Dorie Clark: Author, Agent of Change, and Communications Coach

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Foreign.

I'm Geicawasaki and this is Remarkable People. Today's remarkable guest is Dorie Clark. At age 14, she left high school to attend the program for the exceptionally gifted at Mary Baldwin University. As described by the New York Times, Dorie is now an expert at self reinvention and helping others make changes in their lives. Dori has been named one of the top 50 thinkers by Thinkers50 and was named the number one communication coach in the world by Marshall Goldsmith Coaching. She attended Smith College where she graduated with a BA in Philosophy and later got her Master of Theological Studies at Harvard Divinity School. She is a marketing strategy consultant and speaker for clients such as Google, Microsoft, Yale, Fidelity, and the World Bank. Dori is an adjunct professor of Business Administration at Duke University and is a regular contributor to the Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Entrepreneur. Dori is the author of four acclaimed books. Her latest is called the Long how to be a Long Term Thinker in a Short term World. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is remarkable people. And now here is the remarkable Dori Clark. Let's start at the end point, which is how should people reap their success? Talk about reaping for Dummies.

I love this starting point Guy. And in fact, of all the podcasts that I've done about this book, you're the only person to start right there. So this is Great. And reaping is the thing that most of us start out seeking. The path to reaping is pretty exciting and pretty powerful. There's a lot that we accomplish and get to along the way. So long term thinking, the reason we do it is that ultimately the choice is the one marshmallow now or the two marshmallows down the road. There's only so much we can accomplish if we're thinking about, oh, what can I do this week or what can I do this month. You can take on bigger and far more meaningful goals if you're planning for something that's a five year goal, a ten year goal. In fact, there was a great quote that Jeff Bezos had a decade ago talking to Wired magazine where, where he said he thought at the time his view of why Amazon was successful was that the planning horizon they had, their willingness to make investments was basically more than double the horizon of their competitors. They were willing to lose money and not see results for almost double the amount of time that other people would. And that enabled them to invest in bigger projects that could potentially be more transformative down the road. That's part of the allure of it.

Now I want to know from you, who do you say, well, that guy or that gal is reaping?

Well, one person that I write about with regard to this in the long game is Marshall Goldsmith, the executive coach. And part of why I admire him is because, you know, Marshall's now in his early 70s. He is starting to make choices about what he wants to siphon off and say, you know what, I'm just not doing this anymore. He feels very confident in beginning to limit activities that he no longer cares to do. He doesn't need to do them anymore. One of the things that has actually consumed a lot of his time in recent years, which I really admire, is a few years ago he started a sort of program called 100 coaches. And it's intended as this kind of give back legacy project where he is creating a community of younger professionals that he spends time with, he trains, you know, et cetera. But it's really intended to be a way that he can stay connected, learn from them as well as teach. It's a great example of somebody who is kind of reigniting the circle about learning something new. The way it all came about was he attended this workshop and the woman running the workshop said, well, who are your heroes and why? And he cited some of the people like Frances Hesselbein, the former head of the Girl Scouts, and Peter Drucker, the Famed management thinker. And he said, the reason that I admired them is when I was young and I didn't have anything to offer them, they were generous, they spent time with me, they trained me, they did everything, and they never expected anything. They never asked for money. And the woman who led the workshop said, well, then you do that, you become that. And that's what he ended up creating.

In your book, you go through a long discussion about what it took to get your book published and accepted and the rejection and the agents telling you that. Here are three proposals, and this one isn't a book. This is a post, et cetera, et cetera. At the time you wrote your first book and got it published, do you think that first book caused your later success or was just correlated with your later success?

That's a very sophisticated question. I love that guy. Thank you. It's probably a little bit of both. I'm not sure if you would agree with this, but I know you do a lot of speaking. Having a book is often a bit of a necessary prerequisite when it comes to building up a speaking career, because so often conference organizers or planners, they want someone who has written a book. So I think that the book was helpful, at least in terms of building up that aspect of the work that I did. But you are also correct that the work that was necessary to get to the book, you know, the platform building, the writing, all of those things in and of itself probably would have been sufficient to lead to other outcomes, including attracting more business or raising my profile.

