Season 01, episode 08 April 27, 2025
Originally recorded January 14, 2025
SPEAKERS Dayna Del Val & Dorie Clark
SUMMARY
In this conversation, Dayna and Dorie Clark discuss the concept of middle ground, emphasizing its strength as a compromise and the importance of open-mindedness. They reflect on the challenges of communication in today’s polarized environment and the need for thoughtful dialogue. Dorie also explores the value of a liberal arts education in fostering holistic thinking and the significance of networking and social proof in achieving professional success. The discussion highlights the interconnectedness of content creation, social proof and networking as essential components for recognition and influence. In this conversation, Dorie Clark discusses her latest book, The Long Game, emphasizing the importance of patience, reflection and celebrating milestones in the journey to success. She shares personal anecdotes about her experiences and insights on how to navigate the long game in both personal and professional contexts. The discussion also touches on the challenges of pursuing creative endeavors, such as writing a musical, and the humility required to learn new skills. Dorie encourages listeners to embrace their unique journeys and to recognize that success often takes longer than anticipated, but with perseverance, anything is possible.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
middle ground, thought leadership, communication, content creation, social proof, network, liberal arts education, holistic thinking, long game, patience, musical theater, NEA grant, humility, bravery, professional growth
TAKEAWAYS
- Middle ground can be a strong compromise rather than a weak one.
- Life doesn’t have to be black and white; gray areas are enriching.
- Thoughtful communication is essential for productive conversations.
- Education should prepare us for the complexities of the real world.
- The ability to think broadly is crucial in today’s changing landscape.
- You need to integrate content creation, social proof, and networking for success.
- Most people excel in one or two areas but struggle in all three.
- Geography can impact networking opportunities and professional success.
- New York’s openness fosters connections and opportunities.
- Building a network from scratch requires effort and strategy. Success always takes longer than we want.
- Celebrating milestones is important for our happiness.
- We need to check expectations about our achievements.
- If you have a long enough runway, anything is possible.
- The long game might be the most satisfying journey.
- Being humble makes it easier to take risks.
- We teach what we need to learn.
- It’s important to recognize meaningful milestones.
- Nobody’s thinking about you because they’re busy thinking about themselves.
- The journey of aspiration and achievement is unique for everyone.
Dayna Del Val 00:00
Dorie Clark, thank you for joining me on Brave Middle Ground.
Dorie Clark 00:05
Dayna, thank you. Good to see you.
Dayna Del Val 00:07
It’s nice to see you, too. Okay, so Dorie, let’s jump right into the first question I ask everyone, which is, just, how do you define middle ground from whatever angle or area of your life you want to define it from.
Dorie Clark 00:42
Yeah, so middle ground, I think, in some ways, gets pejoratively labeled sometimes, because sometimes folks think of it as being a weak compromise, or where people you know maybe aren’t being bold enough or aren’t being courageous enough; they’re just sort of hewing to the path of least resistance. But I think in the way that I believe you’re intending it, middle ground actually can be much stronger than that. It can be a strong compromise, rather than a weak compromise. And a way of being open minded to understanding that life doesn’t have to be so reductive. Not everybody has to do the same thing or think the same thing.
Dayna Del Val 01:34
Yeah, that’s an interesting point. I think so often we’ve gotten so comfortable with black and white answers, or yes or no answers, or perhaps most problematically, Scantron answers, which there’s one right answer, and so if it’s not the right answer, then it’s obviously wrong. And I live in that world a lot. I’m a very black and white thinker in a lot of ways, and I would prefer that everyone agree with me. That would just simplify my life tremendously. But that gray area of well, we’re coming at this from a different angle is actually so much more interesting and enriching, because that’s where we have the chance to grow, where we have the chance to change and evolve. And that just doesn’t happen if it’s all or nothing.
Dorie Clark 02:21
Yeah, that’s exactly right.
Dayna Del Val 02:23
So I reached out to you for lots of reasons, but what prompted the original ask was that I read an article that you had written for Fast Company in 2020, that I just came across, called “This is the Right Way to Challenge Someone’s Thinking.” And what struck me about it was the fact that you were willing to say that someone had written to you with some appropriate criticism, and then you wrote about it. I found really compelling. That, to me, really sums up middle ground in a fascinating way. But you had written something. A woman you did not know wrote to you and asked you these three ideas, or you created these three ideas out of the way she sort of held you accountable for something she read of yours. And the three areas that you came up with were 1), Don’t assume intent, which would be like, “You said X, and so that clearly means you meant Y.” 2) Express understanding for the person. and 3) Share why the conversation matters. Can you just talk about that a little more in this world of “I know everything. I’m going to take this sound bite of what you’ve said, I’m going to blow it out of proportion and that’s going to become the new truth.”?
Dorie Clark 04:08
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, just to complicate the conversation a little bit. I mean, I actually didn’t think her criticisms of me were valid. But
Dayna Del Val 04:13
Okay.
Dorie Clark 04:15
What I do think is that she approached it in a very thoughtful and respectful way. And so even if you’re like, “You know what? I don’t really believe what you’re saying, like, that’s not right.” If we’re going to have conversations about issues, we need to do it in a way so that you can actually get to what the issue is, rather than getting stuck on the way that something is presented. Because I can tell you, being what, you know, I would consider to be a normal person, but maybe people would disagree, but for me, I think as a normal: and if somebody comes at me and they’re like, “You did this. You’re wrong. You suck. You’re terrible.” They could be telling me the most logical thing in the world; they could be telling me two plus two equals four, and I could be like, “No, you didn’t.” And I am gonna crush that person because I am so incensed at the disrespect in their tone. And you never get to the meat of the conversation because you’re already gone. You’re already writing this person off as a as a jerk, and so obviously everything that they possibly could say to you is invalid.
