MBA1913 Extended Interview: Dorie Clark – How to Play The Long Game in Business

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I wanted to get her on the.

Show and get her to share why she wrote this book. What are some of the things she really wants entrepreneurs and professionals really start thinking about when it comes to building a long term business. I really try to ask the questions that our listeners want to hear the answers to. So we're going to jump into that conversation with Dory right now. But I'll be back to wrap up the episode and share some important things you need to do to follow up on today's episode. So without further ado, let's jump into the conversation with Dori Clark right now.

Dora Clark, awesome to have you on the podcast. I am going through your book right now. I'm about two chapters away from finishing it. The Long Game. I love the subtitle. How to Be a Long Term Thinker in a Short Term World. I want to get into the book, I want to get into you and what you do and all that kind of stuff. But one of the things I want to just start off with is why do we have such a hard time thinking long term just in general?

There are, there are a number of reasons, Omar. There are a number of factors mitigating against us very quickly. They are, number one, human nature. It's always nice to get things now that's sort of, kind of how it's always been, but you know, we have to rationally override it. Number two, there is societal pressure which has really just frankly gotten worse with social media. As humans, we naturally compare ourselves to other people, but now the sphere with whom we are comparing ourselves has expanded to basically the whole world. And so it can feel really frustrating and confronting when it seems like other people have it figured out. Other people obviously know what they're doing. Why is it not working for me? Why is it not working faster, hard? Yet another reason is that when we are focused on trying to accomplish these things and get these things done, we often get onto a treadmill because there's been a lot of interesting research by Sylvia Bellezza out of Columbia Business School and others that actually there's a social status associated with busyness and, and so we just keep wanting more, faster, more, faster, better, and it becomes a treadmill that's really hard for us to get off of. So there's a lot of factors involved.

I agree with all that. Just out of experience and you know, I think we kind of got busy right away into this conversation. We jumped right into it. But I wanted to set the context because your latest book, the Long Game is such an important book. And I'll talk a little bit why I think it's so important, especially now in a bit. But I've known you for some time. I think we've known each other for like six or seven years now. Yeah, you know, I've seen you speak on stage, I've seen you at conferences. You know, we've broke bread together, we've had great meals together. But you know, we've known each other as friends. But I really don't know you as a professional, so to speak. So I want to take this opportunity, I'm being selfish here. I'm going to take this opportunity to get to know you professionally a little bit. And I want to ask you this question because we're talking about long term goals. What are some of your long term goals and how did you set those goals?

So I will start with what the goals are. I, a few years ago came up with 10 and 20 and even 30 year goals for myself. And so these were created a number of years, let's say three or four years ago. So I'll call them 10 year goals. Even though we're still operating on the timeline. So 10 year goal, become one of the world's top business thinkers. 20 year goal, become a university president. 30 year goal, become a United States ambassador to somewhere cool. And those are the goals, really. I mean, they're big goals, they're sort of lofty goals. I have no idea necessarily how I'm going. You know, I mean, I'm working in the business sphere. The university president, the ambassador, those were things that were a lot more mysterious to me. But how I came up with them was really just asking myself what would be cool to Do. What would I be excited about? What would I be proud about? The really empowering thing, Omar, is that for long term goals, we don't have to have any idea how we're going to get there. The point isn't to have mapped everything out. The world's going to change way too much for us to, you know, for it even to be worthwhile to construct a plan for a 20 year goal. But what we need to do is have some kind of a North Star that we're moving toward and then just start taking steps toward it. You know, we can control that piece so we can learn more about it. And in fact, in the process of learning more about becoming a university president, I ended up actually joining a university board. So I got to immerse myself in that and get a little closer to understanding it. I came to realize actually that's probably not the best job for me. And so I changed and came up with a different goal. And so my new goal for myself was I decided I wanted to learn how to write musical theater. And so I've been working toward developing a sideline as a musical theater lyricist. So. So, yeah, I'm a big fan of goal setting.

I love that. Two things. The first thing I want to mention is it takes courage. It takes courage for you to actually say what you want. You know, most people just don't even know what they want because they had a chance to, or gave themselves a chance to think about it and to just either write it down or just even say it out loud. Did you ever find that a little bit difficult or did you just like, I know what I want, I'm going for it?

