Dorie is a master of habits, how to create them, start them, teach others to do them. She shares how it’s done methodically and effectively. So this conversation is more about personal leadership than environmental stuff but environmental action needs more personal leadership, needs more leadership. That’s what I’m doing this podcast for. Dorie would not be satisfied with doing something partway. Over six months before this conversation when she committed to this challenge I was nudging her to make it less than six months and she said, “No way. I want to do it full six months.” We met at the cafe that she talked about. So you’ll hear the street noise. We’re just sitting there on the street in New York City. She’s incredibly open, sharing about herself and it begins for all aspiring leaders and entrepreneurs with how successful leaders and entrepreneurs talk about entrepreneurial projects, with [unintelligible] project. Anyway, let’s listen to Dorie.

***

Joshua: Welcome to the Leadership and the Environment podcast. This is Joshua Spodek. I am here with Dorie Clark. Dorie, how are you?

Dorie: I’m great, Josh. This is a beautiful sunny day in New York and we’re sitting outside enjoying the elements so we’re soaking in the environment in a very literal sense right now.

Joshua: Literally. Yeah, exactly. We are as mentioned last time which is now six months ago, more than six months ago so you’ve taken on one of the biggest most longstanding challenges of anyone on the podcast. And just to give a little more context let’s just name it. We are at Bluestone Lane coffee on 50 Water Street, down by Wall Street. And if it sounds like there’s a lot of street noise that’s because there is a lot of street noise.

Dorie: We are literally sitting on the sidewalk.

Joshua: Yeah, we are on the sidewalk and there’s cars, what is that, ten feet away, 15 feet away. And then to my left you behind you is the Bluestone Lane so you might hear a little bit of music because they’re playing some music kind of loud, a bus just went by. Hopefully everyone can hear us and it’s not so horrible. I’m kind of leaning forward a little bit into the microphone. And let’s see. So I want to talk to you about the challenge because we’re now six months in and that’s one of the longest challenges. This podcast has been around barely for six months and a lot of people when they take on challenges they stick with it a week or two, New Year’s resolutions happen on January 1 or December 31 and then when do they usually disappear? Like Valentine’s Day.

Dorie: Yes.

Joshua: And so I want to hear about that but also last time you were deep in book stuff. Are you still deep in book stuff? Or has the launch… Is it continuing? Do you mind sharing?

Dorie: Yeah. I mean there is always a long tail. So in some ways you never fully extricate from book launch stuff but the very intense part usually lasts for about three to six months. So I am now officially out of intense book stuff and I just bought a condo so I’m now an intense condo stuff.

Joshua: Oh my God. I was about to say to the viewers who can’t see there’s like a sparkle in her eye and a smile on her face of the release from the book’s stuff. But then I’ve lived in my place 20 years partly because I never want to move again.

Dorie: That’s amazing. Twenty years. Good plan.

Joshua: Yes. Well, like I don’t want to move. How’s that going for you?

Dorie: Well, I am hoping similarly to achieve the same longevity that you have. I am getting a little bit of work done on my place before I move in. I am getting it painted, I’m getting the floors redone and so I want to get it nice so that when I move in I don’t have to move for 10 or 20 years because I’ve officially discovered what would be the worst second career for me ever. And that would be to be an interior designer because I hate it. It’s so incredibly stressful. I understand a lot of people do it recreationally but I think it’s just a nightmare.

Joshua: Yeah. Now I’m applauding because I don’t want to go into…I had a friend who was an architect to redesign my place and then disappeared in the middle.

Dorie: Oh, no.

Joshua: And so I had to switch the contractors, it was like horrible. So actually, one of the places on my blog I wrote a page like I think there’s demand for someone in between people who want contracting done and contractors to manage the contract and speak to you English. And who’s motivated not by getting paid the contractor, there’s always this like you’re halfway through and now you’re stuck and suddenly they jack up the price. And I want someone who can keep that down and I get e-mails every now and then, “It seems like that’s a great idea. Are you doing it?” And I am like, “Someone should do it.”

