The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World by Dorie Clark

Author:Dorie Clark [Clark, Dorie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781647820589
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2021-09-20T23:00:00+00:00

Over the next hour, I wrote pages of notes with answers to those questions, which set a useful strategic direction for me for the next year. (You might want to try it yourself.) Apparently, in the back of my sleep-addled brain, I’d been processing my Drucker reading and how it applied to my own life and business. As the Dutch researcher Ap Dijksterhuis has discovered, unconscious thought while we’re distracted by other things can lead to better results than consciously weighing pros and cons—as happened during my St. Petersburg walkabout. As he notes, “unconscious processes have the capacity to work on different things in parallel and can integrate a large amount of information,” and they seem to be better than conscious thought at “weighting the relative importance of different attributes.”1

I hadn’t realized that jet lag would be the optimal state for me to do my year’s strategic planning. But as soon as I sensed it, I leaned in and took advantage of time that others would have marked as useless. Leverage enables us to get more out of less.

The other question we need to learn to ask ourselves is this: How can I do something once and make it count ten times? In a literal example, you can take one piece of content—let’s say a blog post—and share it in different ways through social media. You can link to the blog itself on Facebook, post an excerpted quote on Twitter, upload a related image to Instagram, and share your key findings in a short piece on LinkedIn. With just a bit more effort, maybe 10% of the effort of writing the post in the first place, you’ve maximized its distribution potential and ensured that many more readers will discover it. And yet, we rarely do the same in other, even more significant, areas of our lives.

Let’s take the example of Nihar Chhaya, a member of my Recognized Expert community and an executive coach to Fortune 500 companies. In November 2019, Nihar traveled to London to attend Thinkers50, a gathering of business authors and executives dubbed the “Oscars of management thinking” by the Financial Times. It’s a pricey event, compounded by travel expenses, including airfare from Dallas, where Nihar lives. Attending also meant he’d be taking time away from his young daughter—so he had to make it count.

Most people would focus on the obvious: making sure they introduced themselves to a lot of people at the gathering, or angling to network with certain attendees. But Nihar took a far more holistic view of how to get value from attending.

After the event, he wrote about his experience for Forbes, where he was a regular contributor, realizing that doing so could help him meet his publishing obligations for the site. The article enabled him to give shout-outs to some of the luminaries he’d met there, including Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School and Stew Friedman of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Sharing the article on social media gave him another opportunity to solidify the new connections and ensure that they remembered who he was.

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