And so I think that what I liked about this woman’s approach was that she was able to be thoughtful in terms of approaching a conversation in a way that, you know, she was essentially able to get up to the front door to knock on the door and have the conversation, rather than having my machine guns gun her down on the front lawn.
Dayna Del Val 05:59
Yeah. That’s an interesting way to say it. So just out of curiosity, how often do you feel like somebody comes at you, regardless what their content is, with the right intent? Because as a public person who produces a lot of writing, you probably get a lot of feedback from people. So how often is it feedback that you say, “Alright. I don’t agree with you, but I appreciate the way you came at it.”
Dorie Clark 06:36
I mean, it’s, it’s fairly rare, which is why I literally wrote about this woman’s email to me. I think that, you know, typically, either somebody, if they don’t like something that I do, they’ll either just stay quiet, which is fine. They’ll be like, you know, “Forget Dorie. I won’t look at her stuff again.”
Or if, if they do engage, I mean, oftentimes, unfortunately, we’ve been kind of trained and rewarded by the internet to do it in a flaming kind of way. I think that certain platforms are worse about that than others. I mean, famously, Twitter/X is a place where there’s a lot of flame wars. YouTube also has a lot of really sort of puerile comments. LinkedIn, thankfully, which is where I sort of do most of my online activity, generally, because it’s tied to people’s identities, it’s tied to their jobs, they are, I think, as a result, more careful about what they’re saying and how they’re saying it. Because they recognize that their coworkers are checking it out. So that becomes a kind of internal check and balance where you have to feel something pretty strongly in order to go on the attack, because you realize that it will be scrutinized by other people. So that that helps keep people honest. I think.
Dayna Del Val 07:59
Yeah, yeah, it’s, it’s pretty shocking the level of animosity to go from zero to 11 in your immediate hatred of someone or your immediate dismissal of someone. I feel like that’s a new philosophy of communication, and maybe it really is just that we’ve never been able to communicate so effortlessly, so anonymously in our history. So maybe it isn’t new, it just feels new. But it there’s such a level of anger in so much of how we are, it’s hard to even call it communicating, because it’s rare that there’s an instance where I would say to you, “You know what, Dorie? I really disagree with you.” and then leave a door open for you to say, either, “Why?” or “Thank you for your criticism. I don’t care.” Or whatever it is. There’s so little conversation even able to happen anymore. And I think that if I go back and I look at the you’ve written multiple books, but the two that I know best are Stand Out, which is now, what? 10 years 10 ish years old,
Dorie Clark 08:01
yeah.
Dayna Del Val 08:32
And then The Long Game, which is post COVID, two, two and a half or three years old. I feel like, without you saying, Look, I’m a communications expert, which I’ve never heard you say you are. You’re really talking a lot about communication, because at its core, the way we get in front of people, the way we matter is how we’re able to communicate our ideas.
Dorie Clark 09:50
Yeah, for sure. So
Dayna Del Val 09:53
I want to spend a little bit of time with a variety of of pieces from both of these books. And I’m going to read I’m going to read your works, and then I’m going to let you respond to it. In Stand Out, you say, “Some of the most significant ideas come about when someone sees a problem in a new way—often by combining disparate elements that initially seemed unrelated. That’s where your unique gifts come into play; no one has the exact same training and background as you do, so no one else can see a problem exactly the way you do. Bringing your whole self to the challenge—everything you’ve done and learned before—is what will allow you to combine ideas into exciting new forms” (68).
And then you say, 15 pages later, “When you integrate multiple skills, experiences, and identities, you no longer fit into neat categories. You’re not moonlighting in another discipline; you’re seeing the world differently because it’s not through one lens…Instead, you’ve adopted so many perspectives, each is shaped by the others, and no one else can replicate this exact mix. A unique point of view means you’re likely to find ideas or opportunities that other, more conventional thinkers may overlook or ignore” (79).
So I’ve mentioned at the beginning that I think we one of the challenges to the way we show up in the world is this Scantron education that is so prevalent this it’s the answer is one of these five, only one, and that’s the end of it, you are arguing in stand out, and I think in much of your work that it’s really about this conglomeration of who you are, and quite frankly, you’re one of the most diversified people. I think I know, I don’t really know many people who can say, Well, I’m a top 50 thinker and a Grammy Award winning producer of jazz albums, and, oh, by the way, I was a journalist, and I have a master’s in divinity, and I ran a nonprofit, and I write musicals. You know, that’s a lot of stuff Tori, and I’m a writer and a thought leader and all these things. So can you just talk about, how do we balance what our education is teaching us with what’s actually, at least from your understanding and really mine too, this idea of holistic thinking and a lot of gray area.