Well, I think that for a lot of people, they put so much weight on things and they invest so much in it that it becomes this part of their identity that somehow if it doesn't happen, their. They're going to be ashamed or embarrassed or, you know, it's a failure that we have to avoid. I feel like if we just treat. We need to treat things seriously, but also treat them lightly because, you know, what if I don't end up becoming a United States ambassador? Is that like a failure in my life? I mean, no, you know, it's not like, you know, oh, it's, you know, it's. The reason I wake up in the morning is I want to be a United States ambassador. It's something I think would be cool. I think it'd be great. But you know what? If it doesn't work, it's okay because probably I will be Doing something even better, even cooler. And I feel okay about that. As long as you keep moving towards something, you are increasing your chances that it will happen or that something equally or, you know, equally good or even better will happen. You're just, you're building your skills, you're building your optionality. So I feel like it's a good intention, but I'm not going to beat myself up if I don't literally accomplish it. I'm curious, what, what are your goals? Do you have, you know, long, long term goals like that?

Yeah, I love, I love the, the question. One of the things I share on the, on the podcast a lot is it's important to have at least one goal in life, you know, and my, my goal and I like this goal because it gives me that flexibility, but at the same time it's defined. And that's just, I want to have success in entrepreneurship. And if I go a little bit deeper, it just means that I want to be able to earn a healthy lifestyle and a living doing something I enjoy. So if I, and I, I've done this, you know, I've started businesses that failed. It doesn't mean I failed on my goal. It just means my attempt to. The business is not the goal. The business is a means to an end. You know, like, at the end of the day, I just still want to be a successful entrepreneur. And one of the things I love about one of the things I love that Mark Cuban says is you only need to be successful once, right? You don't need to be right a million times. That's the joy of business, is that like, if you're right once, then you can ride that wave for as long as you like. Which leads me to where I want to go with this conversation into my next question. One of my favorite quotes by Jason Fried, who's the CEO of Basecamp, is it's easy to start a startup. It's hard to have a stay up. And I love that because I'm interested in having a stay up. I, a lot of people ask, what are you going to do? Are you going to exit Webinar Ninja? Are you going to sell this company? And it's really hard to build a business with any kind of value if you're constantly thinking about selling. And I just don't have that in my mind. I just want to build a great business, a great product with incredible people that I enjoy working with and just focus on that. And if that means I do that for the rest of my life, great. If an opportunity arises And I do sell wonderful, but it's hard for me to think of my life's work as kind of like an exit strategy. So in a world where people are just trying to get rich and there's a lot of media on social media and there's a lot of products and services telling people like, just do this X, Y and Z silver bullet, blah blah, blah, and you got a business on your hands. I want to talk a little bit about that because part of building a long term business is having a solid foundation which sometimes people want to skip over. Did you find that in your research in the book?

Yeah, certainly. I think for a lot of us you want to get to the good stuff and that's natural, that's human. But also we have to recognize that it is going to compromise your long term success because you do need to have a base that you're building. I mean, I think about just, you know, in terms of mistakes that folks make. I mean, I primarily work with professionals that are looking to build their platform, grow their brand, you know, get better known and get their ideas out there. And sometimes people want to short circuit it by, you know, they'll say, oh well, you know, I'm going to hire, I'm going to hire a person to do this and I'm going to hire a person to do that. Oh, I'm going to hire a PR firm. Well, you know, throwing money at a problem for things like that, like a PR firm is not going to magically make your ideas sexy. A PR firm, I mean, mostly they just send blind emails to random lists all day. I mean, you know, a lot of, there's some great PR firms, but a lot of PR firms are not very effective. And it's kind of like that's the short term solution. Oh, I'll just, I'll pay for it, I'll hire it out. When you're doing the work, the work is something that actually takes a lot more time and care. You know, are you developing the kind of ideas and intellectual property that will get you noticed? Are you crafting articles and sharing ideas yourself so that you are actually making yourself findable to potential clients and to in fact members of the news media who always start their research by doing a Google search to see who's written about things. So I think that's sort of one example of doing the work and building the foundation versus trying to say, oh, what's the quick fix that I could arrange?

Yeah, and you remind me of the story of Tesla has no PR department. So Elon Musk actually killed their PR department two years ago and he actually did it on purpose. Not because he doesn't like media, but just because he said, I wanted to force the company to create a superior product. If we have a great product, people are just going to feel compelled to tell everybody and we don't need pr.

