An interview with Dorie Clark, author of The Long Game: How to be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World
By JT Mudge
Looking at Dorie Clark’s resume, “impressive” would be an understatement. Career coach, business consultant, author, speaker, Broadway musical investor, communication coach (former presidential campaign spokesperson), Grammy award-winning jazz album producer. That’s just for starters. She also teaches executive education at Duke and Columbia, has written several amazing books, and her numerous articles and videos are practical yet energetic. At her core, Clark helps people make significant changes in their lives.
And that is what we do as futurists — we study change and try to help others apply it to create preferred futures.
I had the opportunity to sit down with Dorie recently and discuss some of the ideas of long-term thinking in her recent book, The Long Game: How to be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World.
Mudge: When I first saw your interview for the Long Now Foundation, I thought, “I have to talk to this person.” One reason I thought your book is great for the futures community is it takes on a bit of a different perspective about thinking long-term. Foresight can be very academic, and you're very pragmatic and practical.”
From what I have read, you seem to have the keen and patient mind of a futurist, and you're also pragmatic and practical in your consulting. Just to help us get to know you a little bit better, can you share a little about your work, your clients, and your approach to long-term thinking?
Clark: Absolutely. In terms of my work, there are a variety of different buckets. I have done corporate consulting for everybody from Google and Microsoft to the World Bank and Yale University. But in addition to having an enterprise-level focus, I’ve tried to really think deeply about individual professionals. What do the changes in society mean, and how can we be ready for them? How can we make sure that we have, to the extent that such a thing is possible, career insurance, so that we are ready and prepared for the disruptions that will occur?
I've tried to really grapple with those questions. How can we gain back some agency in a world that feels like it's roiling with change all the time? And how can we be just a little bit more prepared so that we're ahead of the curve rather than behind it?
Mudge: That's a lot of what I read in your book. The subtitle, “How to be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World” really resonates with me because that's what we have to do as futurists. We help people understand that there's more to thinking than just what's happening right now.
When talking about the origin of your book, you've said when you were starting to ideate around this in 2018/2019, you noticed some themes would continually come up. People would say, "I'm great, but I wish I had more time." More time to think, to figure things out, to think further ahead and not be surprised and think past the current crisis or the issues they have. So now we're several years later in 2024, do you think the same is true? Do you think the narrative has shifted at all?
Clark: It's interesting. Certainly, before the pandemic, I feel like we had reached a kind of peak frenzy in terms of how people were living their lives and maintaining their work lives. And Covid didn't just slow it down, it grounded to a halt and forced a lot of reckonings for people. We saw the now seemingly permanent shift to much more accommodation of hybrid and flexible and remote work schedules. We also saw the great resignation and people changing things up rather dramatically. There's been a lot of phases in the post-pandemic shake out.
I think that what we're settling into now is a recognition that a lot of people in the workforce now are younger people. Millennials and some of the older Gen Z are seeing that there were a lot of seismic societal traumas that shaped things very unexpectedly — the 2008 recession, Covid and all of the disruptions, the supply chain disruptions, and the economic contraction and then massive inflation that came from it. These are things that surprised most people in a really serious way.
So, I think there is a greater understanding that we are in a kind of ongoing and fundamental state of uncertainty. Most people, if you ask them, are not going to say, "Oh yes, I'm predicting that from now on things are going to be calm." I think that most people are in the mode, "Yeah, shit is crazy and it'll probably continue to stay crazy."
My biggest observation in all of this is that an understanding that rapid change or extreme disruption could be right around the corner tends to lead people to short-term thinking and short-term outcomes because they feel like, "Well, I can't plan for things because I don't know how things are going to go. So, therefore, I will optimize for the thing that's right in front of me."
If we're being smart about it, we as individuals have to recognize that there is a spectrum between short-term thinking and long-term thinking. It's true that it would be foolish to be exclusively a long-term thinker in a world that's roiling as much as this is. You have to be nimble. You can't make these irrevocable plans. But it's also equally foolish to go too far on the other side of the ledger. We need to balance. I think the key thing that is hard for many humans is that we've got to step out of black-and-white thinking and understand that it's more of a spectrum.
Mudge: I love that, “step outside of black-and-white thinking.” In your book you discuss strategic patience and exponential growth. As futurists we often explain that change is not as fast as you think it is, it's happening in the background. Within your own experiences, where have you seen an exponential growth where you thought, "This might be something that's going to have a long tail and really have a change to it."
Clark: I think that this is such a relevant question, and it's definitely a theme that I talk about in The Long Game because compounding is just difficult in general for the human brain.
It seems really weird. You read about it and you're like, okay, yes, I understand that if I put $20 a month into my savings account when I'm 24, by the time I'm 65 I'm going have $15 bajillion dollars. You understand it intellectually, but you can't feel it because it's just so weird to comprehend. It is also surprisingly true that these things apply to our professional lives, our skill acquisition, and our network, literally anything that you're investing in over time. It ends up slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, and then suddenly it kind of bursts forward toward the end and has dramatic returns.
I think that it makes the case for being willing to do the hard thing at the beginning that for a long time looks like it is not bearing very much fruit, but ultimately it turns out to be the key competitive advantage and difference.
For me personally. I think about tangible tactical skills that I have, for instance writing for high- profile business publications. At first, I was a decent enough writer, but when I first started submitting to publications like Harvard Business Review, about half of what I would submit would get turned down. That's not a terrible acceptance rate, but it's frustrating because you're like, "Well, why is this one working? Why is this one not working?" Over time you develop a kind of implicit knowledge so that you're able to do things faster and implicitly that it speeds up the process dramatically. A thing that was hard and burdensome in the beginning becomes much more intuitive. I think that that's powerful.
