Jay Papasan:
I’m Jay Papasan and this is The ONE Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results.
Hey there, amigos. Jay Papasan here. Welcome to another edition of The ONE Thing Podcast. Today, we get to talk to my good friend and author and speaker, Dorie Clark. We’re gonna hear about her journey to finding exponential results in her career and all the steps she took along the way that you can learn from to get exponential results in your work and your career. You’ll learn how to say no. She’s super, super pragmatic and efficient about how to simply say no to things so that you can say yes to the things that matter.
She, also, will give us some tips on how to optimize to keep it all interesting. If it’s interesting, we want to stick to it. And one of my favorite little tips she shares is looking for raindrops. And it’s about, kind of, keeping heart when it’s kind of getting hard along the way. So, lots and lots of great tips for playing the long game to get exponential results in your life.
So, who is Dorie anyway? She’s a multiple Wall Street Journal bestselling author. She wrote a book called The Exponential You, Reinventing You, Stand Out. And the book that we talk about most here is called The Long Game, because she definitely has a vision for her life. She’s also a contributor to the Harvard Business Review, Forbes and Fast Company. And she’s also a professor at the Duke University School of Business, as well as Columbia Business School. Basically, she’s super smart. She’s super practical. You’ve got lots to learn in this episode.
All right, Dorie, I’m so happy you’re in Austin and we get to record this podcast together.
Dorie Clark:
Thanks, Jay. Great to be here.
Jay Papasan:
So when I first read The Long Game, like in the first 11 pages, I’m asking, would this be appropriate or not? And right off the bat, you have this line about some kinds of success aren’t linear, but they’re exponential. And you were talking about your journey to your first book. And you were describing this moment where you had a dinner conversation, where you’d made the decision, “I’m going to do this,” and it felt like you were wandering in the wilderness for, like, five years where nothing’s happening, and then a lot happened. Walk us through that a little bit and that journey. And then, I wanna talk about it, kind of, on a bigger level, because a lot of people give up before they get to where the elbow of the curve is.
Dorie Clark:
Yeah, absolutely. And it is so true that when we think about progress and about success, it’s always the fireworks at the end. It’s publishing the book, or it’s landing the big keynote, or landing the big sale. And those are amazing things and they’re worth celebrating, but if we peel back the layers, all of them involve so much work that’s invisible and under the surface before it. And it felt for me like a long demoralizing period where you’re talking about, I attended a conference in 2008 and I actually kind of felt bad about myself because I was at this dinner with a bunch of people. They were all authors, they were all talking about their books and I was pretty much the only one at the table who didn’t have a book and I thought, okay, I need to do this.
Jay Papasan:
They’re not just asking if you’ve written a book, they’re saying, like, how many have you written, right?
Dorie Clark:
That’s right.
Jay Papasan:
Something like that.
Dorie Clark:
And how many have they sold?
Jay Papasan:
Yes.
Dorie Clark:
And I said, “All right, I’m gonna do this.” And then, meanwhile, it took me about two years to get any agents interested. It took another two years between signing a contract and the book actually coming out. And during that time, all that progress and all that hard work is invisible to the public. You’re just you know you’re making some kind of progress but nothing is evident to the naked eye and it’s only four or five years later that everybody says, “Oh, wow! Congratulations.” But a lot of people quit in that interim and it’s so important to stay resilient and keep moving forward even when it actually can feel a little dispiriting between here and there.
Jay Papasan:
You’ve now written multiple books. So, now, you’d go back to that party and you’d be kinder to the you that showed up without a book. You’ve done like a Broadway play. You’ve done all of these things. But does it all lead back to getting that first book, you think?
Dorie Clark:
Writing the first book was a really important unlock. And I think one of the things that’s so meaningful about the one thing is understanding that when you do tip that first domino, that’s always the hardest because everything else feels easier. I mean, I always like the snowball metaphor that once it’s rolling downhill, you have gravity on your side. And so in the world of books, because you have the book, you get the speaking invitations. And because you’re on stages, then people see you and they get consulting offers. They get all these add-on things that become infinitely easier.
