11 months.

Dorie Clark 00:16:15  That’s fantastic. I love it, and in the long game, I actually talk a little bit about this question of how do you make it feasible for yourself to take time off? And I have a colleague named Dave Crenshaw who I profiled because similarly, he takes two months off every year. He does one in the summer and one around Christmas time. And the way that he structured it, he said his framework, he calls it distance to empty. Kind of like on your, you know, gas reading in your car. The distance to empty tells you. How far can you go before your car, you know, shortens out and collapses.

Dorie Clark 00:16:50  And so he always thought of it as how do you systematically increase the distance to empty in your business? Meaning for him, how long can you be away from your business without your business collapsing? And he just steadily worked to kind of test it. Okay, first it’s a week, then it’s two weeks, and you have to set up the systems so that things don’t go haywire. But he’s eventually been able to get it so that regularly a month goes by and no big deal.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:20  Yeah I have a business coach I’ve worked with years. I think you might know him. Charlie Gilkey. Oh, yeah. That was a very intentional part of our work was, how do I get here? This is the business I want to build. And yeah, distance to empty is a great concept. And luckily for me, I can record a bunch of interviews, and then Nicole and Chris can just handle getting them all out. And as long as I don’t schedule in-person events or, you know, things that require me to show up at a certain place at a certain time.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:49  Now, Nicole might need a month off after she after I’m off for a month when I hand her the whole business for a month, she’s probably like, well, lovely for you. But yeah.

Dorie Clark 00:18:01  Yeah, absolutely. Always, always the consequence. But yeah. But it’s great that you’ve been able to work that out. But I wanted to, to go back to the question that you had asked me initially, which is about saying no to good things. And this is something that I really started to grapple with in the first years after my business kind of started to take off. It almost when when you’re first starting and everything is so slow and it feels like an uphill climb, it’s it’s like a problem that that doesn’t even come into your consciousness. It’s like when anybody starts, the question is like, how do I get a good opportunity? And you’re just, you know, clamoring for them and eventually, oh, it’s a good opportunity. Fantastic. You dive in, but then you reach this point.

Dorie Clark 00:18:45  I feel like it’s so often in life that there’s never exactly an equilibrium. It’s like early on, there’s never enough good opportunities. And then there’s not like a balance. It’s like suddenly one day a switch flips and then it’s like, oh my God, there’s too many good opportunities. What do I do?

Eric Zimmer 00:19:02  Yeah. And then the switch flips back. You’re like, wait, hang on. I say, what happened? I had too many and now there’s not enough. Like, I feel like for me there’s been these like, you’re right, it’s never the right amount. It’s either too many or not enough.

Dorie Clark 00:19:13  Exactly. And so it’s relatively clear what to do when there’s not a lot of good opportunities, which is the minute you see one, you jump on it. But it because that is our training for all of us. As we’re building our business, it becomes really hard emotionally, more than anything, to say no to good opportunities when you were in that mode of of having too many.

Dorie Clark 00:19:37  And so we get ourselves into these problematic situations where you’ve said yes to, you know, to 25 things because they’re all good and they are all good to take in individually, but take and collectively it is too much and and it creates a problem. And so you have to learn, you know, it’s hard to make peace with it, but you have to learn to sort of triage. Is it a seven out of ten or is it a 9.5 out of ten?

Eric Zimmer 00:20:23  Context is everything, right? This is the thing you just said it like individually, these might all be. Yes. And if I consider them individually, I’m going to say yes. I have to consider them in context of what else is happening. I think this is, you know, and I’ve worked with clients on this where we just set up a rule which is anytime anybody asks you to do anything, the answer is, that sounds really exciting. I’ll get back to you. Like, no matter what, even if inside you’re just like, fireworks are going off so that you can go back and go, okay, well, where does that fit? Oh, look, I already have seven other things that very month.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:01  I’m going to hate it if I do it in that month. Right. Like that’s the I think that’s the key. And you talk about other things like what’s the total commitment. What’s the physical and emotional cost. What’s the opportunity cost. And then as I’m saying where does it fit. So for example, if somebody asks me to do something on April 5th, that was really cool, I would have to say like, hang on a second. My book came out six days before. Does that make sense there? And the answer might be no, it doesn’t. If it’s not moving the book forward. Same opportunity. If they asked me to do it August 1st, I might be like, that’s a great opportunity.

