Episode 184: The Long Game
/Show transcript:
Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.
This time...playing the long game in life and work.
“It's a discovery mechanism, a discovery process, rather than saying, ‘you must find the most meaningful thing you can do for mankind,’ or ‘you must find your passion that is solely your calling in the universe.’ You know, that is so high stakes. And I think it just messes with people's heads.”
And what happens when your long-term plan for a more balanced life means turning down a dream job...
“It was just like a breakup call. I told him that I'd changed my mind. And he immediately started saying, what is it? What have I done? He put the phone down on me. And then I heard myself saying, it's not you, it's me.”
Long-term thinking in a short-term world, coming up on The Broad Experience.
A lot of people are quitting their jobs right now. In the US, more than 12 million people left their jobs voluntarily between July and September. They are fed up, burned out after months and months of pandemic working...and some are wondering, what am I doing this for anyway? Is this what I really want to do? If not, what do I want to do instead?
And to be honest sometimes it feels like the only way you can actually think properly about the future - about what you really want, and how to get there, is IF you’re not working. But my first guest today says that’s not true. That those of us still very much in a nine-to-five can still think strategically about the future - if we put in a little effort.
Dorie Clark is the author most recently of The Long Game: how to be a long-term thinker in a short-term world. She’s been on the show a couple of times over the years.
These lines from one of the early pages of her book really resonated with me:
So many of us today feel rushed, overwhelmed and perennially behind. We keep our heads down, always focused on the next thing. We’re stuck in permanent execution mode without a moment to take stock or ask questions about what we really want from life.
Not only that, she says we’re always comparing ourselves to other people, a situation that social media has only exacerbated...
“I know from my own experience and all of the friends and all of the clients that I work with that even leading up to the pandemic, which was its own set of woes, we were on a professional collision course because so many of the pressures that have been building in modern society with the internet and globalization have come together to create not just economic pressures that you read about in the wall street journal, but also personal pressures. Because we see all the success in everything that everyone is doing, and it creates this mounting pressure in the sense that we're not moving fast enough, we're not getting it quickly enough, what's wrong? And I think that turns it into a wheel of frenzy. It becomes really unsustainable.”
Dorie knows this all too well. Her career as a writer and thinker and professor and coach has really taken off over the last several years, which is great. But it’s also taken its toll. She’d wake up to her alarm at four AM trying to recall where she was flying to THAT day to give talks or attend client meetings before turning around and flying another 2 or three thousand miles in the opposite direction for more meetings.
It seemed like the right thing to do - she was taking advantage of the fruits of all her hard work, all those pieces in Harvard Business Review and Forbes and her three books up to that point, they’d won her all this business. But she was beginning to feel like she was on a hamster wheel. And she is far from alone.
“The default in contemporary American life certainly, but perhaps most of Western culture is always going to be pushing you on a conveyor belt toward at least striving for greater and greater professional success. And I'm a fan of that. I'm a fan of reaching for the brass ring, but we have to think about how the pieces come together, because what you don't want is to lose by winning, meaning you get exactly what you want only to discover that it actually is not what you should have been aiming for at all.”
AM-T: “Yeah let’s talk about that a bit more - explain what you mean by the long game...I love the title, how to be a long-term thinker in a short-term world, because we sure are in a short-term world, so talk about what you mean.”
“So playing the long game is a concept that is important to me because the way that I think about it at a really core level is how can we do things today, how can we take action today that will make tomorrow better or easier? That's really it. I think about it as doing a favor for your future self. What is the thing that your future self is going to say, oh wow, 24-year-old Ashley, good job. And so often we make the opposite mistake where we're like, Aw, you know, why, why didn't I start putting $15 a month into my savings account? Or, you know, why, why did I do XYZ? And instead, you know what I have come to realize through my research and through the process of writing the book is it is not a question of making extremely large dramatic shifts. Most of us don't want to do that. Most of us don't need to do that. We don't even have the bandwidth, but it is actually fairly dramatic if we take even very small actions, what the compounded effect can be over a period of a year, of five years, of 10 years.”
