How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World with Dorie Clark: An EOFire Classic from 2021

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. Brought to you by the HubSpot. podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Systems Saved Me. Today, we're pulling a classic episode from the archives, and we'll be breaking down how to be a long-term thinker in a short-term world. And to drop these value bonds, I brought Dori Clark in the EO Fire Studios. Dori has been named one of the top 50 business thinkers in the world. She teaches at Duke, and her new book is called The Long Game. In today's foundation, we'll talk about how to optimize for interesting that will help you keep moving and how often Many, many people are giving up too soon.

0:37Be strategically patient. Place your bet and be aware that the results may not come for a while. Be willing to persevere because it's worth waiting and oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Dory and our sponsors. DTC Pod, hosted by Ramon Berrios and Blaine Bolas, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. DTC Pod is a podcast about all things direct to consumer. Ramon and Blaine cover everything from starting, growing, and optimizing e-commerce stores and DTC brands. If you're interested in the stories behind your favorite consumer brands, this podcast is for you.

1:13One recent episode on how the best brands are built is a must listen. Listen to DTC Pod wherever you get your podcasts. Dory, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. I am so glad to be here. Hi, Fire Nation. What I believe that I think most people disagree with is I think a lot of people say just casually offhand, they say, well, it can't hurt to ask. And one of my philosophies is that actually sometimes it can. And I have developed over the years a philosophy that if you really want to build strong relationships with people, especially as you're beginning to build relationships with higher profile folks, I have a rule that you should not ask somebody for something, you know, a favor that involves political capital for at least a year because otherwise oftentimes they might view you as trying to use them.

2:15And I think it's a lot more important to build that relationship first so they understand that you're in it for the right reasons. Well, you've definitely done that over the years, which is why this is the third time you've been on Entrepreneurs on Fire and we rarely have repeat guests, but you are just such a bringer of value and you have been for so long. And today we're talking about how to be a long-term thinker in a short-term world. And you have a phrase, Dory, that goes a little something like deciding what to be bad at. What do you mean by this? Absolutely. Well, this is actually inspired by the work of Francis Fry from Harvard Business School and Ann Morris.

2:55They wrote about the concept in a book they did a few years ago called Uncommon Service, where they were talking about the service industry. They were trying to explore the question of why is it that everybody wants to be great, but obviously so many businesses out there are just meh. They're just mediocre. And what they discovered, and I have really come to the conclusion that this applies to all of us in our own lives and in our own businesses, that the problem was that people were afraid to decide what to be bad at. Because if you truly want to be exceptional. You can't, you know, everybody's like, oh yeah, well, I want to be great at these things and then I'll just be fine.

3:34I'll be average at the other things. That's not how it works. If you want to be great at something, you actually need to be bad at something else commensurately and be willing to make that trade-off. And when you do, that is where the power comes from. And I will say this actually fits right in with our little pre-interview chat where I was like, so Dory, like, I know that you work at Duke and you've been teaching there for a while, like how's the basketball team going to be? And you're like, you know what? I just, I don't, I don't follow the team. And I'm just like, well, you know what? You can't do everything.

4:03Like you can't follow the basketball team, write books, do this, do that all over the world. And you've got to choose what you're going to be great at. Just like you have to decide what to be bad at Fire Nation. And a key theme of your book, Dory, is strategic patience. What does strategic patience mean and why is it important for us, Fire Nation? I talk in the long game about strategic patience and I really want to draw out the distinction because for me, you know, growing up, my mom was always saying, oh, you know, just be patient. I was, you know, I was this kind of eager kid. I always wanted to do things.

4:40I always had kind of an entrepreneurial zeal. And it was so incredibly frustrating to have to wait that you, you know, just cooling your heels, you can't do what you want to do. And I still actually am very resentful of that kind of patience where it's just being passive, where it's kind of wishing and hoping that things will go well. Instead, what I have realized, I've made my peace with patience because I think as most entrepreneurs know, things do take time, unfortunately. They often take longer than we want. But we don't have to just sit around wishing and hoping. Strategic patience for me is a kind of muscular patience where we are creating hypotheses, we are testing hypotheses, and we are constantly reevaluating.

