unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

218. Strategizing for Work and Life feat. Dorie Clark

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Episode notes

The world seems to be moving faster and faster but there is always a need to plan for the longer arc of life. Having a strategy lets you set short goals while achieving progress toward your longer ones. Now more than ever people need to be intentional about the strategies they use in creating a career. Building these strategies in different areas of your life is what today’s episode is all about.

Dorie Clark is a teacher at Duke and Colombia University’s business schools, a speaker who has given lectures from Harvard Business School to Google HQ, and a prolific author of the books Stand Out, Reinventing You, Entrepreneurial You, and her newest book The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World. 

Dorie and Greg talk about playing the long game, and what that means in your business life and personal life. They also talk about what it looks like to think long term in a world where short term needs are always pressing, and how to think about time allocation for the important things in life.

Episode Quotes:

The power of stories for behavioral change

24:08: A story is a really good way to get in the side door. So that it's essentially evading people's objections because if you're telling somebody: “research says…”, "Do this or do that," there's often just a lot of backlash that people have:” I couldn't do that.” But if they're hearing a narrative, which is not, "Oh, you have to do this," but it's, "Well, here, let me tell you about somebody you know, like you, who did that thing," And they realize, it's a lot less threatening of a way to present information, and it lets it roll around in people's brains and say, "Oh, I'm not that different from that person. Maybe I could try it.’ And that can become really powerful.

02:48: There's almost no one in the world that thinks that strategy is a bad thing. It's not like there's an anti-strategy contingent arguing against it. Everybody thinks it's good. Everybody pays lip service to it. But the problem is that almost no one does it.

Why do we need a coach?

25:38: The answer is we don't always. Sometimes a book is perfectly sufficient for what you want to do. It depends on how important the issue is to you and how detailed of an instruction you require.

Overweighting our short-term thinking can be a liability

17:50: If we're investing money, if we're investing our finances, everybody understands that if your portfolio is overweight in a certain asset, that may be great while that asset is performing well, but it is extremely dangerous over the long term because there probably is going to be some reversal.

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