PR is for people that need, hey.

Can you tell people about this thing? No one knows. He's like, listen, if our product's good enough, people are going to know. And we've known that Tesla's been a great brand and actually has the highest brand value of any automobile industry automobile manufacturer, which is incredible for a car company that spends zero money on ads and billboards or anything like that.

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2025 I want to talk about, you know, one of the things I love about your book, the Long Game. It talks about focus. It talks about saying no, we're going to get into all that. But in our space and entrepreneurship, there's a lot of new trends that come out, a lot of distractions. Whether it's clubhouse, whether it's this new social media platform and we often feel like, oh, I got to jump in or if I'm going to be late to the game. And I'm of the opinion that sometimes those can be more detrimental, those distractions can be more determinal versus, you know, kind of evaluating how does this actually help my long term goals? What are some pieces of advice you can share when it comes to like avoiding these distractions or knowing okay, this is a real opportunity I should get into it.

Yeah, it's such a good question and a good point because, I mean, it's true in some ways, you know, and we all look at this and we see it, oh, there's first mover advantage. I mean, you know, when Twitter was first a big thing, you actually legitimately had people who were quote, unquote, Twitter celebrities and were able to build a career for themselves. And they weren't famous people. They were just random people who happened to hop on Twitter and they got in early, they got in the algorithms, and then they have a million followers. So people look at that and say, oh, well, that's the answer. But of course, for every case like that, you have Google, where people even wrote books about, you know, oh, you know, here's how to get famous on Google. And, you know, now, of course, it's. It doesn't even exist. They pulled the plug on it because it really didn't matter who got famous on Google. Google wasn't a thing. It never became a thing. So in terms of how to straddle that, how to, you know, kind of find the balance, I think that ultimately you're exactly right. We have to figure out. I mean, first of all, it's. It's a little bit of a matter of personality and disposition. If you're somebody that just loves new things, then, you know, harness that excitement. That's great. I mean, for me, I find it a little tedious. Like, I kind of couldn't, like, I experimented with Clubhouse enough to just, like, know how it worked, but I. The idea of spending like 22 hours on the app a day, like, just. Even though I knew that if I did it, you know, at a certain point I would probably get a bajillion followers, I just could not bring myself to do it. So, you know, I think part of it is where your inherent interest lies. But the real winning strategy, this is a concept I talk about in the long game, is how to find the way that you can. You can win even if you lose. And what I mean by that, this is a concept my friend Jonathan Brill talks about. Basically, the idea is, can you structure things so that even the minimal, acceptable, you know, the minimum outcome is something that will be acceptable to you, and everything else feels like gravy. So, for instance, something that I think actually is a pretty good strategy is there are people who are podcasters and they have taken to recording Clubhouse conversations. And, you know, of course you have to get people's permission and tell them you're doing it. Et Cetera. But they're recording Clubhouse conversations, and then they're releasing it post facto as a podcast. So it's kind of killing two birds with one stone. You have content you need to fill for the podcast. Okay, great. Let's do it on Clubhouse, and then we can build the Clubhouse following while we're doing it. That is. That's. That's a kind of gravy strategy that I think is useful. Even if it turns out the Clubhouse goes nowhere. It folds. It's not like it caused them harm because they needed the podcast content anyway. But if Clubhouse becomes a big thing, well, good. They've been investing in building their profile.

On there, and then you can use your content in an evergreen fashion at that point.

Yeah, exactly.

Love it. Awesome. So the Long Game. This is not your first book. I want to first start off by asking you, you know, what compelled you to write this book? You know, this is. You know, this is your fifth book, correct?

Number four.

Four.

Okay.

So is your fourth book. Why did you feel like, okay, I have to write another book, and why did you choose this topic?

So I got inspired to write the Long Game, really, as a result of the coaching work that I do and the work that I do with the online community that I run, which is called recognized expertise, because I was working with folks who, you know, they're wonderful. You know, they're really smart, high quality professionals who are looking to get their ideas heard. And so often, you know, we'd do these coaching sessions and like, every two weeks, they'd hop on and, you know, they'd tell me what, you know, I'd ask what they'd been doing, and they'd give me the report and they'd say, okay, so what now? What next? And, you know, they wanted me to say, like, oh, now it's Clubhouse. The. Oh, this. This week it's TikTok.