Dorie: I know we do. We do need the right the right person for that. I think that that would be… The other big problem that I think needs to be solved and I take this out to the universe, I’m hoping that someone will be smart enough to solve it is that I’ve been going through a lot of Broadway shows lately and I am mortified and appalled every single time that in a hundred plus years they have not figured out how to solve the problem that immediately before the show or during intermission there are maybe a thousand people that want to use the bathroom and I don’t know what exactly what the situation is because it’s not like you can have a thousand bathrooms. But nonetheless, the idea of having these massive like 30-minute long waits is completely impractical. I think Uber and Tesla need to get on that shit. We need America’s greatest minds figuring out how to solve the bathroom crisis at sporting events, at Broadway shows and that person is going to be a godzillionaire.

Joshua: Ladies and gentlemen, this is when people write leadership books and entrepreneurship books, this is what they talk about and conversations like this lead to solutions. And what makes it happen… What’s the difference between people who just talk this way and people who actually make things happen. Any ideas?

Dorie: I think that the part that can make it happen, I don’t have enough depth of industry expertise to be able to do anything with this other than identify the problem although identifying the problem is useful starting point. But if we had either here in person or listening to this podcast potentially someone who works for the Shubert Theatre, the Nederlander theatre, Jujamcyn which are the three big theater owners in Broadway or stadiums, if there was somebody who ran that, who owned that, they would be a good stakeholder. And the other person would probably need to be you know for the sake of innovation it would need to be some kind of like. You know a systems engineer or something like maybe somebody, we can’t predict who it will be but somebody who has solved the problem in a related field. And you know what… I mean how do you strip the problem back to its barest essence which is demand management. There are certain things that everybody wants at the same time and no one wants them afterwards. No one wants the bathroom when the Broadway show is running. They want the bathroom before and during intermission. So if there is a parallel industry that has huge spikes of demand and then a recession of demand maybe it’s accountants, taxpayers…

Joshua: Flowers, and Mother’s Day, and Valentine’s Day.

Dorie: Yes, exactly. However, they solve that problem. I bet that there’s someone listening that could they could see the parallel and be able to team up and do it.

Joshua: I think having conversations like this is a big piece of it and then a big piece of success I think is a lot of people might take the step of making a couple of calls and the people who succeed are the ones who keep going and don’t stop. Everyone thought about it a little bit because you’re standing in line waiting for the bathroom. And then but no one does… And maybe some people will make a call or two but keeping at it, keeping at it, keeping at it, at some point you become the expert. There is no expert, there is no school where you go to find out how do we solve the bathroom situation so you figure it out you are the expert and beyond everybody else. So I’m glad we have this because we’re talking about Entrepreneurial You. And this is how entrepreneurs talk and act. The movies don’t always represent it.

Dorie: That’s right. We’re modeling it right now. This is how entrepreneurs act. One, really funny coffee I had a while back in San Francisco showed me a slice of how entrepreneurs in San Francisco act which is that I went to visit a friend and there was a guy who was just like kind of randomly hanging out at his house. And I didn’t know this other guy. And when I asked him, “So you know what are you up to? What are you interested in?” his answer, of course, this being San Francisco was radical life extension then he went on and he just rattle off like half an hour soliloquy about biomedical advances and about how people don’t really need to die. And of course, he’s not a doctor, he’s not a researcher, he’s a radical life extension hobbyist. And I think that’s sort of the San Francisco flavor of this.

Joshua: Yeah. I feel like he’s going to go to Burning Man.

Dorie: Oh, a hundred percent.

Joshua: So let’s talk your challenge. What was the challenge? What did you do over the past six months? From following from our last podcast.