Another more recent example in The Long Game is that I was learning to write musical theater. Eight years ago, when I started, I didn't have any idea how to do it. I've now gone from not having that skill to having just had a two-week workshop at Vassar's Powerhouse Theater, which is a fairly prestigious incubator of new musicals. If you invest eight years in something you can actually get pretty far. It's like, slow, slow, painfully slow, and then, all of the progress seemingly has happened in the past year.
Mudge: Do you think when you went into that eight years ago, you already had sort of that long-term mindset of this is the way it's gonna be? What was your spectrum of confidence?
Clark: I was pretty deliberate about it, in the sense that it is relatively common knowledge in the musical industry that if you're writing a show that does make it to Broadway (I mean, of course, most don't), it takes an average of about seven to eight years for a show to go from conception to Broadway. In my mind this was all part of what I was considering a 10-year plan, and that seemed reasonable. I knew it was a very long, long term endeavor in terms of one's career arc.
Mudge: You talk about thinking logically, but we don’t get it in our heart. We don't feel comfortable with it to where it just feels native. When you're giving advice to someone about strategic patience, and you explain to them the time it takes, and they get it logically, but they don't feel it, what sort of advice do you give? How do you help coach them through that?
Clark: In addition to grounding people with the knowledge of “here's what to expect," having a community is really helpful. That's why one of the things that I have created in my work is something I run called the “Recognized Expert” online community. It is a sort of community of folks who are professionals that want to have a bigger impact. It's about 800 people now. A community like that is very helpful because other people are able to ask questions and hear from the experiences of peers to know what's normal.
If you have friends that can encourage you along the way and also be a reality check, such as “You know what, I've been doing this for three years, I haven't seen much progress at all.” it helps you level-set in a way that's useful. You can frame it to yourself as, “I'm just not there yet” as compared to, “it's not happening for me because it'll never happen" or whatever people think sometimes.
I think the other thing is helping people to understand that the ability to delay gratification and to work toward a goal with an uncertain outcome is actually a form of moral courage. I mean, any idiot can persist in something if you tell them it's guaranteed to happen. The truth is, in life, nothing's guaranteed. We have to say, "You know what I know it's not guaranteed, but it's important enough to me to try anyway, to work toward it, and to give it my best effort. It's not guaranteed but I think I have a good chance if I do these things." That to me is a very noble endeavor that should be praised and encouraged.
Mudge: I love that idea of moral courage and moving forward while being uncertain of the outcome. In thinking ten years out, what do you think are the most important drivers right now that are influencing or shaping our future. Things we can’t ignore and we are going to have to address one way or another.
Clark: Well, the obvious answer that one can't not mention is AI. I mean, whenever GPT 5 comes out, it is highly likely that it is going to be exponentially better than GPT 4. I think that we have no concept of what that would look like, but it will be seismic. I think generative AI is going to continue to get quite a bit better. I think whatever those improvements are, they will probably reshape white-collar work in a very substantial way.
The other thing for me that I worry about (because I think that people have forgotten it) is that we have not had a legitimate financial bloodbath in quite a while, specifically since 2008. When the stock market turned down with Covid, that lasted for five minutes. I think that we've gotten a little bit lazy about that. So, for me personally, I'm very interested and concerned in how to hedge downside risk.
How do you answer that question JT?
Mudge: Climate. It's unpredictability at a planetary scale. It is very hard to get your head around that level of unpredictability. Once an insurance company says, "We're not going to insure that," it's a pretty big sign that there's something happening.
I think AI and digital automation, in general, are really big too.
When I think longer term, I really see a pretty significant value shift around the world and it's happening in different ways and at different paces.
The other big one is China.
Clark: I mean, always China. Yeah, absolutely.
Mudge: You mentioned in an interview with Forbes that The Long Game is a book about how we can make choices today that will enable tomorrow to be better and easier. Do you have a brief example of what tomorrow looks like in your life and how you're using long-term thinking to enable it.
Clark: When I say that playing the long game is about doing something today, including something small that will make tomorrow better and easier, I mean it in both the micro-sense and the macro-sense. It could be something that is about making tomorrow literally easier, such as, "I want to work out tomorrow morning. I am going to leave my gym clothes out or ready so that it is easy for me to put them on, which means that I am more likely to go to the gym." It also means that done repeatedly over time, I'm more likely to be healthy when I'm 70, 80, or 90.
Another way I frame it is, “How do you do a favor for your future self?” It's about taking the hassle of 20 minutes today to set up the auto transfer that puts $1,000 a month into your stock account so that you are saving on a regular and repeated basis. You do that once, but repeated over time when you are old, you're going say, “Thank you 30-year-old me for having the foresight to do that and to spend those 20 minutes.”
That same thing plays out in interpersonal relationships. It's taking the time to send your friend a birthday text. It's calling your granny. It's making the effort to do the things where you will be very happy years later that you invested in.
Mudge: Oh, it's beautiful. I love it. It's really important for futurists to consider how when we get these long-term visions, how do we make that practical and relevant for today? You have this long-term thing that happens, but you also have this very short-term thing that makes it very practical for the literal tomorrow. People can see practical and potential wins from that.
Thank you for taking the time and sharing your views on long-term thinking.
Clark: Yeah. Thank you, man. I think this is high quality. I love it. We covered a lot of good ground. Thank you.
JT Mudge is a professional futurist based in Seattle, Washington. He earned an M.S. degree in foresight from the University of Houston. He is the editor of The Mudge Report.
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