If I may, take us down a path here for a second. So lots of people ask me how to write a book, why I should write a book, should I write a book, period. And my answer to them is that you should write a book when you have something to say, and that a book is an end in itself. So the purpose of writing a book is not to create something that is a means to an end, that is speaking and consulting. It should be an end in itself. You have a great emphasis on how the book caused slash correlated your success. And I just wanted to probe that a little because it could give many people the wrong impression. Like, oh, Dori said, write a book, and that's the key. I don't think you're saying that it's true.

I think, you know, with now more than a million books published every year, most of them, of course, statistically, are self published. And also the average book selling fewer than 500 copies, there's a massive glut in the marketplace. And of Course, I am an advocate of quality. The asterisk that I'll place on it is that for a lot of people, sometimes they get held up in their mind about, oh, I can't start until it's perfect. I can't start until I have my own war and peace. And of course that doesn't work either, because you only get better by doing it and by putting things out there. And like everybody, I'm completely embarrassed by the blogs that I wrote 10 years ago and think about, oh, you know, I could have made that so much better. It's rubbish. And I also know that I'm only where I am today because I started doing that and got the reps in. So you're exactly right. On one hand, you wouldn't want to encourage the kind of mercenary behavior of, oh, I'll do this to get that. And often there's not a one to one correlation anyway. But also, I like to try to err on the side of encouraging people that even if you don't think it's perfect, yet, there is value in sharing your ideas and being able to start that process because it's the only way that we actually can close the gap between where we are and where we want to be.

I would say that a very good test for someone who thinks he or she has a book in them is, would you write the book even if it didn't get published? Because that really means that you have something burning inside you to say, and it's possible that you will write a book that won't get published, but if you still will do it, then it's kind of like, are you willing to start a company knowing that it could fail? If you're not, then you probably should not start that company because you're not into it enough.

Yeah, that's a very good test.

We shall see. So now we're going to go backwards in time a little because my wife has a master's in theology. So I wanted to ask you, what was the plan when you got your divinity degree?

The plan that I had was one that did not end up working out at all.

Yeah, God works in strange ways.

Exactly, exactly. Never more true than with divinity school students. So I thought that I was going to have a career in academia. So I had gotten my BA in philosophy, I got my Master's of Theological Studies, and I then went on to apply for doctoral programs. And I thought that what I wanted to do, game plan in terms of applications, was that I wanted to study English Literature with an emphasis with literature. In the intersection of religion. And I thought this was going to be awesome, but unfortunately I was the only one who thought it was awesome. And I got turned down by every program that I applied to, which I had not planned for and was really quite depressing in the moment.

Do you think that your background in theology and divinity has helped you in business?

There's not a specific correlation per se, but what I have come to realize, and it actually took me quite a while to realize this, is that in many ways the same phenomenon underlies my interest in both things, which is at its core, religion is a mechanism by which people understand their lives and make meaning of their lives. And in contemporary society, the workplace is where that is done. Our standard go to question in America is, oh, hi guy, nice to meet you. What do you do? We identify ourselves so profoundly with that if we are able to turn the dial just a little bit on helping people become more self actualized in their professional lives, to enjoy it a little bit more, to be able to bring a little bit more of themselves into it so that they feel like they're actually moving forward and doing something positive. Positive that has really profound implications for how they think of themselves in the world, how they feel about themselves in the world. There is that common strand in many ways.

Now we're going to get more, more relevant to your book. And the first question, of course is why are we so damn busy?

Such an important question, because you'd be hard pressed to find anyone these days who did not consider themselves to be overly busy. We all know the common culprits and we can point to them. There's meetings, there's emails, there's family, there's kids, there's all these things. And that is true, and I want to acknowledge that. And also the part that I find especially interesting is that often there are subconscious or subterranean elements that are actually part of what makes it hard to have real change when it comes to busyness in our schedule. And one of them is, and there's been some interesting research out of Columbia University around this, the fact that busyness in our modern society is actually accords us a kind of status. It's sort of status signaling, oh, I'm so in demand. And when push comes to shove, people are often loath to give that up. And the second reason is that busyness can often be a kind of mask or a kind of distraction because the busier we are, the less likely we are to acknowledge or even have a moment to acknowledge questions that may be very uncomfortable for us. To answer, because we either don't know how to do something or we don't want to look at the truth of a question that might be a little painful, like, are you in the right career or is your life going the way you want it to go?

