Peak Performance: Behind the Scenes

 
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This was an exclusive live training for the Forcing Function community giving a behind the scenes look into my personal systems for peak productivity and performance.

I shared the four chapters of my story so far as a demonstration of my own stages of development. Each chapter taught me valuable lessons of who I wanted to become and the systems I needed in place to get there.

Everyone always wants the endgame tactics. It’s like studying the answer key instead of actually working through the practice problems. The only way to internalize the principles is to have lived them.

Check out the video and audio recordings below. Full transcript to follow.

Note: transcript slightly edited for clarity.

Chris: Excited to have all you guys here. Thank you so much. I have a real treat in store for you. This is going to be maybe a little bit different than you expected, but hopefully quite a bit more interesting. So you know, real quick, if you don't know me, my name's Chris Sparks, and I'm the founder of The Forcing Function. And we do what I call Peak Performance Training. Our primary offering is we work with ten executives in meaningful companies. Those are investors, start-up founders, medium company executives. And we help them uncover their own roadblocks in their personal lives, in their business, so they can reach the next level in their development and scale their mission to the next stage. We're super excited about an offering that we have, that we're launching in September, which we're calling Team Performance Training. And as I said, this has been my biggest goal for 2020, to gather twelve leaders together and teach them everything that I know.

This all started when I released Experiment Without Limits, which if you guys haven't seen, is our free workbook that details everything that I teach my private clients in a step-by-step format that you can implement. And so I see that this team training is the next obvious step to build upon that. And it all stems from . . . As you can see, there's a lot of really cool, interesting people with ambitious goals in the room here, and if we get everyone in the room together, not only can I teach what I know, but you guys can help teach what you know. Shine a mirror on what someone else might be missing, or something that's worked for you that someone else might try. I'm gonna talk about that a little bit later, but just kinda wanted to highlight that this is something that I think a lot of you guys would really benefit from. It's something I'm extremely excited about. If you want to check out the website in the meantime, theforcingfunction.com/team-training, all your questions can be answered there. Happy to talk more after the session as well.

Here's what to expect today. So first, get comfortable. Grab a beverage. I've got my tea here. I'm going to be giving you kind of a retrospective of Chris. Call this like a postmortem. Here are all of the things that I've done and learned along the way that have helped me get to where I am. I'm gonna go on for about forty minutes. If it's going on too long, let me know. If I'm going too fast, let me know. But I'm gonna be laying out four major chapters in my life, what I learned, and how I've incorporated those lessons into my own system. At the end there's going to be about twenty minutes for Q&A. Happy to stick around afterwards, but my goal is to get you guys out of here at about five after the hour. So, 1:05 Eastern. And as always, this is being recorded and transcribed. This will be posted on the Forcing Function website on Friday, and if you're here, if you're registered, you don't have to do anything. You'll get that recording via email from Zoom. 

And so for that Q&A portion, you see on the bottom there it says “Q&A,” so you can just click on that, ask a question. And you can also upvote the questions that others have asked. I'm going to endeavor to answer the questions which you guys most want to hear. So if there's something that someone's asked that's like, "Oh, I want to hear more about that," upvote that so it gets to the top.

And last thing is, hey. The chat's open. I'm gonna be asking a couple questions, just so I can make this extra actionable for you guys. So if I ask a question, you feel called to answer, no pressure. Make sure you have it set to "all panelists and attendees" so everyone can see.

So without further ado, I'm gonna jump in a little bit into my own story. So as I said, there are four major chapters here. Chapter One, graduating college, 2008. Really inauspicious time to be graduating, and how I got really stuck, and what I learned from that experience. Second chapter, poker boom. Moved to LA, a mansion with some of my poker friends, go from the middle limits of poker to the top twenty in the world, and what that journey was like and how I was able to accelerate that process. Chapter three, move to New York, enter into the startup world, wear tons of hats, gain lots of experience, lots of exploration (or I call "experimentation"), what I learned from that stage. And then finally the founding of The Forcing Function in 2016, which has been a journey in itself, what I've learned from working with so many talented executives, as well as my own super-focused study on deconstructing excellence.

So first, just wanna say like, why is story important? You know, those of you guys who've heard interviews with me before or have worked with me personally know that I'm not really big on stories. I'm big on action. I think it's really easy to over-internalize from a single example. But I think for today it's the best format, because I do think that progression as a person or progression in your business comes down to stages of development. In order to progress to the next stage there are certain lessons, certain paradigm shifts that need to unfold in order to get there. And it's very difficult for that to occur without the requisite experience.

Reality is messy. Progress is not a straight line. Reading a lot of biographies, you'd think that this person was destined for success. But there's a lot that doesn't make it into the biography. A lot of these failed experiments, which are really only failures if you aren't able to take the lessons from them, or what I call paying tuition multiple times. Everyone wants the end game. You probably showed up here hoping to learn about my crazy new tool or my crazy new system, and the truth is that's not really what you need right now. What's most important for you coming out of this call today is to identify your next step forward. And that's my aim today, is through my own experience to illuminate your biggest opportunity. Not where you'd like to be, or where you think you "should be," but what is your next big step forward?