5:26But as we are watching the signals, we realize, okay, oftentimes many people give up too soon. But if you are strategically patient, you are placing your bet, you know that the results may not come for quite a while, but you are willing to persevere during that dark time when it's really, really hard to tell the difference between it's not working and it's not working yet. And you place your bets and that's how you get to the other side and that's how you put a moat between yourself and the competition. There's a lot of takeaways here at Fire Nation. I mean, one, I love that phrase you used, I've made my peace with patients and we just need to be able to do that.

6:03We just can't always be these inpatient individuals chomping at the bit for everything to be done right now. And let me tell you, moving to Puerto Rico, that really helped me with my patience. I will tell you right now, I mean, growing up in the Northeast and then going out to San Diego and California, I mean, you could really pretty much just get what you wanted at that moment, whether it be food or ride, you name it. And you kind of get to expect those type of things. And when you move to an island like Puerto Rico, man, you are going to the Caribbean, you are going to island time, and you are going to a place where people are not putting a priority on efficiency.

6:37And you just need to make your peace with patients. And it's really also a micro versus macro thing. Like you were talking, Dory, about the long-term thinking. It's just like, you know, if you're going to be a day trader in stocks, like 95 plus percent of day traders in stocks end up losing all of their money. But if you're just going to be macro long-term, say, I'm going to put some money into a stock that I love or a company that I love, or even preferably more like an index. So you're diversified across a ton of companies, 500 or more with the S &P 500 or just a global index and you just sit in your patient, the macro trends are going up over years, over the 79 plus years the market's been tracked.

7:18So micro versus macro is so critical for all of these reasons. And you also talk about setting aside 20 % of your time. And when I see things like this, reminds me of when Google talks about how they give their employees 20 % or sometime around that of their time for just creative work. And that's actually how Gmail came to be and other stories like that. So why don't you dive into that practice and talk to us about how Fire Nation can actually do this effectively within our business? Absolutely. When I was looking into Google and their 20 % time philosophy, one of the statistics that I read was the most surprising to me, which is that even at Google, Even at the company that more than any other company is publicly saying, do this.

8:07This is a good idea. Estimates are that only 10 % of Googlers are actually using 20 % time, which is kind of crazy. It's because they're on Instagram with that time they could be doing that. Yes, definitely. Definitely. But I think it goes to show that it's not easy. No one is going to hand you that 20 % time. Even if you're theoretically being encouraged to do it, it's so easy to just fall back on, well, I'm too busy or I have too many responsibilities with my official job to try something new. So we really have to carve it out and fight for it aggressively. But it's something that we can and I would argue that we should all do in our own lives, in our own businesses.

8:52Because there's real magic in it. 20 % time, if you work on something that is speculative or experimental and you spend 20 % of your time on it and it doesn't work out, that's annoying, but it's never going to destroy you. It's not enough to destroy you. However, on the other side, if it actually turns into something, if it is your equivalent of Gmail or Google News, which were both developed through Google employees 20 % time, 20 % is actually enough time that if you keep putting in effort month after month or year after year, you've really got something there. And it enables it to be a kind of greenhouse that nurtures your next big service offering or your next big product.

9:31And so I've applied this in my own life for the past five years. I've been working on my own creative sideline where I've learned how to write musical theater. And I created a 10 year goal for myself of writing a show that gets on Broadway. And, you know, you can't do it overnight. But over the past five years, I have been accepted into and now completed a pretty prestigious training program in musical theater that the music publishing company BMI organizes and have written a complete musical. So you really can get there faster than you might imagine. Fire Nation, there's so many ways to look at it that way.

10:06And on the flip side, you know, I kind of sometimes look at myself with a little disappointment because, you know, when I first got to Puerto Rico, I'm like, you know what, I'm just going to spend like an hour a week working on my Spanish and just trying to get to a place where I can speak Spanish. And frankly, I failed miserably at it. And here I am five years into being on this island. And I look back and I'm like, if I just stuck to that, just one hour a day, one hour a week for five years now, like where would I be? And if you just think about that incremental stuff, it can really be powerful over time.

