The 3-Part Formula to Become a Recognized Expert with Dorie Clark

Dorie: [00:00:00] what I work with people on now, is to try to systematically go through that and solve, the problem. Because the tricky part is, most people intuitively are kind of good at one or two of those things, but unfortunately this is not an area where it's like, lean into your strengths.

Allan: Welcome to the Lean Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Allan Dib. We break down strategies, tactics, and speak to world class people here on the Lean Marketing Podcast to help you grow your business fast. and Do Less Stuff. Today I'm joined via with a special guest, Dori Clark.

She's an author. She's a speaker. She's an entrepreneur. Welcome Dori. How are you?

Dorie: Allan, I'm awesome. It's so good to get to connect again. Thanks for having me.

Allan: Great to have you.

Now you're someone who's kind of difficult to put in a box. And I suspect you, you probably did that intentionally. I mean, you talk a lot about long term thinking. You talk about communication, you talk about personal branding, you talk about entrepreneurship. Who are you and what are you [00:01:00] about?

Dorie: Yes you're so right. It is both a feature and a bug that I'm hard to pin down, but you know, broadly speaking I am someone who got my start in a fairly eclectic fashion. I studied philosophy and religion in college and graduate school. I had a bunch of crazy different jobs I worked on.

U. S. political campaigns, including a presidential campaign, I ran a bicycling advocacy non profit, I you know, was a newspaper reporter, I did all these things, and then eventually, you know, now this has been quite a while, this is 18 years ago, I started my own consulting business, and I basically took all of these really eclectic things that I used to do, and I, you know, put them in a bag and shook them up and basically what I ended up doing was focusing kind of in your world around marketing and communications and what I really became focused on was this question of, it was a question that I had to [00:02:00] solve for myself and I think that every small business owner has to solve, which is once you enter a market it feels like suddenly everyone in the entire world is doing the same thing as you and somehow you have to differentiate, somehow you have to get the word out.

And it's really not easy, so I really tried to reverse engineer the question of how do you become recognized as an expert in your field when things are so crowded and so difficult? And that's the problem I've been working to solve for the last 20 ish years.

Allan: Well, I feel very boring by comparison. . You know, I I was talking to Chris Ducker the other day and he was talking about hobbies and he said you know, I talk to entrepreneurs and, tell them that they have to have hobbies and it can't be working out. And I'm like, all right, well, that's me done

So, but you've done so many different things. So what were the strategies, what were the tactics that did help you stand out? Because you, you have done a great job at. Kind of being very different standing out. And so what conclusion did you [00:03:00] come to? How did you get to stand out as an entrepreneur the way that you have?

Dorie: Yeah, thank you, Allan. So, caveat here is it took me well over a decade of being in business before I was able to articulate this. But I did ultimately come up with a framework to sort of explain what I was feeling my way into. And a big part of what I do now is really try to spread the word and make it easier for other people to solve those problems that I had such a tricky time solving on my own.

But ultimately what I discovered is that I call this the Recognize Expert Formula and the key to becoming recognized widely for your expertise is actually three components. It is content creation, because people need to know what your ideas are in order to understand that you have expertise. It is your network because you, you need to know people so that they can be spreading the word about you and so that you, your impact can be amplified.

And it's social proof so that you have the [00:04:00] credentials so that people, once they hear about you, will take you seriously. And so basically what I did myself, and what I work with people on now, is to try to systematically go through that and solve, the problem. Because the tricky part is, most people intuitively are kind of good at one or two of those things, but unfortunately this is not an area where it's like, lean into your strengths.

I mean, it's great to have your strengths, but you need to have all three. You will have problems getting recognized if you don't do all three. And so at a certain point you need to turn your attention to where your weakest area is and try to get it up to snuff so that people actually can recognize who you are and what you're capable of.

Allan: So how do you kind of fix that sort of cold start problem where, yes, great. If you've got traction, great. If you've got an audience, we can create content, we can create social proof. We can do all of that. But for those who maybe have got a good level of success in their business, but they haven't really invested in [00:05:00] media assets.

They haven't built an email list. They haven't built a social audience. They haven't got that social proof and that content. How do you start, because it feels like, a vicious, vicious circle, right?

But how do you start from zero?

