753: Struggling With A Long-Term Vision? Click Play

0:01Okay, I have been on this ruthless pursuit to purge any clothes that I'm not actually wearing. Like if I haven't reached for it in months, it's got to go. I am trying to be really intentional about what I bring into my closet right now, which means I am only buying pieces that I know I will actually wear and use. Revolve just gets it though. I'm literally wearing my brown Autry sneakers from there right now and my new suede purse. It fits my laptop in it. So it's basically a fancy shoulder bag that works for everything. I love finding pieces like that. Things that look good, but also work hard for my actual life.

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1:13Offer available for a limited time. So happy shopping. We don't have to be engaging all the time in deep long-term reflection. There are times when heads down mode is what's necessary, right? You're executing, you're doing it, but the problem comes when that's all we do. Hey, my name is Jenna Kutcher and I am obsessed with all things business, marketing numbers, and helping you to navigate both the messy and the magical seasons of this thing called life. I'm a small town mama who took a$300 camera, grew a successful photo biz, and now I work from home and run a seven figure online business. I teach you the tried and true secrets to building a career you adore.

1:53Shy away from the real talk? No way. Money, hardship, growth, loss, and marketing are all topics we discuss here. Think of this as your one-stop shop for happy hour with a gal pal mixed with business school. Pull up a seat, make sure you're cozy and get ready to be challenged and encouraged while you learn. This is the Gold Digger Podcast. Are you thinking of the long game in your business or are you solely focused on short-term wins? Like when you think about yourself a year from now or five years from now, or even 10 years from now, Do you have a clear vision of where you want to be, who you want to be, and who you want to be with?

2:29Or are you someone who is stuck in the frenetic day-to-day routine, feeling overwhelmed and perpetually behind? My guest today is Dori Clark. She's been named three times as one of the top 50 business thinkers in the world by Thinker 50 and was recognized as the number one communication coach in the world by the Marshall Goldsmith Leading Global Coaches Awards. A former presidential campaign spokeswoman, Dori has been described by the New York Times as an expert at self-reinvention and helping others make changes in their lives. She's also a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review, consults and speaks for clients including Google, Microsoft, and the World Bank, and is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of several books, including The Long Game.

3:12Since Dori has worn many hats in her career, which we'll discuss today, and she's written a whole book about long-term goal setting and future planning. She's teaching us how to reorient ourselves to see the big picture so that we can tap into the power of small changes that made today will have a huge impact on our future success. We discuss everything from why goal setting is important, how we can make sure our vision stays both clear and flexible, and how we can start to practice seeing a long-term plan for ourselves, our businesses, and more. This episode is truly jam-packed with everything you need to know about how to approach goal setting and achievement while staying grounded and present where you are, I cannot wait for you to hear it.

3:54Without further ado, Dori Clark, welcome to the Goal Digger Podcast. Ooh, growing pains hurt. And when you're a marketer trying to generate leads for your brand new business, you know the pain all too well. Thankfully, there's HubSpot for Startups, a special program that gives startups discounts on HubSpot and so much more. But first, let's talk about the platform, the platform that unites your entire front office from marketing to sales to support the platform that streamlines your support tickets, generates more leads and increases sales. The platform that scales right along with you. Oh, and don't even get me started on the educational articles, industry reports, videos, tips, templates, literally everything founders need to help scale.

4:40HubSpot for startups has it all. So get ready to build a brand everyone loves and make your startup growing pains a thing of the past. Visit HubSpot.com slash startups to see how much you can save. That's HubSpot.com slash startups. Dory, your latest book, The Long Game, is all about long-term goal setting. And I honestly think that so many entrepreneurs are focused on the day-to-day and what they need to get done today that they fail to even envision what they want long-term for their life, for their business, for their family. Walk me through, how can we actually start thinking in a different way, pulling ourselves out of the day-to-day minutiae to start to see the bigger picture?

5:25Where do we start with that? Well, you're absolutely right, Jenna, that so many of us are just in this hamster wheel of all the meetings, all the emails, all the obligations, and you never really get a chance to breathe or even think. But I think it is essential to lift ourselves up and ask those bigger questions about what you're aiming at. Because the thing you don't want is to work incredibly hard for five years, 10 years, 20 years, and discover that you have succeeded at meeting the wrong goal. So ultimately, one of the things that I suggest is actually use jealousy in a positive way. People always talk about, oh, jealousy is bad.