10:39And when we get back, Fire Nation, from our break, we're going to talk about optimizing for interesting. We're going to talk about failure and you're not going to want to miss it. So we will be right back. Marketers have never been spread so thin. Trust me, I feel it too. Between creating content, launching campaigns, generating leads, nurturing your prospects, and more, you barely have a second to breathe, let alone do your best marketing. But I've got some great news. There's a better way to do things and it's with the help of HubSpot and Breeze. It's new built-in AI. When you combine the power of HubSpot's marketing hub and content hub, you can have your best quarter every quarter.

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11:47Visit HubSpot.com slash marketers to learn more. Dory, we're back. And in your book, The Long Game, you talk about the concept of how to optimize for interesting. Expound upon that. Yeah, so I think that for a lot of us, we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to figure out, you know, what is our passion? What is our mission in life? Certainly if you're at the early stages of your entrepreneurial journey and you're trying to figure out the exact right thing that you should be doing, or even if you're further along as an entrepreneur and you're starting to say, well, you know, what next? what now?

12:25There's a lot of societal pressure to have the answer and to know exactly the right thing to do. And I think that that actually can be harmful for us in some ways. So in the long game, I actually advocate for a slightly different concept that I call optimize for interesting, because instead of optimizing, you know, just let's say for money, you know, you're just doing it all for the cash, which can feel pretty hollow after a while. And instead of optimizing for passion or optimizing for meaning. I mean, that's great if you know what it is, but it's often paralyzing if you haven't quite figured that out.

13:01If we instead optimize for interesting, that is a bar that almost all of us can clear. You know, all of us know what we at least at a basic level find interesting. You know, what are you spending your free time on anyway? What's, what seems like something where, you know, I'd read a book about that or, oh, I'd watch a documentary about that or, oh, I'd like to learn a little bit more about that. That's the bar we need to cross. And then it's just a question of taking an experimental mentality toward it. And if we keep finding it interesting, then we keep moving in that direction. And if we don't, we pivot.

13:33A lot of lessons here, Fire Nation. And when you were talking, Dory, it was making me think about one of my buddies, Billy Jean, where he shares, boring will put you out of business. And when you really think about that mentality, like, what is it that you're sharing that's actually interesting? You know, that great phrase from the gladiator, Russell Crowe, when he screams out, are you not entertained? I mean, it really comes down to that root. I mean, like, are you being interesting? Are you entertaining? Are you at least avoiding being boring? And I mean, we look back at our favorite teachers from elementary school on up.

14:10They were the interesting ones. They were the ones that made learning interesting. And I think that's such a key takeaway. And that's why, you know, for a lot of people that listen to entrepreneurs on fire, one of the first things you say is, John, you just bring so much energy to the show. Like if I had this flat monotone voice where I just didn't even seem like I was interested in anything Dory had to say, then how would you and why would you? And so I love that Kevin Kelly quote, which is enthusiasm is worth 25 IQ points. Like just think about that fire nation. Like, I mean, we're not all going to be the smartest people in the room, but we can be the most enthusiastic.

14:47We can be the most interesting. So before writing this book, Dory, you had a certain way of looking at failure. How has writing this book changed your view on what failure means? Yeah, so in the long game, I actually devoted an entire chapter to diving into this because, you know, it's easy for a lot of us to, you know, if we're thinking about failure, to tell a story about, you know, when we were 16 years old and we failed and we got fired from the fast food store or whatever. But I really wanted to go there. And so in the book, I actually write about five different stretch goals that I had for myself in 2019.

15:31So pretty recent, just before COVID. And over the course of the year, four of them didn't work out. I just got my hat handed to me. And one was almost getting really close, a major media publication invited me to try out to be a columnist. And they kept coming back and they kept asking for sample columns and, oh, can send us more, send us more. I ended up sending them 4 ,000 words and they finally say, no. There were a lot of other scenarios like that. Finally, toward the end of the year, the fifth, so speaking of 20 % time, one out of the five goals worked out for me. But it was a process, even, you know, fairly far along into my career, where there's a lot of rejection.