Dorie Clark 00:21:38  That’s that’s exactly right. And I think your point is well-taken, which is that this is not always true. I mean, there are some there are some things that are just a date certain, and you can do it or you can’t do it, but there’s actually a fair number of things that if you’re creative, you can you can kick the can down the road a little bit and find a way to make it work.

Dorie Clark 00:21:58  you know, is it possible to do it later? Is it possible to start it now and maybe have one kick off session, but then delay the implementation by two months? You know, there’s there’s ways that you can be just a little bit creative and squeeze a little bit more out of the out of the orange. But yeah, sometimes hard decisions do have to be made. I mean, I have a friend that has a timeshare, I guess you could call it, but it’s like a high end timeshare in Tuscany. And he actually reached out, you know, a few weeks ago, and he’s like, we’re going to be in Tuscany in March. Do you want to come and stay in the spare bedroom and, you know, for free for like a week or whatever in Tuscany? And this, of course, sounds amazing. I’ve never been to Tuscany. This, you know, this would be great, but unfortunately, I looked at the calendar and, you know, it was a couple of months lead time, and I just I had too much booked.

Dorie Clark 00:22:54  I was already traveling a lot and it would have been possible. That’s the hard part, right? If, if, if it was totally impossible, then I could have just let it go. But it would have been possible. But I would have had to do this ridiculous thing where I was like, you know, flying to Tuscany from Dallas and then going back and going to another speaking gig, and it just wouldn’t have been able to be fun as a result of that. So I said no to a free vacation in Tuscany, which is painful, believe me.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:28  Yeah, you’re going to be very busy in March helping promote my book too. So.

Dorie Clark 00:23:32  Exactly. Eric, I didn’t even know, but.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:35  Yeah, exactly. I mean, I’m glad you said no to Tuscany, because that’s not going to work for us.

Dorie Clark 00:23:40  That’s right. It’s so hard to properly promote when I when I’m stuffing my face full of pasta. So I feel you. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:47  So let’s talk about setting the right goals.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:50  Tell a story about Marian Stoddard. Why don’t you tell the story?

Dorie Clark 00:23:54  Yeah. So about 15 years ago now, I fulfilled this long standing dream since I was a teenager, I always thought, oh, it’d be so amazing to direct a movie. And of course, I was picturing Hollywood movies. But what I ended up doing, which was actually very cool in a different way, is I directed an environmental documentary, and it was about a woman named Marion Stoddard, who was really quite extraordinary. And she she’s now still alive. She’s in her 90s. But, in the 1960s, she was, you know, as, as was so often the case, a very overeducated housewife who was staying at home raising kids, kind of looking for a project that was meaningful in her life. And she ended up successfully leading the cleanup of one of America’s most polluted rivers. And so my collaborator, Susan Edwards and I made this documentary film talking about how exactly she did it. And so we spent a lot of time with her.

Dorie Clark 00:24:54  And one of the really interesting stories that she told us that I think influenced a lot of her subsequent life decision, was she told us the story about her mother’s advice to her as she was leaving for college, and literally as Marianne was walking out the door and leaving to to head off, her mother gave her a piece of advice which was if you have a choice between two decisions, always choose the more interesting one. And I thought, oh, that’s fascinating. And I thought that actually is a pretty good rule of thumb for life. And so I included that in the long game, as I think a pretty helpful heuristic. Many times people get paralyzed. They get hung up about, you know, what’s the right decision. And you know what? Where am I going to make the most money? Or you know what’s going to be, what’s going to look the best or what’s going to be best for my career? And the truth is, we often don’t know. You can’t predict, you know, sometimes even the safe thing isn’t so safe, right? But if you pick the more interesting, you’re usually going to end up in a pretty good place.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:01  That is wonderful advice. Optimize for interesting. The other thing that you mentioned in that section, which is about setting the right goals, you talk about people going to extremes. Explain to me where going to extremes fits in. Like what’s the value here? And in being sort of a long term thinker or playing the long game.

Dorie Clark 00:26:23  Yeah, yeah. I mean I would say the Value of being a long term thinker, and the reason why lots of people pay lip service and say, oh yeah, that sounds like a great idea, but then they don’t do it. Is that the the payoff takes quite a while. And so it’s a little bit invisible because you get a good result and most likely you’ve probably been building toward it in one way or another for years, you know, months or years or decades. But people kind of only see it pop up later on, and they are ascribing some kind of immediate cause to it. So it’s hard for people to really appreciate the value of it. But the way that I think about it, the metaphor that for me makes the most sense when I think about long term thinking, is the difference between a jellyfish and a speedboat in the ocean.