So then how does one decide on the quote unquote right goals and priorities?

So, of course, this is the challenge. How do we figure all this out? So when it comes to the right goals, it's often easier just to start by saying, what are the wrong ones? And typically, the wrong ones are ones that, number one, we have adopted unconsciously. We are on autopilot, and therefore we run a risk if we've just adopted them from the ether of getting pretty far down the path and then suddenly discovering, oh, no, this is not where I wanted to end up. So a consciously chosen goal is much better and much more advantageous because, number one, it's far more likely that it will accord with where we actually want to end up. But number two, even if it turns out at a certain point, we realize, oh no, this isn't it. Because we've chosen it, we recognize we have the power to unchoose it. We recognize that we have the power to find something different. I'm curious, how do you think about goals and goal setting in your own life?

Oh, Lord, I'm a bad person to ask that.

You're anti goal or how do you think about it?

It's because I'm not that cerebral. And so people think, oh, guy, you must have established this goal as writing this book, making so many speeches, creating a successful podcast, liquidity at Canva, whatever it is. But the truth is that my career since leaving Apple and some startups has been basically unplanned and serendipitous. And I fall in love with certain things. Two years ago, I fell in love with podcasting. It was never a plan. And I fell in love with writing. I fell in love with speaking. So I never had this plan of goals. And so people ask me to this day, what motivates you? And I tell them, well, I have four kids. Two are out, one is in college and one is in high school, so I still have two tuitions. That's what motivates me. I'm not trying to dent the universe. I'm not trying to change the world. I hope that some of the things I do help people do that. I'm a simple guy. What can I say? So what are your goals right now then?

Oh, boy. Also, we have to recognize different time frames. It's perfectly appropriate once you've decided to write a book. Obviously I'm sure it's like, okay, well in the next six months I'm going to finish this book or whatever. So there's the kind of shorter term operational goals, then there's the big picture, longer term. And for me, I definitely have them. I also recognize they, they could change. I try to hold it lightly because if something better comes along, I'm not at all averse to it. But I would say my 20 year goal, which is the kind of longest, longest term that I currently have, is that I would like to become a United States ambassad to somewhere cool. And I don't really know how this is going to come about. I know the pieces of it, which is typically you need to back the right presidential candidate and raise a lot of money for them.

Yeah, that won't take 20 years.

I imagine that in the next 20 years if I stay peripherally involved in politics, if I meet some interesting people and if I make enough money such that I can either and donate highly to them and also become a bundler, then it puts me in a decent shot for it. I don't know if it'll happen, but it's a possibility and it's not something that I have to expend a lot of mental energy on. You can't really control things perfectly 20 years from now, but you can take small steps that can put you in a better position to get towards something like that.

Okay, some tactical information. How does one say no?

Yes, I can offer up at least some of what I do and I hope it'll be helpful to other folks. I'd certainly love to hear from you as well because I'm sure you field plenty of requests. But one thing that I've found useful is there's kind of a checklist of four questions that I like to run things through. The first one is what is the total cost? And what I mean by this is that it's often very easy for us to con ourselves into things like oh, can I do the webinar? Well, that's only an hour. I could do that. And we forget about the prep time, the prep calls, the slides, the back and forth, which can often make a seemingly one hour engagement actually be three plus hours. So we need to really think through what is the total commitment look like. Question number two is what is the physical and emotional cost of doing something? Because if you are accepting something at a very busy time of year, if you've just been traveling, if you're kind of burned out in general, if something is particularly high stress for you, even if it's a good offer, it might be especially draining in that period. As one example, in the long game, I talk about how I turned down this speech that a friend wanted me to do in the Caribbean, which sounded really great, but I realized I was going to be on the road the week before, I was going to be on the road the week after, and I was going to be a wreck, so I wouldn't be able to have any fun with it. Question three is what does the opportunity cost? Because we often forget that it's not, oh, should I do it or not, it's actually, should I be doing this thing for an hour? Or should I actually be doing literally anything else in the world, whether it's spending time with family or friends or exercising or whatever. And then the final one is, how would I feel about this a year from now? To just apply the lens of time? Because oftentimes things that we might seem a little bit upset to miss in the current period a year from now, we wouldn't even remember. Those are the questions that I've found to be helpful as we figure out what we should say yes to and what we should weed out. What's typically your process guy?