And so, I think what’s so powerful about your work is really stepping back and asking that 30,000 foot question of, all right, where does it make sense to start? Where does it make sense to focus on? Because if you choose wisely, everything else from there forward becomes a lot easier than it would have been if you were trying to do them on its own.
Jay Papasan:
And what I love about your story is it perfectly illustrates something we say all the time. People, often, overestimate what they can do in a year, but underestimate what they can achieve in five. And by the time you look at ten years, it’s almost anything is on the table. And you hit those exact points like three or four times, I think with almost the exact verbiage in your book – this idea we overestimate in the short run and underestimate in the long.
Dorie Clark:
It takes in general between two and three years of legitimate effort, legitimate hard work for you to start to see literally almost any result from that hard work. The first two to three years are kind of painful because you are putting in a lot of effort and to be glaringly obvious, you’re not getting much back at that point. And so, that’s when you’re at your weakest emotionally because there’s just so little positive reinforcement. It actually takes a lot of character to be willing to say, “You know what, I’m gonna do it anyway. I’m gonna keep moving forward. I’m gonna persevere.”
But what I’ve seen time and again from the hundreds of people that I’ve worked with is that by the time you get to about year five… year three, you start to see some response. You start to see a few things kind of coming back to you. And you know, it’s nice. It’s like, “Oh, here’s the thing here and there. Okay, I’m getting a little bit.” By the time you get to year five, you’ve actually built up a substantial moat around your business, because you’ve been going so long and so hard. It’s very hard for other people to compete with what you’ve built. You built up substantial momentum and name recognition.
And all of a sudden, the things that were so hard and so hard fought at the beginning start coming to you actually remarkably easily, so much so that it is kind of hard to believe. And to explain that to someone who’s six months in or a year in, you almost wouldn’t believe it. But it’s the perseverance and the courage that’s necessary to get to that point. But when you do, it can be really powerful.
Jay Papasan:
But how does someone know that they picked the right thing? Like, is this really the right journey? Should I stick this out? Like, when do you choose to stick and when do you choose to quit?
Dorie Clark:
You don’t really know. And so, the question we have to ask ourselves, is it not happening for me or is it not happening yet? And the truth is when you’re in it, you really don’t know. You really can’t tell. You want to find a way but it’s almost impossible. And so that’s why there’s a couple of things that I advise people to do. The first actually comes at the beginning. It comes at the outset, which is… I call it a scoping question, essentially.
For most of us, the things that we want to accomplish in the world are usually things that someone has done before, right? I mean, most of us aren’t doing quantum computing or whatever. We’re trying to hit a milestone that other people, and in some cases a lot of other people, have done before. And yet, we often systematically fail to research upfront. What did that look like? If you know people like that, you can ask them. But even if you don’t, there’s so much we can find out now by scouring LinkedIn profiles, by reading news articles, and trying to understand, okay, what were the steps they took? How long did it take them?
It’s very easy for us to have erroneous assumptions that we never question about what the journey looks like. And so, I often hear from people who are so frustrated, they’re at the end of their rope because they feel like they’ve done everything, they’ve tried everything, and let’s say they’re two years in, and they think it should have happened in 12 months. And so, they say, “Oh, well, I’ve been doing it double the amount of time that I should. It’s obviously not happening.”
But if there was a scoping error to begin with, and it actually takes most people three years, you’re right on schedule, you just don’t know it. And so, for me, the tragedy is when people quit too soon and they could have reached it. So scoping is the first issue.
Jay Papasan:
So, when you say scoping, I’m saying, is there a model, is there a pattern, a proven best practices that I can at least step into and not reinvent the wheel.
Dorie Clark:
Yes, that’s exactly right. It’s so important to get a sense of it. I mean, it’s true, it’s possible that you might be faster or better or more efficient than other people, but in general, if the vast majority of people have achieved something and it’s taken them three years, you’re probably not gonna get it done in six weeks. And so, just having realistic expectations going in enables you to have the fortitude to withstand the pressure when you’ve been doing it for a while and you get frustrated. The second piece is what I like to call looking for raindrops. And essentially what that means…
Jay Papasan:
Well, I’m interested. I just like that saying. What is looking for raindrops mean?