And no, it's more of the same thing.

I felt like the biggest grinch in the world. Omar. Yeah, because every time I had to be like, just keep doing what we talked about before. And they're like, really, really, like, not a new thing. And I'm like, no, in fact, definitely not a new thing. And what I came to realize is that so often as we are on the journey, we, you know, we know on one hand there's not a magic bullet, but on the other hand, we kind of want a magic bullet. We kind of want somebody to say, oh, you know, clubhouse is it? Or whatever. And at the end of the day, it really is kind of about doing the hard. The hard grunt work of just keep going, just do it. And I wanted to write a book about that to help frame it for people and to help. To help encourage people along the path. Because it is a hard journey. It can be a boring journey sometimes. It is not sexy, as you know, but it is a worthwhile journey. And I wanted more people to be better equipped to make it so they could get to the other side and actually get to the good stuff.

You're so right, Dori. I mean, I think back at all the biographies I've read, whether it's athletes like Mike Tyson or Andre Agassi or musicians or entrepreneurs. It's not the platform really. It's not clubhouse. It's not podcasting. The reason why a podcast is successful is because the person who runs the podcast worked on the craft of communication. There's really worked on trying to add value. It's not really podcasting, right? It's not. Why is a movie a great movie? It's not because it was, you know, filmed on the soundstage, da da da. It was great script, great acting, gate writing. That's the stuff that makes. It is really what makes it a great hit. And the truth is, is that we can't be great at something overnight, you know, the truth is that one of my favorite books is Mastery by Robert Greene. And he talks about, like, the difference between what, how much time a master puts into, like, being a, you know, a great pianist or something like that. It's like eight hours versus two hours of practice a day. It's like it just takes reps. And that's the thing we don't want to hear is that it just takes a lot of time and reps. And that's why they say try to choose something that you can at least tolerate or at best enjoy so that you can keep doing those reps. Love it. I personally think the first two chapters of your book are worth your book alone, just because it just rewires people's brains. You talk about two concepts. One's called white space. The other one is, you know, learning how to say no or choosing what you want to do or what you're really good at versus trying to say yes to everything. So I want to talk a little bit about these concepts, and then we'll go into some other. The other concepts that I love in the book. But white space is. And correct me if I'm wrong, but it's just creating more space in your calendar. So that way you don't. You're not overly busy. You have time to think, you have time to kind of absorb what's going on and you're not overwhelmed. How do you. Yeah, so how do you balance that with the culture of you got to be super productive, you know, work to your eyeballs, bleed and you know, every minute counts?

Yeah, that is certainly the challenge. Omar, you're exactly right. But one of the things that I realized in the course of researching long term thinking is ultimately long term thinking is a non starter. Like it's not even possible. If you have a schedule that is so overstuffed that you literally do not have a moment to think or to breathe, you're never going to get there. And frankly, even if you say, okay, okay, I can carve out 30 minutes for long term thinking between 10:30 and 11 at night, well, you know, your head is not going to be there because all the adrenaline is still rattling around and you're not going to have the mental space to be able to do what you need to do. And so it is not easy. None of this is easy. I believe you have to become a vigilante in defense of your calendar because no one's going to protect it for you. It is always easier for everyone else if you are on 24 7, if you are responsive 24 7, if you were doing their bidding 24 7. No one's going to tell you no because it's easier for them. And so we have to learn to stand up for ourselves and guard it. And it's not, it's not easy. It really is like, you know, being some kind of a bouncer. But we have to do it in order to, to be able to create the necessary preconditions to do the kind of strategic thinking that we need to.

I can't agree more. I'm one of the vigilantes and amongst my friends, I'm a little bit of a freak because, like, they may necessarily not be in business or entrepreneurship. They might have jobs and like, they'll ask me questions like, hey, do you want to play basketball? Like right now, like, I need a little bit of a heads up, you know, it's not, you know, because my calendars literally booked. Even if it's, even if I have a three hour block to catch up on reading or whatever it is. I don't want to get off the discipline of doing what I subscribe to do and jump off and play basketball. But they get over and it just becomes one of my quirks. When you were talking about the whole calendar thing and having a Jam packed calendar. I've seen the evolution of my own calendar in the last 10 years, and if I can share some of my own takeaways from what I learned from your book and my own reflections, I'd.