Dorie: Yeah, great question, and it's true, obviously. Once the flywheel is spinning, everything becomes easier, but there are absolutely ways to begin to, to break in. I will give you an example. One of the things, when it came to social proof, that I thought of, for me, as an important lever, was having some kind of university or institutional recognition in some way.

I mean, there's a lot of ways you can leverage social proof. It could be places you've written for, or places, you know, media outlets that have quoted you, or clients you've worked with, or conferences you've spoken at. There's a myriad of options. But one of the ones for me that was personally meaningful having come out of an academic background, was, I thought, you know what, what would be really helpful to me, for having me.

is to have a number of universities where I guest lecture [00:06:00] at them. And, I started out, I didn't have any. I'm like, well, how do I, get to this? And so literally what I did was I created a spreadsheet of the top 50 business schools in the U. S. And I looked up the department chair in the relevant department, and I got their email from the web, and sent them an email.

Cold pitch emails to them. And this was even sort of pre Covid, so Zoom chats were much less frequent, but, you know, so I said to them, you know, Hey, I've written this book you don't have to have written a book, you can say I've written this article, I've written this white paper, you know, just some way to convey your ideas.

Here I would love to guest lecture for any classes that you have or relevant classes that your colleagues have. I am willing to pay to come to you and, you know, and, or you can say, you know, I happen to be in D. C. on these dates. Do you need anything? But I just cold pitched people and I did it.

Until I had actually reached and, you know, you get [00:07:00] passed around to different people, they'll say, Oh, I don't need you, but maybe my colleague does. But Ultimately, I went through a period where, you know, I've guest lectured now probably at a dozen different prominent universities, all through cold pitching, because that was a lever that I wanted to deploy.

But, you know, also, conversely, it's like, once you have in your resume that you've guest lectured at these prestigious places, It actually becomes that, like, everything else becomes that much easier. Oh, well, can I interview you for my blog? Well, you know, it's a credible person. Or, oh, can I meet this person?

They look on your website, they say, oh, other people are recognizing her, I might as well take the meeting.

Allan: That's really cool. That's clever. And so is it just so that you can say you've guest lectured at this prestigious university or do you use video footage from that or photography or like how do you leverage that?

Dorie: If you can get it, if the professor is cool with it, then that is great. Certainly at a minimum, you know, you can take a picture in front of the university gates or whatever and say, Oh, hey, you know, I'm so happy to be guest [00:08:00] lecturing at blah, blah, blah university day and put that on your social media.

That's totally totally cool. But, for me mostly it was really just a question of your bio. Like one of the sort of formulas that I try to abide by I call it my three by three formula, is in an ideal bio, at least according to me there are gonna be three categories of social proof that a person has, and three examples of each category.

So If you have that, it's like rock solid credentials, like almost incontrovertible credentials, because it's just like, wow, this person is dripping in social proof. So it would be, Allan has written for publications including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Forbes. Allan has worked with clients including, you know, Google and Microsoft and Nike.

And Allan has, you know, spoken at prominent conferences including South by Southwest, The World Economic Forum, and you know, whatever. And you see that and it's like, my God, this person has credibility. And so when we aim for that, [00:09:00] your social proof really becomes an asset that can help you get in almost anywhere you want to get in.

Allan: I think that's so much more powerful than the claims that people make. People like, you know, we're the leading provider of X or I'm the leading whatever voice in this. Leading with proof is so much more powerful. Being able to say, Hey we've been featured here or we deliver this in this amount of time or whatever else.

So proof is such a, so, so much more powerful than just making claims, which is what most people do. And most people make baseless claims for the most part. Hmm.

Dorie: Thing about social proof as well, if we go back to the recognized expert formula where there's three components, so content creation, network, and social proof, the really nice thing about, about social proof is that once it's done. In the sense that it's not like I have to keep guest lecturing at universities every year.

I don't, I haven't done it for years. But it's because I spent a lot of time investing in doing that ten years ago. And now it can live on my [00:10:00] bio forever, because it is true forever that I have, in fact, guest lectured at those places.

Allan: Tell me a little bit about network because I see the, tremendous value of having a powerful network as both of us do. But also, you know, the term network is kind of loaded with like cringe, you know, swapping business cards at events and, weird follow up emails and stuff like that.

How do you think about networking?