And it's less what I do now, and more what I did to get here. Because what's holding you back is not a new tool, is not a new system, is not a new addition, but finding what is working for you right now, and how can you double down on that? So keep that in mind, because it's important not to take on tactics wholesale, but to internalize the principles behind them and apply them to your own situation.

Now, something that I love to say, and listen to this carefully: "The future flows logically from a hypothetical present." So what do I mean by that, is if you have a really clear idea of where you are right now, your next step will become obvious. You don't know what to do next because you aren't clear on where you are now. So with that, I have a little prompt for you guys. And just close your eyes with me, indulge me. I can't see you on video, but I'm gonna trust you to do it. Close your eyes and imagine you have a nice leather-bound book in front of you and you're reading one chapter, the current chapter of your story. This is your autobiography, but not the one you want the world to hear. What's actually going on in real time. And you're reading yourself as a character. What is the next thing that that character should do? What are you rooting for them to do? What's so obvious that they just can't see? Like, if you are reading your own story, step outside of it and say, "What is the obvious thing that I should be doing next?"

An easy way to identify this is think about, well, what's the next chapter of your life going to be? How do you want that chapter to play out, and what is the biggest thing that's different between you now and the person who is acting out that next chapter?

If you would indulge me, just whatever comes to mind, no wrong answers, you know, someone please be brave enough to share first, just type into the chat, is just kind of like the frame I want you guys to have, is like how do you want your next chapter to play out? If you wouldn't mind sharing that in the chat. Now with that, I'm going to jump into my story.

So, chapter one. 2008. Graduate college. You know, study consumer behavior at Ohio State, sold ads for the Lantern, the school paper. President of the American Marketing Association. I was that super-annoying ambitious kid who . . . I had this dream. I wanted to be a Fortune 500 CEO by age 35. And what was my path? I was super passionate about commercials. Specifically TV commercials. My junior year I had the privilege of working on a Super Bowl commercial with Nationwide. If you remember the Life Comes At You Fast campaign. And I thought, "This is the dream. This is what I want to do with my life." And all that kind of went out the window when I met the CEO at Nationwide, a Fortune 500 company, and I was like, "Oh, this is not what I want in my life at all." But like, how did I get there?

I had this reality show my senior year called Quad Squads. It was on the treadmills in the gym in college, and through this reality show that I was in, I was able to meet the director of Team Detroit, Ford's advertising agency, and was able to land a management position. So, like, perfect. I'm on track. And what do you know, graduate 2008, auto industry collapses. Everything is on hiatus, I'm in this hiring purgatory, and I find myself . . . You know, I moved up to Detroit to take on this job. I'm stuck in Detroit, I'm super depressed because I have a terrible diet, I'm sleeping during the day sometimes, staying up all night playing video games, watching TV. My back is constantly in pain, I know no one in Detroit, have no friends, lose contact with all of my college friends, and I would literally go weeks of my life without going outside. Like the only contact I would have is the delivery driver delivering my large works pizza and a two liter of Coke.

Needless to say, this was kind of my rock bottom. The one shining light was I had been playing poker to pay my tuition while I was working my way through college, and for the first time I had no other responsibilities, and so I started to ask myself, well, you know, just because this is something I enjoy doing, this is a video game that pays me money, you know, what does it look like to do this all the time? And you know, poker became this all-consuming thing for me. It was a bit unhealthy and unbalanced, but I started to see this way out, and I have something that I love, that I can make a living at, and that I enjoy improving. And I think that's really key, is you know, leaning into what you are best at, what you enjoy doing the most, what feels effortless. And that was it for me. 

But what was I lacking at this moment in my life? I was super out of balance, really unhealthy. Obviously I put on a lot of weight. Like I said, terrible energy. I would just fall asleep literally at my desk at random times of the day in the middle of a poker session. And just my mental game was terrible. The smallest thing would just send me into this multi-day spiral of doing nothing productive, just kind of feeling sorry for myself and becoming increasingly isolated.

So how did I break out of that, is . . . I said, a lot of these shifts is taking a major step that completely transforms all of your defaults. Well, 2009 I get all of my best poker friends together for my twenty-second birthday in Vegas. And you know, in case there's kids on the call, I'll spare all you guys the gritty details of that weekend, but you know, you can imagine. A bit of bachelor party. You know, bunch of nerds who have money for the first time kind of thing. And at the end of the weekend it's like, "Oh, well, you know, you don't want to go back to your mom's basement, I don't want to go back to Detroit in the winter. Let's figure out something else." 