I used to have a really simple answer, which is it's either a company or organization that I like. It is a topic that I like. It is in my mind a moral obligation to do this. And another question is it's a lot of money. And so three of those four make me accept.

Nice, nice.

But I want to dig a little deeper. So you have explained some very good questions. An acid test to saying yes or no. But now let's suppose that you have decided it's a no. Now, literally, how do you say no?

This is often a place you're exactly right where people get tripped up because they feel bad about it and they're not sure what to say. And. And so even if in their head they know they should say no, sometimes they still fail to do it because they feel so awkward about it. A couple of principles that are useful here. Number one, you need to make sure that you're saying no rapidly because there is a tendency to procrastinate on it. And it compounds the problem because if you wait six weeks to tell someone no, then you look so rude you feel terrible, and then you're liable to say yes anyway just because you feel so bad about the procrastination. So it ends up being very counterproductive oh my God.

Calling the kettle black. I can relate to that. Yes. Okay, go on.

Yes. So that, that is, number one is speed is useful here. The other thing that is helpful is to be what I would call polite but definitive. Because if you give a response like, oh, thanks guy, I really wish I could do it, but I'm afraid I'm just too busy the next couple of weeks, then the obvious thing is that the person's going to come back and say, oh great, could you do it three weeks from now? And if that is not in fact what you want, you don't want to give them room to do that. So you need to be clear enough to say, oh gosh, thank you so much. This sounds like a wonderful event. I'm afraid I can't participate, but thanks for thinking of me and wishing you good luck. Just keep it nice, but keep it closed.

It sounds like the same people have asked you to do stuff that have asked me.

That could be.

I completely, utterly love your response that you have to say no fast. I have also found that it helps if someone, a virtual assistant, a helper or whatever does the dirty work for you because then you just never look back. I have someone, I just say, I give them a one word thing, decline, and then they craft a heartfelt emotional response that probably brings the other person to tears that I couldn't do it, I can't do it. My whole disposition is to default to yes. Now I realize, having read your book that defaulting to yes can be a very dangerous thing. But I will also tell you that I've defaulted to yes and said yes to things. And most people, it would never have gotten past Jim Collins group of advisors who tell him yes or no for each strategic speech. Never would have gotten past that. But there are many times that I said yes to things and I did them that provided opportunities, financial, emotional, whatever that I never predicted. I'm not convinced that defaulting to yes is a poor strategy.

I feel you, Guy. Absolutely. I think there are merits to both positions. We need to set a few parameters. I mean, the first is like anything, it can't be default to yes all the time because that would literally mean that everything you do is reactive and responsive rather than creating your own agenda. That being said, every person can set their own balance. And so if you just dispositionally want to default to yes more often than not, that's not a bad move. In fact, in my previous book, Standout, I talk about a lot of the research that's been done into I'll call it the Science of luck, which is kind of an interesting concept. But a lot of researchers, including Dr. Richard Weissman, have focused on this question. And one of the points that they make is that when it comes to people who are considered lucky, one of the things that they typically do is they have a sort of attitude of curiosity and openness toward other people, such that everybody else in the, in the room could have had the opportunity to talk to these people, but they often just looked past them because maybe they're not fitting in. Maybe it's like, oh, but he looks like the homeless guy, not like the millionaire of the VC or you know, whatever. But if you're the kind of person that's, heck, I'll talk to anybody. You're the only one in the room that actually makes that critical connection. So there is something powerful with serendipity. And if that is a natural tendency of yours, then it's a perfectly good idea to lean into that. It sounds like it's work for you.