Love to hear them.

Yeah. So one of them was that I asked myself, why was my calendar so jam packed versus now? It's not as jam packed. And it's exactly what you said. I changed my mindset of like, I'm not working for tomorrow, I'm working for the next 10, 20, 30 years. Right. So my timeline changed. My long term view just became apparent. And when you're not in that mindset, you think all you have is today. You just think, like, I got to get everything done right now. Everything is just as important as the other thing. And you realize that doesn't make any sense. There can't be 10 priorities. You start to realize, okay, what's really going to move the needle? The concept I learned from Dan Martell was like, the big rocks. The idea of do the big rocks. Things that really move your, you know, the $10,000 tasks that really move your business forward. Those are the things you really need to work on. If you don't get the pebbles in the sand done, which is a smaller task, that's okay, you know, you're going to be all right. But my, My biggest takeaway from that chapter was just like, you can't think long term if you're just thinking you have to do everything right now.

Right. Yeah. So. So true. Well put.

Yeah.

One of the things I wanted to also touch on is the chapter on saying no. And I know for a lot of new entrepreneurs that are listening, saying no is super, super hard because they feel like they have to say yes to every opportunity that comes their way. It's one of the most challenging things because it dilutes your brand, dilutes your usp, your new selling proposition. But also it just overwhelms you. What are a couple of strategies that have worked for you in terms of how to choose what to say no to?

Yeah. So this is a big challenge for so many of us. And the truth is, early in our entrepreneurial journey, we often don't know what's going to pay off. And so the bias towards saying yes in the earliest days is not a bad thing. But what we have to learn is that over time, we need to. And no one says this right. Let's. Let's make it clear. Over time, you have to systematically tighten, Tighten your eligibility criteria in terms of what you say yes to. If you are saying yes to the same things that you were saying yes to three years ago, even a year ago, you were probably making a systematic mistake because you should have been. Hopefully you are advancing in your business and therefore your time is at a greater priority the closer you get to actually having traction and product market fit. And you're scaling. There are things that you need to do. Whereas in the earliest days, if you're still figuring things out, oh, but I need to meet these people because maybe they can become customers, maybe they can become suppliers. Oh, I, you know, I need some ideas. Well, great. You're sort of in heads up mode. It's. It's great to say yes to lots of things, but we have to tighten it. And so one really simple strategy that I use, Omar, is this sounds so basic, but a lot of people don't do it is literally just asking systematically for more information. And what I mean by this is that a lot of people, sometimes because they don't know any better or they're moving too fast, and sometimes because they're actually concealing something, are deliberately vague when they ask for your time. And for so long, I made the mistake of assuming that other people either had my best interests at heart or that they actually had a good sense of who I was or what I could do or, you know, or I don't get it.

Like, I'm dense. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But, you know, the truth is, a lot of times they didn't. They'd be like, oh, you know, you get messages all the time. I still do. Hey, Dory, I'd really love to talk to you. Can I get on your calendar for like 30 minutes? When are you free? And in the moment, it's easier to say yes and just like, okay, get it out of the inbox. But, you know, you're creating this 30 minute task for yourself, and it may turn out they want to sell you insurance. It may turn out they're asking you for advice about something you literally have no freaking idea about because they have an erroneous idea of what you do. It may turn out that they are asking for something that they didn't want to say up front. I mean, I've had whole people invite me over for dinner, and it turns out that the whole premise behind it is they wanted to ask me to invest in this project of theirs. And it was kind of a setup to do that. So asking is probably just the best strategy.

Wow. There's so many moments when you were just talking right now that I cringed just Because I've been a part of those conversations. And to be honest with you, I sympathize because I feel a little bit like, obviously people who do this are doing it out of some level of desperation, some level of need. It's not like they want to do this. It's not like they have customers knocking on their door and they're just doing this for fun, you know, but at the same time, you know, like you mentioned in the book, you know, your time is so valuable. Your time is something you just cannot take back. You know, it's like, I think it's one of the things that we don't talk about enough in business and. Or in life is just like, the clock's ticking. You can't take these minutes back, you know, so, like, that one liner of, hey, can I get some more information so I can be able to make a decision? Great. Awesome. That's an awesome strategy just to one, weed out people that actually care, and we're gonna give you more information. Or somebody's going to say something that's going to reveal, okay, this is for me or not for me. So I love that kind of just very easy one liner. It could just be a. Even a text expander kind of shortcut. Yeah. Where you can just, hey, I'd love.