Dorie: Yes. So the challenge that I set myself, the reason, Josh, that we are at Bluestone Lane of course is that my challenge was related to Bluestone Lane. This is a coffee shop near where I live which I like a lot. I come to it reasonably frequently and there is a favorite lunch that I would get, sometimes breakfast, depends how ambitious you are, and it is avocado toast and I would get it with cherry tomatoes and feta. It was delicious and something that I’d probably get a couple of times a week. One of the things that I realized would be good for me was to try to eat more vegan. I was not interested in being fully vegan because I feel like it’s hard to maintain. A key for me in coming up with goals is something that I feel like it’s plausible to maintain over the long term because you were talking about how to avoid slippage or recidivism or something like that. And so, I wanted something that felt manageable so if I said, “Okay, well you know I’m just going to go completely vegan,” I wasn’t sure that I could really stick with it. But what I realized I could do is to take certain things that I ate a lot and then make those things vegan.

So I had done this previously with a dish that I had at Chipotle which I started having just as a vegan dish and I decided I’m going to do it here too. And so steadily I’m going to just sort of chip away, chip away until I have a pretty darn vegan diet. And so that is what I’ve been up to. I just I stopped cold turkey not once since we made the pledge. Have I had the avocado toast with feta, here at Bluestone Lane, I just cut it out. I get the avocado and the cherry tomato. It is satisfying. I like feta but I can live without feta and I can just feel the virtue coursing through my veins so I have been able to keep it up over these last six months.

Joshua: So how often have you been here? Has it been a couple of times, two or three times a week?

Dorie: Yeah. I would say probably if you average that, because I travel lot, maybe once a week. But yes, I come here regularly.

Joshua: I want to ask about the action but you talked about… At the beginning you said something that would be good for you and you talked about virtue. So while I am trying to lead people through their values, not anyone else’s, so that tells me that there’s something before I ever talked to you, before this podcast you had it in mind, you had a value that you were attaching this to. What was the value that you’re acting on?

Dorie: Well, I think there’s a couple of things, of course. So I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 13. And for me the reason is that I really love animals and so I wanted to try to reflect that with my day-to-day action. I never was vegan. I grew up in North Carolina and it was in a small town, it was enough of a struggle to be vegetarian. As a teenager, of course, I was kind of convincing my mom because she was sort of the you know the master of the kitchen. But even just finding options, things to eat. I mean in New York City it’s not really hard but in a lot of places especially if you travel it is rather hard. But I respect people that do it because of course there are better ways of getting milk or eggs or cheese or things like that. There are better ways and worse ways but in general you know they are doing things that if you look at them a little too hard, we’re not that nice. It’s like, “Oh, we want milk. Let’s just keep these cows pregnant all the time.” I mean you know it’s basically like, “Hey, let’s make you a cow slave.” And I realized if I interrogate my values I don’t think that that’s great.

And so I definitely have felt strong enough to say OK I’m not going to eat meat but I figure that the more that I can do in the direction I’m just not being involved with animals at all in terms of eating…

Joshua: Eating them or eating parts of them.

Dorie: Yes. I think that that would be better and would feel better for me.

Joshua: So would you feel differently if we didn’t live in an industrial age and everything was a family farm and it was hen milked, would you feel differently? I’m just curious to hear.

Dorie: Yeah, I would certainly feel better about it in terms of the dairy products and things like that. In terms of actually eating meat and things like that I’m a very big animal person and you know this is sort of a philosophical thing but I actually really don’t accept that my life as a human is worth more than an animal’s. I think there’s a lot of people probably most people would be like wow you know yeah I don’t like pouring Clorox in the Bunny’s eyes just to fuck with the bunny. But you know if we’re if we’re doing something with a bunny or the chimpanzee or whatever to advance medical research, if we’re testing a drug that could save human lives, then it’s worthwhile. I understand most people think that. I actually don’t. I am a little bit of an absolutist in that because I’m just not sure that I’m more worth it than other at least mammalian creatures are.