16:21And I think, first of all, we, of course, just need to keep plowing forward and need to keep persevering. Number two, I think it is important to talk about it so that people, especially as they're in the earlier parts of their entrepreneurial journey, understand that this is normal, that this happens all throughout. But number three, the most important is that I really have come to view failure, quote unquote, as not being a fixed state. Because the truth is, something is only a definitive failure if you just quit after that, because otherwise the story is still being written. And there are a lot of ways that you can repurpose the learning or repurpose sometimes even literally the things that you've created as part of the endeavor and use it towards something else that actually might turn out to work.

17:08The long game. I love when I talk to authors about why. Like, why do you come up with that title? What do you want it to convey to our listeners? Take this moment to share why Fire Nation needs to dive into this book and where we can do so. Thank you, John. I appreciate it. Something that is really frustrating and really upsetting for me is when I see smart and talented people give up too soon. And oftentimes that happens because we look around and, you know, on social media, it looks like everybody else has it figured out. But the truth is, oftentimes, the best stuff, the stuff that's worth fighting for, that's worth working for, just it really does take a lot longer than we want it to and that we expect it to.

17:57And we don't know what's going on behind the scenes with other people. And so I wanted to write a book to reverse engineer the process and really help make it clear and lay it bare what it what it takes, what the process looks like about how to get through the dark times when you don't really know if it's working and how to decide whether to pivot or whether to keep going. Because I would love to live in a world and I want to encourage that world where great, smart, passionate people with something to contribute are able to keep doing that and they do persevere to get to the other side and make their contribution.

18:32And so I will just mention that for folks that are interested, I have a free long game strategic thinking self-assessment. And because Fire Nation is so amazing, you can get it at doryclark.com slash fire. Doryclark.com slash fire. Let me tell you, when Dory writes a book, when she creates some kind of giveaway, Fire Nation, it is well done. It is high quality. It is worth your time. So make sure you take action. DoryClark.com slash fire. Get that assessment and give us a quick rundown maybe Dory of what we can expect with this assessment. Absolutely. So there's a series of 15 questions that are adapted from the book to really help walk you through the question about how do you apply the principles of strategic thinking in your own life, in your own business, in your own career, so that we can really just forcibly orient ourselves toward asking the long-term questions that are going to be most helpful to us.

19:32Fire Nation, you're the average. Of the five people you spend the most time with, you've been hanging out with DC and JLD today, so keep up that heat and head over to eofire.com, type Dori in the search bar, D-O-R-I-E. Her show notes page will pop up with everything we've talked about, plus her prior two episodes on Entrepreneurs on Fire were amazing. Check those out too. Why don't you just have a little Dory triathlon? It'll be a great time, I promise you. And check out the long game. You can learn more, doryclark.com slash fire. Get that assessment, get the book. And Dory, thank you for sharing your truth, knowledge, value with Fire Nation today.

20:12For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thanks, John, and thanks, Fire Nation. Hey, Fire Nation. Today's value bomb content was brought to you by Dory and Fire Nation. If you've ever thought about creating a podcast on your own podcast journal, it's for you. It's called the podcast journal. It's gorgeous. It's full leather and it will guide you step by step in both the creation and the launch of your podcast in 50 days. That's five zero. Visit the podcast journal.com. Use promo code podcast for a$15 discount. And thank you for listening to my podcast. and I will catch you there or I'll catch you on the flip side.

20:51DTC Pod, hosted by Ramon Berrios and Blaine Bolas, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. DTC Pod is a podcast about all things direct to consumer. Ramon and Blaine cover everything from starting, growing, and optimizing e-commerce stores and DTC brands. If you're interested in the stories behind your favorite consumer brands, this podcast is for you. One recent episode on how the best brands are built is a must listen. Listen to DTC pod wherever you get your podcasts.