I’m sure you’ve heard this before, and it’s absolutely true. Success - real sustainable success - takes time.

But not only does it take time, it also takes work - strategic, intentional and focused work. And it takes setting up the right decisions and boundaries so that you can ensure you’re always focused on the right work.

When you add all of those things together, it’s not that easy to do. We need help in understanding how to plan for and play that long game. We need a framework. We need guidance. We need a strategy.

And that’s why it was such a big help for me to talk with Dorie Clark this week.

Dorie’s a leadership consultant, keynote speaker and professor at both Duke University’s {FEW-KWA} School of Business and Columbia Business School. She’s a contributor to Harvard Business Review and she’s been named as one of the Top 50 business thinkers in the world by Thinkers50! Dorie’s also the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Entrepreneurial You, Reinventing You and Stand Out, which was named the #1 Leadership Book of the Year by Inc. magazine.

And Dorie’s recent book recently hit the Wall Street Journal bestseller list too - The Long Game: How to be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World.

If you think about where we are today, and what technology and customer experience has provided us, we’re pretty spoiled as it relates to instant gratification. While it’s great to be able to get our hands onto most anything we want either overnight or same-day, that expectation is spilling over into our lives and what we expect to achieve. But that’s not the case. Real significance, real milestones, real achievements take time. In The Long Game, Dorie shows us why it takes time, but she also gives us the strategies and frameworks to work towards those goals while it’s taking time so we don’t simply give up when realistic timelines and our own timelines don’t match up.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

November Nonprofits: Orange Effect Foundation with Joe Pulizzi