She says the thing is so many of us are caught up in the doing, doing, doing of our everyday lives we keep putting off the small actions that could add up to big rewards later - like, say, starting a writing practice or learning a new language online. She says it is easy to tell yourself you’ll get to these goals when you’re less busy...but we almost never are. Which brings us to another concept Dorie discusses in The Long Game.
AM-T: “You talk about this idea of white space, which is effectively making time to focus and think about what we actually want so we can start to build toward it, right?”
“Yes, white space, as I think about it is in some ways the necessary prerequisite to long-term thinking, if you do not have any white space, if you are racing around, if every minute on your calendar is allocated, even if somehow by a miracle, you get a little time on your calendar, oh, the appointment just got canceled! Are you really going to be able to use that for effective long-term thinking? I sincerely doubt it because we get so trapped in the rushed, sped up mentality. We're not even in the space to be able to do it. We have to create the mental space that enables us to ask the meaningful questions rather than just triaging and, you know, sort of taking in all the things and responding and reacting as they come. So I think that that is crucial.
And I also recognize it's not easy - the execution is really the hard part. I mean, I think most people would be like, yes, I would like more white space, but it feels impossible because of the structures and the strictures around them. And I want to help people think through how they can do more of it because I mean, frankly, you have to become a vigilante in support of protecting your calendar. You have to be the bodyguard. You have to be the bouncer. It is not easy. It's often not fun to guard your calendar that way, but that is what we are called to do in modern society if we want to operate successfully.”
AM-T: “Right, and one of the things you have to do of course to guard your calendar is to say no, which I will say women in part have a hard time doing, I mean I did a whole show about this once….so many women have been socialized to please it is very tough for them to say no, and I know a lot of people who will say their overwhelm has a lot to do with the fact they just can’t say no.”
“Yeah. That's, that's exactly right. And you know, one phenomenon that I have noticed, which I think is really interesting, is most people do not feel bad at all I mean, you know, maybe there's a twinge ‘cause they would have liked to do something, but they don't feel bad, they don't feel guilty saying no, if they have a quote unquote legitimate reason. Oh, you know, Ashley, can you come to this thing? ‘Oh no. So sorry, I'm going to be out of the country.’ You know, that's not something you feel bad about. That's a fact, you can't change that fact, but it should actually be as meaningful of a fact if you just don't want to come or if you are just busy and it would burn you out to do it, but we don't treat it that way. We treat it as oh, but you know, I could, I theoretically could. And so therefore we feel pangs saying no about it. And I think we really need to readjust our frame to understand that those are just as valid of a reason as 'I can't physically be there.'”
I’m going to link you to a great piece I read recently about women giving themselves permission to say no - it’s really nuanced and interesting and if you’re someone who has trouble saying no to things I think you’ll enjoy it. I’ll post that under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com.
Now there’s saying no, and there’s saying no when you’ve already said yes. We’re going to come back to Dorie a bit later in the show, but in the meantime, I want to tell you the story of someone who appears in her book, someone who made a pretty big work/life decision, thinking about the long-term, and he wasn’t sure if it was gonna work out.
I wanted to tell Tom Waterhouse’s story because a) it’s interesting to hear this particular story coming from a man for a change, and b) it’s an example of something Dorie writes about: that playing the long game does not spark immediate dividends. If you’re trying to achieve a long term goal it takes time. You to be patient to see results.
Tom lives in Geneva, Switzerland. He’s in his fifties now, and his career has mostly been in financial services firms working in tech, strategy and HR. He spent many years working for a private Swiss bank. Earlier in the two-thousands - when he was in his early 40s - he got the opportunity to move to Singapore for the bank, and he jumped at it.
“It really was in many ways the top of my dreams. I'd been working in Singapore for two or three years, you know, flying over there and spending two or three weeks working on projects. I loved the city. I loved the dynamism. I loved the way that the business was developing there. And I just saw it as an opportunity really, to preside over something over the following, you know, five to 10 years, maybe if the growth of, you know, what was going to be at least one of the, if not the Asian hub for the organization. So it was, it ticked absolutely all the boxes for me.”