Well, I love storytelling, so I'm going to tell you a story with the caveat that just because I can tell you this story or you hear a story, that doesn't mean that it's scientifically proven or is usually the case. So with that caveat, one of the greatest stories that I look back upon with great humor and amusement and value. So in addition to being a podcaster, I'm also a guest quite often. So one day I start this podcast. I say yes so much I can't ever remember the girl's name, what her podcast was about, anything. I just, it's on my calendar. Click on this zoom link at this time. And I click on it and I say, bring me up to speed. Tell me about your podcast. And she says, well, my podcast is, I don't know, over the Blue Moon or Once in a Blue Moon or something like that. I say, okay. And she says, yeah, I'm a 14 year old girl in, I don't know, Little Rock, Arkansas or Tuscaloosa, Alabama or Mobile, I don't even know. And I'm sitting there saying, guy, why the hell did you accept this interview from a 14 year old intermediate school girl? Now you're gonna spend an hour talking to someone who probably has 20 listeners and 14 of them are her relatives. That's going through my mind. Lo and behold, she asked me great questions. So right there, kudos to her. And at the end of this podcast, I say to her, so who else have you had on this podcast? And she says, angela, Duckworth. I said, what you got? Angela Duckworth, MacArthur Award winner, the queen of grit. She goes, yeah. I said, how'd you do that? She says, I sent an email. She responded. And apparently Angela Duckworth really likes to help young women in their careers and in their education. Meanwhile, I have been trying to get Angela Duckworth. I don't even get a response from the same infoangeladuckworth.com so I say to this 14 year old girl, it seems like you hit it off with Angela. You think you could reach out to Angela for me? She of course defaults to yes because it's Guy Kawasaki asking. And she introduces me to Angela. And with her introduction to Angela, Angela finally pays attention to me and accepts my request to be on my podcast. So the bottom line is I got to Angela duckworth via a 14 year old girl in Alabama. Alabama or Georgia or I don't know, South Carolina someplace, because I indiscriminately said yes to a podcast interview. That's my story.

That's hysterical. I love that. That's a great example.

Up next on Remarkable People.

One of the hardest parts is that in the moment you really can't tell the difference between it's not working and it's not working yet. So how do we decide this? How do we figure out how to do it?

I'm part of the HubSpot Podcast Network and I want to explain some of the benefits of being a HubSpot customer. First of all, to truly understand HubSpot you have to be customer centric. So what does that mean? It means building and growing sustainable customer relationships, fulfilling unique customer needs, and personalizing the customer experience. So how does the HubSpot CRM platform help you build a customer centric business? Well, the HubSpot CRM platform provides game changing tools, for example, native payment links, recurring payments directly embedded in HubSpot, quoting tools, and emails for easy delivery and collection. This helps you build a seamless payment experience with your customers. A CRM powered cms, lots of acronyms there, means both you and your marketeers can personalize the customer experience and ensure all engagements are timely and relevant. Learn more about how a HubSpot CRM platform can help you build, maintain and grow your customer relationships. @HubSpot.com you're listening to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki. Your advice? How do people keep the faith when things are not going according to plan? Or at least as fast as plan?

Yes, this part is so hard and I've certainly been there, probably all of us have where we want so badly to reach some kind of goal. And it's just taking longer than we want. It's taking longer than we think think it should. It's in those moments when we are most likely to give up. And it feels very rational at the time to give up because I thought it would take X amount of time. Obviously gone well above and beyond that, it's just not working. And one of the hardest parts is that in the moment you really can't tell the difference between it's not working and it's not working yet. So how do we decide this? How do we figure out how to do it? One frame that I talk about in the long game is a concept that I call strategic patience, which I am using to distinguish because regular patience is so irksome to me. I have never been good at regular patients and I feel like actually in many ways people use it as this blow off term, oh, just be patient to me often reads as just shut up, just stop agitating. And it drives me crazy. It's so tough. So strategic patience is my reframe of this. Because the truth is we often do have to just wait, right? Like, you know, you want things to move faster, but they just don't sometimes. And we have to cope with it. But I feel like we don't have to passively cope with it. Strategic patience to me is about, okay, formulate a hypothesis. How long do you think it's going to take? Do some research. What is it taking for other people? Let's track it, let's evaluate it, let's pivot if we need to. Let's understand that this may be a frustrating process with a lot of setbacks, but as long as we are continually monitoring it and making sure that even in small ways we're at least beginning to advance toward our goals, then we are less likely to give up on the process.