Dorie Clark:
Yeah, thank you. Well, the way that I think about success and how we measure success, it’s always, sort of, the glamorous end outcome. That’s the thunderstorm, right? That’s something that is so visible to anyone that anyone could perceive it. But it takes a while for a thunderstorm to build and there’s things that happen before it. The wind changes, the barometric pressure changes, you start to feel little tiny raindrops coming before the storm emerges.
And so often, we are so focused on that end outcome that we don’t even notice when there are signs of progress or success along the way. And that’s how we can keep ourselves motivated, is to understand what are some of those early measures that enable us to say, “Oh, I must be making progress because I can feel the winds shifting.” And if you can, in advance, identify some of those measures, “Oh, okay, something’s different, something’s changing, there’s more momentum here,” it can enable you to stay encouraged when a lot of the time other people might be giving up.
Jay Papasan:
I love that. So, looking for raindrops, it’s like for me, we talk about Goal Setting to the Now. So, you go out and my someday goal is this, and we’ll ask the question, “Well based on that, what’s the one thing that you would have to accomplish in five years to feel like you were on track?” And based on your five year goal, what would you have to accomplish in one year to feel like you’re on track for the five. And it will just kind of migrate your way back to the quarter of the month, the week, the day, and it creates almost like you’re in the future looking back to find the milestones, the raindrops. Because five years or ten years, how do I act appropriately this week? How do I even have a sense that I’m on track? That’s been the way we’ve done it.
And those milestones become little finish lines for you along the way, so that you have something to celebrate. Like I hit my one-year goal. The one-year goal might have been wildly inaccurate because you really didn’t know what it took. But, now, I know enough to set another one-year goal that’s probably more on track towards the five-year goal. But just finding reasons to celebrate and build momentum along the way, yeah, I’ve seen high achievers that are so focused on what you call the storm, they can’t see all of the progress. It’s the old gap in the gain, right?
Dorie Clark:
Yes.
Jay Papasan:
They’re only seeing the gap. They can’t imagine how far they’ve gained and celebrate how far they’ve come.
Dorie Clark:
Yeah, that’s exactly right, Jay. I love that.
Jay Papasan:
So, you’re going towards a big goal. We know that it has potential. It’ll feel like nothing’s happening before it goes exponential on you. You’ve gotta have the right expectations, which is what you called scoping. And then, there’s the looking for raindrops, have moments to celebrate to keep you going. Later in the book, you kind of talked about looking forward and identifying mission and pursuing things that are inherently interesting to you. Is any of that front-loaded too? Like, is that something… because I find mission can be something that can keep people engaged when everything else goes away.
Dorie Clark:
Yeah, absolutely. So, one of the things you’re referring to is I have a section in The Long Game called Optimize for Interesting.
Jay Papasan:
There we go. Thank you.
Dorie Clark:
Part of why I talk about that is so often in our lives, in general, and certainly in our professional lives, there’s a lot of narration about “should.” Well, I should do that. And just the pressures of obligation, whether it is some script that we have from other people, or even our own internal sense of, well, this is the appropriate thing to do.
And let’s be honest, sometimes it’s necessary. There are things in our lives that we have to do, pay the taxes, you know, keep up with the emails, all the things that are kind of boring, but necessary. But it’s also true that I think many of us, particularly high achievers, almost go on a “should” overload, where we are so governed by scripts about how things ought to look. We don’t properly query those assumptions. And I think it’s actually useful to get back to first principles. And for me, asking the question, what is interesting to me is really powerful because oftentimes…
Jay Papasan:
Do you think most people know the answer?
Dorie Clark:
I do actually because you know we put a lot of pressure on ourselves sometimes to say, “Well, what’s my purpose? What’s my calling?” I think a lot of people don’t know that because that’s a very highfalutin question, right? It’s a sort of existential thing. What am I here on earth for? I mean, who knows? But do I find it interesting? I mean, I think you can tell me pretty fast, like, ” Hey, Jay, do you like bird watching?” Like, “Are birds cool to you?” And, you know…
Jay Papasan:
The honest answer is, the older I get, the more interesting it becomes. I’m becoming a cliché of an old person.
