Dorie Clark

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People.
Today's remarkable guest is Dorie Clark.
At age fourteen, 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.
Dorie has been named one of the Top Fifty Thinkers by Thinkers-Fifty, 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.
Dorie is an adjunct professor of business administration at Duke University and is a regular contributor to the Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Entrepreneur.
Dorie is the author of four acclaimed books. Her latest is called The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World.
I'm Guy Kawasaki, this is Remarkable People. And now, here's the remarkable Dorie Clark.
Let's start at the endpoint, which is how should people reap their success? Talk about reaping for dummies.
Dorie Clark:
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.
Dorie Clark:
In fact, there was a great quote that Jeff Bezos had a decade ago talking to Wired Magazine, 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're 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
Now, I want to know from you, who do you say, “That guy or that gal is reaping well”?
Dorie Clark:
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 Marshall's now in his early seventies, 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 program called 100 Coaches and it's intended as this give back legacy project where he is creating a community of younger professionals that he spends time with, he trains, 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 reigniting the circle about learning something new.
Dorie Clark:
The way it all came about was he attended this workshop and the woman running the workshop said, "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 admire 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, "Then you do that, you become that." And that's what he ended up creating.
Guy Kawasaki:
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 it just correlated with your later success?
Dorie Clark:
That's a very sophisticated question. I love that. 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 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, 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
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, i.e., speaking and consulting, it should be an end in itself. You have a great emphasis on how the book caused/correlated your success and I just wanted to probe that a little because it could give many people the wrong impression, "Oh, Dorie said write a book and that's the key." I don't think you're saying that.
Dorie Clark:
It's true.
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 in 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 ten years ago and think about, "Oh, 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 mercenary behavior of, "Oh, 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
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 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.
Dorie Clark:
Yeah, that's a very good test.
Guy Kawasaki:
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?
Dorie Clark:
The plan that I had was one that did not end up working out at all.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, God works in strange ways.
Dorie Clark:
Exactly. Never more true than with divinity school students.
And so, I thought that I was going to have a career in academia. So, I had gotten my BA in philosophy, I got my masters 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you think that your background in theology and divinity has helped you in business?
Dorie Clark:
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. 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, that you 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, 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
Now we're going to get more relevant to your book.
And the first question, of course, is why are we so damn busy?
Dorie Clark:
It's 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, 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 at Columbia University around this, the fact that busyness in our modern society, actually accords us a status, it's 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 mask or a 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. “Are you in the right career?” Or, “Is your life going the way you want it to go?”
Guy Kawasaki:
So, then, how does one decide on the quote unquote, “right goals and priorities”?
Dorie Clark:
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?
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, Lord. I'm a bad person to ask that.
Dorie Clark:
You're anti goal or-
Guy Kawasaki:
No-
Dorie Clark:
... how do you think about it?
Guy Kawasaki:
... it's because I'm not that cerebral.
Dorie Clark:
Mmhmm.
Guy Kawasaki:
And so, people think, "Oh, 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, "I have four kids, two are out of college, 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.
Dorie Clark:
Yeah,
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm a simple guy, what can I say?
So, what are your goals right now then?
Dorie Clark:
Oh, boy. Also, we have to recognize different timeframes, it's perfectly appropriate.
Once you've decided to write a book, obviously, I'm sure it's like, "Okay, in the next six months, I'm going to finish this book or whatever." So, there's the shorter-term operational goals. Then there's the big picture, longer term. And, for me, I definitely have them. I also recognize 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 twenty-year goal, which is the longest term that I currently have, is that I would like to become a United States Ambassador 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, that won't take twenty years.
Dorie Clark:
I imagine that, in the next twenty 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 twenty years from now.
But you can take small steps that can put you in a better position to get towards something like that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Some tactical information. How does one say no?
Dorie Clark:
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 feel plenty of requests.
But one thing that I've found useful is, there's 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 does 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 the year, if you've just been traveling, if you're 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.
And one example, in The Long Game, I talked 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 is 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?
Guy Kawasaki:
I used to have a really simple answer, which is, it is 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 is a lot of money.
And so, three of those four, make me accept.
Dorie Clark:
Nice, nice.
Guy Kawasaki:
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?
Dorie Clark:
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 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, my God. Calling the kettle black. I can relate to that, yes.
Okay, go on.
Dorie Clark:
Yes. So, that is number one. 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. 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 is 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
It sounds like the same people have asked you to do stuff that have asked me.
Dorie Clark:
That could be.
Guy Kawasaki:
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 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. It 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. So, I'm not convinced that defaulting to yes is a poor strategy.
Dorie Clark:
I feel you, Guy. Absolutely. There are merits to both positions. We need to set a few parameters.
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, Stand Out, I talk about a lot of the research that's been done into, I'll call it the science of luck, which is an interesting concept. But a lot of researchers, including Dr. Richard Wiseman, 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 an attitude of curiosity and openness toward other people such that everybody else 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 VC or 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 worked for you.