Do you ascribe to the theory that there's no failure, there's only learning opportunities?

I think that is largely true. The distinction of failure, once you call it, once the patient is dead on the operating table. Okay, we're done. We called it, but you get to determine when you call it. You could invest in a stock and it's gyrating, it's up, it's down, it's underwater. And as long as you are not selling the stock, as long as you keep holding it, it may go up. Now, this could be a very poor decision or it could be a great decision, we don't know. But it's not a failure until you actually make that final call. We all can think of a lot of examples in our lives where something that appeared to be a terrible setback or a failure actually was something that we were later able to parlay into an unexpectedly positive outcome.

Do you think that generally people.

Quit.

Too early or stay too long?

Definitely they quit too early. What we're all paranoid about is staying too long. But because of that paranoia that we don't want to look stupid, we don't want to be that idiot who's hanging on too long, we tend to cut bait way too early. And the problem is that things often really take a long time. In general, part of why I wanted to write the long game was to encourage people to have the context and hopefully the support in a framework so that they could feel okay slogging through those difficult times when it looks like it's not happening yet, but to be able to get to the other side. Which do you think? How do you view that?

If I had your book in 1987 and read it and believed it and not left Apple not once, but twice, we wouldn't be recording a podcast right now. It would be my podcaster's podcaster podcaster talking to you. Although you may be so famous that it would be your podcaster's podcaster's podcaster talking. So we'd have our personal assistants scheduling us. I left Apple twice. I turned Steve down for a third job. If I had not made any of those decisions. Don't get me wrong, it's not like I'm working in a coffee shop right now, but those were big goofs on my point. On the other hand, I would be even more of an insufferable asshole if I had stayed at Apple all this time. But anyway, that's a different discussion.

Always trade offs.

There are always trade offs. No kidding. No kidding. So let's say you're a young person, you're listening to this podcast, and you're thinking, okay, long haul, long term, grid it out. But what do I look for in my first job?

Yeah, that's a great question. Right? What's the starting point? So what I have come to believe is that our society, the way we talk about challenges, I think sometimes can be very misleading. And I feel like there is a. A lot of black and white thinking that a lot of people feel, okay, there's really two options, right? You either are optimizing for money or you're optimizing for your passion. Pick one. And we know the problem with optimizing for money, which is money, is Nice. But often it leads people to pick jobs that they are really unhappy in. It's not always the case, but there's plenty of that. And so the sort of valorized option in our society is to optimize for your passion. That's the thing we applaud people for. And that's great too. If you have a passion that you feel great about. I'm all about encouraging people in that. But what I often see as a use case, and this is certainly true for young people who are just out of college, they're figuring stuff out. It's often a case, frankly, for mid to senior level people that have been working heads down so long, they may have even just lost touch with some of these first principles, but they don't necessarily know what their passion is. And a lot of the focus in society is, oh, gosh, how sad for you, you don't have a passion. Wow. Well, you better go work on that. You better go figure out what your passion is and then maybe you can do something. And the problem, of course, is that you are never going to figure out your passion by beating your head against the wall. That's not how it happens. So I like to suggest instead of we lower the bar, optimize for interesting. If you can find a job, if you can find something to do that you at least find interesting, then the good news is everybody knows what is interesting to them. You are not going to end up with a job you hate. And if something stops being interesting, it's okay, hold it lightly. That's where you can pivot to something you find more interesting. So that's, that's my strategy. There's.

The passion test is too high a bar. Well, first of all, it's very hard to feel passionate about something when at the beginning you're not good at it. You're not good at anything, frankly. What happens if you make a lot of money doing something you're not passionate about? Do you think that you just park that part of your brain or, or maybe you become passionate about it? Let's say you're a programmer and you get hired by Amazon very early and you're not passionate about selling CDs, DVDs, books, anything like that. But damn, your 0.01% of Amazon is now worth $100 million. You probably will become passionate about E commerce.