Joshua: There’s plenty of cases where people are forbidden or restricted from doing something, they find another way to do it. I am not saying they can find it in every case but in many cases, people find another ways of testing things. I’ve been a vegetarian myself since 1999, so…

Ok, so first of all, you had something that, how do I put it, this tapped into something that was already there. Partly, I am glad to bring that up because I think most people that I talk to have something that they’ve wanted to do and given the impetus to do it and not feel like it’s just spitting in the wind, they’ll do it. And so I hope people listening maybe they’ll think of something whether they’re vegetarian or not they might have something else that they could think of doing that they could do less of or more of or change. So it happens that generally getting animal stuff is affecting the environment more than eating plants. So what happened to tap in? Was that easy ump for you? Was that link obvious or simple? I mean to do something for animal rights isn’t necessarily just something environmental. How’s that jumped for you? Was that connection obvious and simple? It is to me but it might not be to everyone.

Dorie: Yeah. I think so. I mean certainly from a beef perspective you hear about oh, my gosh, you know it’s like you know the biggest contributor to greenhouse gases and global warming is just the methane from the beef industry and you know the dairy industry I’m sure is kind of hand in glove with that because cows emit a lot of methane. So yeah, they seem pretty tightly bound to me.

Joshua: All right. You talked about what you did and I believe I saw some happiness. Not once did you want cold turkey and not once did you relapse. And I want to ask about the emotional side of things. How did it feel? How would you describe…. I mean I think I picked up from your tone of voice but what was… How did you feel? What was the experience?

Dorie: Yeah. I would say it felt good. I mean I think something that we talked about in our first interview was the commitment and the consistency principle that Robert Cialdini talks about. And so I would have been kind of embarrassed with myself if I had suddenly been like, “Oh, today I really feel like putting feta cheese on my avocado toast.” I mean it’s a minor thing. You know it’s not like it’s the hugest transgression in the world. But if you have made a commitment not to do something and then you do it, presumably it needs to be for a pretty good reason. And I just couldn’t ever find a good enough reason. I mean the reason would have been like, “Oh, I feel like it” and that seemed a little lame to me. So I figure you know it can be so trying sometimes to find things that…You know we all have big goals and it can be a long process and a difficult process to achieve them. And so if you have something that you can… There’s a small thing that you can say, “All right. I’m going to do this. I’m not going to do this” and you can just stick to it and it’s clean, that’s actually a nice thing. It’s kind of a kind of a win.

Joshua: I think a lot of people here would think, “Yeah, that’s what you do. Start small and build. It won’t be just about me.” At the moment they make the pledge, the commitment they are like, “Nothing will stop me.” And then later they’re like, “I deserve it.” And “nothing will stop me” goes away. But you didn’t have that happen. What’s the difference?

Dorie: Well, I think it’s about choosing your goal well. Because if you choose something that’s going to make you feel deprived, then almost inevitably there’s going to be a backlash. And so I think that if you can choose strategically either something small enough that you feel you have other pleasures to turn to or something where it might be abstemious for a while but there’s kind of outlet valves, then I think that can work well.

And I’ll give you another example. This is not an environmental pledge but it’s kind of related principle. So my girlfriend had been expressing to me recently that she wanted to get a little bit more fit. And she decided a couple of times and you know it didn’t necessarily seem to have a clear plan articulated for that. Because I had heard her a few times talked about this this kind of [unintelligible] desire, I thought, “All right. Well, is there something we can do?” And so I made a suggestion to her that I would do along with her in order to kind of you know be accountability buddies. And so we decided that we would limit ourselves to one alcoholic drink and one dessert per week. And that was it. And you know we can be flexible about what day it was. You know if it was like oh, we’re going out with friends on Friday, then we’ll do that. We can separate them out. You know maybe it could be Tuesday we have the dessert and Friday we have the drink but we have one of each. That’s it. And you have your number, your checkbox and when you’re done with that week, you’re done with that week. What I like about this and you know we’re newly into it, we’re on like I think week two of it but so far it seems to be pretty good is that you’re not saying, “Oh, you can never do this” but you’re providing choice about when and where to exercise it. And there’s enough of an outlet so that if you really want something, you can do it. But it feels very manageable and so, so far it’s been fine for me.

Joshua: So I’m hearing that one, you made a game of it, you involved other people in it. Because my experience when people talk to me about fitness it’s really hard to talk, depending on the person, it can be really hard to talk to people about fitness even if they ask for help. And so you found a way of making it work. I presume you’ve been with her for a while so you know each other pretty well. You know what to talk about and how to bring things up. She brought it up.