Guy Kawasaki:
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. 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 said, "Okay," and she says, "Yeah, I'm a fourteen-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 thinking, "Why the hell did you accept this interview from a fourteen-year-old intermediate school girl? Now, you're going to spend an hour talking to someone who probably has twenty listeners and fourteen of them are her relatives."
That's going through my mind.
Guy Kawasaki:
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?" And she goes, "Yeah." "So, 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 info@angeladuckworth.com. So, I say to this fourteen-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 fourteen-year-old girl in Alabama, or Georgia, or I don't know, South Carolina, someplace because I indiscriminately said yes to a podcast interview. That's my story.
Dorie Clark:
That's hysterical. I love that. That's a great example.
Guy Kawasaki:
Next question.
So, your advice, how do people keep the faith when things are not going according to plan or at least as fast as planned?
Dorie Clark:
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 goal and it's just taking longer than we want, it's taking longer than we 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, I've 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 patience, 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. 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 has it taken 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 were at least beginning to advance toward our goals, then we are less likely to give up on the process.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you ascribe to the theory that, there's no failure, there's only learning opportunities?
Dorie Clark:
I think that is largely true. The distinction of failure, once you call it.
Well, 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, but 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you think that, generally, people quit too early, or stay too long?
Dorie Clark:
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 and the 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?
Guy Kawasaki:
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.
Dorie Clark:
Always tradeoffs.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, there are always tradeoffs. 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, gridded out, but what do I look for in my first job?"
Dorie Clark:
Yeah, that's a great question. What's the starting point?
So, what I have come to believe is that our society, the way we talk about challenges sometimes can be very misleading and I feel like there is a lot of black and white thinking. A lot of people feel, "Okay, there's really two options 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 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, so 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, 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, 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're 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 my strategy there.
Guy Kawasaki:
The Passion Test is too high. 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, 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 percent of Amazon is now worth 100 million dollars. You probably will become passionate about eCommerce.
Dorie Clark:
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. 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 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, more power to them. I don't have any purity tests whatsoever. That's a fantastic outcome.
Guy Kawasaki:
Let's say you have a niece or nephew and she or he says, "Auntie Dorie, 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” or are you saying, "Oh, my God"?
Dorie Clark:
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, 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." That's probably the best business advice because you have more optionality.
One of the worst things in the world is having these golden handcuffs where you've created a lifestyle for yourself that 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
So, if I may summarize, Aunt Dorie said, "Yeah, go for it." Is that the bottom line?
Dorie Clark:
My bottom line is, go for it and, if you hate it a year from now, you can leave.
Guy Kawasaki:
There's always McKinsey.
Dorie Clark:
That's right, that's right.
Guy Kawasaki:
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?
Dorie Clark:
Now, you're speaking my language, Guy.
Guy Kawasaki:
Speaking as the person who is going to focus on theology.
Dorie Clark:
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, it goes making $28,000 a year doing that.
And then, I went to work on progressive political campaigns, and then I ran a bicycling nonprofit. So, my twenties were really not the most remunerative in the world but 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 financial capital and earning that early on, that's great but that's not the path for everybody.
You also can have a 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 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're clever about it.
What was your first job?
Guy Kawasaki:
My first real job was, literally, counting diamonds, working for a jewelry manufacturer.
Dorie Clark:
Oh, my goodness. Wow.
Guy Kawasaki:
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 because that's the only two functions there are.
Dorie Clark:
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.
Guy Kawasaki:
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."
Dorie Clark:
Everybody has their challenges as we've 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 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
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 fungi? What's are those little bats called ?
Dorie Clark:
Fungo?
Guy Kawasaki:
Fungo, whatever.
Dorie Clark:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm pitching you a wiffle ball, you've got a Fungo, okay? So, what are the three keys to long-term thinking, Dorie?
Dorie Clark:
Oh, my goodness. The three keys and I can expound on any of these. But it's independence, it's curiosity, and its resilience.
Guy Kawasaki:
You got to explain a little more of that.
Dorie Clark:
That's right.
Guy Kawasaki:
At least run the bases, my God.
Dorie Clark:
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 only to discover that we have been optimizing for the wrong goals, and that can be pretty tragic. But where that often happens is at ... Cat alert here.
Guy Kawasaki:
The listeners obviously didn't see that but her cat just walked across the video. Oh, my God. Is it time to go? Okay.
Dorie Clark:
Yeah, he's calling it.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah.
Dorie Clark:
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 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 we set a goal when we're twenty 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 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. It's almost on the surface, illogical, to think that we could make a ten or twenty-year plan for ourselves and have literally everything work out exactly how we predicted.
Sorry, the butterfly is flapping its wings here. No, that's not going to happen. So, we have to be prepared for it, not take it personally, not take it as, "Oh, you're not 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 and the door to keep moving forward.
Guy Kawasaki:
I hope you enjoyed my interview with Dorie 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 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm Guy Kawasaki.
This is Remarkable People.
My thanks to Peg Fitzpatrick and Jeff Sieh, Shannon Hernandez, Madisun Drop-In Nuismer, Louis Magana, and Alexis Nishimura.
This is the team that makes the Remarkable People podcast, remarkable.
Enjoy the Christmas season.
Mahalo and aloha.