To help if I can. What was it you wanted to talk about? That's it. That's it.

That's great. That's great.

What's your best. No strategy.

That's a good one. So, first of all, it's evolved over the years, but at this point, I have been fortunate enough to be able to have a criteria where it's just like, am I going to enjoy this call? Am I going to. Is something I want to do, first of all. Okay. Because. So that's one too. The other thing is that, like, is this going to benefit beyond me? Is it going to benefit my team, is going to benefit my customers? It's going to benefit in some way. And sometimes I do need to ask for more information. But one of the best moves I've ever done in my life, it was a late. Hi, super late hire, was get an executive assistant. Like, I just have somebody that just goes through my inbox and tells me what's important, what's not, you know, gives me summaries, goes back and forth with them, and then gives me the gist at the end.

Here.

This is what you need to know. And it's been a great hire just because, again, I'm saving time and it's worth so much.

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I want to talk a little bit about something else you do outside your books is your online courses. So you've built several online courses and you've been doing this prior to the pandemic and you really started to invest in it, you know, leading up to the pandemic, but also after as well. Just good timing, I guess.

But.

But I want to learn a little bit more about how has your online courses help you achieve or get you closer to your long term goals?

Well, online courses have been actually a really important part of my long term goals in the sense that I recount a story in the long game where I mean, it's, it's just still very vivid. It was the end of 2015 and I had just launched my book standout and I had kind of gone nuts with the idea of like speaking and book touring and whatever. And so I had given 74 talks that year, which was kind of the high water mark for me.

I remember you were everywhere I was.

Yeah.

Yes.

And at the end of the year, I got this terrible cold because I was like pretty much sick the whole year because I was all I was was on planes and I was just sitting there like, you know, feverish and miserable and being like, why? Why am I doing this? And I, and I just realized, okay, first of all, no more 74 talks in a year. This is a bad idea. I need to really dramatically cut it back but it also made me realize, I thought, you know, gosh, like, okay, I have a cold. Like, I'm going to get over the cold in a few days or in a week and it'll be fine. But it really hit me, like, what if I actually got really sick somehow? What if I hurt myself? What if I got some illness, God forbid, and I wasn't able to do it? Speaking was a big revenue source for me. And I thought, okay, that's kind of a precarious position. And then one step removed with the same outcome was, okay, what if there's a big recession? That, that comes periodically. And the first thing always that happens is that conferences are cut and therefore conference speakers are cut. And so I just identified that as two potential points of vulnerability. I clearly did not have pandemics on that list. But it turns out the net result of a pandemic is the same thing. You're not traveling, you're not speaking, there's not conferences. And so in order to hedge against the risks that I perceived, I started getting more into online courses and really made an effort both to create courses for other platforms that I work with, like LinkedIn, learning and some other ones, and also to create courses on my own platform. So I, I did my first one in 2014, I did another one in 2015, and then 2016, I just kind of went all in and I started doing a bunch. And that has been very helpful to me because certainly during the pandemic, you know, all of my in person speaking was canceled, but it actually, you know, sort of bizarrely turned into my, my most successful year ever financially because so much of the world tuned in to online courses and so it more than made up for the revenue lost. So that's actually been a, a pretty big deal and a helpful element as I think about the long game.

Love that. You know, a lot of our listeners as well as our users at Webinar Ninja, they're independent creators, teachers, coaches, trainers. They, they have tons of courses online, offline, you know, on demand. And one of the things I love about course creators is their just willingness to give and to give information and to share. And we, in our community, we say, you know, those who teach change the world. And it's really true because a lot of us don't see us that way. But I definitely put you in that camp, Dori, the impact you've made on the world and the world is just made up of people. You impacted me because I read your book and you've impacted all the other people that Read it. So in our own ways, I feel like courses can really scale that up in a way that it may not seem as significant as getting on a big stage, but it definitely makes a big impact in terms of the people that you touch.

It's really true. It's really true. Thank you, Omar. And I know you feel very passionate about education, so that's awesome.

Yeah, totally. So I kind of want to wrap up with a semi personal question. The Long Game just recently hit the Wall Street Journal bestseller list. When things like that happen, how do you celebrate?

