“Everything takes longer than we want.”
That’s what Dorie Clark told me when I interviewed her during my Summer Camp series in July 2021, and as much as we might pretend this isn’t true, it 100% is.
We’d like to think otherwise. You think, “this shouldn’t be hard.” Your clients promise you that this project “won’t take long.” We think we’re a few hacks away from, well, anything, in a few hours, or weeks.
But it’s more like…years. And that’s not bad news. Because if we planned for years, instead of being disappointed daily when things don’t happen quite as quickly as we want, then we’d in fact be set up to get far more of what we actually want.
That doesn’t mean life should or must be an endless upward grind, but it does mean that the people who stick it out longer tend to succeed more often.
Dorie Clark certainly appears to succeeds more often than most humans. A quick glance at what she’s up to and you’re going to want to crawl back into bed.
But if you read her new book, The Long Game: How to be a Long Term Thinker in a Short Term World, and I recommend you do, you’ll see for yourself that Dorie doesn’t pull stuff out of thin air. And in some ways, to assume she did is to underestimate her own efforts—and our own, because we’re all capable of a lot more than we think, if we are willing to hang in there for it.
Dorie works at it. And works. And when she doesn’t get accepted or even a response, she simply doesn’t give up.
And that’s how she defines persistent: “Being willing to do hard things for long periods of time that other, less persistent people aren’t willing to do.”
She also doesn’t waste time worrying about whether she’s got enough talent or if she started too late or any of that. She simply asks questions to things she doesn’t know, and keeps going.
You think there has to be more to it than that. But most people never stick around long enough to find out. That’s the truth.
This is a clip from an interview I did with Dorie during my Summer Camp series in July 2021, in which she talks about why the Long Game matters.
And Dorie’s also offering a free Long Game assessment at dorieclark.com/thelonggame
Check out the video clip here: https://youtu.be/h0MbVlGj9qc