Dorie Clark:
There we go, amazing! But you list a bunch of things like, “Oh, do you like doing math problems? Do you like golf? Do you like birds? Do you like watching football? Do you like knitting?” Like, any of these things, people probably pretty fast can say yes no. And what I love about it is that it’s a low bar. Interest is just, would you choose to do it if no one was looking over your shoulder? Is there something that’s intriguing? And all you need to do is just keep moving in that direction. And I think even within the scope of our regular jobs, there are things that are more or less interesting to us.
I mean, you’re, I think, a prime example of this, right? I mean, there’s no official mandate saying, “Jay, your job here at Keller Williams is to do this podcast.” This is something that, I think, I hope is interesting for you. And so, you’ve moved in this direction. This becomes part of your mandate, but you’re creating that. And I think it’s really powerful because we’re able to shape a lot more than we think we might.
Jay Papasan:
So we got to take a break real quick. We’ve kind of broken down, when we’re playing a long game, which is the point of the book, we’re looking farther out, we’re making a strategic goal and we’re going for it. There’s some of the things that we need to line up on the front end. Expectations, and finding your milestones of success, making sure that it’s interesting so it sticks. I want to go on the other side of the break and talk about how we stay on course. Things like saying no and avoiding FOMO and all the things that throw us off course. Does that work for you?
Dorie Clark:
I love it. Let’s do it.
Jay Papasan:
So, Dorie, in the first half we were talking about this longer journey. And I’m butchering your book because I’m not getting it all in order. I didn’t write it like you did, but I did take a lot of notes. And there’s some parts of it that I want to go deep on where people that are likely to pursue a big goal, that are listening to this podcast, we have a lot of entrepreneurs, we have self-employed, we have leaders, a lot of people that don’t have a problem having a long to-do list, they are going to tackle the world head-on every day. And that’s actually a challenge. It’s like, how do we stay on track?
So I’m not even sure where to start, but one of the things I remember and loved is you have some executive coaching clients, and you gave them a framework of like four questions. When someone brings a new opportunity that they should ask before they say, yes. So, the framework, I just, I’m going to read through these or at least my version of them. What is the total commitment? So, you’ve got an executive, you’ve got a leader, you’ve got a founder, they’ve been given some opportunity. This is not like picking out a Netflix show that night with their spouse. It’s an opportunity to pursue something. Why is that the first question and what does that mean?
Dorie Clark:
So, I think a lot of us make systematic errors and a big one is underestimating the amount of time that something will take that we have agreed to. You know, if I say, “Oh hey, Jay, I’m editing this new volume, and would you like to contribute an essay for it,” let’s say, you might say, “Oh, well that sounds exciting. Gosh, I want to be in this book. There’s cool people, who are I’m going to be alongside. That’s great.” And so, if you’re like a regular person, I do this all the time, you might say, “Gosh, write an article for it. Well, maybe that’ll take two hours, and great.”
So, meanwhile, what we forget about is, “Okay, well, I’m going to insist on a planning call with you. You’re going to write a draft. I’m going to review the draft. But, oh, it’s not quite right. Can you do a second version? Oh, I sent it to the publisher, but the publisher wants some more changes, Jay.” And all of a sudden, the thing that you agreed to is most likely going to probably take 20 hours, sometimes even a 5x, a 10x differential. And so, really understanding before we say yes, what is the total commitment, what is it going to look like realistically over time.
If you are still happy to do it knowing it’ll take 20 hours, then Godspeed. But if you look at that and say, “Oh, wow. I never would have agreed if it was a 20-hour commitment,” then let’s head it off at the pass.
Jay Papasan:
What’s funny is I can think of very few times my brain’s going back where I’ve invited someone to do something where they’ve asked that question back to me. It’s such a good strategic question. I would love to. Can you tell me more about what’s involved? Some version of that.
Dorie Clark:
That’s right.
Jay Papasan:
And what they’re looking for is that kind of answer. The second one is a big one for me. What is the opportunity cost? So did that show up organically or did you learn that one the hard way?
Dorie Clark:
I think I learned all of this the hard way.
Jay Papasan:
Okay.