Dorie Clark 12:16
Yeah, I’m always so interested in thinking about, you know, this, this disjunctive education, and you know how we make our professional lives? My wife is a professor who studies, you know, kind of at a meta level. She studies higher education. And, you know, there’s been so much debate recently about the value of a college education, or, you know what? What is it? What is it for? Is it worth it? Etc. And I am. I have always been, and still am, very much a partisan for liberal arts educations. That’s, of course, the piece that’s gotten dragged through the mud over the past 10 to 20 years, because everybody was saying, STEM, STEM, STEM. And, you know, honestly now a lot of STEM pursuits, I think, are going to be changed radically, maybe made less necessary by AI. I mean, you know, however good you are at science and biology and studying drug compounds, guess what? AI is going to be better at it? AI is going to be faster at it. So maybe you’re the disc jockey running the AI. But I do think that the ability to think broadly, to understand trends in history, and the virtues that a liberal arts education teaches you, I think that that’s really important. But I think, more more than anything, the piece that fails to be taught, that, you know, we need to teach ourselves, or, you know, in the spirit of sort of doing a favor for the world, we need to teach the people, and especially the young people around us, is just, you know, really making it explicit, like what school is doing is not bad, it’s good, but it’s bad. If you think that that’s the world, it is not how the world works, and if you assume that school maps precisely to how the world works, then you’re going to be really frustrated and disappointed. And we need to understand that it is it’s a thing. It’s its own thing, and the world actually has a very different operating system than the K through 12 school system.
Dayna Del Val 14:28
Yeah, that’s a I was going to say. What’s interesting is that perhaps front line assembly workers would understand school but of course, we have so few front line assembly workers left in the world because of automation. That maybe you’re right, maybe there is a virtually nobody left who leaves school and can say, of I recognize this, maybe even teachers, interestingly, because they’re they’re learning as humans, is moving so much faster than the. Type of education seems to be steering so I too, am married to a college professor, so and have a ton of education. So I also have terrific regard for particularly the liberal arts. I have three degrees in it, and am happy to see that it is slowly, at the very least, occasionally, people were talking about STEAM instead of STEM, and seeing the value of arts and humanities and liberal arts. Because, you know, who really cares if you remember what happened in 1492 you can Google that. That’s pretty easy to find. It’s a little bit harder to say. Why did Columbus come this direction? And you know, what were the ramifications of that? Okay, so when I first got to know you, is a height of the pandemic, 2020, April, I think, is when I first joined your Recognized Experts group. You, you were talking a lot at the time about the principles inside stand out and these three forms of currency, which are not financial currency, which is, I think, the way most of us think about I have resources. You have money. Let’s exchange ideas for dollars or a product for dollars, but you have these three ideas, which are content creation, social proof and creating a network. Talk about those Dorie in terms of their value. And this is the piece I find so compelling about them, the insistence, I think, from you, that you can’t have two out of three and be successful. You really have to go three for 300% all in on all of them.
Dorie Clark 16:45
Yeah. I mean, it would, it would be nice. It’d be nice if you could get away with not having all of them. But unfortunately, you there are situations in life where you are held back by whatever your weakest link is, and unfortunately, this is, this is one of them. I’ve seen a lot of people who, in their journey to be recognized for their expertise or for their thought leadership, kind of hit a plateau, and they get really frustrated, and they’ll say things like, but I’m working so hard, I’m doing all the things. I’m working all the time. And you know, objectively, that’s probably true. They are working all the time. But the problem is that what I often see and now as part of the recognized expert community, you’ve seen too, there’s about 900 people who’ve been through the program over the past nine years, and so I’ve really gotten to see a pretty good cross section of people’s experiences. And so I feel like I can speak reasonably well about what some of the common problems or hang ups are, and one of the biggest ones is that, quite understandably, as humans, we tend to double down on the things we like and the things we’re good at. And so yes, you may be working hard and you may be making, you know, legitimately great progress at those things, but they are the things you’re already strong in. And this is not a case where keeping on doing more of your strength is going to help. There comes a time where you have to shore up the weakness. And so just by way of example, you could have a person who loves content creation, and let’s say they have a podcast, and they want to, they want to do podcast, podcast, podcast. You know, you could do an episode a day and you feel like, Oh, I’m really getting traction here. I’m really, you know, doing it. And that’s, you know, that’s, that’s wonderful, and it’s not a bad thing, certainly. I mean, each, each piece helps, but the marginal gains are not that strong if you don’t have good networking behind you, because there’s no one to amplify their message. There’s no one to say, oh gosh, you really need to listen to so and so’s podcast. It’s amazing. It’s not going to be very helpful if you don’t have friends or allies who are helping you get good guests. And so each additional podcast, it’s not that it’s a bad thing, but it’s not a high value thing compared to where you could spend your energy to to make sure that you’re that you’re right with all three pieces of content creation, social proof and network.
Dayna Del Val 19:10
Yeah, it sounds to me sort of like the difference between addition and multiplication.
Dorie Clark 19:16
Yeah.
Dayna Del Val 19:17
You know, like I can say I’m a prolific content creator who cares my network isn’t big enough to do help me amplify the content, and so I’m doing one plus one plus one plus one, and getting to the end and saying, Wow, I got 12 million things, and four people have looked at it, one of whom is my mom, and while I appreciate my mom’s support, that’s not particularly useful to me in the long term professional setting. So that multiplication piece of looking at the three of them together, and I just want to say them again, because I think they’re interesting. Content Creation, social proof, and your network. And do you find Dorie that my. Most people, we’ll just make this generalization. Most people are pretty good at one, maybe two, and really struggle in three. Or do you know people who sort of out of the gate, once this idea is in front of them, can say, oh, yeah, look at me. I’m excelling in all three simultaneously or equally.