He was due to move over in February. He was single at the time, and he spent the Christmas before the move with his parents and his sister and her family in London, where he’s from.
“Everyone was buzzing. Everyone was talking about, you know, when we come over to visit you in Singapore, we're going to do this, and we're going to be able to use it as a hub to visit the rest of Asia.
And everyone was excited. And I think it was Christmas Eve.I think I was sitting going through my emails and I suddenly sensed the presence of my mum behind me. And she said to me, ‘you know, we're all really excited about you going to Singapore. Everybody's really excited about this - except you, am I right?’ And I was like, oh...and I mean, my mother's always read me better than anybody. And the fact was that, yeah, I had gradually, increasingly started to have doubts.”
To backtrack a bit, Tom married young, he and his wife had a baby, but when their son was two they split up. They were living in Switzerland but his ex moved back to London with their son, and Tom visited every couple of weekends. But he was well aware he had no real parenting responsibilities. In some ways he was more like a friend to his kid than a father. He’d had relationships after his marriage broke up but nothing really serious. Now, in his early forties, he was thinking about family a lot.
“And I think I'd always known deep down that I needed to have a family again, or I certainly wanted, but I think I needed it. And this was what was starting to dawn on me. I mean going to Singapore... I mean I'm someone who has a very strong work ethic. I knew I would work very hard, and I started to think about, if I go to Singapore, who were the women I'm going to meet.”
Realistically, he thought, he’d be in the office nearly all the time, and he'd most likely be meeting western women who were dedicated to their careers and in Singapore for that reason. And he had a timeline...
“I saw a window maybe of four or five years where really, I felt I needed to maximize the chances that I was going to meet someone and develop a relationship that was strong enough that having a family would be back on the cards.”
He realized that if he took the job in Singapore the chance of meeting the right person and having a family might never arise.
So in the new year, back at the office, he picked up the phone.
“And, you know, my first call of the day was to the CEO of the Singapore office who had become a family friend. I'd been there on holiday with my son and I stayed with him when we were on holiday. So I’d become very close to him. And we were really good, we worked really well together and I called him and I said, you know, hope you had a great Christmas and a great new year. I need to tell you something. And it was just like a breakup call. I told him that I'd changed my mind. And he immediately started saying, what is it? What have I done? He put the phone down on me. He called me back 15 minutes later, more or less in tears. And then I heard myself saying, it's not you, it's me. I mean, it really was like a classic breakup conversation. And it was horribly painful. But I knew it was the right thing to do.”
Then he needed to tell his bosses in Switzerland. This is a 200-year-old firm where many people work for life.
“And so when I informed the partners about my decision and particularly the partner who was responsible for the department that I was working in and the partner who was responsible for the Singapore office, I was very quickly made to understand that I betrayed the family, that they couldn't trust me anymore, and I was actually put into purgatory more or less for 12 to 18 months. I didn't have any interesting projects for a year.”
Tom was cast out. His career slumped.
He says eventually time did its work and he was once again welcomed back into the fold. He ended up working at that bank for another decade.
In the meantime though, in those years after he rejected the Singapore job, his love life was not flourishing.
“I got to the point in 2010 where I was saying to myself, well, you know, that window I was looking at has kind of slipped away. And I was kind of reconciling myself to the fact that I would not have a family again. And that's when I met the woman who's now my wife and the mother of my two young children.”
AM-T: “So it really was a long game.”
“It was a long game. Yes. And the partner responsible for Singapore actually took me to one side about eight or nine years ago. It was probably just after the birth of my daughter. I think he'd heard about the birth of my daughter. And he said to me, I'm sorry for what I said to you back then, you were obviously right. You knew what you were doing.”
AM-T: “And that’s great that it worked out. But you are lucky, I mean as someone who would have liked to have had children, you are lucky that you can still do it.”
