Welcome back to Season 4 of the [B]OLDER podcast!

Today, Debbie Weil brings author, entrepreneur, and renowned business thinker Dorie Clark on the show, a perfect way to kick off Season 4.

Dorie is a 42-year-old business consultant whose life and work resonate strongly with Debbie.  She was a Philosophy major in college, graduated from Harvard Divinity school, worked as a journalist (something Debbie did for two decades) and was a presidential campaign spokesperson. 

Then, in a very intentional way, over a period of eleven years, she became a highly respected business author and speaker. Dorie is on the Thinkers50 list, the top 50 business thinkers in the world, and has just written her fourth book: THE LONG GAME: HOW TO BE A LONG-TERM THINKER IN A SHORT-TERM WORLD. She now teaches at Duke and Columbia’s business schools and consults with clients like Google and Microsoft and the World Bank.

But – and this is the part that applies to midlife reinvention – it took repeated rejection along the way for her to get to where she is today. She tells us those stories and more in THE LONG GAME. Her new book is aimed at a mid-career business audience but Debbie was struck over and over, as she read it, how Dorie’s approach applies to life and work after 60 or 65 or 70.

Dorie is also a documentary filmmaker, a Broadway investor, and a trained musical theatre lyricist and composer.

She writes in THE LONG GAME about creating white space in your calendar, meaning give yourself unstructured time to think “differently” and to explore and experiment. She also talks about optimizing for meaning (instead of for money, usually the default) and optimizing for interesting: follow your curiosity even if you don’t know exactly where that will take you. 

Wow, she could be writing a script for a grown-up gap year and for optimizing a post-career, non-retired chapter of life – the focus of this podcast.

Needless to say, Dorie is also a huge proponent of trying new things even if they are way outside your current area of expertise.

This is a great conversation full of useful nuggets about how to think long-term and why that matters.

Mentioned in this episode or useful:

• Dorie’s bio
• The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World by Dorie Clark (‎ Harvard Business Review Press 2021)
• The Long Game Self-Assessment
• Thinkers50
• Dorie’s other books: Entrepreneurial You, Reinventing You, and Stand Out
• Dorie’s most popular course: Recognized Expert
• Marshall Goldsmith and his books
• Sam Horn’s Year by the Water

Note from Debbie

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– Debbie

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