You might. And that's great. I don't think that we need to be overly ideological about this. The thing that I'm concerned about is the person who is going into a job that they hate the job that they feel is soul crushing. I don't want that for anyone. You know, we spend far too much of our lives at work to be miserable at it. Now that doesn't mean we're going to be self actualized every moment of every day. But I don't, I really don't want people to be miserable at what they do. So if someone picks a job for quote unquote mercenary reasons and then they grow to love it, all the better. Like more power to them. I don't have any purity tests whatsoever. I think that's a fantastic outcome.

Let's say you have a niece or a nephew and she or he says, Auntie Dory, I just got accepted into the Goldman Sachs internship program. What are you really thinking? Are you saying mazel tov, that's just great, fantastic opportunity, you're saying, oh my.

God, I actually think that would be great. I don't want to presuppose how other people will take things or whether or not they'll enjoy them. There are plenty of people that have made entire careers at Goldman Sachs and really like it. And if you are one of the people who thrives in that environment, then that's a fantastic, remunerative and exciting thing to do. Again, I think that it's just useful to do stress tests for ourselves. If you think you're interested in something really intensive, possibly even a little cutthroat like investment banking, by all means, test it out. A brand like Goldman Sachs is good on your resume. Let's be honest, it will probably open doors, but you need to make sure that you don't let yourself get sucked into a system that you don't love. If you do really enjoy it, then keep going. But the problem comes if you hate it and you do it anyway. And so that's why I always try to advise people, keep your expenses low. I think that's probably the best business advice because you have more optionality. One of the worst things in the world is having the sort of golden handcuffs where you've created a lifestyle for yourself. They can't be supported by anything other than working at Goldman Sachs. That's when you're actually in prison. And I want to have a situation instead where if you actually are earning good money, that it gives you optionality rather than digging you further into a hole.

So if I may summarize, Aunt Dory said, yeah, go for it. Is that the bottom line?

My bottom line is go for it. And if you hate it a year.

From now you can leave there's always McKinsey.

That's right. That's right.

One must ask what happens if you're interested in stuff that is difficult to see how it's going to be financially viable? Then what?

Now you're speaking my language, guy.

Speaking as the person who is going to focus on theology.

That's right. Me and my fancy theology degree. The job that I managed to get after I got turned down by these doctoral programs was as a political reporter at an alternative news weekly. I was making $28,000 a year doing that. And then I went to work on progressive political campaigns. Oh, and then I ran a bicycling nonprofit. So my 20s were really not the most remunerative in the world. But, you know, yeah, that was what interests me. I felt perfectly fine about all of that. One of the philosophies that I've come to develop is we have to recognize that there are different kinds of capital. There's. I mean, there's capital capital. You know, there's financial capital. And earning that early on, that's great, but that's not the path for everybody. You also can have connection capital. If you are really good at networking and meeting people, you can have knowledge capital. If you are having the opportunity in your jobs to learn lots of new things, lots of new skills, you can have the capital of social proof and affiliating with brands or entities that are really well respected. We need to be mindful that in the jobs that we take, you need to be earning some kind of capital. But it doesn't necessarily have to be financial capital. Ultimately, once you've earned it, it does become fungible and you can actually trade certain forms of capital for other forms if you are clever about it. What was your first job?

First job out of college?

Yeah.

Well, my first real job was literally counting diamonds working for a jewelry manufacturer.

Oh, my goodness. Wow.

I did not. You know, I'm a very bad example of a diligent Asian American. Because I dropped out of law school, I went and got an mba. While I was getting my mba, I worked for a Los Angeles jewelry manufacturer. And when I graduated from the mba, all my buddies were going to work for Lehman and Wells Fargo, and I went to work for a small jewelry manufacturer as sales and marketing. But I will tell you, that sales and marketing position trained me to become an evangelist. That prepared me for the Macintosh division. I basically divide the world into two kinds of people. There are people who are making it and there are people who are selling it. So if you can't make it, you better be good at selling it, because that's the only two functions there are.