Dorie: Yeah, Yeah. So, really how I think about networking is, in its purest form, it's making friends with interesting people that you would want to be friends with. You know, I, I think where it goes wrong is when, whenever people, Get in their heads about, Oh, well, if I know that person, then they could recommend me for this, or they could introduce me for that person, you know, it does become very transactional and so I actually have in my book, The Long Game, I created a rule that I call the no asks for a year rule and it's basically my way of keeping me honest and hopefully if other people [00:11:00] follow it, it can keep them honest too, because the idea is that if you meet someone You should, as you're building a relationship with them, not ask them for anything, like, important or politically sensitive for at least a year into your relationship.

Because, you know, the worst thing in the world, and we've all experienced this, is like, you meet somebody and then literally the next day it's like, Oh, hey Allan, I see on, Facebook, or I see on, LinkedIn, that you're friends with so and so. Could you introduce me to him? It's like, oh my God, like, Are you so transparent?

Like, it's ridiculous. And so, I want to just get that out of our heads. Like, don't even think about it. Don't even think about it. It is off the table. You concentrate on being that person's friend. You concentrate on getting to know them. And then, you know what? If you've actually been legitimately someone's friend for a year, whatever resources they have, if you're genuinely friends, they'll probably want to share them with you freely anyway, and vice versa.

And it doesn't have to become a, what can this person do for me, kind of [00:12:00] thing.

Allan: I totally agree. with content especially when you're starting out, is it just that you've, feels like you're just shouting into the void, right? You post something, there's crickets, there's your mum likes it your wife likes it or whatever. And so on. What have your been?

Is it just, Hey, that's just the difficult period you've got to get through, or have you got some strategies around kind of juicing that up, especially in the beginning?

Dorie: Yeah, I mean, it's very demoralizing at first when you don't have an audience. I mean, there's kind of no two ways about it. But I think that the most important thing is reframing it to ourselves. Because if in your head the goal is, Oh, I'm going to get so many readers for this, then of course you're going to be depressed when five people read your article.

You know, I mean, obviously but I think that the most important way to think about it in the early days, and again, you know, like for a year, two years, even three years, I would say, to keep your head in the game, you need to not think about absolute views. What you need to think is, okay, I am writing [00:13:00] content to attract my ideal customer.

If my ideal customer comes across it. Great. That's amazing. But in the meantime, what purpose this serves is that if I already have a prospect in my pipeline, this document is going to make it easier for me to make that sale because I can say, Oh, Hey, Allan I, you know, you're mentioning you're having a problem with this just last week.

I wrote an article about that. Let me send it to you and I hope it's helpful. And that makes it so much easier for you to trust me, for you to trust my approach, and to be willing to hire me to help you with that problem. And so. It is not about generating leads from outside, at least at first. It's about making the sales process smoother, and if we can re conceptualize it that way, it feels a lot better, and a lot less sad.

Allan: Yeah. Yeah. Totally.

Dorie: just going back to the networking piece, Allan. mean, we Were able to first meet virtually and then eventually meet [00:14:00] in person through mutual friends, through sort of an author gathering. so I'm curious, like, talk to me about your networking, because, like, you're building relationships half a world away in America so how did that look?

Like, you know, I guess it was Mike Michalowicz that was probably the driver there, but did he reach out to you? Did you reach out to him? How did that work?

Allan: no Mike invited me to, come to Nashville, which was really good. And I think pretty much, as you said, I've just been developing friendships with other authors, which is I think the author world is a little bit different. different. Whereas in most industries, we would be considered competitors, right?

If you buy from me, you won't buy from from you, right? Whereas authors really, you know, you buy one book you're a reader and you'll buy other books, right? And so authors really help each other a lot more than I, I feel in other industries. So for me I've always found, you know, networking kind of difficult.

I'm naturally an introvert. I'm the guy awkwardly standing in the corner at a [00:15:00] networking or business event or whatever. So I've always found that a challenge, but like you say, I like to connect with interesting people. I don't have asks. Almost ever. I mean, maybe once in a blue moon, maybe when I'm releasing a book or something like that I'll call in some asks and again, with no obligation, no expectation, that sort of thing.

But the thing that I found best is turning up at physical events. has been by far my most effective and when I say effective in terms of building a relationship because you can go for a coffee, you can have a drink, you can whatever, that sort of thing. And you're all there, you know, you don't have emails and distractions and all of that sort of thing going on.