Dorie: I mean she brought it up just in terms of sort of saying like this would be good to do like you know that she wanted to get more fit. Yeah, I suggested the format for a possibility of how to do it.

Joshua: By any chance to do with your experience with this podcast bring to bear that working out?

Dorie: Not consciously but probably subconsciously.

Joshua: I feel like you’re drawing on past experiences of having done this before of other times. You didn’t just start it here, I think. I’m going to tell you a story because you made me think of something. I talk a lot on this podcast about how a lot of it began it was when I decided to try to avoid packaged food. Now you reminded me that for years before that I remember my cupboard always had chips or pretzels, and in particular Snyder’s of Hanover the broken bits with the flavors on top and it was like you couldn’t eat it your fingers, your fingers were completely crusted with the salty flavors stuff. And I always had it there and I made it rule for myself if I bought a big bag of chips or a big bag of pretzels I had to take at least three days to do it. And I talked just like you that was like, “What’s a day?” Like if I’d usually eat half of the bag on one day, the next day I have like half of what is left or maybe like three quarters of what was left and the last day sometimes I’d have like one chip the last day. And you are laughing, I’m laughing because you play little games with yourself. And so I could technically eat like almost midnight one day then the next day’s 24 hours and then just after midnight the next day and that’s three days but it’s really 24 hours plus like five minutes. Or I can alternatively…I play these little games but it’s fun. And people say, “Josh, you’re really, really nerdy about this.” I was like, “Yeah, I am. But it’s fun.” I think there’s many ways to be fun about it. And I hear the same kind of, no offense, nerdiness and geekiness in you in how you’re doing it. You work out these little things that sound weird but they’re kind of fun. And it works. You’re reminding me of that story. Does that ring true to you?

Dorie: Yeah. I think that’s great. Yeah, just sort of you know setting out a framework and pacing for yourself. I mean another related thing which you know I know I got years ago from whatever books I was reading about you know motivation and willpower and things like that probably Dan Ariely thing or whatever was about the best way, maybe possibly the only way but although I like yours of eating half a bag of chips when you say, “Oh, I’m going to eat half a bag of chips” but no one ever does it. But the way to guarantee you eat half a bag of chips is to take a moment where you have the most willpower which is before you start eating, you take half the bag and you throw it in the trash. You literally just shake it out and put it in the trash so that you would not ever touch it. And then you have half a bag left and then you can eat that.

Joshua: So now you’re buying extra chips. Yeah. So that works.

Dorie: Yes.

***

Joshua: Another big challenge for a lot of people is relationships. I don’t know if you come here on your own to Bluestone or if you come with other people but sometimes when you’re with other people that makes it a challenge. Actually, you picked something worth that you’re fairly in control of this environment and when you are not here it’s not an issue. Was it an issue for you?

Dorie: It was not. I primarily come here by myself to grab lunch or do a little bit of working on my laptop. I actually just before you came I ran into somebody that I knew. But mostly I’m coming here by myself. But, yeah when it comes to sort of peer pressure or whatever what I have found to be more effective is just being very clear on, “I do not X.” If you say to yourself, “Well, I sometimes X and sometimes don’t,” then it’s this constant sort of isolation about, “Well, is this one of the times when I do X or is it not?” And then you’re kind of back and forth and you’re like, “Oh, well it would be nice, it will be fun. Well, OK well, maybe this time I’ll do X.” But you’ve got to draw the boundaries so that you don’t have to expend the cognitive energy on it.

Joshua: To me the mental freedom is… That makes it so much easier that the…. For fitness the calories burned is tiny effort. It’s maybe a lot of calories but compared to the mental effort of, “Am I going to do this or not?” much easy to say for me, maybe for others it’s different, just like, “Yes or no. OK, how am I going to do this? I’m going to do this.? And then yeah you got to do it. But you don’t have to wonder, “Am I going to do it or not” because I do my exercises every day and stuff like that.