6:07It's terrible. It's terrible. But actually, I think it can be instructive in a lot of ways. Of course, you don't want to obsess about other people or beat yourself up, but it's really useful to look at the people around you that you admire and say, why not me? Or why is she doing this and I'm not doing that? I think we can use it as kind of a North Star for ourselves to see what's possible if we interrogate, well, why is it that I want a life that looks like her life? Or why is it that I want a business that looks like his business? If we can answer those questions at a deeper level, it actually can become a mirror that reflects ourselves and our desires back to us in a useful way.

6:47I love this. And I love this reframe on jealousy because I think you are so spot on when we are jealous and we have a level of consciousness around the jealousy, we can start to really identify what we actually want. And I think that in today's culture, there are so many things that are so shiny and interesting in these like quick hits of dopamine that people get so caught up in those little things that like you said, they arrived to the mountain peak and they're like, I was climbing the wrong mountain all along. How did you get this idea for the long game? Where did this come from? Pre-pandemic, I was finding myself all the time having conversations with people.

7:32And I'd ask them a really simple question like, hey, how's it going? Or what's going on? And almost invariably, really successful people that I knew kept saying some variation of, oh, it's great. It's good. I just wish I had time to think. I just wish I had a moment to breathe. And I heard it so often, it really made me stop and think and say, look, these are people who are successful, who have more of a degree of control over their lives than most people in the world. And yet they are finding themselves systematically in a situation that if you ask them, do you want your life to be like this, they would say no.

8:14And I really wanted to understand, well, what is going wrong? And why do we keep doing this to ourselves? How did you dig into this? And have you been like a long-term thinker? Because when I wrote my book, How Are You Really? That's exactly the point of like, but how are you really? Because I think that we live in that world of like, good, great, busy, all these things. And when you really get below the surface, you start to unearth things. So have you always been a long-term thinker? Is this something that came natural for you? I'm pretty good at delaying gratification. I think at the core, that's it, right?

8:54There's the famous Walter Michelle marshmallow study. Do you eat the marshmallow now or can you wait for two? I feel like I've been pretty good about that. But also, it is a question that I really wanted to understand because I struggle with aspects of it too, most notably just filling up every crevice of my calendar. Because when we think about long-term thinking, it's not that long-term thinking takes some huge amount of time. It's not like, oh, it takes 10 times longer than short-term thinking. It doesn't. It takes basically the same amount of time. It's just a shift in your perspective. But it is a shift in perspective that is impossible to do if we are so busy, we can't rest ourselves from the present moment.

9:43And I found that like a lot of people, to occupy myself, to bolster my self-worth out of habit, a million reasons, I was making myself so busy, I was practically sick. And it meant that I didn't have enough time for the long-term thinking that I knew would be important and valuable. You have reinvented yourself in a million different ways. Tell us a little bit about your story because you went from politics, journalism, bicycling advocacy, like you have done a lot of different things. I feel like you've lived like a million lifetimes in one. Give us a little bit of Dory because I love the way that you are thinking.

10:22And I think we're going to go really deep on how a listener can think a little bit differently and pull themselves out of that day to day. But how did you get here? Yeah. Thank you, Jenna. And I mean, you're actually a fantastic exemplar of this as well. So I think we're both on the reinvention train in a lot of ways. But for me, and I wrote about this actually in my first book, Reinventing You, it was certainly not an intentional growth strategy. It would be nice if retrospectively I could say, oh, yes, this was the plan all along. It actually was a response to a bunch of hypotheses that I made about my life that did not pan out.

11:00I had to adapt. So the first one was I got a master's degree and I thought, this is great. I'll be an academic. I'm just rocking it here. So I applied to several doctoral programs, got into none of them, which was a surprise to me. That had not happened before. So I had to pivot and reinvent. And then I became a journalist and I really liked that. That was a great job, but I ended up getting laid off and couldn't find another job in journalism. I then pivoted into politics because I had been a political reporter. So I became a spokesperson on a governor's race, which we lost, and a spokesperson on a presidential race, which we also lost.

11:40So any of those maybe could have been my careers, but then they just weren't. So I finally got a job running a nonprofit. That was the Bicycle Advocacy Group. And it was through that, ironically, this kind of super random career that I realized, oh, wait, running a nonprofit is really basically the same thing as running a business. And then I thought, well, I could run my own business. And so now for 18 years, I've had my own consultancy and executive coaching and writing and speaking and, and, you know, all that constellation of things. I love that you're sharing the things that didn't work because I think it is so easy to come on a podcast and most people know the success story, right?