“And on top of that, lucky to be able to do it and know that becoming a parent in my mid forties, late forties, fifties, would likely have little negative impact on my career, because that's the other thing. I try to do what I can in terms of my parental duties, but in terms of the way that you're looked at in the workplace and the way that people think about your priorities and your commitment to your job and so on, I think becoming a mother in my late forties and the role that I was in, the level of seniority I was in, would have been very difficult. And I say that having worked for a company which had a very positive culture and very strong values, but came from a very paternalistic and patriarchal history. I'm not sure that I would have been completely sidelined, but I don't think I would have had some of the opportunities I subsequently had in my career, had I been a woman becoming a mother in my late forties.”
These days Tom is an independent consultant - he lives with his wife Erika - who has her own career...and their son and daughter. He works on a lot of gender equity issues and hosts his own podcast called ‘If I Had Been Born a Girl’, where he asks successful men to reflect on what really got them where they are today.
So it’s me again - i just wanted to let you know that after a mere 9 years of existence The Broad Experience is finally on Instagram. I admit I could not face tackling yet another social media platform but thanks to listener Sara Rodriguez the show now has a presence there. Go easy on us because it’s all new - it’s a work in progress - but I did want to let you know. I hope I’ll see some of you there.
I’m not gonna make it to Tik Tok though.
In her book Dorie Clark outlines many ways in which people can build toward their long-term goals from finding the time to think, to identifying what’s most meaningful to you, to dealing with the inevitable setbacks. And I can see how if you work for yourself this seems do-able, but I wondered if she thinks these ideas are just as relevant if you work for an organization?
“I do. I think that people who operate inside of a corporation rather than entrepreneurs probably feel less agency because at the end of the day, they say, well, you know, I have to do what my boss wants me to do - and that's not wrong. But there is often a lot more room to maneuver than we give ourselves credit for. And the truth of the matter is, you know, I'm not saying that there's not bosses like this, but ultimately if you have a reasonably decent boss that is not, you know, some kind of a tyrant, they want you to be using your time well, they want you to be productive on meaningful things, not dumb things or trivia. And so what is needed is persuasion. You need influence. It is true that if you just say, well, I'm drawing a boundary and I'm not doing bla, then that's probably not going to go over well, because that sounds a little bit like it could be a temper tantrum or, you know, just somebody being a prima donna. But if you take the time to frame it up and make it clear and make the case that no, no, I need to draw these parameters so that I can do better work, more important work, more meaningful work for the benefit of the company, that's something that most people can get behind. And so it's maybe that extra step of having to explain your rationale, but if you can do that, then oftentimes you might be far more successful than you imagine.”
And if you’re someone who’s not quite sure what your long term goal or goals are, Dorie says that’s OK. One way to get closer is to do what she calls ‘optimize for interesting’ - now this is different from optimizing for money or optimizing for passion, which is HUGE - like you have to be passionate about what you do.
Dorie says forget that and just pay close attention to the things you’re curious about, that interest you...
“Because if we are just following our curiosity, it means, first of all, that we are unlikely to ever end up in a career that we hate, right? I mean, that's the saddest thing. We spend so much of our life at work and to end up in a job that just feels crushing to you, I think is devastating. So if we just say, you know, what's interesting? and you just keep pursuing that, you keep moving toward that. And then, you know, you hold it lightly. If it stops being interesting, fine, pivot, do something else. It's okay, but you keep exploring it. And the truth is if you don't have a passion, if you don't know what your passion is, it could potentially lead to that. It's a discovery mechanism, a discovery process, rather than saying, ‘you must find the most meaningful thing you can do for mankind,’ or ‘you must find your passion that is solely your calling in the universe.’ You know, that is so high stakes. And I think it just messes with people's heads.”
When it comes to optimizing for interesting, Dorie says it’s about noticing how and where you like to spend your time. She tells a story about a lawyer who had originally gone into law because she was interested in helping artists - but as often happens, the job she landed out of law school didn’t cater to that interest at all. She learned a lot about the law but it became clear that working with artists at that firm...just wasn’t going to happen.