Dorie Clark:
But it’s really true. I mean, for devotees of The ONE Thing, it’s a crucial question because when we’re agreeing to do something, you were saying earlier, our creativity isn’t finite, but guess what, our time is.
Jay Papasan:
Yes.
Dorie Clark:
And so, if we’re saying yes to this thing, let’s say, “Oh sure, Dorie, I’ll write that essay for you,” that is two hours or 20 hours that you’re not spending pursuing something that you’ve previously said was valuable to you. Maybe it’s writing your own book, maybe it’s spending time with your family, maybe at the beginning of the year you said, “You know what, I want to recommit to my health this year, so I’m going to be spending more time at the gym.” Something has to give. And so, the question is, is the new thing that’s coming on your plate valuable enough that you’re willing to displace previous commitments? What are you giving up?
Jay Papasan:
I love it. Opportunity costs. A lot of people don’t even know what that word means. But like you’re saying yes to something is automatically saying no to a lot of other things. And are you aware of what you’re saying no to? My coach always points out you’re going to disappoint people, just make sure you disappoint the right ones. You don’t want to disappoint your spouse, you don’t want to disappoint your kids, you don’t want to disappoint your friends and family, so make sure you’re disappointing the right people.
So, the first question illuminates the total cost. The second one tells you if I pay that cost, is there an extra one that I’m not aware of. And the next question you have is what is the physical or emotional cost? Where does that one come from?
Dorie Clark:
So, this is one that I experienced personally, and I tell the story in The Long Game. I had a friend reach out to me a few years ago, and she had what seemed like a great offer on the surface. She was part of a professional group, and they were having a conference in Grand Cayman, and they wanted to invite me to be the speaker. And I thought, “Oh, that’s amazing! I’ll get to spend-“
Jay Papasan:
I get to go to Grand Cayman, I get to get paid to go to Grand Cayman, I get to spend time with my friend, yeah.
Dorie Clark:
And spend time with my friend, yeah. What could be wrong with this picture? But there was something tugging at me, and I didn’t say yes right away because of that. And when I looked at my calendar, the first pass, I said, “Oh! Well, I’m free those dates. I can do it.” But I looked a little more closely and I realized I was traveling the week before and I was already traveling the week after.
And so, if I had said, yes, I could have done it, I could have physically managed it, but I would have been on the road for three weeks. I probably wouldn’t even have had the opportunity to come back to my house, even to figure out laundry, because I was going to be in such different geographical areas, and I just knew at the end of it, even if each individual activity was fun, I was going to be miserable because I would be worn out, ragged, my nail would have built up, I probably would have gotten myself sick. And I thought, “You know what, that’s just too much.” And so, thinking about the physical and emotional costs of what we’re saying yes to is a really important criterion that I added to the list.
Jay Papasan:
I remember when The ONE Thing came out, it was a year before, I had worked in publishing at HarperCollins for about six years, but I never got to go to Book Expo. And have you been to Book Expo? Do you know what that is?
Dorie Clark:
I did once, yeah.
Jay Papasan:
It was really cool. So, this is like a book lever stream. And I got invited. And I remember my initial response was going to be yes. My calendar was free that day when I looked at it on my phone, but I took a step back. So, we teach people to use a month-at-a-glance calendar. And it’s just something Gary said a long time ago, if you’re gonna achieve really big things, you need to have a bigger view of time.
And I looked, and what I didn’t see is that my son’s 13th birthday was gonna be the day after. So, I might have been able to go, and I might have been able to even come back in time to say, “Let’s do this party in the afternoon,” but I started going through the emotional and physical. Like you only get one 13th birthday with your kid. And like would I have been there really present? Would I have been tired? What if the flight got canceled? Like I just, I ended up turning that opportunity down.
So, I love that. Let’s go back. What’s the total commitment? What’s the opportunity cost? What’s the physical and emotional cost? And then you have a last one is, will I regret saying no a year from now.
Dorie Clark:
Yes. So, time is the ultimate lens. And there are some things that you might feel bad about, in the moment. You know, “Oh, you can’t make this coffee,” or “Oh, there’s a party,” or something like that. But I think you’ve given us an example that’s really critical, right? You get one 13th birthday. And that was something that was important enough for you that you wanted to be there for your son.