12:21Like the hero's journey of like, and then, And I just love of like, I tried this and then this and then this. And I think this ties in really well to the long game because when I even think of my own journey over the last 12 years, there have been so many pivots and reinventions and so many places where I'm like, I never thought I'd do that, but here we go. And so here's a question for you because I often struggle with this, and I'm curious if you do as well, is I feel like I couldn't have dreamt this life up five years ago. And I have trouble even imagining what my life will be like five years from now.

13:00And so how do we start to think more about this long game approach, even if we're struggling to have a vision for the future? What can be the cornerstones or the pillars for us as we kind of elevate to this different way of thinking? So in Silicon Valley, there's a concept that gets talked about or bandied about sometimes. And it's the idea of strong convictions lightly held. And I really like that and find it useful. Because for me, what it means is that you do need to have a kind of hypothesis about where you want your life to go. You need to be aiming towards something just so you're moving in the right direction.

13:40But it's also true that it might not be the definitive thing. I mean, pretty much no one predicted there'd be a pandemic. And of course, that's a pretty large geopolitical, sociological phenomenon, but there's so many smaller things. I mean, you don't know in 10 years, you might be living in a different city or state. You might have a different constellation of professional activities. Your friends might look different. We just don't know. And so it's good to aim towards something because that forward momentum that you're making is opening up new possibilities for you. It's also true something different or better might come along.

14:18And so it's just like a Silicon Valley investment, right? You say, yes, I'm going to invest in this. This is the course. But if new, different or disconfirming evidence comes to light, you say, okay, I'm willing to change. I'm willing to adapt. And so for me, that's the idea. We've got to hold our hypotheses lightly. When we were young, we dreamed of castles and fairy tales. And as we grow up, those dreams might shift into building something real, like starting a business. You need a website, payment systems, a logo, and a way to reach customers. It can all be overwhelming and confusing, but thankfully that's where today's sponsor Shopify comes in.

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16:48I love that. And I also just think too, it's like, you're not directionless. I think a lot of people these days, especially post pandemic, where it's like, I don't know. I think we're living in this really interesting time where people want things immediately, whether it's results or, you know, their Uber eats or whatever it is. We want things like at the drop of a hat, but we're also afraid to look too far into the future because we were rocked in this level of uncertainty that no one could have predicted. And so I feel like we're in this really interesting era where people want overnight success, but they also don't necessarily know how to think ahead in a long-term way of like, what does this actually look like?

17:32And what's reasonable? And what am I willing to do to get to this place? When you were thinking about like vision setting, Do you have any practices or questions that you ask yourself to kind of help ground you? Because I often feel like that blank pageness of like, what is the vision board? Should I be looking at Pinterest? Should I be like, how do you kind of start to cast a vision? Yeah, I think that's a really important question. So going back to a topic that we were addressing earlier about, you know, kind of getting your head turned by other people and what they're doing. I think it's interesting.

18:08I mean, you and I actually met at a sort of mastermind retreat where we were talking with other authors. And I think that events like that, gatherings where you're able to talk in a sort of trusted and supportive circle with other peers and colleagues are so important. Because if the only data that you're getting is somebody else's Instagram feed, of course, that's biased. Of course, that is only the very, very best stuff. And you're sort of extrapolating out from there, oh, he must own the Lamborghini. He couldn't possibly be renting that Lamborghini. And it's just distorted. But if you actually have a group of trusted people who are colleagues, I mean, so often people get sort of weird about it.

18:55They're like, oh, I don't want to share trade secrets with competitors. You know what? No one's your competitor. No one is your competitor. We compete against ourselves. We compete against people doing things for themselves. We compete against the ether. But if you find people that you trust, they can tell you how it really is. And it helps you make smarter and better goals to see what is possible for other people. I think that's a really crucial element because it comes from real data and not kind of fake suppositions or things that you're interpreting incorrectly because you don't have the full picture.

19:30Oh my gosh. I so agree. It's almost like too, you get the opportunity to peek under the hood and really say like, is this actually what I want? I always will remember this time when I was a wedding photographer and I saw one of my friends shot this wedding at the Eiffel Tower. And I was like, that is the dream. That is the dream. I want to do that. And then I started to reverse engineer all the things that went into shooting a wedding at the Eiffel Tower. I was thinking about her sloughing through the airport with all of her expensive gear. I was thinking about the time zone change and being jet lagged and figuring out transportation and where does she even set her bag near the Eiffel Tower.