Ah, that's a great. That's a great question. The way that I celebrated. So there were a couple of ways. The first is it's always great if you can get together with friends. And so I had a group of fellow authors and entrepreneurs in New York, and it was about a half dozen of us, and we all went out for dinner to celebrate and commiserate and, you know, talk. Talk about our various book stuff because one. One of the other people in attendance had a book coming out the following month. A couple of people had had books that came out earlier in the year, yet another one had a book coming out in the spring. So, you know, we were all just sort of trading war stories and celebrating together. So that was really nice. And then on a more ongoing, tactical level, whenever I need to do something nice for myself, I buy Indian food.

Nice.

That's great. Awesome. I love Indian food, but my digestive system does not love it as much, so I can't have it that much. I have it maybe once every couple months, but it's a little bit of a treat. So that's definitely great. Awesome stuff. I love that because I think a lot of people in our space, we're always thinking of the future, always thinking about the next thing, and we never take the time to celebrate the wins and realize, hey, what I've done is great. What I've done is enough. What I've done is significant. And really I've tried to get better at that, especially because I manage a team of people at Webinar Ninja, and I feel like it reflects if I don't celebrate. Nobody celebrates. I just think it's unimportant. Okay, move on, next thing. But it's important for us to all celebrate because everybody did all the work. And I think that is something to keep in mind. If you're listening and you're leading even a small team, you're starting to grow. If you don't take the time out to say, hey, guys, you do a Great job. Let's. Let's do a meetup or drinks or even we do virtual dinners together. So that's because we have a remote team around the world. That's super helpful. Dori, it's been awesome to speak to you. I got one more question for you, and it has to do with writing books. We've written four books. A lot of people don't know how much hard work writing a book is. It's really like the equivalent of an artist coming up with an album. It's like, it takes so much work to put together to get the ideas down, to edit, even from the COVID And then once it's out, you got to market it. You got to get the word out, you got to make sure that it's pitched to the right audience, all that kind of stuff. Now that you just got one under your belt, you got another one under your belt. That's done well. Do you immediately think about the next book and how do you mitigate your feelings of, like, man, that's a lot of work. I don't know if I want to do that again. How do you balance that yin and yang of feelings?

Yeah, you're pointing to something really important, Omar. I would say, certainly with my earlier books, I was totally on to the next thing. I had a theory. It did not actually turn out to be true, but, you know, it was not an illogical theory that the publishing industry was going to totally collapse. And so I wanted to write three books as quickly as I humanly could because I thought, okay, the publishing industry is going to collapse. I'm going to get it under the wire and commercially publish three books and, you know, get ideas out there and whatever before, you know, everything sort of dissolves into chaos. And anyway, so I. So I came out with a lot really quickly. Reinventing you was released in 2013. Standout was released in 2015. Entrepreneurial you was released in 2017. So, boom, boom, boom. You know, two years is about as fast as you can go in between books because of commercial publishing schedules. So you'll note that it's now been four years since my last book. And so I took more time with this book. I decided that actually I was shifting. One of the things that I talk about in the long game is an idea I call Thinking in Waves, which is basically, there's a season for everything in our businesses. And so 2013 to 2017 was all about creating IP and getting it out there. Starting in 2017, I was like, okay, I need to focus on revenue. I was making good money before, but I wanted to make great money. And so I really leaned into the business side of my business and focused a lot of energy there, which, which was great. I think that was a necessary thing to do. And so now in writing the Long Game, I actually think retrospectively, you know, it's, it's fine. It's not like I made a mistake per se, but something that I now realize that I think I did quote unquote wrong is I just was onto the next thing too quickly. I was like, okay, you know, like all in on the launch. And then like, all right, great, it's out of the universe now. It'll kind of take care of itself. It does not take care of itself. It does not. And so I am going to promote the Long Game. I have already decided and committed in advance. I'm going to promote it for five years. This is going to be my five year book. So I'm not going to have a new business book come out for five years. This is what I'm talking about. This is what I am focusing on. And I want to really drive the longevity of this book and not rush into creating the next thing.