And there are a lot of things that you might feel a little FOMO tug. You know, “Oh, but everyone’s going to be there.” But you know that it’s just going to fade into the background and you’ll see him again, you’ll see him next week, you’ll see him next month, whatever. But if something really matters, if it’s a seminal life event or it’s a big chance to do something you’ve always wanted to do, those are the things that should move to the front of the line. The other things you can feel okay letting go.
Jay Papasan:
You gave a few techniques in the book. Can you share a couple of those for our listeners, so I can tell you again and again, the thing that stops people is they know what to do, they even put it on their calendar, but then something comes up that they don’t actually say no to when they could have, and it gets them off track.
Dorie Clark:
Yeah, that’s absolutely right. And the worst feeling is when you know that you should say no, you don’t do it, then you procrastinate and it becomes so late that it’s rude and then you feel like you need to say yes because otherwise you’d just be unspeakably rude; whereas, a quick no would have taken care of the problem altogether.
But you’re right, in some circumstances, it feels weird or bad to just outright say no. And so, I like to offer up a variety of different pathways to no, as it were. One of my favorites actually is a time delay mechanism, which is essentially – I mean, this sounds a little harsh, but I think it’s useful. It’s a test for people. It’s a test to see how serious they are, because the truth is sending an email to someone and asking for something, it’s so easy, it’s so low stakes and low cost for the person. They may be really sincere and earnest, but it’s also true. They may be doing this to a hundred people and they don’t even really care.
So, if someone were to email you and say hey Jay, will you do blah blah blah? Will you come on my podcast? Will you have a coffee with me? Whatever it is, I think that a very easy test is to write back and say to the person, “I would be glad to do it. I’m really slammed for the next,” you know, insert amount of time. You know, maybe it’s a month, maybe it’s two months, whatever it is. “Please email me back in two months. And when you do, I’d be glad to set it up.”
And it’s a really simple test. Two months later, are they still interested in having coffee with you? Or have they forgotten, have they moved on? And the people who actually get through that net, the ones that are serious enough and responsible enough to put it on their calendar, you know, “Follow up with Jay Papasan,” those are the ones that are worth knowing, because they have the planning skills and the perseverance to show that they’re really going somewhere.
Jay Papasan:
In my experience, a lot of times is, could you just circle back next week?
Dorie Clark:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
About half of the requests go away.
Dorie Clark:
Yeah, it doesn’t even have to be two months. It can be next week.
Jay Papasan:
It’s not a no, it’s a not now.
Dorie Clark:
That’s right.
Jay Papasan:
Because that feels a little easier mentally for me to say, “I want to say yes, but it’s not now, but yes later. So, can you circle back next week and we’ll try to set something up.” And a lot of times it just goes away.
One of the other ones, and if I butcher this, you just make it look cool and correct it. You made a commitment that you weren’t gonna meet with people just to meet with people. So you would just ask, can you really quickly tell me why you want to meet and why I, in particular, might be able to help you. I think I got that language. You wanted them to be specific about why they needed your time.
Dorie Clark:
Yeah, that’s right. Because for a long time, I would get inquiries, and I think probably all of your listeners get some variation of this, where people don’t provide a lot of context. They’ll just say, “Hey, Jay, can we have a call next week?” And I used to think that there was a reason that they were not saying it. That maybe it was like some sensitive topic or some really important topic and they couldn’t tell me what it was. And so, I’d say, “Oh, okay. That must be important, so I’ll do it.” But their version of must be important and yours may be radically different.
And so, I’ve made a vow to myself that I will never agree to meet with someone without understanding what it’s about because too often, I’ve gotten on the call or had the meeting and have been burned because I’ve discovered that the person either wants something totally inappropriate. You know, “Oh, hey. Will you invest in my film project?” You know, some totally random thing.
Jay Papasan:
Will you go strike my book for me?
Dorie Clark:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
Right.