I love that I'm totally with you. I feel like I would not be able to be successful had I not spent two years running the bicycling advocacy group. It was this tiny nonprofit, as you might imagine, and you really had to be a renaissance person. You were doing everything. And it taught me the skills that I needed to be an entrepreneur and to be scrappy enough to be an entrepreneur.

So when your niece or nephew tells you that she or he got a job at Goldman Sachs, you should say, why don't you think about going to work for a bicycling co op instead? That'll serve you better over your career.

Everybody has their challenges, as we talked about. And the interesting thing, I learned so much in terms of the knowledge capital working at the bicycling organization. But the fundamental problem that I had once I actually did become an entrepreneur was that I did not have the right network to be successful because everybody I knew ran little tiny nonprofits with no budget. There was nobody to hire me, or they could hire me, but for 500 bucks. And so I had to have this very concerted element of up leveling my network so that I could actually make a sustainable living. In fact, you know, in some of the coaching that I do, I work with people who have come out of sometimes even long careers in these very elite consulting firms or what have you. They have an impeccable Rolodex, but they don't have the skills or the knowledge around building the business. And that's their version of it. But if you're diligent enough, you can learn any of the pieces. It's just a question of which kind of capital you want to start with.

You end your book with the three keys to long term thinking. And it is beautifully succinct and to the point. So you could just repeat those three keys verbatim. It would be wonderful. It's so valuable. Let me give you a soft pitch right down the middle, okay? Get your bat. You don't even need to have a big bat. What are those little bats called? Those fungible or fun fungi or what? What's those little bats that batting cool.

Fungo.

Fungo, whatever. Yeah, I'm pitching you a wiffle ball. You've got a fungal. Okay, so what are the three keys to long term thinking, Dori?

Oh, my goodness, the three keys. And I can expound on any of these, but it's independence, it's curiosity, and its resilience.

You got to explain a little that.

That's right.

At least run the bases.

My God, I'll run the bases. So independence is necessary for long term thinking because as we were talking about earlier, one of the biggest mistakes that we can make is to progress, to work hard, to do all the things right, only to discover that we have been optimizing for the wrong goals. And where that often happens, that can be pretty tragic. But where that often happens is cat alert here.

The listeners obviously didn't see that her cat just walked across the video. Oh my God, is it time to go?

Yeah, he's calling it. Yeah, independence. So you need to be enough of an independent thinker to be pursuing your goals, your vision, not what society or people around you are telling you is the thing to do. Because otherwise that's sort of the path to sorrow. Curiosity is really important because as we are coming up with long term thinking, there's always the possibility and the potential that there may actually be better outcomes than we even imagined. We don't, of course, want to constantly be in shiny object mode, but we also don't want to be falling prey to the other problem, which is where we set a goal when we're 20 and then somehow we feel like we have to pursue that the rest of our lives. Curiosity enables us to have the joy of discovery, of meeting new people, of discovering new things and saying, oh, maybe this. And it can lead us in sort of magical places. And then the final piece is resilience. Because ultimately it is almost inevitable. If you have a long term enough goal, you are going to have probably a number of setbacks. You know, it, it almost is on. It's on the surface illogical to think that we could make a 10 or 20 year plan for ourselves and have literally everything work out exactly how we predicted. Like, sorry, you know, the butterflies flapping its wings here. No, that's not gonna happen. So we have to be prepared for it. Not take it personally, not take it as, oh, you're not gonna good enough, but instead to recognize, all right, this is a freaking hassle, but I'll come up with something else and you find another way in the door to keep moving forward.

I hope you enjoyed my interview with Dori Clark. I learned how to decide when to say no. Remember she said, consider the total commitment that's necessary. Calculate the total physical and emotional cost, figure out the opportunity, opportunity cost of accepting something, and then ask yourself, will you feel great about doing this in a year? For someone like me who defaults to yes learning how to decide to say no is very important. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. My thanks to Peg Fitzpatrick and Jeff C. Shannon Hernandez, Madison Drop In Nismer, Luis Magana and Alexis Nishimura. This is the team that makes the Remarkable People podcast Remarkable. Enjoy the Christmas season. Mahalo and aloha. This is remarkable people.