And we came together, it's like . . . "How can we help each other succeed on our goals?" It's something that was super obvious to me, but it needed to be pointed out, was if we worked together towards our common aims, we would not only increase our chances of getting there, we would collectively raise our ceiling for what's possible. So what we did, we drove to LA (because that was the closest beach) and we found the biggest mansion we could find, and we all moved in together and just said, "We're gonna hold each other accountable. In this next year and a half together we're going to become the best poker players in the world, and systematically uncover what is in the way of this goal."

Now, this is going to be ridiculous. I don't want the takeaway for you guys to be, "Okay, I'm going to . . . Chris, he was making a bunch of money, can go around and hire a bunch of people," but more it's like, recognizing what is most holding you back, and taking that one major step that can remove this bottleneck. So some of these for me, like, my environment previously in Detroit was terrible. So moving to an inspiring place, super-optimizing my setup to somewhere I'd be comfortable sitting all hours of the day if I needed to . . . Removing all distractions, so got rid of my video games, had no TV, blocked all the distracting sites. All the things that I used to do to procrastinate, to avoid taking action, were now no longer an option. 

Energy. Energy was awful before, so I decided, "I'm just going to solve this." I hired a nutritionist, had them create a custom diet plan for me, and then I outsourced the cooking of that plan to a chef who prepared all of my meals. And I started working out with a personal trainer. This was literally the first time I had stepped foot in the gym, if you can imagine, and I was able to put on fifteen pounds of muscle through this process of just scheduling a gym session that I had to show up with, that had to get me out of bed, and just every single day small improvements over time. I was able to get to the point where my energy was all over the place, completely awful, to I was able to sustainably play for a twelve hour poker session, if I needed to.

Focus. I had a personal assistant, and their major thing was just to sit next to me so that I would stay on task. And if they ever saw me doing something really you know, low-value or low-leverage, just say, "Oh, is that really what you want to do right now?" So that sort of system tended to work really well. I think we can recreate this by having a plan, and say, "Well, okay, why didn't I follow the plan today? How am I trying to backwards-rationalize this thing that I wanted to do?" 

I scheduled those gym appointments. Hey, my schedule was all over the place. Like I said, I literally never saw the sun in Detroit. And so you know, scheduling that gym appointment in the morning, and then I actually started a consultancy specifically so I'd have appointments that I'd have to be dressed and show up for where I started coaching up-and-coming players. This later became an investment arm. I ended up working with a hundred players, and investing in fifty more, and it all started because if I had an appointment I knew I would have to show up. This is now what I call a forcing function, is I had to show up, I had to be ready to deliver value to someone who is paying me a lot of money.

And that actually led to this peer support, is now I had people who were counting on me. I was a mentor. And we started doing house masterminds, where each week we would sit down and cover you know, whether it's fitness, health, mental game, or just poker strategy, what was the thing that was most holding us back from reaching the next level. I later expanded that, and created a community of over two hundred players, where we could all systematically work together to better ourselves, as well as planning quarterly group trips where I would rent a house in some exotic location around the world, we would all get together, have fun on a beach, and just illuminate ways that we could be even better. And that's the type of atmosphere that I'm really trying to replicate today.

So what's the key here? Identify your bottleneck. Add a forcing function that will immediately change your default action. Right? So my bottleneck is I'm super out of shape? What's the one thing that I can do that makes working out the default? How do I remove friction to that? Right now, working out from home, I have a bunch of kettle bells, bunch of weight bands, spent two hundred bucks on just things that I could do at home, and I have a set routine that I can follow. There's literally no excuses if you know what the next step is.

But the thing that I really learned here is it's important to constrain alternatives. So once I really understood what my goals were, primarily, "I want to become one of the best poker players in the world," anything that was not in line with that vision became a distraction. And so I made those alternatives harder to access. It's something that I see all the time, someone says, "This is something that's such a priority for me, something that I really want to do, but I just don't have time." I say, well, "Which is the case? Is it you don't have time, or is it it's a priority? It can't be both. And if it is a priority, you need to make time. And presumably the way that you're spending your time right now is the best indication of your priorities. There's some sort of disconnect. So if you know what you want to accomplish, make that the easiest thing to do. Make everything else harder to do. Constrain those alternatives."

But still, at this point I was lacking a little bit. You know, I was losing opportunities, had kind of non-lasting friendships. You know, going out in Hollywood wasn't the way to make super good alliances. Wasn't sustainable. A lot of this was just kept in the air by spending money, having people yell at me to do things. Kind of a one-dimensional-act purpose, right? It was just only poker, all the time. So what I took away from this is, "This needs to be sustainable. This needs to be balanced. These things that I'm so dependent on others to make happen, how can I become solely responsible for them? How can I create systems that automatically remind me of what's important, automatically reinforce my habits and my systems and what I want to do?" And that kind of started the third chapter, which is New York City.