I mean you had a bigger goal of… I feel like there is a long-term goal of full vegan for the rest of your life. I’m not sure.

Dorie: We’ll see how plausible that is. I feel like society is getting better and better like I’ve become a raw fan. I love the Beyond Burger, I love the Impossible Burgers. You know they’re creating really super good meat substitutes and I just I think that in order for me as somebody who travels a lot and you know is just on the road a lot to able to really be quote unquote successful again. I think that more of the rest of the country needs to offer viable vegan alternatives besides like an iceberg or lettuce salad. But I think that you know with the right structure in place which means I either have a private chef like Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi or I’m spending all my time in urban areas or the rest of America gets a little more up with it, then yes, I think that would be a good goal. At present, I don’t think it’s necessarily feasible for my lifestyle. But I think if one of those three conditions can be met, then yes.

Joshua: First, I have to mention Pat Brown, I’ve just interviewed him. He’s the inventor of the Impossible burger. And before I had him on, I thought the Impossible burger… Like I don’t want meat and I thought there’s plenty of veggie burgers out there and I had one at Umami Burger because they sent me there. They were like, “Go check it out.” OK. So I had that and I thought OK this is good but I’m not trying to get meat and his… Here’s a very interesting take. His goal is not to make necessarily the best tasting veggie burger for people who don’t eat meat. He wants to make meat without going through an animal. It’s a very to me a mind-blowing concept. He wants to make meat. What does a cow do? It takes plants and water and stuff and turns it into meat. But that’s just chemical, physical, biological, reactions so I think that’s awesome. I know it’s not my strategy because I’m not his market. I don’t want a beef-like thing. But as you say, that’s a big challenge. We’re not going to change a lot of people. They don’t care if it tastes better. They want beef. So he’s making that. If you ever want to get in touch with him I’ll put you in touch.

Dorie: That’s great, yeah.

Joshua: Are you thinking about… Is this expanding to other areas past Bluestone?

Dorie: So. I’m thinking about possibilities. I’m a big fan… You could probably pick up on that, about you know sort of measured goals. I try to not overbook myself with goals so to speak. And so for me what that means is just really pacing myself. I am a very big believer in the adage that people typically get a lot less done than they imagine it in a day where they get a lot more done in year. And it’s hard for people to sort of feel like things are adding up but then you look back on your previous year and it’s like oh, my god, that was a lot of things all together. And so if you’re very steady and very measured in what you do you can actually really take big transformative actions. You can write a book. You can know whatever by the condo or whatever it is. And so I have a few things that are kind of my personal improvement goals that are coming up which I’m trying not to take on too much more than that because I want to do them properly. I would see that for the next month or so and it’s been the case for the past month is stuff related to my condo, getting it fixed up moving in et cetera, et cetera just kind of getting my place set which is a big deal.

After that some other things that I’m interested in doing more of which one in particular I did a workshop back in March by a woman [unintelligible]. So it was like Design the Life You Love. And one of the things you know it’s just sort of a good few hours sort of think about things you want to do. And one of the things that came to me from it was that I really miss playing squash which I used to play. And it’s not super convenient for me to play squash. But I had this realization that I would just even if it is not convenient, I’m going to do it anyway. I’m going to make the time for squash. And so I have reached out to a guy about setting up lessons. And so once I finished moving into my apartment and get that all set later this summer I’m going to start taking weekly squash lessons and that is going to be part of what I’m doing. So I’m just I’m sort of adding things in incrementally about turning myself into the Dorie that I want to be.

Joshua: This echoes a lot of… I also just interviewed David Allen who is really big on small consistent things that you do and they really add up. And they add more than anything. And I think a lot of people out there are… It always makes me think of the person who’s the alcoholic and like it’s all the alcohol and he pours it all out and he is like never again. And then they are back on. On or off the wagon, I don’t know which is which. And I keep talking to people who are successful effective leaders, people who change your lives and they’re all it seems like it’s pretty consistent, like small little things that they keep up with that they can do. And they think of “What can I do?”, “What won’t I be able to do?” I think also that at some point the thing that you’re trying to do becomes background like it becomes like some people out there are trying to be vegetarian. You are not trying to be vegetarian. You’re just vegetarian. But I don’t know if at some point it was…. Maybe for you it wasn’t hard at the beginning because you just couldn’t fathom eating meat I would guess?