Dorie Clark 20:17
I mean, every once in a while you get, you get a triple threat, you know, but it’s, it’s like, I mean, it’s like, Hugh Jackman, like, how many Hugh Jackman’s are there? No, he’s the singer, dancer, actor, but God bless he can do it, but, but most, most people, you know, they can act and sing, but, you know, God help us, don’t have them dance. Or, you know, vice versa. And I think it’s true for most professionals as well.
Dayna Del Val 20:44
What area did you have to work the hardest at when you were getting started?
Dorie Clark 20:50
So, you know, I think that an area that I had to put, I mean, I wasn’t averse to it, but I had to put a lot of work into it was network. Because when I started my business, when I became self-employed, I was 27 and I had never worked inside of a corporation. I mean, I’d had some, you know, some interesting jobs. I’d been a journalist, I’d worked on political campaigns, but as a result, you know, people in those worlds, those are not people who can hire you for anything. And so I, I was very jealous of people who, like, started a consulting business, you know, at age 55 after spending 30 years at McKinsey, I’m like, Oh, my God, okay. Well, they know everybody. They have all the clients, you know, like, people are just handing them work. And I didn’t. I not only didn’t have people handing me work, I I didn’t. I didn’t even know anything or anyone in the corporate world, and so I had to to work really hard to, I mean, honestly, both to establish sufficient social proof so that people would take me seriously, but also to to build up a network from scratch when I really didn’t have one in that realm.
Dayna Del Val 22:02
So you’re not from the Midwest, but you’re from a small region of the world. You’re from the Carolinas, which is not the place that people think of as being the epicenter of much of anything like where I’m from. How much do you think geography plays a part. Was your success, in part because you were in Boston and then went to New York. Could you have, could you have reached your success? Let me ask it this way, do you think you could have reached your success had you not left the Carolinas and stayed in this rural part of the country?
Dorie Clark 22:38
It’s a really good question. I mean, I’m always very interested in research around this. There’s a lot of fascinating stuff coming out of the Santa Fe Institute. And I think there’s a guy named Dean Simonton that has done a lot of research around the question of cities and innovation and things like that.
Dorie Clark 23:30
So, I mean, obviously the web and the internet, I mean, you can connect with people like it’s not like how it used to be even five years ago. You can do so much more, stay so much more connected. So the playing field is much more level. But I do think, for me personally, that my success was tied to where I was.
And, I mean, it’s intriguing to think about sort of the path not taken, because I think I probably would have had success, but different success, if I had gone somewhere else. I mean, I’m quite sure that if I had chosen instead to move to the Bay Area after college, that I would have gotten involved in the tech scene. And it would have been a completely different route, you know, because it’s just like, that’s where the energy is, that’s where the connections are. It’s easy to get a job in tech if everybody you know, and your roommate and your friends are all in tech. And so, you know, I probably would have been working in that world and in that ecosystem.
But instead, I went to Boston, and so I got into kind of the academic ecosystem, which is a, you know, different world. And I ended up with my first book coming out from Harvard Business Review Press. So that was, that was kind of its own animal.
And then, you know, New York, of course, is helpful because there’s just such density. There are so many people. And what is great about New York is the mindset of the people there, because most of the people you will meet are not necessarily native New Yorkers. And that is a good thing. I mean, not that it’s bad to be a native New Yorker, but it is a good thing because people specifically have come to New York because they have ambitions and because they want to meet new people. And so there’s a level of openness to people and to experiences, because that’s literally part of why they’re there.
Whereas if you move into other places, it’s often harder to break in. I mean, this was true for me in Boston, which, you know, of course, there’s subsets, like in academia, because a lot of people are coming in, and so in that tiny pocket, they’re happy to meet you. But beyond that, I mean, Boston, it’s, I mean, it’s even a hub, you know, but it’s a regional hub. And so a lot of people still have their friends from high school, or they have their friends from college. Some of them even have their friends from grade school. And so honestly, they don’t really want to be your friend because they’ve got enough friends.
And this is not very helpful when it comes to ideas and cross pollination and things like that. I can only imagine that it’s worse in places that are less hubs and more people who have always been there. And so I think in New York, what’s really fantastic is just the, you know, the ability where, if you say to somebody, “Hey, do you want to come to a dinner?” You know, nine times out of 10 they’ll say, “Yeah, I want to come to the dinner.” Because that’s literally why they came to New York, was to be invited to a dinner. So that’s pretty great.
Dayna Del Val 26:24
It’s funny. I’m glad you brought up your dinners. So you have these networking dinners, which I knew about a little bit even before I met you, because I was connected to Mike Roderick, who I know was an early collaborator of yours on these idea dinners, where you’d bring people, and then someone else would bring people, and it would just sort of become a mishmash with some guided conversation and some open conversation.
And so when I was rereading these books to get ready for this conversation, one of the things that I was thinking about is I am a spectacular connector in my little corner of the world. But how could I do what you and Mike did? And you and other people did? How could I start to do that with the understanding that my network is small and tight, and the people who I could surround myself with kind of know the same people. So where are the new people? And that, I think, is one of the great challenges to being in the lesser populated parts of the world, is just, if you and I both live in Fargo and we’re both interested in meeting interesting people, chances are pretty good we know mostly the same people, and that’s hard. So it’s an interesting conundrum, and I think what it does is it puts even more benefit, pressure, expectation and satisfaction on something like a Recognized Expert group, where you can really develop meaningful relationships with people you’ve never met.
You know that there’s this subset group from recognized expert of women who are over 50, and I was part of the very first in person meeting. And I walked into the room, and I was one of the last people to arrive, and another recognized expert, our friend Tammy Gooler Loeb, was there. And we had spoken on Zoom, but never obviously met. And I walked in and she said, “You’re tall!”
It was just so funny, because, of course, do we even have legs? You know? You don’t know on Zoom. And so it was such a funny moment, because we knew each other well enough that that was her first shot out of the gate, which I really loved, because it meant we had transposed past this awkward like, “Hi, I’m Dayna. What do you do?” Which was so great.
Dorie Clark 28:57
Yeah,.
Dayna Del Val 28:58
But also very funny.
Dorie Clark
How tall are you?
Dayna Del Val
So I’m going to tell you, and then I’m going to tell you what I know about you. I’m 5’9”. And I asked someone once, it might have been Tammy, something about you, because I knew she’d met you. And the first thing she said to me was, “Well, she’s quite tall.” I was shocked in my mind, you were 5’4”. How tall are you, Dorie?
Dorie Clark 29:21
Well, I’m in between. And of course, sweet, sweet Tammy, very tall. I’m shorter than you. I’m 5’ 7 ½”. Oh, okay, okay, yeah, I would consider myself fairly average in height. But yeah,
Dayna Del Val 29:37
Well, and in the world we live in now, I mean, particularly in the Midwest, because we’re so Scandinavian, I’m not even tall here, I have many friends who are six feet and taller, so I don’t think of myself that way. But I like that Tammy thinks of both you and me as being very, very tall.
Okay, let’s move on to your newest book, The Long Game. First of all, I remember when you put into recognized experts a number of title pages asking people you know, which cover do you like? I love this cover. For people who are listening to this, it’s l, o, x, and then about 12 zeros and some x’s and 12 more zeros ng game. And I just think it’s so beautifully both, you know, your mind goes too long game, but also, because the o’s and x’s are like they’re in chalk, it doesn’t take it too seriously. And I think there’s something really profound about that, because I am someone who feels like, “For God’s sake, I’m now 52 years old!” I have been waiting since I was, I don’t know, nine, to make it. Whatever that means. I’m still, I think maybe 10,000 miles away. This might be the longest game in the history of humanity. But if it’s in chalk, it doesn’t feel quite so damning that I still feel like I’m in the middle of the o’s and nowhere near the end of the game. So I really appreciate that about the cover.
But the big question that I want to know from you, Dorie, is just we live in this immediate satisfaction. I need it right now world. How in the world did you have the audacity to say to people, “Hold on. There’s nothing wrong with the long game. In fact, it might actually be the most satisfying journey.”?
Dorie Clark 31:34
Oh, well, you know, they always say, right, we teach what we need to learn. So I yeah, I’ve never been especially good at being patient. You know, as a kid, my mother would…I was always tormenting her, because I, you know, wanted things now. And you know, it’s not, it’s not that I was like, “I need this toy.” Like it was, it was like, “I want to vote! Why can’t I vote?”
You know, I was just so angry, you know. I wanted political representation. I mean, it actually, like, people don’t think about this, but like, really, children, you know, have no rights, no representation. It’s a terrible thing to be a child, like, you know? I mean, everything’s like, “Oh, it’s so nice. It’s so happy to be a child. You just get to be carefree and play.”
It’s like, “Excuse me? You have no liberty!”
I was very caught up in this. I’m like, I need elected representation, and I couldn’t have it. And then she’s like, “I’m really sorry, you got to wait until you’re 18.”
I’m like, “Alright, fine, fine, fin. Okay. Great. I’m going to start a business.”
And so I want to, you know, I want to, like, you know, can I be a hairdresser?
And you know, she’s like, “Well, you need a license for that.”
And I’m like, “How do I get a license?”
And she’s like, “Well, you have to be 18.”
I’m like, “Just no civil right!”.
So yeah, I was very impatient for a lot of things. The good news is that actually, when I became an adult, I was like, “Oh, thank God. Finally!”
Then I then I stopped needing to be so impatient because I could actually do things in the world. But, yeah, it was something that I struggled with. Also, a lot of times, people might assume, I think there’s an assumption, that if someone has some reasonable degree of success, that they must be a very competitive person. But I’m not competitive at all. I’m really not, and so I feel fine with some of the harder parts of playing a long game, which is that other people get things sometimes before you do, or it looks like they get things before you do. And that really plagues a lot of people, but I’ve managed to really be okay, like, swimming in my own lane. And so I think that part helps.
Dayna Del Val 33:47
Oh, I’m super envious of that. I’m just gonna try and channel you periodically, because I think I’m in a lane, and I’m often looking and thinking, “Well, why am I swimming against Michael Phelps? I can’t compete against Michael Phelps! And let’s tie both his arms to his body, and he’s still gonna win.” So it’s a tough lane for me to be in.
One thing you talk about in this book that I think is kind of a little bit of a, “Oh yeah, by the way, this thing.” But it really struck me is you say, “Success—always—takes longer than we want. If we wait until we finally ‘made it’ to celebrate, we’ll likely be waiting forever. a\After all, what is success” (The Long Game 202)?
And then you go on and you talk about how the things that we that happened to us today years before, would have been the kind of thing where you called every friend and you said, “We have to meet for coffee or drinks or go out to celebrate” or whatever. And it would have been this enormous thing.
And today you’re like, “Oh yeah, by the way, Dorie Clark was on my podcast.” Or, you know, whatever. That’s not how I feel, by the way, but you know, someday, maybe I’ll feel that way.
But what I loved about it is it reminded me so for the first 10 years of my son’s life, we lived in income-based housing, and I read this article from Naomi Watts, the actress, and she talked about when she first moved to Hollywood, she and Nicole Kidman had been friends in Australia. And Nicole Kidman was married to Tom Cruise, and she was sleeping in their extra bedroom, and she said in this article, “I mean, this was a time in my life where I was going to Banana Republic and dreaming of being able to buy those clothes.” And then it said in the article, she laughed.
And I remember reading this and thinking, “I will never get to buy clothes at Banana Republic. Her, like, K Mart is Banana Republic.”
Banana Republic may as well have been Fendi for me. But I can shop at Banana Republic today. And you know what? I don’t post about it on social media. It’s not I saved all year to go to Banana Republic, and so I was thinking about that shift in, you know, roughly 20 years of my life, and how true that is. If we’re fortunate, for many of us, that is part of the long game, whether it’s professional or something silly, like shopping, to be in one place where you aspire to something that eventually is just part of your day to day.
How do you think about that Dorie, in terms of helping executives who aren’t thinking about, well, I need my pants from Banana Republic, but who are thinking about, you know, making the next big leap in their career? How do you think about that?
Dorie Clark 36:50
Well, I think part of why I wanted to talk about that in particular is that we as humans, I mean, this is very evolutionarily beneficial, we just keep moving on to the next thing, the next thing, next thing. And we never really stop to pause and celebrate. And you know, that makes sense, because pausing and celebrating, like, we’re not optimized to be happy. We’re optimized to survive, and so surviving means going and doing the next thing, not, you know, sitting on your behind, and saying, “Oh, I’m so great so…”
Dayna Del Val 37:26
Or getting eaten by the wild animal that comes out of the bush, you know, 1000s of years ago. So, yeah, I’m sorry to interrupt you, but you’re right. Not a lot of time to reflect when you’ve got saber tooth tigers coming at you. I understand. I’m mixing geological periods. But you know what I mean.
Dorie Clark 37:43
Yes, in the “old timey days,” that’s right. So yeah. So anyway, it’s important, though, for us in in terms of our own satisfaction and our own happiness, to not just be machines, you know, propelling forward, but to actually recognize that there are some meaningful milestones.
And you know, the you 20 years ago made certain sacrifices to make the you today possible. And you know, whether it’s, you know, saving money, or, you know, putting part of your checks, you know, in this in the savings account, or not doing a thing, or, you know, whatever it was. But there were choices, there were sacrifices. And I think part of the way that we honor the us of the past is being able to say, “Oh, you know what good move that worked. It panned out, you know, the way you thought it would work, and actually worked.” And that’s, that’s a very meaningful thing, because I think that it, it gives us more incentive to do it today for the us in 20 subsequent years. You know, that’s the thing, right?
I mean, we talk now about, like, “Oh, well, you know, how are we going to be as 80 year olds or something?”
And I mean, it’s, it’s directly related to, like, how much are you exercising now? How flexible are you now? That determines whether you’re an 80 year old that’s like, you know, taking a vacation to Cabo, or an 80 year old that’s been in a nursing home for the past decade. And so if we need to continue doing future favors for our future self, it’s important to think about the past.
And, I mean, I just think about even, you know, a sort of small example of it, which is really, like, fun and meaningful for me. I mean, this is, you know, very niche as many of these things are for people, but, you know, that’s what makes it special.
So when I was a young teenager, 13, there was this musician that I really loved. Her name was Melissa Ferrick, and she had for a couple of records. She had a deal with Atlantic Records. So, you know, big, big label, although they later dropped her, unfortunately, and she became an independent artist. But she, like, in this subsection of, like, if you lived in Boston in the late 1990s and if you were a lesbian, like, everybody knows her, like, “Oh my God!”
Okay. And so recently, I got to have dinner with Melissa Ferrick! And, like, now we’re, like, pals, and it’s so cool. It’s so great. It’s actually like a legitimate, like, victory. And, I mean, the good news is that in the in the 20 intervening years, you know, it’s not like I have to be some lame fan. :ike I have developed aspects of my life that mean that I have something to bring to the table too, so we can actually be friends. And it’s not just like, “Wow, you’re awesome!” But, you know, as, like, a little thing from, like, you know, looking back on my 13 year old self, I’m like, “Hey, I got you covered. It took me fucking 30 years, but I did it.”
Dayna Del Val 40:57
Yeah, but I mean, so, so she’s not in the echelon of, say, Taylor Swift, because I have not heard of her, but if she was a big deal to you,
Dorie Clark 41:08
Yes,
Dayna Del Val 41:09
Thirty years. In looking back, 30 years flew by, I imagine. What if we could all set our sights for, “Okay, in 30 years, I want to fill in the blank.” as you said. And then incrementally just start working towards it? I mean, I don’t imagine you were working towards having dinner with her and becoming friends, but, but your point, I think, is this idea of something you love, somehow reaching it, whether it was intentional or windy. I mean, I could say the same of Banana Republic, which, again, that sounds like I love Banana Republic. I don’t really care about Banana Republic, but it’s important to this story. Banana Republic is just now a thing I can have if I want it. That’s, as you said, that’s a lifetime of intentional and unintentional work to get to a place. And actually, I’ve not really considered it until I was rereading your books and that whole article about Naomi Watts came back to me, and I was really filled with a little bit of gratitude for where I’d been, where I am and I think this is important, the long game journey between then and now.
