How to play the long game (even if you feel like you can barely make it to Friday)

We all know the exercise. You wake up every day, doing your best to work through your to-do list, be a good person, and keep all your balls up in the air. But in your few quiet moments, behind the feeling of being overwhelmed, it is there. It’s that nagging, nagging feeling that the world is passing you by and you are so busy keeping up with the most urgent things that you have neglected the things that really matter to you.

You’re not alone. We’re all being pushed to our limits and the feeling of being constantly behind has become the norm.

The question for so many of us is how can we break out of this endless cycle and create the kind of interesting, meaningful lives we are all looking for?

As top business thinker and professor at Duke University, Dorie Clark, approached this question, she found herself on a treadmill of constant travel, early alarms, and long days that (although looking highly productive and outwardly successful) both internally and were emotionally less satisfying. As a consultant and executive coach, she also observed a similar pattern among her clients.

Nobody, it seems, had a moment to breathe.

At the opening of her latest book, The Long Game: How to Be a Long Term Thinker in a Short Term World, Clark describes her own turning point when she was jolted awake by an early morning alarm clock and had another challenging week ahead of her. She says, “All I had to do was get my body to stick to it. I knew I could do anything. I had to.”

While the week (successive meetings, trips and multiple requests) went smoothly, she said in the early morning darkness: “I felt a quick, sharp prick. For a brief moment before I could push it down, it felt like loneliness. For a moment I wondered why I had decided my life should be like this. ”With this opener, Clark directs readers to the solution to the looming, often unspoken problem of our time. Why should any of us live like this?

In The long game, Clark explains why, while we all know intellectually that lasting success (personal and professional) requires persistence and effort, much of the relentless pressures in our culture urge us to do what is easy, what is guaranteed, or in the moment looks glamorous.

Covid and Lockdown may have eliminated constant travel, but for many, the speed of the treadmill has deteriorated. The endless loop between desk, bed and video camera has become more exhausting than a red eye.

Drawing a parallel to a widespread macro problem, Clark writes: “Just as CEOs who optimize for quarterly profits often fail to make the strategic investments for long-term growth, so do our personal and professional lives.”

One-part personal journey, two-part practical application, The long game, shows concrete strategies to create more white space in your life and to concentrate on where it matters. As a reader, I have reconsidered some of my long-held notions of success and recognized new ways to reinvent myself.

Clark is refreshingly open about her own successes (including what is now a seven-figure income) as well as about her failures (several stabbing rejections). By combining the personal (how to spend more time with people who get the best out of you) with the professional (reconsidering failures and strategic patience) she approaches life holistically and focuses on the dual needs we all have for have economic success and meaningful connection.

Clark claims, “Everyone is given the same 24 hours – but with the right strategies, you can use those hours more efficiently and effectively than you ever imagined.” The long game skips the usual mundane waking up an hour early, color codes your to-do list suggestions, and instead focuses on specific things you can do today to advance your bigger life ambitions.

It is unlikely that the pace of work and life will slow down or that there will be mandatory breaks for strategic thinking. Ultimately, we can only live the life we ​​really want if we take the time to create it. No matter where you are, there is a part of your life ahead of you, probably a large part. You can spend your time on short term reactions and try to focus on Friday. Or you can resist the pull of our ever-urgent culture and decide that you are here to play a much longer game.