Dorie: No, no. I mean I loved eating meat. I thought was super delicious. But I think it was the part it was not hard for me was when I was 13 and I was just filled with sort of like you know teenage rage and rebellion. And so I’m just like, “I’m doing this!” and that you know teenage rage and rebellion get you through almost anything.

Joshua: And it stuck?

Dorie: Yeah.

Joshua: So it’s interesting. It’s bringing motivations from other places sometimes will get you going… Something that really motivates in one area, if you can apply that to a different area, it can work. By the way, do you ever think of sharing… You know all these bestselling authors and people who are out there do the TED talks and they always have these prepared stories and edited stuff and you’re sharing your life. Not accessible to everyone always. So thank you and it’s off the…This is unprepared.

Dorie: Thank you, Josh.

Joshua: You’ve had six months of preparation I guess but six months of not falling off or on. So I want to wrap up. I usually wrap up with two questions. One is, is there anything I didn’t think to ask that’s worth bringing up and the other’s any message direct to the listeners that you want to pass on? Pick which one first if you want one or the other.

Dorie: Yeah, fantastic. Well, in terms of things to bring up and I just want to say I think it’s so cool you’re doing this. You’re really an exemplar of the message. So keep rocking it, my man. And I think to your points about the small you know kind of steady things, I do a lot of executive coaching and I hear this all the time from my clients. You know, they will just hop on the call and be like, “OK, what next? You know what’s the new assignment this week? What’s the new thing? What’s the new challenge we’re going to surmount?” And what I often find myself in a position of having to do is be like, “Guys, like no new challenge. We just keep doing the challenge you’re working on.” And it seems so boring sometimes because you know there’s a human tendency where it’s like you want the sexy thing. It’s like, “Oh, what are we trying? Let’s try for this.” But I would say that you really only need to make big strategic choices I don’t know every quarter, maximum every six months maybe that’s about how often I do it. You make a six-month plan and then the trick is you just fricking stick to it. You just do it. You just do the work and you don’t question it unless there is some piece of jarring counter evidence that comes to you. You just keep doing the damn things. And that is how you make progress. And I think it’s like that for business, for life, for almost everything.

Joshua: I’m connecting with what you’re saying now that what you said on a week scale you don’t get a whole lot of done. I think you have the expectation. Not only are you sticking with something but after a year you’ll look back and say, “Wow, that was a lot.” If you stick with it. Did I combine this effectively?

Dorie: Yes, very much so.

Joshua: All right so I’m going to wrap up with that. I hope people listening learn from Dorie’s practice. And if there’s something environmental or leadership that you want to bring to the audience, you are always welcome back. And before we wrap up you have a book that’s out. People can reach you, you coach. How can people find you?

Dorie: Yeah. Thank you, Josh. The new book is Entrepreneurial You and if folks want to dive into the [unintelligible], I have more than 500 free articles available on my website. It’s dorieclark.com. D-O-R-I-E-C-L-A-R-K.com

***

Some guests you can tell they’re always conscious of the microphone. Dorie felt like she just shared. Most of us are so genuine with friends and family. I think we all wish we kept that genuineness and authenticity in public. She’s clearly figured out how to lead one’s self as well as lead others. But the personal leadership really comes out to me in this conversation I can see why people who read her books love her books because she tells people how to be like her, that genuine and that authentic. So I really appreciate Dorie for sharing her life. She’s a best-selling author, she’s a [unintelligible] coach, she’s a professor, she’s a public speaker. But when you meet her in person she’s just a regular down-to-earth person. I think that takes skill and practice we can all learn from.

• ← 066: “And that is how you make progress”; Dorie Clark, part 2
• Fitness is about the mind, intelligence is about the body →