I just admire that so much. I love this idea of, hey, I got something that I really worked hard on. It's fantastic work. It has a lot of value. Let me, let me make sure it reaches its full potential, you know, through marketing it and focusing on it and speaking on the topic and all that kind of stuff to really bring that book up front and center. I just, I just feel like that's a great insight because a lot of people feel like if I'm only as good as my last thing and I need to push, push, push. But some of the best things I love in life are things that were really using that strategy, whether it's my favorite albums or whatever. Like one of the, one of the albums that come to mind is like, so a lot of people ask if you had one album you would choose to listen to rest of your life. Like hands down, not even a, not even a question. It would be Michael Jackson's bad. And that album was like promoted and in the market for three years.

Wow.

Like that's unheard of. And this is the reason why for three years. And that book has the most number one hits, any or number one singles in any other album in history. And it's just because he was just like, I got a great album. I'm just going to promote the hell out of this thing and make sure every, every single hits were number one. And if you see the charts on Billboard.com, it's like, it stays number one for, like, so long. It's, like, ridiculous. It's just dominance. But the point is, is that, like, he could have just said, okay, next one. Let's do it next album. But he was just like, I'm going to focus on this. Took me a long time. You know, it was like four. More than four years before or after Thriller. So it was just interesting when you look beyond, like, why is something a hit? Why is something it's not just because of, you know, oh, everybody loved it because it was just great. No, he worked at making sure it stayed number one for a long time, and I thought that was really interesting. So you're. You're doing the right thing. I mean, if you're. You're. You're on the path of being a legend. So I love that. Dory, I always love speaking to you. You're honest. You're super valuable in terms of just, like, being transparent and sharing what you know. You're a wonderful, you know, author because you really write plainly, and I love the way that you write because it's just like, here are the facts. This is what you need to know. I actually think your books would probably be longer if somebody else wrote it, you know, but which I really appreciate because I don't feel like you're beating a dead horse and, you know, regurgitating ideas over and over in a book. It's really, really well done in terms of, like, every word is thought about, every paragraph is really thought about, and you're really getting some great value. So I highly recommend everybody to pick up the long game. You know, it's. It's one of those books that's going to really rewire the way you think about your career and business. So I love it. Dory, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

Omar, thank you. It's a pleasure to get to hang out with you and to talk with you. Thanks.

Wow, wow, wow. What a fantastic conversation with Dori Clark. I want to choose a few points and really emphasize them. Number one, are you saying yes to everything and anything? Are you forgetting that you have months and years ahead of you that you need to work on? You don't need to do everything right now. So by saying no now doesn't mean no forever. So try to say no to a few things to give yourself time to work on the things that matter, the things that you're great at. One of the things I found really helpful was creating that white space on your calendar. One of the symptoms of short term thinking is thinking you have to do everything right now, like I mentioned, and filling every minute in your calendar. This doesn't allow you to really have any deep work time, deep thought time. And at the end of the day, as the leader of your business, your job is to make solid decisions. And you can't make solid decisions if you are mentally stressed. If you're mentally stretched, you got to be in your best state of mind, guys. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to pick up Dori's book the Long Game how to Be a Long Term Thinker in a Short Term World. It's available on Amazon or you can go to our website doryclark.com if you go to our website, you check out some of our best performances on stage, including Google, TEDx and a whole lot more. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you like this format, this extended interview format, we may do more of these in the future. If you guys say, hey, we like them, it won't be the format for every episode because we love our short lessons, but once in a while we want to just get a little bit more from our experts, sit down and get inside of their minds. If you found this useful, let us know, email us over at support00mba.net we would love to hear your feedback and forget to hit subscribe so you don't miss an episode. On tomorrow's episode, we take a deep dive and explain what are NFTs? You've heard about them on the news, you've heard about them on social media. What exactly are NFTs? Are they good investments? Are they a dangerous idea for an entrepreneur? We get into all those details in tomorrow's episode, so make sure you hit subscribe before I go. I want to leave you with this. As a new entrepreneur, sometimes you can't help but think short term. You want to get some traction, you want to get some wins, you want to have some success in your business and you want it now. And you can't help but think, hey, how can I get to that by tomorrow, by next week, by next month? That's fine and all, but you got to remember that your business life is not just this week or this month or this year. Don't make decisions for the quick win. Make decisions for wins that will last long a lifetime. I always say if I look back 40, 50 years from now, if I'm still around, will I be proud of the decision I'm making today? The decisions I make for my business. Will it be a decision that really is an investment in our long term success? Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode.

I'll see you then.

Take care.

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