The Long Game

How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World

By: Dorie Clark

Narrated by: Dorie Clark

Your personal goals need a long-term strategy.

It's no secret that we're pushed to the limit. Today's professionals feel rushed, overwhelmed, and perennially behind. How can we break out of the cycle and create the kind of interesting, meaningful lives that we all seek? Just as CEOs who optimize for quarterly profits often fail to make the strategic investments necessary for long-term growth, the same is true in our own personal and professional lives. As top business thinker and Duke University professor Dorie Clark explains, we all know intellectually that lasting success takes persistence and effort. And yet, so much of the relentless pressure in our culture pushes us toward doing what's easy, what's guaranteed, and what looks glamorous in the moment.

In The Long Game, she argues for a different path. It's about doing small things over time to achieve your goals - and being willing to keep at them, even when they seem pointless, boring, or hard. In The Long Game, Clark shares unique principles and frameworks, as well as her own instructive experiences, to show how you can tap the same 24 hours everyone has - but leverage them in more efficient and powerful ways to break out of the frenetic day-to-day routine and transform your life and career.

©2021 Dorie Clark (P)2021 Ascent Audio

Great reinforcer

I really appreciated Dorie’s candid stories of how playing the long game pays off. Sometimes it is hard to believe it when you are in it, but this book is a great reinforcer of the strategy. Thank you!

Entertaining, but limited usefulness

This book was interesting and entertaining, but I didn't feel like I got a lot of practical, useful direction from it. Don't get me wrong, there are a few good ideas, and lots of inspiring and interesting stories, but the practical aspect was very much limited towards people who want to follow the author's footsteps as a content creator.

If your goal is to become a blogger, video creator, author, speaker, or similar type thing, then this book is aimed directly at you. For anyone else, you'll likely find more entertainment and possible inspiration than actual useful advice.

On the positive side, the author's background in public speaking shows through in their performance, and they did a proficient job there. For anyone interested in content creation of some sort, this book could be very useful.

Overall, it's a quick read/listen, and there's nothing necessarily bad here; however, it's hard to recommend it over other books covering similar territory that I think are more thorough, useful, and generally better done. As an example, I would recommend something like Atomic Habits by James, Clear to most people before I would recommend this.

Pareto principle

First of all very easy listen. Practical simple ideas that can be instantly put to application. He didn’t directly reference the Pareto principle, but there was a chapter in which Dorie talked about asking yourself questions. One of Dories questions referred to what are the 20% of the things we do that yield 80% of the results. Dorie is one of many authors who cover this principle in one way or another whether mentioned casually or whole chapters written about it. This was the biggest take away from the book for me. I used the principle in my own life when I first heard about it in college and it carried me all the way to my teaching career. Somewhere along the way, I got away from that. Thank you for reminding me how to get back in the long game!

Totally Awesome Book …Dorie Clark rocks!

Doris Clark is so real and informative in her book. I have all her audiobooks and I love learning from her. She really does help people stand out if they follow her guidance.

Wonderful read. Great tips!

I’ve always enjoyed Dorie’s content via LinkedIn Learning. I’ve watched a few videos on strategy and when I saw this book I had to read it. I’m glad I did! As someone who struggles with personal long term planning and goal getting, the teachings in this book came right on time! Can’t wait to read more.