The challenge for all of us is an inner one: to keep going when it seems like no one is paying attention or cares. And to believe that eventually the world will catch up. (Location 174)
I’ve come to understand what few recognize: the rate of payoff for persevering during those dark days isn’t linear. It’s exponential. (Location 188)
If it were easy to be patient, and easy to do the work, then everyone would do it. What I’ve come to love about patience is that, ultimately, it’s the truest test of merit: Are you willing to do the work, despite no guaranteed outcome? (Location 193)
The first step is understanding that the key to a meaningful life is to set our own terms for it. (Location 216)
Playing the long game—eschewing short-term gratification in order to work toward an uncertain but worthy future goal—isn’t easy. But it’s the surest path to meaningful and lasting success in a world that so often prioritizes what’s easy, quick, and ultimately shallow. (Location 221)
“You don’t need time to have a good idea,” he told me. “You need space. And you can’t think appropriately if you don’t have space in your head. It takes zero time to have an innovative idea or to make a decision, but if you don’t have psychic space, those things are not necessarily impossible, but they’re suboptimal.” (Location 401)
Instead, he prioritized time with his family and the ability to work on interesting projects. (Location 500)
“Choosing to be bad is your only shot at achieving greatness. And resisting it is a recipe for mediocrity.” (Location 551)
Four questions can help you determine whether something is worth doing: – What is the total time commitment? – What is the opportunity cost? – What’s the physical and emotional cost? – Would I feel bad in a year if I didn’t do this? (Location 660)
“Whenever you have a choice of what to do,” she told Marion, “choose the more interesting path.” (Location 712)
Wherever we are in our lives, we may not yet have identified something overtly meaningful that we want to do or are good at. But we all have things we’re interested in and want to learn more about. (Location 717)
Figuring out where your true interests lie may seem complicated. But often it’s simply a matter of noticing how you’re already spending your time—and, perhaps, reconnecting with what motivated you in the past. (Location 754)
The whole point of playing the long game is understanding that ridiculous goals are ridiculous right now—not forever. When we force ourselves to take our goals to extremes—What would ultimate success look like?—we can create an honest road map for ourselves. It might take five years, or ten, or twenty. But that time will pass anyway. (Location 838)
When you’re working toward something meaningful, that goal can carry you through the tedium of the small, everyday steps needed to accomplish it. When it comes to optimizing for interesting, what’s really interesting isn’t a goal that feels manageable. It’s working toward a goal that’s remarkable. (Location 871)
When we make the choice to optimize for interesting, we’re investing in our future selves. We don’t know where it will lead, and that’s the whole point. (Location 899)
You develop a hypothesis about how you can help, because coming in and demanding to be handed an interesting project is a recipe for disaster. The reaction, he says, is, “Oh, you’re going to be work.” Instead, make it clear that you’re going to take work off their plate. As Adam notes, “If you go and say, ‘Hey, I read ten articles. I found this deck. I see these three things. I have an idea that this is where you need to go in the next couple of months or years. Have you thought about these five things? I’d be happy to spend a few hours on it a week’—it’s hard [for them] to say no.” That’s your opening, he says. “And then, if there’s a fit, naturally over time, you get invited to more meetings, you’re in the circle a little bit more, you get entrusted with things.” (Location 964)
“You can make most of the opportunities you want for yourself, if you’re deliberate and proactive about it,” (Location 985)
Give Yourself a Deadline It’s always easy to put something off until tomorrow. There’ll be plenty of time in the future, when you’re less busy. But you’re never less busy. (Location 1131)
Too many professionals berate themselves because they don’t yet know their ultimate vision. That’s fine—really, who does? Things change all the time, and part of success lies in capturing emergent opportunities that we couldn’t have predicted. (Location 1183)
The secret is understanding where you are in the process, and making strategic choices about when to go all in and when to shift focus. (Location 1209)
You can access it at https://dorieclark.com/toolkit. (Location 1210)
Note: Check this out
“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.” (Location 1262)
There are four key Career Waves in becoming a recognized expert in your field: Learning, Creating, Connecting, and Reaping. (Location 1275)
I’d spend evenings reading through classics of business literature, from Michael Gerber’s The E-Myth Revisited to Keith Ferrazzi’s Never Eat Alone to Jim Collins’s Good to Great. (Location 1296)
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. You’ve absorbed others’ perspectives and ideas, and have learned enough to evaluate them. Some ideas will resonate, and others will seem flat-out wrong, and you’ll stir and sift them into your own point of view. Creating is how you can make a contribution to your field and attract like-minded people to you and your business. (Location 1334)
Writing is one method for sharing your ideas, but it’s not the only one; you can give speeches, or conduct webinars, or host a podcast, or create online video tutorials. The key is to make yourself “findable” by the people you’d most like to do business with. (Location 1340)
The most successful people enjoy their success, then recognize: it’s time to move on and learn something new. (Location 1434)