She loved making jewelry, which she did on the side, and she’d sell it on Etsy. And one day she was poking around the site and she noticed Etsy did not have an in-house lawyer. This was when Etsy was still very much a scrappy startup. To cut a long story short she pitched herself to Etsy and ultimately she got the job as their lawyer. All because she used the site herself, got curious about working there and knew her skills and interests were a good match.
And as I said earlier when talking about Tom, attaining a long term goal does not happen overnight and there are bumps in the road. And Dorie says this is where so many people get discouraged. They pick a goal, start doing the work to achieve it, but after months or longer of their efforts apparently not bearing fruit, they’re on the verge of giving up.
“...because they underestimate what it will take. They oftentimes don't do the research upfront to scope it out and evaluate exactly what it will take. And so they have this guesstimate in their head. And if for some reason, as they're making progress, the pace does not accord with the guesstimate in their head they start to get a little nervous and then they start to freak out because it's not happening. And so they often draw the conclusion erroneously that, oh, I guess I must not be good enough. Or, oh, I guess this isn't a good idea. Or, oh, I guess this will never work out. Oftentimes the problem is not anything to do with them. And it's not anything to do with the idea, it's that they simply have not put in enough time toward that effort.”
As an independent podcaster I can attest to this. Back in early 2014 I’d been doing this show for close to two years - and regularly for the last year - and I had fewer than a thousand listeners. On the one hand I felt like I was onto something because I was hearing good things from listeners. On the other hand I was despondent. I felt like this was important stuff: Why couldn’t I get more people to listen?
I remember meeting with a PR person for some free advice on a freezing January Friday in Brooklyn...then going home for the weekend. And that very weekend the Guardian published a tiny write-up about the show - someone tweeted me to tell me about it. I had no idea anyone at the Guardian knew The Broad Experience existed. That write-up got the podcast launched. It increased listenership by leaps and bounds and things went on from there. I’d been toiling away in what felt like total obscurity, creating a show archive, and somebody influential had found it. All that work had not been in vain. But I was so close to giving up.
This is just to say that if you feel strongly about an idea but it feels like it’s taking too long to make it happen...that’s normal.
Finally, I wanted to ask Dorie about the timing of this book.
AM-T: “The pandemic...your book was accepted just before lockdown came along, but I’m also thinking about your readers, my audience, women in particular have had a pretty brutal pandemic, a good deal of them have children at home…what do you think of people’s ability to make these changes in their lives when some people are really digging out from Covid?”
“I think when it comes to playing the long game, there's a concept that I talk about in the book, uh, called thinking in waves and really at a fundamental level, what this boils down to is we have to understand that there are phases in our life where we're going to be focused on different things.
So, you know, if, for instance, you were a mom and you were at home with kids during the pandemic, you were over-indexing on family and you know, it needed to happen. And I think first of all, it was like, we can't beat ourselves up, that you didn't make as much progress as you maybe wanted in other areas of your life. Because guess what? There really weren't a lot of other choices. It's not like, oh, you had a choice and you screwed it up. You didn't really have a choice. So you did what you needed to do. But now, now that things are getting a little bit back to normal, God willing, they will continue to get more back to normal, and you have options and other humans can watch your kids and things like that, now is the time to consciously begin to rebalance your portfolio. And yes, I'm deliberately using stock metaphors here. You know, it would be nice if everything could be balanced all the time, but that's not reality, but with a long enough horizon, and if you are playing the long game, you can achieve all the pieces that you want.”
Dorie Clark.
Thanks to her and Tom Waterhouse for being my guests on this show. I will link you to more information about both of them under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com.
That’s The Broad Experience for this time.
You can now find the show on Instagram, Facebook, and me on Twitter and LinkedIn. It’s always great to hear from you and hear any suggestions you have for future shows.
Thanks as ever to those of you who support the show with a monthly donation and anyone else who’s given recently. I truly appreciate your support over the years for this one-woman show.
I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening.