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

by Dorie Clark

sometimes, if the opportunity in front of you lines up perfectly with your goals, you might want to strategically overinvest.

It’s the ultimate in short-term thinking, because jumping from one thing to another never allows any idea, no matter how wonderful, the time it needs to flourish.

“You can be in a heads-up mode, where you look for new opportunities, or you can be in a heads-down mode, just executing and focusing.”

You’re more effective when you work in cycles than if you slog forward, repeating the same tasks every day. Switching between heads-up and heads-down enables you to leverage the power of focus to your advantage.

There are four key Career Waves in becoming a recognized expert in your field: Learning, Creating, Connecting, and Reaping.

Michael Gerber’s The E-Myth Revisited to Keith Ferrazzi’s Never Eat Alone to Jim Collins’s Good to Great.

I suspected I’d probably break a few conventions once I started my business—and that’s a great way to differentiate yourself. But you have to do it consciously, and understand what convention looks like in the first place. Otherwise, it’s just ignorance.

Part of playing the long game is understanding that you can’t always immediately jump into the ring. Moving slow may feel like wasting time. But every moment you spend understanding the nature of the game, and how it works, makes you stronger once you do get in.

Learning your craft is an essential first step, but if you want people to recognize you and the unique contribution you can make, at a certain point, you have to begin the second wave: Creating.

Creating is how you can make a contribution to your field and attract like-minded people to you and your business.

The key is to make yourself “findable” by the people you’d most like to do business with.

What can get you through—both by growing your audience and by helping you obtain the support and encouragement to keep going—is the third wave: Connecting.

If you’re a sworn introvert or lone wolf, connecting with others may seem frivolous—a needless diversion from your “real work.” And you can get away with ignoring it for a while. But eventually, having a tiny network becomes a roadblock.

No matter how good you are, you can’t win any game by doing the same thing all the time.

We all have strengths, but too many of us overplay them, and then get bitter when we don’t get the results we want or expect. Playing the long game means understanding where you are in the game and what skill is necessary to deploy at what point.

To get more done, alternate between heads-up and heads-down modes. During the former, you’re actively seeking connections and exploring new possibilities. During the latter, it’s time to focus and execute.

Learning. Study your field so you become knowledgeable.

Creating. Now that you have experience, give back by creating and sharing what you’ve learned.

Connecting. Begin leveling up your connections with others in your field, so you can learn from them and cont...

Reaping. You’re at the top of your field, and it’s time to enjoy the bene...

Remember: don’t stop learning. Soon, it’ll be time to start the cycle over agai...

If we want to use our time strategically, to accomplish the things we claim are important to us, we have to learn to ask ourselves different questions.

How can I leverage time that otherwise would be wasted?

How can I do something once and make it count ten times?

So often, we feel powerless about our time and our schedule, which cripples our ability to think and act in our long-term interest. But we all have agency. The secret is upending the time limitations we all have so that we can think in new ways.

Leveraging for Your Relationships

Leveraging for the Life You Want

‘Do you want to hire the best person for the role, or the best person in your zip code?’”

Leveraging for Your Professional Goals

value is not always just in dollar amounts.

“Usually you’re either getting money or fame, but you’re rarely getting both,” he says.

Leveraging the Currency We Have

there are three key components to becoming a recognized expert in your company or field.

Content creation. You can’t become known for your ideas if other people don’t know what they are. Thus, you need to find a way to create content,

Social proof. People are busy, so you need to give them a reason to pay attention to what you say. Social proof—your demonstrated credibility—is a quick way to do that.

Network. Finally, creating content and being credible is essential, but if no one knows who you are, it still won’t do you any good. You need to develop a network that can help you amplify your voice and spread the word about what you’re doing (not to mention help you identify which ideas are good, and which aren’t, in the first place).

you need all three components. This is a situation where doubling down on the pillar you like the best simply doesn’t help.

the right move is to take the area where you’re strong—the currency you have—and strategically leverage it to gain the currency you lack.

Get creative about leveraging the forms you have, or can acquire, and trade that for other ones you want. It’s those strategic trade-offs that enable us to make better and smarter choices about the long term.

It should be clear by now that optimizing for the present, or the short term, will almost never get us to where we want to be in the end. And it’s also true that we rarely have exactly what we need for long-term success. That’s why we make strategic trade-offs. Because when we leverage the assets we have to get those we want, we’re able to reach what otherwise would have seemed impossible.

What are the 20% of my activities that will yield 80% of the results?

What can I stop doing?

How can I use constraints to m...

How can I do something once and make it count ten times?

What are the ways I could combine work and my personal life to make both more enjoyable?

What forms of currency (e.g., connections, writing for high-profile publications, hosting a podcast, memberships in certain clubs, etc.) do I have that I could leverage to obtain different forms of currency?