So for me, going to physical events has been really powerful. The other thing that I found really powerful is going to events outside of my industry, like going to a real estate conference, a pharmacy industry conference, whatever, for a couple of reasons. Because first I'm a pattern interrupt [00:16:00] there.

I'm the only marketer there and everybody wants, wow, you're a marketer. You're not the boring pharmacist, like the other hundred people here, right? So you're a pattern interrupt. You're kind of a little bit like the star of the show, but you also get such deep insight to an industry that, I mean, I could have spent six months trying to figure out what's going on in the pharmacy industry or real estate industry or whatever, and not found out what I found out in a few hours, just being at a conference, listening to keynote speakers, listening to panel discussions, listening to what people are chatting about.

So from those two perspectives, I found in person events and conferences super, super powerful.

Dorie: That's really interesting, Allan. Thanks for sharing that. so you've had success even just going as like a regular guest, a regular participant at the

Allan: Totally.

Dorie: Wow. Very

Allan: Like I texted my friend the other day. I said, Hey, there's a real estate conference going on. You want to go? And he's like, You're not in real estate. Like, well, why are we going to a real estate conference? I'm like, because we're not in real estate is why we want to go to a real estate conference.[00:17:00]

Dorie: So cool.

Allan: So, I don't know maybe, I'm a bit weird but love the, like, just, completely different, you know, conferences, because I get to see in a deep fashion, what goes on in other industries, what their problems, what their fears, what their desires are. And it gives you ideas that you can cross pollinate into our world.

So, I think it's really powerful. And also understanding our clients at a deeper level, because we do have clients from all sorts of industries, all sorts of backgrounds and being able to connect with them as well. I think that's really cool.

Dorie: No it, it is. I love that. It's really true. I mean, I run an online course in community actually called Recognize Expert and we just concluded a launch for it. And so I've been having a lot of conversations lately with people who are like, should I do this? Should I not do this? And I had a conversation just a couple of days ago with a woman who was an attorney.

She was a prosecutor and she had some ideas she was very passionate about. And she was sort of struggling like, Oh, you know, should I do [00:18:00] this? But I'm also thinking maybe I should do something like industry specific where it's like just for lawyers. And I mean, I, you know, I'm biased a little bit, but I said to her, you know, It's great to learn from other lawyers, but you probably know a lot of lawyers.

You, you probably have learned over the years from tons of lawyers. And it might be interesting if you are trying to solve a problem that is Not a legal problem. You know, marketing your ideas, getting, you know, getting more traction for your ideas. That's a marketing thing. That's not a legal thing.

It might be interesting for you to learn in a community of people who are not just lawyers. And uh, she ultimately decided to go ahead and sign up, which I think is really cool. But yes, you know, that, that kind of cross pollination can be so powerful.

Allan: I've had such home run hits by just taking an idea from one industry and implementing it in another, because people tend to be so insular in that like everyone just does it the same way. Either, you know, prices their product the same way or builds it or delivers [00:19:00] it or whatever, and just being able to take an idea.

So, You know, take a potentially like a subscription service and drop it into an industry where that's unusual or um,

Dorie: have any particular examples that, that come to

Allan: Yeah, I do. I do. So, uh, we've worked with a few clients in legal where it's more normal now, but certainly a few years ago it was unheard of to have like an unlimited subscription where, hey, you pay us a fixed monthly fee and we're your HR lawyer or your, we're your whatever, right?

So that was something they would just bill per hour or per day. And that was it. It was billable time. So I took essentially the model that we used in the IT industry, which was managed services, which is, Hey, we're going to charge you a fixed monthly fee. We're going to make sure that everything's taken care of.

And you're, you know, you haven't got problems with your desktop, your server and all of that. And so in that kind of model, your incentives are aligned because if problems come up, that's a cost to you as the provider. Whereas if I'm billing per hour, [00:20:00] I make more money if you have more problems, you know, if my client has more problems.

So incentives are misaligned in that perspective. So in a similar way, we worked with a company who is in HR law. And so their whole value proposition was that Put us on retainer and we'll make sure you don't have your contracts are really tight. You don't have the employee problems. You don't have Suits filed against you by former employees And if they if you do have them then that's taken care of as part of the monthly fees So that was pretty revolutionary at the time and I think even somewhat now, but that's essentially something I was cross pollinated from the IT industry into legal

Dorie: That's super cool. I love that example. Thank you.

Allan: Yeah. My pleasure. My pleasure. You wrote a book called the long game.

And the subtitle is how to be a long term thinker in a short term world. And I sit down with my CEO every quarter we, plan goals for the following quarter and often, you know, revenue goals are really pretty much the center of the discussion.

What's [00:21:00] been your thinking around long term versus short term goals? So yes, we want to hit certain revenue marks over this quarter, that quarter. And also in terms of incentivizing, I mean, that's something that I've struggled with a lot. How do you incentivize someone over you know, a goal that's maybe five years out or three years out or whatever versus, okay, we want to hit this number in Q3 or whatever else.

Dorie: Yeah this is really the question when it comes to so much of modern business life, right? Because we know that there are certain things that do take a long time to percolate, to come to fruition. And they're important, good things.

They're worthy goals, but they sometimes stretch so far into the future.

It's tricky because particularly if you're working with a team of employees, I mean, how many of them are actually going to be around 10 years from now? I mean, if you're an entrepreneur and you're controlling your own business or, you know, especially a solopreneur or something like that, Then you have certainly more bandwidth to [00:22:00] be able to sort of, turn the dials the way that you need to.

But in most contemporary business life, you have situations where you have all the pressure on one side of the ledger in terms of short term results and improving yourself and, you know, showing your efficacy. And yet, we understand intellectually that there are some things that Literally only can work or only can come to fruition over the long term.

So that's the needle that we have to thread. And, you know, the truth is it's not easy. And sometimes, if you have a boss that's kind of riding you and forcing you, then you do need to play along. You need to do the thing that's required. But in general, the way that I think about this is that ultimately.

We need, to adopt a different mindset, I think a big part of it is a mindset shift because we have to think like stewards of, you know, whatever. I mean, if you're an example that I gave early in the book is about a friend of mine named Martin Lindstrom, [00:23:00] who's a branding specialist and he's done consulting for royal families.

And he told me once about a conversation that he had with a monarch. And the monarch said to him, Martin, we have a really long timeline here. We have a really long term view. And Martin says yes, I understand. And the monarch was like, you know, do you really? Because basically what we're going to be looking at, like how we're going to be measuring your success, is if this generation is successful, then you have succeeded at what you're doing.

And so I think a lot of it is taking on an ownership mindset and a stewardship mindset of recognizing that, yes, there are some sort of performative measures that we might need to flash to show that we're doing the right thing. But ultimately, as much as is humanly possible, we need to be taking seriously the long term interests.

You know, treating it like our own of the company, or of the goal, or of the [00:24:00] project, so that it can thrive the way that it deserves to thrive.

Allan: So, that's great, but practically, how would you implement this with, say, a CEO that was working for you or some key personnel how would that go for, I mean, there's the EOS model of like rocks, we've got these big rocks for the next quarter or the quarter after that, or whatever else, how are you sitting down with your leadership team, how are you sitting down with key people and talking about, okay, here's This is five years out.

This is three years out. This is this quarter or how are you thinking about that?

Dorie: Yeah. So it's true that for every long term goal, there's a lot of things that need to happen in order to, you know, to get there and to make that possible. And so I think one of the most important things there's, two components that are key here. The first one, which I think too often we fail to do, and it's, very basic.

It's not hard, but we fail to do it, is to have proper scoping up front. Because if we're trying [00:25:00] to Accomplish a long term goal. The biggest challenge is that, you know, it's actually, you might think the biggest problem is like, well, it just wouldn't work. Actually, I'm going to suggest that the biggest problem is that we don't know what it would look like for it to work because we make assumptions that like, oh, well, this will be, you know, this will be a six month project and actually, if you dug a little bit further and did research into what it really would take, because In almost all circumstances in business life, you are not doing something that no one in humanity has ever done before, right?

This is not like particle physics, where it's never been done before. It might be a different industry, it might be a different context, but someone has done it before. And we often, you know, think something's gonna take six months, and we get to month nine, and it's not working, and we're like, well, we gave it every possible chance, you know, guess that was a failure.