Dorie Clark 42:27
Yes, absolutely. And I think your point, Dayna, is well made, because one of the points that I make in The Long Game, that I really believe strongly, is that if you have a long enough runway, literally almost anything is possible. Like it is, it is not really possible, you know, barring some bizarre miracle, for me to become best friends with Taylor Swift next month, let’s say. But you know, if, like, that was your goal or whatever, if you had 30 years to operationalize it, or, you know, 10 years, or whatever, like, I mean, most people are barely planning for next week, you know?
But if you have this long enough period of time where you’re like, how do I make myself an interesting enough person that Taylor Swift would want to be friends with me? Or, how do I put myself in in an orbit where that’s the kind of person that I’m hanging out with, or, you know, what have you. All of these things actually are really feasible.
I mean, you know, one of the things that I talk about in the book is my journey, and you alluded this earlier, learning to write musical theatre. And, you know, it’s, I started it in 2016. And I started it literally from zero. I’d never done it before. I had no background. I, you know, I barely knew the musical theatre canon. And, you know, the good news is that if you spend 10 years doing almost anything, you will actually be pretty good at it, because 10 years of effort, like, you can really get somewhere. And people somehow, you know, don’t forget that; they systematically underestimate that.
Dayna Del Val 44:04
Okay, so my next question, Dorie, literally says Broadway in 2026 because you say in the book, “In 2016, I set a goal of being on Broadway in 2026.” All right, we are 11 months from 2026. What’s the, give me the update on will I see a Dorie Clark musical on Broadway next year?
Dorie Clark 44:29
Well, I don’t know if it’s literally gonna be 2026, but we’re actually making really good progress. Of all things, we found out just before Christmas that we had won an NEA grant, a National Endowment for the Arts grant for our show.
Dayna Del Val 44:46
Ohhhh congratulations, those are big deal!
Dorie Clark 44:49
Thank you. Yeah, it’s, it was a surprise. And they are, you know, very coveted and very hard to get. And so it is for a production in 2025. And now, the key, it’s not enough to fund a full production, so we’ve got to figure out fundraising strategies to close the gap. But it is a substantial start towards that. And we have a partner, which is an Off Broadway theater, and so we either will do it with them Off Broadway, or we may take on another partner potentially, and do it Off Off Broadway, which the distinction is the theater size. So, you know, just, it’s sort of like a calculation about, like, Well, how long would we run and how many seats are there? And, you know, how can you fill it best? So it seems highly likely that we will be able to do an Off Broadway or an Off Off Broadway in 2025. So whether it can make the leap to Broadway in 2026, I’m not sure, but we are working hard to get there so, so I think I would say that the progress has been very good.
Dayna Del Val 45:53
That’s astonishing.
Dorie Clark 45:56
Thank you.
Dayna Del Val 45:56
I am someone who’s, at least was, very involved in the musical theatre world. I don’t write musicals, but I made a lot of them, and it’s incredible to say, “I don’t know, I just think I want to write a musical.”
I love the way you tell it in the book, because you really say it the way someone else might say, “I don’t know. I just thought I would dye my hair pink.” Like that’s an easy thing to do. Write a Musical, for heaven’s sakes. Look at, you know, look at Bono writing Spiderman. Getting billions of dollars, basically almost killing the original Spiderman from that one night where they shot him into the wall. And people being like, “What the hell is this?” Boom. Done. You would think, Bono, could baby pull off…Sting, too. You would think those two men could pull off a Broadway musical. They don’t have NEA Grants behind them. And you can say, “Well, they didn’t need it.”
That’s not the point. They didn’t get the grants because they didn’t have what it took. It’s unbelievable. Dorie, it’s really exciting.
Dorie Clark 46:59
Well, thank you. I appreciate it, and I think you actually raise an interesting point. I mean, obviously they’re both amazing songwriters, but one thing that I’ve learned, which is which actually very interesting in terms of the question of, like, how expertise is transferred, and kind of, the nature of the beginner mind. Musical Theatre is much more different than traditional pop songwriting than one might think. And on the outside, people don’t necessarily understand the distinction, especially because a lot of pop stars, you know, write musicals, are brought in. But in a lot of ways, they’re brought in either because they’re a name and they can sell it or, you know, I mean, maybe it’s something that they’ve always wanted to do.
But the problem, essentially, is that they are importing pop songs into a musical; whereas the genre itself has different requirements. And if you are trying to kind of mash something into a format where it doesn’t naturally fit, it can create thematic problems. And it’s, it’s a really different thing. I don’t know that I’ve actually seen someone who started as a pop singer actually try to take the time to learn to do a musical song, rather than just writing what they normally write, and then saying, “Here, let’s put it in.” And so being able to kind of learn the requirements of the genre from the ground up is a really interesting challenge. Because it is subtle and it is different. I mean, it’s kind of like how the first television was basically people sitting in chairs and doing a radio play…
Dayna Del Val 48:37
Doing radio.
Dorie Clark 48:38
Yeah, just watch them like, “Hey, I’m reading a thing, sitting in a chair.” And it took a while to kind of understand like, “Oh, TV’s different.”
Dayna Del Val 48:48
Yeah, absolutely. How do you think that working in this both formulaic but also enormously creative world of musical theatre has evolved you as a business thought leader?
Dorie Clark 49:08
Well, I think that probably the, I mean, over time, I’m sure I’ll see many lessons and many transferable things, but I think in the near term, probably just the most important is humility. Because as a grown up, it becomes less and less common for us to do things we’re bad at. And, you know, I mean, when you’re when you’re 10, you do things you’re bad at all the time, like, that’s the nature of it. You know, your mom puts you in piano lessons and ballet lessons and, you know, tap lessons and, you know, I mean, maybe that’s just me, you know…
Dayna Del Val 49:47
Things to prepare you for musical theatre, Dorie,
Dorie Clark 49:50
Yeah, oh my God. But you know, there’s all kinds of things that you’re that you’re bad at and that you’re learning, but it’s sort of expected. And like your parents, they’re like, “It’s okay, you’ll learn.”
You know, there’s a script for it when you’re 10. But as you get to be an adult, you build up some degree of expertise, and then, because so much of our identity is centered around our work, we very quickly start conflating our self-identity with the thing that we’re doing, and being good at the thing that we’re doing. And so it becomes much more psychologically risky for us to try things that we’re not good at.
And so it was in many times, you know, in the early years of learning to write musical theatre, it was embarrassing. I was less good than other people. I knew less. I didn’t know what the conventions were. And you know, you’d have, because you’re doing everything with a partner, and the partner would be all frustrated, like, “Why did you do it this way?”
And you know, you kind of feel like a moron. But you know, you just have to sort of remind yourself, like, “Okay, I’m, you know, I’m learning. Like, you know, I’m not dumb, I’m just learning.”
And so that’s, that’s something that I think is useful for all of us, because it means that when you have that muscle of being humble and being able to detach your essential identity from your, you know, identity in the moment, I think it makes it easier to take risks.
Dayna Del Val 51:20
Oh I love that. You’re right. It’s hard to take a risk everything. The stakes feel really high always. I think when you’re grown up, and you…I’ll keep it about me, I take things way too seriously, most importantly myself. And so then the idea of falling on my face in front of people becomes exponentially more serious than it needs to Okay? I want to read one last section back from the original book Stand Out, You say, “Recently, there’s been some cultural blowback about the concept of ‘thought leadership’ itself…The underlying assumption seems to be that aspiring to the creation of new and important ideas is somehow sleazy, or a form of strategic puffery. Admittedly, some advice on thought leadership is vapid and banal, just as some advice on marketing, or strategy or finance can be. But sharing your ideas with the world, when done right, is a far more meaningful act. Often it looks like bravery” (Stand Out 3).
And of course, the third word to my podcast is Brave Middle Ground. So my final question for you, Dorie, is just how—I don’t even know how you can synthesize this down, because you’ve got, you know, a decade plus two decades of thought leadership around this—but how can people take that first step, dip their first toe into the water and say, “I think I might have something to say that might matter to somebody. I think I can be brave and try it”?
Dorie Clark 53:01
Yeah, I think it is such an important question and such an important thing to do. What I have seen is, you know, it’s a little bit ironic, because it does require bravery, but it’s kind of a different bravery than we might anticipate, because almost always what we’re afraid of is we’re gonna say something, you know, you write a blog post, you put something out there publicly, and people say, “Well, that’s stupid, you know, that’s a bad idea.” Or, you know, “Oh, it’s so unoriginal”. Or, you know, “Wow, how could you think that?” Like, you know, just some sort of ad hominem attack on the material. And I would say like 99.9 times out of 100 that never happens. And the reason it never happens is that people don’t look at it.
So the bravery is actually that no one’s gonna look at it ,and so we’re a little bit afraid of the wrong thing. And so I want to allay the concerns of the people who are worried that they’re going to be attacked or canceled or whatever, and instead, just say, “You know what? There’s probably going to be like, two or three years of just being out there and, like, you know, you’re hollering into the void, and nobody’s hollering back, and it can feel really depressing. It can feel really lonely. It can feel like this is pointless.” But you have to believe that there’s a point, and eventually people do start paying attention, and they do start listening, and it’s at that point later that you can change what you’re afraid of, because people will start criticizing you then, but not at first. So I don’t know if that’s helpful at all, but I feel like, hey, we need to, you know, check expectations.
Dayna Del Val 54:48
As I say, all the time, nobody’s thinking about you because they’re busy thinking about themselves. I mean, that’s just sort of a comforting fact, if everybody thought about me as much as I think about me, I would be Taylor Swift. But nobody’s thinking about me as much as I think about me, and that’s kind of a relief.
Dorie, thank you so much for your time, for your thoughts. Again, the books are Stand Out and The Long Game. And I just want to say this to people, I am not a typical Dorie Clark person, I think, in a lot of ways. I’m not in Harvard Business Review. I haven’t been published in Forbes. I don’t have a business background, and yet, the value that I took from it, and in some cases, adapted to apply to my own journey, have been really, really impactful and useful and advantageous, and have given me lots and lots of ways to think, so I think these books are really for anybody. They’re not business books. They’re books in the business sector that you can apply anywhere. And I think that’s just a delight to know that actually, I’m not so far off from the 6-, 7-, 8-figure people, I’m just doing it differently than they are. And I can take, stay in my own lane, and you can help me advance, swim a little bit faster, try to, you know, reach Michael Phelps’ toe someday,
56:13
That’s amazing. Dayna, thank you so much.
Dayna Del Val 56:16
Dorie, thank you. Everybody else, we’ll talk soon.