So you know, for those of you guys who know a little bit about poker, 2011 the entire poker industry collapsed on a day we call Black Friday. I had half my net worth seized by the government. That's a long, fun story. And with this uncertain future, you know, my whole career is in question. People aren't even sure if poker will be around in a couple years. I go the exact opposite, and I start living hostels. You know, I go from spending a few thousand dollars a day to living on thirty dollars a day. And really kind of questioning what made life meaningful and what was required for happiness. You know, for a while I even moved home, 'cause I was so, so confused. And that was a good lesson on, hey. We fall into the shape of our environment. You know, being back in the place where . . . It was pretty unoptimized for the person I wanted to become. It was interesting how you know, I automatically regressed to that level. But I digress. What was this big realization for me was that my most successful friends from poker were now investing and building businesses. 

And so I realized I didn't know anything about these things. I had nothing to offer. I certainly wasn't going to be one of the best in this game, where I was right now. So how could I systematically acquire these skills that I didn't have? And you know, here the lessons were, it was like, "How do I prioritize learning and knowledge sharing?" Or the infinite game of constantly being curious, and being a beginner? And it all started for me with systematic outreach to people who I thought had the answers, constantly building signal that would increase my inbound for opportunities to continually level up, and to structure my life around solid habits and routines rather than paid accountability. And you know, finally realizing hey, what was lacking in my life was I was playing a very zero-sum game, and I wanted to be playing a more positive-sum game. So how could I optimize for direct impact, seeing the results of the things that I'm doing directly in the world? 

So here are the things that I put in place in New York, that I think make this chapter really interesting. I would assume that many of you guys are kind of at this stage right now. You know, first learning and knowledge sharing. Making it a priority by blocking off with my day. So the first hour of my day, the last hour of my day were reserved for reading things that I thought were going to get me to the next level. Taking courses, taking notes on those courses . . . Anything. It was like whatever skill was most holding me back from where I wanted to be, I wanted to systematically go to the best source and learn that, and that required making it a priority by blocking off in my schedule. Starting to build signal, starting to create a reputation to start inbound, you know, writing and blogging. This has been the compounding gain that just continues to build over time. It's brought all of you guys into this room, it's what makes Forcing Function possible, it's what brought my best friends into my life, is just sharing ideas, being willing to be wrong in public, and using that as a tight feedback loop to learn from.

So, just prioritizing writing. And identifying within New York, who were the connectors? Who were the people who are making things happen, and how can I systematically get to know them? So I started emailing one of these people every single day, asking for advice, asking for connections, adding random value. I started doing anything that I could to help someone who I thought was doing something interesting. So for example, at this point I was experimenting with a lot of things that I might want to do with my life, trying to find that right fit. So at first I wanted to be an investor, because I was an extremely successful investor in the poker world. I thought this might transfer over to the startup world, VC private equity. So I started doing industry deep dives, and compiling those into reports and sending them to funds. I was creating my own investment DCs. I was becoming a scout for funds. "Hey, sourcing investments. Here's one that I think will be really good." Helping with presentations for investors. Like, "Here. Based on the investors I've talked to, here's the feedback, here's how to improve your presentation." And then realized, "Hey, I actually will have much better deal flow if I'm a value-add investor, so I need to have more hands-on startup experience."

So I first started advising startups. Became an expert in data analytics, based on a big key part of my success in the poker world, with deep dives into the statistics of my opponents, and so doing the same for a business. Uncovering key insights based on the data they are already collecting. But then use that data for paid marketing campaigns, for conversion optimization, so they can convert more leads into customers. Anything that I could do to add value, build my skillset by doing. Because I didn't need to know a ton, I just needed to know a little bit more and be able to work a little bit harder to take something off the busy plate of an executive. 

But what's wrong with this? It was a total dabbling, because I kept moving to what was needed, what was being asked for. It was being pulled out of me, and thus I just kept bouncing from project to project. Many of these that were unpaid where I got a lot of social capital, but I wasn't able to capture much of that value. And so what did I learn, is I needed to start with me. Not in a selfish way, but what is the value that I can best offer the world? What is the thing that people are constantly asking for help with? What is this thing that comes easy to me that looks like just running up a wall to someone else? And what I kept doing was, "Hey, here's what I'm being asked to do, here's what people are struggling with," versus coming back to first principles: "What am I most qualified to help with?"

So I'd like to help some of you guys today. The promise is that I want you guys to walk away with something super-actionable you can put in your life today. So here's a question for you. And so if you put this into your chat, this is something I'll address directly. So that's a little carrot for you guys. My question for you is, "What's keeping you up at night right now?" You know, that moment when your head hits your pillow, and it takes you a few moments to fall asleep, because you can't just get it out of your mind. You start making lists about it. “What's keeping you up right now?" And if you're not coming up with a good answer to that, here's another prompt for you: "Everything is great right now except for (blank)." Whatever the first thing that comes to mind for you, the first answer is usually the best one. "Everything is great right now except for blank." I'm gonna wait one minute for you guys.

So I'm going back, and I want to frame this in terms of some of the goals we have. So we have someone launching an online course in September, which is awesome. I'm doing the same here. Highly recommend. We're having Tiago Forte on next Tuesday to talk about the fastest path to launching online courses. Alistair, talking about breaking out of the corporate world "and starting a venture aligned with my goals of health and well-being." That's phenomenal. As someone who narrowly escaped the corporate world myself, I can certainly understand, and you know, my quick advice there is being really specific. Having something that's aligned is very important, but starting from this place of, "What is the value that I can best offer to the world?" And it always with this, I think people stick to their current job rather than their side hustle for too long, and the important thing is to frame this as an experiment, as far as what are the key assumptions that you need to prove in order to make the jump, or what is the milestone that you need to reach in order to be confident making that next move, and what is the most direct path to proving that assumption, to hitting that milestone? And if it turns out that it's not the move, awesome. But fail fast.

Alex. "My business is not growing fast enough." So again, identify the bottleneck there. What is most holding you back from growth? Look at the funnel. What is the stage where people are falling off. I think it might also be defining growth. I think everyone always thinks incrementally. It's like, "I want to do the same things, but have more of them. More clients, more customers, more sales." But thinking about like what does success look like? And you'll generally identify a more direct path to get there. “Good functioning house, good social circle.” Happy to share a lot of things in this next stage that have worked for me there. "Financial situation needs help." Certainly not alone in this time. You know, start with a budget, have an idea of the milestones you need to hit in order to unlock certain outcomes. And identify what are the levers in your career, what are the levers in your personal finances that everything turns on. You know, generally where are you spending the most money, where are you getting the most return on that money.

And yeah, remember to put this to all attendees, in case you know, you want to keep that private to me, which is obviously welcome, but I think other people would benefit from seeing this as well. "My ability to focus and my energy levels." SC, check out the workbook. I detail all of these in . . . I believe it's chapters six and seven, "Attention" and "Energy," respectively. Definitely cover that a little bit. Prachetas: "I don't get enough time on my most important tasks. I constantly feel the urge to work on myself instead of my business, to debug my personal problems." So first I would say here, is like, hey. Your business is subservient to you. So maybe implicitly you're saying that your business and some of the things going on there is not as important as your "personal problems." But you know, the advice I usually give there, I detail this in a post I put out recently called, "How To Work From Home and Not Go Crazy," is you just need to create a separation. There is dedicated work time, dedicated work space, and personal tasks are outside of that. If you have dedicated time to work on yourself, you'll always find the time to progress on your business. But it's important to keep those two separate.

Nuno: "What's keeping me up at night is having a vision for something that takes years and many people to build and still being at the foot of the mountain." Super resonates. I feel you there, and I said for me this all comes down to having an infinite time horizon. This is something that I super struggled with, and said . . . I would love to dive deeper into this with you guys, but it was like every day for me was a change of course, was an existential crisis of like, "Should I be doing more? Am I doing the right things?" And the only thing that gets me past that is this experimentation. I was talking about this as my key system, which is a planning/experimentation/reflection cycle. And key to that, planning, what am I going to do next? Experimentation, collecting data, reflecting, what's going well? What can I learn from that? How can I improve this for next time?

Having those planning and reflection cycles, knowing that I'm going to stop and see what's working and what's not working allows me to sprint in the interim, convinced that what I'm doing is the right thing, knowing that I can stop at the end of that experiment. 

And again, I love this mountain metaphor. You guys can see that's the image that we've used for Team Performance Training, because I think a lot of us find ourselves a local maxima, right? We're blind people trying to walk to the top of the mountain, and we just keep going uphill and we get to the top of the hill, but we don't know if we're at a hill or a mountain. In order to get up to the mountain we're going to have to go downhill for a little while. There's a couple steps backwards in order to go forwards. 

And having this infinite time horizon, that these important skills that we're building compound literally for the rest of my life. Right? It's like I don't work out today to get bigger muscles today. I work out today so I can be cognitively functioning at a high level, at a hundred, when I have all this compounding wisdom, knowledge, network, skills. I want to be performing at my peak. And I'm thinking everything that I do, I'm failing now, I'm paying low tuition now to learn these lessons while they're cheap, whether it's like hiring a delegation, scaling a business, marketing, doing a webinar like I'm doing right now. I want to make all these mistakes frequently and early so that I can learn those lessons and compound them for the rest of my life. It's so easy to say, but so hard to do, but just keep your eyes on the long term. If you have an infinite timeline, it takes all of the stress out of the everyday. It's like each day, like, today doesn't matter. All that matters is that you're taking these small steps forward that are setting you up for the long run.

So hopefully that was useful. I'm happy to come back to that, but man, that super resonates.

All right. So without further ado, that was a fun intermission, I'm gonna wrap up this story for you right now, which is kind of chapter four, and then I'm gonna get into you know, what are the critical principals for peak performance I took away from this experience? So you know, backstory with me here. 2014, I was working full time at a startup, leading marketing, realized that, hey, having a boss, you know, doing things for others rather than capturing that value wasn't for me. I was looking for more autonomy and freedom and the ability to do what I thought was the highest-leverage thing to help the world. So I went on a little sabbatical, did a little soul-searching. And as these things usually do, a three-month trip became an eighteen-month trip, fifty countries, traveling the world. And I woke up one day on a beach in Thailand, and I did some mental math, and realized that with the money that hit my bank account that day . . . You know, I got the money back from poker . . . I could spend the rest of my life on this beach, if I wanted to. And you can sense a theme here. You know, wanting Fortune 500 CEO, wanting this life of like fame and fortune in LA, living the Hollywood life, living the super chill relaxed happy life on a beach in Thailand . . . It took me achieving them to realize that it wasn't actually what I wanted.

And that's the big question I always ask myself, is like . . . What do I want to want? Because we can get ourselves to want anything, by taking action. The more we do something, the more our beliefs and our values shift. And I was just doing things that culture was expecting of me. These were cultural paths to success, but realizing, you know, I can create my own path. And so I started by just projecting out. This is my first question I asked every client, is, "Where do you want to be in twenty-five years?" Thinking on uncomfortably long timelines, like, "What do you want to do with your life?" And then the follow-up question is, "What is the one thing you can change now that most puts you on the path to getting there?" Something really to think about is there's one thing you could do right now, that if you simulate out the next twenty-five years, is most correlated with you being on the path versus not on the path. So your job is to identify that and install it. 

And what did I realize? I realized that a lot of innovation occurs at the intersections. That all of these strange experiences that I'd had climbing to the top of the poker ladder, all the experiences that I had working with and for startups and doing early-stage investing, spending lots of time with statistics and deep dives into psychology and operations and human behavior, all of this actually combined into something that was pretty interesting, and I realized that if I could deconstruct excellence, if I could determine what needed to be put in place for goals to be achieved, regardless of the goal, what are the values of goal achievement, that I could add value to anyone that I met for the rest of my life. That I could put myself in any room that I wanted to be and I could create ripples that would, you know, empower entrepreneurs, that would help people put more things out into the world, help them achieve their goals faster. And not only would that be incredibly meaningful, it would be incredibly useful. 

I started The Forcing Function in 2016. Didn't have a website, just asked a couple of friends of mine, like, "Hey, would you be interested in doing this? This is something I've been thinking about, I'd love for one of you guys to take the loop." And just from slowly over time, building out by client referral, you know, bird by bird, as they say, I have a real business. It's wild to realize . . . In the moment it felt like things were moving so slow. You know, the classic, we overestimate what we accomplish in a week, but we way underestimate what we can accomplish in a year, in a decade. And four years later, I look back, and I've worked with sixty executives, at super-successful, meaningful companies. Last year we released our peak performance workbook, Experiment Without Limits, which we get amazing feedback on. We've had thousands of people download and use that, anyone from musicians to scientists to startup founders . . . All of them find their own way of creating groups around it and finding value. And it's been a really fun ride and really fulfilling to you know, teach the system to others. 

So I mean, without further ado, I just wanna kinda give you guys the cliffs notes of what you came here for. What are my most critical principles for peak performance? What are the key lessons that I leaned through these, my own chapters of my life, as well as my work with sixty really successful high performers? So the first one I highlighted is these planning/experimentation/reflection cycles. Everything starts with this, and the tighter you can iterate through this loop, the faster you can plan, put something into motion, collect data, and then reflect on what you learn, and feed that back in, the faster your speed of progress. And thinking about how you set up your day. The 80/20 is start on your most important thing before you let in the world. And that means choosing what that most important thing is. What is most holding you back? What is most scaring you? What is highest leverage? And then check email. And then check social media. Do your own priorities before doing other people's priorities. That's the 80/20 of the day. 

I've also learned if I put my physical health first, my mental health first, everything else falls into place. If I'm working out, I'm sleeping well, eating right, talking with my friends, getting inspiration and ideas, everything falls into place. But if those fall off, everything else falls apart. So take care of yourself first, worry about everything else second. 

Talk about routines. High level. Concentrate on your first hour, your last hour. The moment you get out of bed, how do you spend the first hour of your day? The moment your head hits the pillow, how do you spend that last hour of the day? Focusing on these bookends, if you start the day well, end the day well, everything in between will take care of itself. Same bookend happens for your workday. What's the very first thing you do when you sit down at your desk? What's the last thing that you do when you close your laptop for the day? Having this bookend, knowing what you're going to accomplish, creating that plan for what you're going to do, being super intentional and deliberate about what you do, and at the end of the day closing those loops, creating that separation, having those two hours solved allows for lots of creativity, exploration in the middle. And if you start the day perfectly it will tend to end perfectly as well. But if the day starts as a mess, it tends to go down that path. So focus on the first hour, the last hour, and I said everything else will fall into place.

You know, here's the key. I used to have huge issues with procrastination. Started in college, continued through a lot of these stages of my life. Soon as I decided something was important and scary, I found lots of creative things to do instead. And so here's the new habit that I encourage you to learn. If you want to see how it's broken down, check out the "Procrastination" chapter in Experiment Without Limits, but high level, if you find yourself procrastinating, don't be judgmental. Be curious. Figure out why. What's the reason? There's something really important that your subconscious is telling you about this task. If you can figure out what that is, you can strike a compromise that will allow you to move forward, allow you to get started. And that's all overcoming procrastination is, is finding a way to get started.

A related note, all the time . . . I think people think that peak performers like, feel great, accomplish things every single day. But you know, as we've talked about, you just saw from my process, it's super messy. It's super messy. Some days, you just don't have it. And so this is what I call closing the container. You go to bed early, you put yourself in a position to succeed the next day. Here's the habit: if you feel crappy, do something that makes you feel good. Listen to music you like. Do your habits, get outside, get away from your devices. Just anything that makes you feel good, now is the perfect time.

And so highlighting these key aspects of systems . . . So check out chapter two, the "Systems" chapter, or my post, "Systems Thinking" on the Forcing Function website if you want a little bit deeper dive on it, but essentially here are the three parts. First, feedback loops. Track everything that is important to you, optimize for deliverables. Always be shipping, so that you can get feedback on things. Like I said, the tighter that feedback loop, the faster your progress.

Secondly, the bottleneck. The key insight here is that most things we are doing are a complete waste of time, because there is something that is holding us back the most, whether that's in our life or our business, and if we're not taking action on that, we're not actually having any effect on the overall system. At all times, trying to be asking yourself, "What is most holding me back, and what can I do to remove that constraint?" I would like to say, more wood behind fewer arrows, or do less but more intentionally. 

And then the last one is leverage. The easiest way to figure this out for yourself is to put a dollar amount on everything that you do. Just track your time for a week and say, "Hey, this is ten dollars an hour, this is hundred dollars an hour, this is a thousand dollars an hour." It's simple arbitrage. Take the things that you value at a thousand dollars an hour, and do more of them. Take things that you only value at ten dollars an hour and do less of them. We tend to treat work equally, but work operates on a power law. The most important thing you're going to do after this call today is worth everything else on your list combined. So maximize that time you spend on the most important thing, minimize the time you spent on those urgent but not important things. Put a dollar value on it.

Another thing here is I'm super big on creating processes for things. Never do the same thing twice. That's the biggest opportunity for saving time, is you find yourself doing the same thing over and over again rather than creating a really good process. Once you have an explicit process, it's really easy to identify ways to streamline, improve, and maybe even eliminate it.

So what are my key systems? First, here are the ones that I recommend everyone implement. The four systems. First, project management. You know, again, I don't care about tools, what I care about is the results. So all my clients have favorite tools, favorite ways of doing things. I'm able to work with all of them. Here are the key principles you want to have for your project management. First, you need something that you trust. Right? This means confidence that nothing is falling through the cracks. You're able to capture everything that you're committed to. All the projects that you're working on and their current status. You have one essential place that you can look as a dashboard, where, "Here are all the things that are going on in my life," and have the confidence that nothing is unaccounted for. And so that requires, one thing first, capturing things the moment they happen. Second, doing regular sweeps of all the places that your commitments or next actions could be living and put them into the central place, and third, having a way to resurface them at the moment you need them. 

For me this is my week in review, where once a week I'm looking at all the things that I could be doing, deciding what makes sense for me to do right now. Second, relationships. This is a common one that you guys have brought up. My system for relationships is, first, being intentional. Who do I want to stay in touch with? I have a little spreadsheet. "Here are the people I want to talk with at least once a month." And so keeping track, "Hey, when's the last time that we talked?" And so if I see, "Oh, I haven't talked to this person in two months," well that's an obvious prompt. I want to talk to them once a month, I haven't talked to them in two months, send them a text. "Hey, thinking of you." 

And here's the other thing too, that I find really powerful, is take notes on your conversations. You know, when we're in person I would bring a notebook, when we're on a call it's really easy, but hey. Even if you're seeing someone face to face, just write down what you talked about afterwards. And that way you don't have the same conversations over and over again. Every conversation you have builds off the previous one, and that way your conversations get deeper and deeper, to the things that really matter. None of this small-talk type stuff, but like, why are we here on this earth? What are we working towards, and how can we help each other get there together? That's what makes for great friendships, and that's the power of documenting these conversations, is that's what you work towards.