Well, actually, what if you misscoped it? And it actually should have taken 18 months, and you thought [00:26:00] you were past the finish line, but you were only a third of the way there. So scoping is going to be so critical to enable you to be smart about how you're measuring and how you're analyzing where you are in the journey.

So that's the first part. The second part is I'm a big fan of interim metrics. I call it looking for the raindrops. Because, again, we are often bad, as humans, at looking for the small signs of success. You know, I mean, of course, everybody can see when you achieve the final goal. but it takes a long time to get to the final goal.

And so what we need to do is identify, as early on as we can, what are the signs, what are the metrics that something's working. I mean, if our goal is you know, we're gonna sell a hundred million dollars worth of this product. Okay, great. That's gonna take a while. But are there things like the number of organic web searches has gone up?

Or the number of social followers is going up, or all of a sudden your competitors keep trying to poach your [00:27:00] executives because everyone is buzzing about your company. Like, whatever those metrics are, those are actually a sign that you're on the way to the place that you want to go, and it can give you the faith and the spine that you need to make the difficult choices to keep persevering.

Allan: How are you going about choosing long term goals? Because when I look at five years out. One of the things that I think about is five years back. And when I look at myself five years back, I'm nothing like I was five years ago. Right? So, then that gets me thinking, I'm like, well, what am I going to be like, or what am I going to want?

What are, where am I going to go in five years time? So how do you think about some of those longer term goals? How do you go about planning those? And I mean, now with things moving as fast As it is, and you know, kind of makes me laugh when I see people kind of doing financial projections three, five years out.

I mean, you know, what's the interest rate going to be next year, like let alone five years out all of these projections. So, how are you [00:28:00] thinking about that?

Dorie: Yeah it's important to recognize that. Your goals, what you want, what the world is going to look like is probably going to be pretty different. And so that's why I am a huge fan of just provisional hypotheses. The metaphor that I like to use is, you know, we're all sailing in an ocean. And it's a very, it's a very uncertain ocean.

There might be hurricanes and squalls and whatever. But if you were a jellyfish and you have no goals whatsoever, it is conceivable that you might end up, you know washing up onto a nice pleasant beach and having a great experience. But it's also possible equally, if not more possible, that you end up washing up, you know, somewhere trashy and terrible that you don't want to be.

And that's really how it is when we're not setting any goals. It's just like, whatever, okay, whatever the wind brings. Meanwhile, if you are the speed boat in this equation, I mean, a hurricane is always going to beat a speedboat. There's no question. [00:29:00] There's no guarantee that you're going to be reaching your destination.

But you are a hell of a lot more likely to reach your destination if you have enough engine and enough volition to point yourself in the right direction and say, Okay, I'm heading here. And you know what? Along the way, you might have a detour because you see a beautiful island and you're like, You know what?

That looks better. Here, let me go over here. That's cool. That's fine. You know, God bless. But. Having that initial goal makes it a lot more likely that wherever you pivot from, you're going to be in a stronger position to do that pivoting. I mean, I'll give you an example. A goal that I had for myself years ago, five, you know, ten years ago.

I envisioned myself as I, you know, got toward my fifties or whatever where I thought, you know, it would be a great, like, second career for myself. Once I'm out of the consulting and author game, I thought, you know, I could be a university president. That would be a really cool job. And, you [00:30:00] know, it seemed like a cool job.

When I went to school, it was cool. You lived in a beautiful house. You were surrounded by smart people who were into the life of the mind. You know, like, it seemed awesome. But anyway, in the last few years, for anyone who's been paying attention universities have become like a garbage dump. It's just like, it's just like a, you know, total fire happening there and it's not anything that I would want.

But I did sort of take steps to work toward it. I actually ended up serving on the board for four years of the university. I explored it in more depth and it enabled me to say, okay that's not what I want. But it gave me interesting connections and interesting experience having served on the university board.

There might be yet another way that I can leverage that in the future. It's not like a lost experience. It's just like, okay, I was able to investigate a thing. Now I don't want to do that thing. I mean, I'm curious. How do you think about goal setting in your life, Allan? How does it work for you?

Allan: I struggle with this a lot. the conclusion I've come to [00:31:00] is systems, not goals. So for example, I've got some fitness goals and, you know, traditionally we're told things like smart goals, you know, be specific, measurable, blah, blah, blah, all of that sort of thing. But I mean, in a year will I have lost, two percentage points of fat.

Will I have added a certain amount of strength? I mean, I can pluck numbers out of the air, but I found it much more useful to just create systems where, Hey, I just work out six times a week. I pull the weights and then um, do progressive overload. I eat a certain diet and then where that takes me in a year.

will be a better place. So I think of it as infinite games rather than, okay, I've got this goal. I want to get to whatever 10 percent body fat. I want to get to this amount of strength or whatever, which I'll just be pulling out of my butt really. I mean, maybe you can sort of guesstimate something or whatever.

So I've always thought systems over goals is a much more productive way of, doing it now longer [00:32:00] term. I follow my curiosity and again, I don't think that's maybe the optimal way of goal setting. I think you know, someone like Elon Musk, Hey, we're going to populate Mars or whatever. That's a big, huge, whatever, hairy goal.

I've struggled with those. I work on the micro, the what can I do daily? What can I do daily, weekly, monthly? And to me, that's created more. more of what I want in terms of health, wealth the stuff that I want, business success, than anything else, than kind of the big, hairy, audacious goal, and then setting visions and all of this sort of stuff.

So, that's been my approach.

Dorie: I think that's great. I think that's right on. And I mean, ultimately, populating Mars that's Elon fulfilling his curiosity. You know, it's just like, it's just like, what are you curious about? You know, in his case, outer space.

Allan: the other thing, I mean, I look at some of the big goal lists that I wrote years ago and I'm like, it doesn't even register anymore. And, you know, some of them I've smashed out of the park, others became completely [00:33:00] irrelevant. But the stuff that's stuck is the stuff that I've done daily, weekly, monthly the compound interest of, you know, Working out six days a week, the compound interest of showing up and writing daily or reading daily, all of those sorts of things.

That's the stuff that's really made the biggest changes in my life over anything.

Dorie: Yeah, that's, it's so true. I mean, the power of small compound things is really critical. And I think when it comes to long term thinking and long term strategy, that's a piece of it too, right? I mean, we often, I think, culturally tend to think of strategy as this. Hard, complicated, difficult, portentous thing like, you know, I need to go off and develop a strategy, you know, it's sort of like somehow equivalent to like, okay, I need to go to an ashram for six weeks or six months and then I'll have a strategy.

And it's like, you know, that's not what strategy has to be. It doesn't have to be this incredibly rarefied thing. We [00:34:00] can all be strategic. We all have that ability. It's not actually harder to be strategic than it is to be reactive. It's just a question of having a different lens and looking at the world through a different lens.

And if you're thoughtful about just taking a moment to say, Alright, if I zoom out here, you know, what is the impact of this longer term? You know, where, will this get me closer to where I want to be? Or, you know, at a minimum, to where I think I want to be? And that that's a powerful question that, It can become very instinctual for us to ask you know, ourselves and to train ourselves to do that if we're thoughtful about it.

Allan: Well, the other way that I think about it is kind of the Jeff Bezos question. What's the stuff that's going to stay the same? What's going to be relevant in a year, two years, five years time? Like with AI or whatever. I have no idea what's going to happen. I mean, maybe I have some, you know, direction or whatever, but know for a fact that it's a good idea for the next 40 years to be [00:35:00] lifting weights.

I know it's a good idea for the next 40 years to be reading books. I know it's a good idea for the next 40 years that it's going to be a good idea to Write books to create content, to do all of those sorts of things. So yes definitely I can have bets on things that may or may not happen, but what are the things that are gonna be a good idea in a year, two years time, five years time, 10 years time, and just let those compound.

So, that's a lot of the way that I've thought about it rightly or wrongly. But , that's been what's worked best for me.

Dorie: No, amen. I mean, you know, if AI is going to help us all live forever it's not going to be very effective if you're super weak and sickly. So you're exactly right, Allan. You got to stay healthy as long as you can.

Allan: We've touched a little bit on networking and I mean, you're an expert on how to stand out in networking. That's literally the title of one of the books you wrote. So, we talked about, yes, making friends. Good idea. Yes, not asking in the first year, all of that sort of thing. But. you walk into a room there's all some people, you know, [00:36:00] maybe most of the people you don't know feeling awkward or whatever, you're an introvert.

And again, I'm just telling you my life. So, how would you advise me?

Dorie: like how should Allan work a room?

Allan: Exactly. Exactly. This is a selfish ask.

Dorie: That's right. That's right. Well, you know, I mean, obviously the instinct for almost anyone would be to just gravitate to your pals and stick with them and whatever. That's natural. I have a friend named Robbie Samuels. He's actually a member of my recognized expert community and he is a really very thoughtful person.

about networking and he's given talks and written books about this. And one of his rules that he has for events that he organizes, which I think is so great. I mean, what's really fantastic is that it is literally an official rule of his organization is that in his events there are people who he's sort of named, You know ambassadors kind of and basically his idea is that if [00:37:00] you're a regular at his events You know, you've come like more than like two or three times.

He'll pull you aside. He'll be like, okay You've been here a few times, you know how things work. You are now gonna be like a special Ambassador and so the next time you come here's your job He said for the first is like a two hour event for the first hour You are not allowed to talk to people, you know The first hour is for meeting new people And it is to help them.

You now have a job, and your job is to make that other person feel welcome. And after that, in the second hour, you talk to whoever you like. You talk to your friends, you catch up, no big deal. But in that first hour, it's a very precarious time for new people, and they need to be welcomed, and it is your job to welcome them.

And I think that if all of us kind of took that on as our mantle, and instead of getting in our own head about like, I don't know these people, this is weird. If we appointed ourselves as ambassadors and basically said, yeah, that first hour, that's for saying hi and welcoming new people. Um, You [00:38:00] know, whether or not you know what the heck is going on, who cares?

But just go up, be nice. If they're standing by themselves, they're going to appreciate it. And then hour two, you do what you want.

Allan: Nice. Another tip I heard was. To a lot of the high level events that you'll go to there'll be a, you know, like a list of who's going right. Sent ahead of time. So it'll be, you know, Dory Clark's going, this person's going, this person going. And so, to connect with them ahead of the event to say, Hey Dory, really looking forward to seeing you there or whatever.

So that when you, and also researching the people that you don't know, so that when you're at the event, it's not like, Hey, who are you? What do you do? You know, that sort of weird, awkward stuff. And then yeah just small talk. So I thought that was a really good tip.

Dorie: Yeah that's a great one. I mean, another one that I'll surface. which comes from another friend of mine, an author named Christian Bush, who wrote a book called The Serendipity Mindset. He has a philosophy which I think is really great, which is that he likes to [00:39:00] introduce himself by giving multiple facts about himself, like short facts, which he calls Serendipity Hooks.

And his idea is that, you know, if I say, well I'm Dory I'm a marketer, or something like That's great if someone knows about marketing, but if they don't, it's like, well, what the heck do I do with that? You know, we're like, where do I go? I don't know what to talk about this person. But if you're able to say you know, hi, I'm, you know, I'm Dory.

I live in Miami. I have a business where I do marketing consulting and I am a cat owner and I like to play ping pong and, you know, you know, I, whatever the, I'm a really big fan of, you know, blah, blah, blah, TV show, you know, you're giving people so many things, probably one of them is something that they can relate to, that they can hook onto, and it enables the basis for a more useful connection and conversation.

Allan: that's cool. I like that. That's a good idea. [00:40:00] I'm going to use that. Dory thank you so much. I really appreciated your time, your wisdom. You've been very generous. It's been a pleasure to get to know you a little bit better as well. So, you know, we keep crossing paths. So, and I hope we'll continue to do so.

people, uh, where do people find you? I'm assuming doryclark. com. Anywhere else? and what books would you want someone to read first of yours?

Dorie: Yeah. Thank you, Allan. Well, you are, spot on. It is dorieclark.Com is my main home online. And for folks who are interested in getting a free long game, strategic thinking, self assessment, and also joining my email list you can do that at dorieclark.Com slash the long game. And it's a way to, just a simple self assessment that can help you really think through ways to get more of that strategic thinking frame into our day to day lives.

And yeah, that long game is probably the [00:41:00] best place to start, although I will Also give a hat tip for those who are small business owners or entrepreneurs. I have a book called Entrepreneurial You, which is about specifically how to create multiple streams of revenue in your business. And you know, making more money is always desirable, so that might be of interest too.

Allan: I agree. Thank you so much, Dorie. We'll link to all of those resources, of course.

Dorie: Thank you so much. Great to talk with you, Allan.

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