No matter how good you are, you can’t win any game by doing the same thing all the time. You could be amazing at shooting three-pointers in basketball, but sometimes you have to play defense or sink a free throw. (Location 1438)
What should I spend my time doing? 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 my advantage? (Location 1484)
What are my hypotheses about the future—and how do they inform my actions today? (Location 1486)
How can I do something once and make it count ten times? (Location 1496)
Most people do one thing and then stop, especially if that thing is time-consuming, onerous, or expensive. But when we can make one activity count more than once, we have a unique competitive advantage. (Location 1514)
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, whether that’s through writing articles, giving speeches, starting a podcast, making videos, holding lunch-and-learns, or whatever channel you prefer. (Location 1600)
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. (Location 1602)
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). (Location 1607)
Remember: Ask yourself some of my favorite questions for achieving leverage: – What should I spend my time doing? – 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 my advantage? – What are my hypotheses about the future, and how do they inform my actions today? – How can I do something once and make it count ten times? – Where, and how, do I want to live? What would it look like to stand up for that vision? – 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? (Location 1634)
“To get an invitation, you have to give an invitation.” It’s still good advice. (Location 1657)
The moment you identify a commonality with someone you’d like to meet, or a group you’d like to get more involved in, you can leverage that shared experience to connect more deeply. (Location 1765)
The most powerful client relationships don’t come from you pushing an agenda or shoving a sales pitch down someone’s throat. They come from developing so much trust that the other person asks if you’ll consider working with them. (Location 1803)
Long-term networking isn’t about getting a job next week or next year. Instead, it’s about cultivating connections with people you admire and want to spend more time with. (Location 1813)
When you connect to others with an infinite horizon—no agenda whatsoever other than being helpful and deepening your relationships with interesting people—that’s how opportunity happens. It’s also how I found myself onstage at the Grammys. (Location 1884)
If you can practice the art of strategic patience—not blindly waiting for good things to magically happen, but understanding the work that needs to be done and making it happen—you’re far better off than almost anyone else in your realm. (Location 2085)
Aikido master George Leonard notes, “In the land of the quick fix it may seem radical, but to learn anything significant, to make any lasting change in yourself, you must be willing to spend most of your time on the plateau, to keep practicing even when it seems you are getting nowhere.”6 (Location 2116)
David says, “Impatience isn’t necessarily a bad thing if it motivates you to work. It’s only a bad thing if you tell yourself you’re failing.” (Location 2165)
The lesson we can learn from Silicon Valley and the lean startup methodology is that we should, in the early days, treat everything as an experiment. Failure is upsetting to so many of us because it implies finality: you tried to accomplish something, and it didn’t happen. But an experiment, which you recognize from the beginning has an uncertain outcome, can hardly be called a failure. (Location 2297)
When you measure yourself entirely based on factors outside your control, like a random person’s decision to hire you or not, it can be devastating to fall short. But if you simultaneously nurture several paths to your desired outcome, you’re not only taking back power from arbitrary gatekeepers, you’re also forcing yourself to think more creatively. (Location 2339)
“Whatever it is,” says Sam, “whether someone wants to write a book, launch their own business, travel on their own, or whatever, I’ll just say almost unequivocally: if you do not have a date on the calendar, it is not getting done. Because life will intervene and you’ll say, ‘OK, well, not now, later.’ And then you set up that loop.” (Location 2389)
To make success more likely, always put a date on the calendar and involve others in your plan. That enhances your level of seriousness and commitment. (Location 2425)
Playing the long game means being willing to think ahead, and even make short-term sacrifices, to accomplish what matters. When we become disciplined about time management, and work relentlessly to enhance our distance to empty, we’re giving ourselves the space we need to achieve our dreams. (Location 2544)
We’re imprinted with unique preferences and experiences, which make up our own personal constellation of what success means. (Location 2581)
Early in our careers, we would have killed for some of the successes that we now experience and, at times, take for granted. (Location 2591)
We have to show ourselves how far we’ve already come so we can see that the rest of the journey is possible. (Location 2599)
It’s so easy to forget what we’ve accomplished. And when we do, we lose sight of the powerful fact that if we’ve done it before, we can do it again. With effort and enough of a horizon, almost anything is possible. (Location 2629)
And that’s true for any of us. (Location 2630)
No one ever gives you credit for doing what’s slow and hard and invisible: sweating out that book chapter, doing that colleague a favor, writing that newsletter. (Location 2638)
We have to be willing to be patient. (Location 2641)
Big goals often seem—and frankly are—impossible in the short term. But with small, methodical steps, almost anything is attainable. The only goal of this book has been to show you how to think, and act, for the long term, to make that possible. (Location 2646)
Chance, luck, and individual preference play a massive role in how situations play out. (Location 2682)