Dorie Clark 00:27:14  There are some people that truly don’t have a vision. They truly don’t care where they end up. But but most of us do. You know, we do have some ambition about, oh, you know, I’d like my life to look like this. I’d like my career to look like this. And the problem is that if you are not making conscious choices and you were just acting, you know, letting other forces act on you, you know, sort of like, oh, okay, I’m not doing my own thing. I’m just responding to the emails that come into my inbox. It’s being a jellyfish. Like you’re letting the waves just sort of whap you around, and you might end up in the right place. You might end up literally across the world from the right place, because it is the luck of the draw in terms of what waves are hitting you. Whereas if you are exercising agency that comes with long term thinking, if you’re saying, all right, I am making the choice to do this and not that you are more like a speedboat because, you know, the truth is, we can’t control everything.

Dorie Clark 00:28:09  There might be a tsunami, there might be rogue waves. You might get kind of knocked off course. But anyone can see that if you have a motor that is propelling you in the direction you want to go, you are much more likely to either get to that destination or to get close to that destination. And so for me, long term thinking is basically about making conscious choices rather than just letting things happen.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:35  Right. And so where doing extreme things. You mentioned somebody who wanted to play Carnegie Hall. Tell us that story.

Dorie Clark 00:28:45  Yeah. So there was a woman that I profiled in The Long Game named Marie, and she was a, you know, jazz musician. And of course, you know, for any musician, there’s kind of a big goal, right? I mean, you know, if you’re a football player, you want to be in the Super Bowl. And if you’re a musician, you want to play Carnegie Hall. That’s the the big dream from the time you’re little. And so in Marie’s case, she actually found a way to do it.

Dorie Clark 00:29:12  She found a path to do it. And, you know, she got accepted to be able to play at Carnegie Hall. But what she didn’t realize was that in order to actually have this concert there And, you know, there’s there’s different things. If you have a. You know, promoter backing you or something, then they take care of all of this. But Marie did not have a patron. She was having to to do it herself. So she gets accepted to perform at Carnegie Hall. And all of a sudden she realizes these things that she never knew, which is that, oh my gosh, if you’re performing, you have to pay all of these fees. And there’s like, you know, unions there to like, okay, there’s the lighting union. And if you want to have a prop on stage, oh, that’s, you know, the prop masters union. And all of a sudden for, you know, the whole rental and all the expenses, it was going to be $40,000 to do this concert.

Dorie Clark 00:30:06  And you make some of it back from the tickets. But you know, this this is an economically very dicey situation, especially for someone who was making less than $40,000 a year. I mean, can you imagine having to spend your entire year’s salary plus some? write on one day, but this was this was her big vision and her big goal. And so it became a kind of central organizing principle for her that she. She was like, well, I have to do it. I have to figure out a way to do it. So she started doing all of this really intensive fundraising. And that goal sharpened her focus so much that she actually was able to do it. She carried it off. She successfully played at Carnegie Hall, which is amazing, and it’s a thing she can always talk about and carry with her. Sometimes you need a really big goal to be able to, to crystallize that focus for yourself.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:03  It’s funny, just the other day, I was talking with a friend and we were talking about a book marketing, and he was like, yeah, I always think it’s good to to like, take 10% of your time and your resources and try some crazy ideas, like just like 90% of it like you do the standard basic stuff.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:24  You do that but take 10% and just do something way out there with it because it may not work, but it might. He was telling me a story about he teaches entrepreneurs, and he’s got a chance to do a workshop in Brunei, and he’s decided that he wants to make a point to try and meet the Sultan of Brunei. Now, the odds of this are very low. He’s like, but even if I don’t, the stories that I will tell in my attempts to meet the Sultan. And if you’re listening, by the way, I have to do this for my friend. If you have any contacts to the Sultan of Brunei, please send them our way. So I’ve been trying to think about like, well, what would that look like for me for the book? And I don’t have any good answers yet, but I’m looking for a couple of like, what are some wild things I could try? One of the things I’ve wanted to do is be on Armchair Expert, which is a Dax Shepard podcast, and he interviews celebrities.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:14  I’m not a celebrity, but he talks about addiction and all that. I thought, maybe I’ll hire one of those trucks that drives around in broadcasts and I’m just going to have it circle Dax Shepard’s house saying like, Eric Zimmer would be an amazing guest for Armchair Expert. I mean, I don’t know, I’m going to do something. So also, if you have crazy ideas for book marketing, send them my way. But I love that it was funny that he and I talked about that. And then the next day I read your chapter about going to extremes and I was like, interesting.

Dorie Clark 00:32:41  Yeah, I think, I think that’s great. And I think you’re raising a really important point, Eric, which is that 10% is great because you you don’t want to do everything in your life to extremes, and you don’t want to risk everything by doing something like totally nuts. But it is good to, you know, as I wrote The Long Game, I realized, you know, I kept going further and I’m like, oh my gosh, you know, this is a book about life and about your career.

Dorie Clark 00:33:10  But in in many ways, it’s almost an exact parallel as like a personal finance book. Right? Because good personal finance is about playing the long game. And similarly, you know, they always, you know, a kind of piece of reasonable investment advice that some people state. I’m not an investment advisor, but, you know, is often like, okay, do you know X percentage safe but then have 5% or 10% in, you know, kind of crazy assets, right. Like, this is, you know, like the, you know, it could be Bitcoin or it could be some, you know, hedge fund thing or, you know, alternative assets, whatever that means. You know, artwork people, people try different things and you can argue about the the merits of them. But it’s interesting to try to identify what is the thing that is not correlated to other outcomes. It’s a little different than other people are trying, and it could be a worthy experiment. And in fact, there’s a whole section in the book where I talk about, you know, sort of the concept of Google’s 20% time, which is basically the corporate version of this, where Google years ago, it’s become kind of less of a thing over time, but they encourage their employees to spend up to up to one day per week, up to 20% of their time doing purely discretionary activities that were bets, essentially.

Dorie Clark 00:34:28  And that’s how Gmail was invented. It’s how Google News was invented, was somebody said, you know, this could be interesting. And there’s, you know, a million more that didn’t work. But the ones that work really do.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:40  You know, as I read the book, I was like, this person, you are amazing. Like you just mentioned a woman hiring somebody to play at Carnegie Hall. Well, at a certain other point in the book, you dropped like, oh yeah, and I have a Grammy for a jazz record, and you just mentioned a documentary that you did. You’ve also decided that you were going to write musicals. Like, there’s a lot of different things like this in your own life where you just get an interest and just go do it. And I just love that. Use the word earlier agency like this agency of just saying, like, I’m interested in this, I’m going to do it. I mean, it’s why the one you feed exists. I didn’t start with like, well, I think podcasts would be a really good.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:24  I just was like, this sounds like something that would be kind of fun to do. I don’t know how to do it. And we did it. And, you know, I was sort of surprised, like, oh, wait, actually, this is working. So I just love all these little things that you, you take on. Tell us about the decision that you were going to write a musical, because this is one of my, my favorite ones in the book.

Dorie Clark 00:35:45  Yeah. Thank you Eric. So in writing musicals, which I’ve now been doing for for ten years, I actually got started because I realized that I was kind of burning myself out with with the approach that I’ve been taking to work. I was traveling every week, and I was living in New York at the time, and it was really expensive to live in New York, and I was I was hardly ever there. And when I was, I was usually Sick because I had been on airplanes so much, and so I decided that I was going to do what I called one uniquely New York activity per week.

Dorie Clark 00:36:26  That was my that was my goal for the year. My New Year’s resolution was, okay, I’m if I’m going to be here, I’m going to appreciate the city. And so I tried to to pick things that you could only do in New York. So not stay at home and watch Netflix, but go out and and do something interesting. And one of the things that I did was go with a friend to a Broadway show, and it was very impactful to me. I mean, I had seen shows before, but honestly not that many, and it was not my genre of choice growing up. And I saw this and I just thought, oh, this is this is so fantastic, I should be doing this. And I did not know how. I had no idea, but it just really hit me that I know something resonated. And I’m like, I want to learn how to do this. And so it’s not easy to learn from scratch, an entirely new discipline. But I, over the past decade now have committed myself to trying to learn the form.

Dorie Clark 00:37:22  And I’ve now written three complete shows. An initial goal that I had that I talked about in the long game was over ten years. I wanted to write a show that would make it to Broadway, and it hasn’t happened yet. It takes it takes a little bit of time, but I can say that all of the shows that I have written have had readings or workshops, you know, been featured in festivals. We had a one night production at a at a club Off-Broadway. So we’re getting there, and it’s been a very joyful learning process.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:26  So did you have a musical background? Did you have a writing background? Like, I go see Broadway musicals, and I’ve never left thinking I should do that, although I, I play guitar and I’ve written songs. Did you have some connection to it in some way, or is this just like out of the blue? Like, I am going to make musicals. I just I’m fascinated by this.

Dorie Clark 00:38:45  It was a little bit out of the blue.

Dorie Clark 00:38:47  I mean, I did play guitar, bad guitar as a teenager, so I wrote my share of angsty songs. So I had a little bit of knowledge, although I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t say I was well trained, but a good thing about musicals, actually, from this perspective, is that it is typical for there to be a collaborative team. So, I mean, Lin-Manuel Miranda is actually the exception in the world of Broadway, He writes, you know, he writes the lyrics, he writes the music, he does the whole thing himself. What is much more common is, you know, a writer of words and a writer of music get together. So, you know, sort of the classic ones like Rodgers and Hammerstein or, you know, Lerner and Lo, famous classic Broadway musicals. And so similarly, I was able to recruit a musical, actually, a couple different musical collaborators. So I did the lyrics and the so-called book, which is the script of the musical and, and they, they handled the music because I certainly would not have been able to do the technical element of putting it all to music.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:48  So let’s talk a little bit more about this. What was the process of, okay, I’ve decided I’m going to set a ten year goal to have a musical on Broadway in ten years. Where did you start?

Dorie Clark 00:40:04  So like like, like any good, you know, person pre II. I started with Google. Eric. I googled how do you write a musical? And honestly, it was not that evil. You would think that there would be better books about it. And I did find some books, but yeah, but it was it was a little bit of an opaque process. It’s kind of it’s kind of complex. And so I was fumbling around and I was, I was literally googling questions like, how many songs are in a Broadway musical? And, you know, how many words should the script be like? I just had no idea. So I started and I was coming up with stuff and it was it was bad. And I didn’t even understand how it was bad, because I didn’t know the form and I didn’t know what mistakes I was making.

Dorie Clark 00:40:49  So eventually I decided to essentially take my own medicine because, you know, one of the hats that I’ve worn over the years is executive coaching. And, you know, I run an online course and community as well. So I believe in the power of getting help for things. And so at a certain point, it occurred to me I’m like, oh, I could hire a coach, and I also didn’t exactly know where to go, but I figured somebody would know. So I asked a friend of mine who was closer into that world, and he got a suggestion, and he found someone for me who was a musical theater writer, who I paid to coach me in this. And that was really helpful in terms of accelerating my skill development. It’s like a lot of different leads you have to put together at a conference. I ended up meeting a guy who was a musical theater writer, and he was a graduate of a program that BMI, the music publishing company, runs, and he told me about this program and he said, you have to do this.

Dorie Clark 00:41:46  And it was a training program, which amazingly, it’s pretty impressive that BMI does this. It is a completely free training program, but you apply and it’s quite competitive to get into it, as you might imagine. But if you do get into it for two years, you get free instruction in musical theater writing. And that I thought that was great. I’m like, well, instruction, that’s what I need. So I did apply and and you know, through I think the help of this guy’s recommendation, I was accepted. And so I trained up and spent a lot of time, you know, the 10,000 hours plus learning to write musical theater in that way.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:24  So when you get an idea like this, are you the sort of person that it sort of captivates you and you find it really easy to put the work in? Because one of the things I think is challenging for a lot of people, and I know it is for me some of the time, is I have these ideas of what I would like to do.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:45  And yet back to busyness. I’m busy. It gets to be eight at night, done working. You know, I’ve eaten dinner and I’m like, it’s really hard to imagine working on something else for two hours. Like, does that come pretty naturally to you? Did you find yourself having to set structure for yourself. Like what was that process like?

Dorie Clark 00:43:08  Well, I’m a big fan of creating forcing functions for ourselves because I agree. I mean, you know, at the end of the night, it’s hard to motivate ourselves to do anything. but in my case, I decided, all right, this is important to me. And I had gotten very clear insight from the guy that I met who was a graduate of the program, that this program would be a good thing to do. So I really made it my North Star. So I said, all right, there is an application deadline. So that is the thing that I’m working toward. I have to get the application ready for this. And then once the application was done and I managed to get accepted into it, it was a structure.

Dorie Clark 00:43:46  It’s a built in structure that Monday nights you go to the session and you work around it and then you get assignments. And so about every three weeks an assignment was due, and then you had to present it at the program and other people would critique it. So you had to be ready for that presentation. So, you know, it’s the same thinking as hiring. Hiring the fitness coach. So that. All right, you say you wanted to go to the gym. Well, you know, gym is going to be there at 6 a.m., so you better go meet gym. I think a question we can ask ourselves so often, the reason we slack off is because the next step, or whatever the thing is to do, is a little bit foggy or a little bit unclear. And the the deadline for sure is unclear. And so if you can create a structure for yourself where it is perfectly clear what you need to do, and it is perfectly clear when you need to do it by, I think that most people actually, at that point are more likely than not to do it, because you don’t want to let somebody down or you don’t want to look stupid when people are expecting it.

Dorie Clark 00:44:48  So I’m curious. I mean, clearly you got your act together very well to to write this book. What was the system that you put in place to make sure that that happened?

Eric Zimmer 00:44:58  Well, I didn’t decide to write the book until I felt like I would be able to have some time to do it. You know, so once I had a contract, the book proposal had its own thing. So once I had an agent, then we had a book proposal and the same thing forcing function on that. Once we had a deal, I knew I had a year, and I had no idea how long it would take to write a book. I couldn’t say like, oh, I’m going to write a thousand words a day or a chapter a month, or I didn’t have the foggiest idea. All I really could do was say, this is the time I have available. And so my focus was always on 30 minutes at a time. Did I use that time? You know, here’s the time I have available.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:35  I have four 30 minute blocks today. Did I show up for those 30 minute blocks and do my best to write in those windows was pretty much how I did it. I mean, the book is how a little becomes a lot, and the book was literally written that way. It was written, I would say to myself, just 30 minutes, sit down and do it, 30 minutes, and I would do it. And then I obviously sometimes I would hit the 30 minute mark and be like, I’m doing great, keep rolling. But yeah, for me it was just about setting the structure, and it’s kind of what you said. Structure forcing functions when it comes to doing things like this. Ambiguity is a really big problem. Right. I think ambiguity is really a big driver of procrastination, because we’re almost not even procrastinating because we haven’t even said what it is exactly we’re supposed to be doing. We just have this vague intention and vague intentions, at least in my life and in the work that I do with people.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:26  And what I talk about in the book is vague intentions got to be translated into actions that we can understand, that are doable in our context.

Dorie Clark 00:46:36  Yes, exactly.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:36  So if I had said I’m going to write for six hours every single day, I would have failed at that, because that wasn’t reasonable in my context. But I could say, okay, three days a week I can carve out four hour windows. And again, that’s a little bit of a stretch. But I’m, I’m, I’m prioritizing. I’m saying yes to this because I’m saying no to other things. And then it’s just yeah, putting the putting the effort in in those windows. I’m curious for you. You set a goal. A goal is a musical on Broadway in ten years, which you haven’t quite hit. Ten years is a long window. So how do you stay motivated in the in-between time? Are you deconstructing that? Like, okay, that’s still the big goal. But right now the goal is to get into this workshop.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:24  Right now, the goal is to complete this week’s exercise. Right now, this job is to complete this workshop. Right now, the job the goal is to get the first draft. Talk to me about going from a big goal down to the actual things that both give you structure, but also sustain your interest and momentum and confidence.

Dorie Clark 00:47:48  You raise a really important point, Eric, which is that for big goals, they almost necessarily take a long time. And so there’s a huge gap between committing to do it, deciding to do it, and then actually attaining it. And so one of the biggest problems when you’re embarking on this is that for a lot of us, and I certainly would count myself among this, you don’t necessarily know what all the steps are like early on. One possibility is just you don’t know what the process is because you’re new to it. One possibility is that circumstances might be changing rapidly. And so maybe the way that things are done in year one are not going to be the way things are done in year nine when you’re close to accomplishing it.

Dorie Clark 00:48:38  So what I like to use is my mantra is that you really only need to know two things. The first is the next step. What is literally the next thing that you are focused on or need to do? And then the second piece is the last step. You know what? What is the ultimate goal? So in my case, you’re exactly right. If the ultimate goal is I would like to get my show on Broadway. Step one is okay. Well, I need to get into this BMI training program. So that became the focus and it clarified a lot of things. I wasn’t I wasn’t worried about all of the the different pieces. I was just, you know, it’s almost like being a Central Park horse with blinders on. It’s like, all right, I am focused on the road ahead of me. There’s a lot of traffic around, but I am just not dealing with that. I am dealing with what I can handle. And so I think that’s the question for all of us is just understanding.

Dorie Clark 00:49:29  All right. Find your next step. Do that and then find another reasonable next step. And even if it turns out it’s not optimal, in the end it is going to be a useful data point. And you’re probably not going to waste a lot of time or effort because pretty rapidly you’ll discover, oh, that wasn’t really the move. All right. Let me let me shift over here. Let me try another next step.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:51  I really love that next step. In the last step. That’s very helpful. I’m a big fan of the next step. You know I’m in recovery, and one of the sayings in recovery was always do the next right thing, which turns out to be remarkably sufficient for living the good life. You know, like, what’s the next right thing? And knowing where you’d like to get is helpful. So imagine you hadn’t gotten into the BMI program. How do you think you might have pivoted it at that moment? So that was the plan. I’m certain in your in your musical journey and we’re glossing over ten years at this point, I’m sure there have been plenty of times where the next steps appears to be a, and then A evaporates or falls apart, and you have to pick another.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:35  So can you tell us either you could theorize on what you would have done if BMI hadn’t happened, or you could pick another example, but I’m curious how you audible when what you thought the next thing was. Turns out not to be doable or possible.

Dorie Clark 00:50:50  Yeah. You are hitting on something that that is really useful, which is I have found so often that when people get one rejection or one sort of block of their progress, they are really too quick to take it as a final referendum or, you know, oh, you know, it just didn’t happen. It just didn’t work for me. The universe said that it wasn’t the right thing. And, you know, I always like to interrogate that a little bit and say, you know, is the universe really saying that? I’m not I’m not so sure. So in fact, just to complicate the story a little bit, I didn’t get into BMI the first time I found out about the program. I applied didn’t get in. I didn’t, you know, like, I really didn’t get in.

Dorie Clark 00:51:37  Like, you know, there’s a couple of rounds like, you know, sometimes you can qualify for an interview. I didn’t even qualify for the interview. And so obviously I was not I was not doing it right. I knew I wasn’t doing it right, but I didn’t know what to do. And so that was the point where I said, I’m going to hire a coach. Yeah, there’s always this the saying, right, that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and thinking you’ll get a different result? I said, I am going to do a different thing. I am going to come at it from a more educated approach, because I will have this coach train me over the next year so that my application will be good. And then the second time it was much better and they did let me in. So that was one clear pivot that I made. So I think that step one is saying, all right, the thing you thought you were going to do. Is there a chance that if you try again in a better way, that you might actually be able to do it? That’s that’s one alternative is just trying again? But yeah, in the case of musical theatre, there’s a variety of different things that you can do.

Dorie Clark 00:52:35  I mean, in the world of musicals and, you know, it’s different for every genre. But one of the common ways that you get noticed is applying to festivals or awards or things like that. So I do think that hiring a private coach was actually very useful for me. And, you know, I think sometimes people might, might think, oh, but you know, isn’t that so expensive? And it’s true if you’re working with, like, you know, one of the world’s elite, executive coaches, sure. You’re going to pay tens of thousands of dollars for that if you’re hiring a musical theater coach. Guess who that is? That’s an unemployed musical writer. You’re probably going to pay $50 an hour, which is what I paid. So. Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:14  Right.

Dorie Clark 00:53:14  Yeah. You know, you can you can get pretty far, with not that much money. I think it’s much more accessible than people might imagine. But I think probably what I would have done is work with a coach, as I did, and then just really have a concerted effort to try to apply for for different festivals and awards and just keep at it until I got something which I could use as my hook to to meet people, to get to get the work noticed, etc..

Eric Zimmer 00:53:43  While we’re talking about things not going according to plans, I’d love to talk about a chapter in the book that’s called Rethink Failure, and in it you tried to set a bunch of audacious goals for 2019. Talk to me about what those goals were and how it all worked out.

Dorie Clark 00:54:02  So by 2019, I was doing, you know, really pretty well in my business. I had written three books that had been published with with major publishers. I was making over $1 million a year by a lot of outside measurements. I think people would have said, oh, yeah, I mean, she’s she’s pretty successful. And one of the lessons that I thought was so powerful, which I wanted to share in the long game, was that even when you’ve reached a certain level of success that, you know, other people would say, oh, that’s that’s pretty good. You still get rejected and you still are failing all the time. Maybe not in super visible ways, but ways that are painful and disappointing. And you have to keep relearning the lesson about how to overcome failure if you want to keep stretching and growing.

Dorie Clark 00:54:55  So I wanted to kind of give people a play by play. So in the long game, I write about these five goals that I had for myself in 2019. One of them was to co-author a book with a prominent author. One was to option the the movie rights for a musical that I wanted to write, and these were all reasonable things. The author said yes to co-authoring the book. The creator of the movie said yes to my optioning the work and turning it into a musical. I had a friend who worked at a major newspaper who reached out to me and said, hey, we would like you to try out to write this column. I was like, oh my gosh, this would be so amazing. I wanted to speak at a at a major conference and I, you know, knew some of the people who were on the committee. So I thought, okay, you know, these these are all things this is not outlandish goals. These are all kind of reasonable goals, and I failed at every single one of them.

Dorie Clark 00:55:55  They just they didn’t work out. They chose someone else for the for the column. The filmmaker decided after saying yes, that he wanted to revoke that because he wanted to develop the property himself. The author that I was going to work with, got got a million, $1 million book deal and needed to go work on that instead. you know, all of these things just were not, you know, I got I got ghosted by the conference program. They never even got back to me. But clearly that was a no. So it felt kind of depressing. It was sort of like, oh, gosh, I guess nothing is working right now. but I did have a fifth goal. And that one, that one thankfully did work out which was which was meaningful to me. In 2019, for the first time, I was named to a list that while it is niche, it is not, you know, as famous like the Pulitzers or something. It is very meaningful within the world of business thought leadership, which is that there is a conference called.

Dorie Clark 00:56:52  Thinkers 50 and they did this biennial ranking of the world’s top business. Thinkers. And so I was named to that list. And that was that was really exciting. They do it at this black tie dinner in London, which was very cool. But an update to this story, you know, I mean, so like moral a of the story is, gosh, you know, even when you when you’ve reached a certain level of success, there’s never a point where it’s like, oh, everything’s smooth sailing from from that point on, there’s always failures and setbacks you have to deal with. But an interesting thing is, if you play the long game sufficiently, even some of the failures can turn into victories. The book deal that ended up not materializing in 2019. I actually signed that book deal last year. And so that is the book that I’m working on right now. So that is amazing. And I thought it was dead. And it is not dead. It just had to wait an extra six years.

Dorie Clark 00:57:44  So that’s pretty cool. And now for the speaking at the conference. I didn’t get to speak at that conference, but I got to speak at another analogous one. And that talk kind of went viral online. That was really cool. I’ve now four times been named to the list of top business thinkers. And so I think it’s really important to just mention that things that seem like a defeat at the time, if you keep going. Not all of them, but you can turn a lot of them into victories in one form or another if you’re just willing to persist.

Eric Zimmer 00:58:20  Well, that is a great place to wrap up. What a wonderful story, and I agree. I mean, the number of things that don’t work out, that kind of come back around with persistence is really true. And knowing that there will be failures all along the way, I think is really, really valuable. It’s a good lesson for me that I keep having to remind myself of like, okay, that didn’t work, but something else might.

Eric Zimmer 00:58:43  This might. You and I are going to spend a few minutes in a post-show conversation talking about the three habits of mind that are especially worth cultivating as a long term thinker. Listeners, if you’d like to access that post-show conversation with Dorine, you’d like to get ad free episodes and be part of what we do and support the show. You can go to one UFI and we’d love to see you there. Dorie, thank you so much. It’s been a real pleasure.

Dorie Clark 00:59:09  Great to speak with you, Eric. Thanks.

Eric Zimmer 00:59:11  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.