Dorie Clark:
Or they sometimes have a very mistaken understanding of what you do or what you can help them with. You know, they’ll have a whole meeting and it’ll end up with, “Jay, can you introduce me to your literary agent?” or something that either you can’t do or it wouldn’t be appropriate to do. And if they had only told you what it was, you could have warded it off with an email, you could have solved it with an email, or you could have referred them to someone else and said, “You know, actually, that’s not really what I do, but you might wanna talk to this other type of person or you might want to look into this resource.” So, I just don’t want to live in a world where I’m allowing other people to waste my time anymore and asking a few simple questions up front enables us to do that.
Jay Papasan:
If you’re wanting guidance on how to get better at saying no look at your rejections from people that are achieving more than you are currently because I find that the people who have built strong gatekeepers around their time and strong systems, that’s like three or two of the four or five ways you tell people to say no. You’ve clearly had some practice at doing this at a high level, and you’ve established rules for yourself for what you’ll say yes to. Like, look to the people that are achieving at a high level, and a lot of them will point the way, because if they’re achieving at that level, they’ve learned how to say no. That’s in my experience. They’re not saying yes to everything anymore.
Dorie Clark:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. In fact, an early inspiration for me was I asked something, I don’t even remember what it was, but I reached out to Dan Pink, the author, and I said, “Hey, Dan. Would you blah, blah, blah?” And he sent back this rejection, but it was the most gracious, nice, thoughtful rejection. I’m like, “Oh, that is good, I’m gonna copy that, man.”
Jay Papasan:
You wrote down, I’m trying to remember the section of the book, like you would only meet with people when it actually mattered to you. You would only meet with people when it was convenient. Like, you’re not gonna go way out of your way. And only when it worked for your time schedule. Like you had three rules for saying yes on top of everything else.
And it made me think of, I remember when I started meeting with people, and I’ve told the story. Like, I would meet with one stranger every Wednesday. And as an introvert, like it wasn’t a dinner party that you did in New York, but it was my meetings with a stranger. And I asked Noah Kagan. And most of the people, if I asked them to meet for coffee, it was either a yes or a no, nothing. But he was the first one, it’s like, “Noah says he can meet,” it was his assistant, “but he won’t meet at your place, you have to come to his place. And it won’t be on a Wednesday, it’ll be on a Tuesday.” And I was like, “He’s got a system for this. He will say yes to strangers, but only on a Tuesday and only at his coffee shop.” So I went to his coffee shop that time.
Dorie Clark:
Nice.
Jay Papasan:
But it’s like he was already playing at a really high level. He’s got a huge business. I’m sure there’s a million people asking for his time. So he had strategically figured out how to say yes in a way that he wasn’t saying no to himself or his people.
Dorie Clark:
I think that’s so great because it did give people who are highly motivated an opportunity.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah. Well, that’s you in the two months because you’re placing a delay or a barrier. If you do this, I will do that. And it’s just a simple test. And the people who are not serious, it’s amazing the number of people who won’t circle back.
I actually have, like, two more pages of notes I wanna ask you about. Like, I wanna talk about the waves and there’s so many little parts. So, all I’ll say is I got a lot out of your book. As a student of The ONE Thing, as a co-author of The ONE Thing, I found a lot of resonance. And that’s been my experience. People who are achieving at an extraordinary level – and that includes you, Dorie – there’s patterns that show up. And they are clear about where they’re going. They know how to say no. And they also have this compassion for how to reach out and connect with people. So, thank you for your time today and thank you for pouring into our people.
Dorie Clark:
Jay, thank you so much. I’m a fan of your work and I love this energy and it’s such a pleasure to talk with you.
Jay Papasan:
Well that’s a wrap on my conversation with Dorie Clark. Now, our challenge for you this week. I asked Dorie after we taped, I said, what do you want their challenge to be? And she said, I would love it if they would find just one new thing to say no to this week. Kind of hits on the theme, right? We have to say no in order to say yes. So your challenge for the week, find one new thing that you can say no to so that you can stay focused on your one thing.
Now, next week I’m gonna do a solo episode in honor of it being February and Valentine’s Day. We’re gonna talk about how to have a relationship with your goals. It’s one of the secrets to what we do here at The ONE Thing. I can’t wait to share it with you.