20:07And I started to think of all these different things and how much time she was away from her family and all these things. And all of a sudden I'm like, I don't want that. Like give me a bingo hall in Wisconsin and I'm good because I'm back home by the end of Saturday night. And so I love that you're also just talking about like really thinking about like the big picture. And it's such an interesting world where we eat with our eyes first, right? Like we are so so visually inspired. And so do you have any questions that you might ask yourself? Let's say you notice that ping of jealousy, or you start to think like, okay, I think this is going to be the goal.

20:44Are there any like guidelines or structures or questions that we could ask ourselves to really get clear? Like, is this the right thing? Yeah, absolutely. One of my favorites, and this is a topic that I talk about in my book, The Long Game, is what I call optimize for interesting. And what I mean by that is, so often in our culture, the default is to optimize for money. What's the thing that can earn me the most money? That's good, although it certainly can lead us astray at times. And sometimes when we get fed up with optimize for money, we sort of shift to the opposite extreme, which is optimize for meaning.

21:23I mean, that's great too. It helps lead you to charitable pursuits or things that are inherently meaningful. But the truth is, sometimes we just don't know. There's a lot of conversation about the importance, the necessity of knowing your passion, following your passion. And that is wonderful if you know what your passion is. Amen. But a lot of people don't. And it can feel really shaming. It can feel really confronting if it's like, you know what? I don't really know what I'm put on earth to do. You know, can't help you. And so my advice for that in terms of identifying possible goals is lower the bar.

22:07It doesn't have to be your life's purpose. It doesn't have to be the most lucrative thing in the world. Just say, do I find it interesting? Would my life feel interesting if I were to be doing this for eight hours a day or if I were to be doing this for multiple years, would that be interesting to me? And if it is, keep moving toward it. And if it's not, that's an opportunity to pivot. But I think with that bar, you know if something's interesting to you or not. You can answer that pretty clearly. It doesn't have to be the sole defining question, but it helps lead you on the right path. And it gives you enough information and data that you can make strategic shifts later if you want.

22:50That's the key question that I like to ask. I think that's so powerful. And I feel like most entrepreneurs are creative and like visionaries. And so when we get that idea or that spark, it's so easy. You can get so lost in your work. All of a sudden you look up and it's dark outside and you have no idea where the day went. And I think a lot of people listening right now might be in the camp of like, I don't want to be doing what I'm doing today, five years from now. I cannot imagine my life if I'm still doing this. So let's pivot into this reinvention because this is also a space where you speak so eloquently into.

23:26So what would you say to somebody listening right now where they're like, I pray to God, I'm not doing what I'm doing today, five years from now. And there's got to be a shift or a change and I have to reinvent. Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, certainly a lot of people feel like that about at least aspects of their work. And what I often turn to is some interesting research by a professor at Harvard Business School named Teresa Amabile. She and her husband, Stephen Kramer, wrote a book called The Progress Principle. They followed a number of professionals over time. They really were trying to answer the question, what makes someone feel very engaged in their work?

24:07What makes them really feel like they're doing a great thing and they're excited about it and they feel good about their work and their lives? What they discovered is that the answer is the people who felt the very best about their work and their life were the ones who made progress, even a small, tiny amount of progress on a project they perceived as meaningful every day. And for me, that's such a powerful lesson because it's true. I mean, people have obligations, they have financial or other obligations. And so you may not be able to quit that job tomorrow, but over time you can do it. It's just a question of, all right, can you spend 10 minutes a day doing something that will move the ball forward on the dream that you want to pursue?

24:56And if we can keep doing that, it's a message to ourselves that we are taking our dreams seriously and that, you know what, it might take longer than you want. A lot of things, unfortunately, take longer than we want, but you will get there because because you were putting in the work. Oh, I love that. I think that there's so much power in slow growth. And I, you know, my friend Tori Dunlap said the other day, like everyone looks like an overnight success if you found them yesterday. And it's like such a true statement because I think nowadays we're like discovering new people and oh my gosh, they've done all these things.

25:33It's like You missed so much of the journey. And I love the little progress. And I do believe too, it starts to shift your identity when you actually see yourself following through. I think identity plays a huge role. Let's talk about identity in that because I can think of like one of my best friends in the world right now. And every time I'm with her, she hates her job. She's hated it since I've known her. And it's like, I just want to like shake her by the shoulders. And like, you can change. Like you can make a change. You're strategic, you're savvy, you're smart, you have everything necessary to not be in a career that you hate.