System three. Knowledge. This is something that Tiago's going to talk about on the lunch hour on Tuesday, is having a system where everything you learn, all the books you read, webinars that you attend, videos you watch, is easily retrievable in a format that you can search, remix later. Right? So it's stuff that I've learned at some point, I can find it, I can access it, I can retrieve it, and then I can work with it. I can remix it, whether that's creating new content, or you know, building bridges between these ideas, or identifying next actions. But I don't want to keep learning the same lesson twice, and that means documenting the things that I learn. It's a really key system, and you see the people who are really successful, that is the key: they're able to accelerate their learning so they can get up to speed really quickly. Shoutout to Nat Eliason. This was the last Lunch Hour that we did on jumping headfirst into new domains, is looking at your system for learning and how to accelerate that.

And then finally, this is one that I mentioned a couple times. Constraints on focus. Anything that is not my current priority is a distraction. So, first identifying what your current priority is, and then systematically making everything else harder to access. Bad habits, low priorities, distractions, add friction to them. I have pretty concise system there. In the post "100 Resources For Productivity and Performance," I talk about some of those blockers that I use to add constraints to the internet, but a lot of that comes to your physical space as well. Being intentional about what you let in and close the door on everything else.

So again, hey, reminder. We're taking Q&A. All things being equal, I am going to be addressing some of the things you guys had in the chat as well. We're coming up on the hour, so if you have to leave early, no worries. You'll catch the recording even if you missed the question. But I just want to take a few minutes to highlight what we're building right now, which we're calling Team Performance Training. And again, you can learn more about that at theforcingfunction.com/team-training. What are our goals with team performance training? We have three goals. First, we want to teach you how to optimize your productivity. Two, we wanna remove roadblocks to scaling your mission, whatever that mission may be. And third, we wanna show you how you perform at your peak, so you can show up as your best self every single day. And how am I going to do that? I'm going to show you how to implement the most important parts of my peak performance system. Not, "here's the tools that I use, like here's the way that I take notes, et cetera," but "here are the principles behind them and here's how you install them into your own situation."

These are the things that I've found critical for success and how to put them into action. So if you've seen Experiment Without Limits, you have a good idea of what I'm about, and this is building and expanding upon that in an actionable format. It's like, what generalizes across the top performers that I see? You know, what is the pattern of success? And so these are frameworks that I've distilled from hundreds of books that I've read as well as the four hundred coaching conversations that I've had to date.

So how are we going to do that? I'm super excited about this format. We're going to be having a weekly two-hour training session. So, twelve weeks. Twenty-four hours of coaching, which is wild. So much opportunity there. And what we're going to be doing during these sessions, I'm going to be teaching you, I'm going to be setting aside time for you to immediately implement things into your business. And then that's the first step. You'll see the theme here of feedback loops. The second one is we're going to get together in a group, we're going to talk about it, we're going to uncover opportunities. You're going to see things that other people are doing like, "Oh, that's really interesting, maybe I can incorporate that," or "Oh, that's an interesting choice." But everything will really cast a mirror on what you're doing. And then we're going to get into groups and do what I call "hot seats." And we're going to really stress-test these plans. By the time that you leave this two hour session, not only are you going to know what to do and you're going to have an opportunity to immediately apply it to your business, this plan is going to go through two or three iterations, so you can just hop off the call, immediately put it into place, and start seeing results.

And what I'm most excited about this format is just getting amazing executives together in the room. We have four spots of the twelve filled already, and it's pretty incredible, the interest that we've been getting. I like to compare it to an executive MBA program, where you're a little bit intimidated by the other people in the room. It's like, "Oh wow, this guy founded that company, or this guy made that investment in that unicorn, or he wrote that book. Wow." But not even realizing that they're thinking that same thing about you. And as excited as I am for the things that I have to teach in Team Performance Training, I think the biggest breakthroughs are just going to come from the side conversations, and my job just is to get out of the way of those and let people explore. So I can't wait to see what's going to emerge from that.

As part of it, we're going to open up a private community, which I'm calling the Brain Trust. So the idea here is keeping each other accountable, sharing resources, getting together and solving our problems, you know, finding ways around our biggest roadblocks, and then just tightening those feedback loops. How can we improve faster? How can we fail faster so we can learn and put into place what needs to be worked, and then double down on that?

So, hey. If you're interested, I would really, really encourage you to apply. We actually just opened up applications yesterday, and as I mentioned, four spots are filled. Applications are going to be open until next Friday or until those twelve spots are filled. Whichever comes first. If you have any questions about that, please don't hesitate to reach out. My email is chris@theforcingfunction.com. Like I said, I try to answer most of the questions I've gotten so far on the Team Performing website, but if anything that I can do to make it a no-brainer for you, you know, definitely shoot me a message. And I really encourage you to apply. I think it's going to be a great program.

So who's it for? This is for busy executives, small-to-medium organizations, expect a curated mix of founders, executives, and investors working on really interesting and meaningful things. And that's the value, is just being in the room and you know, learning from each other.

So, whew. You know, I always love to try to cram as much in as possible, but I want to just take one moment to just take a deep breath, so . . . Just, you know, if you have a pen and paper next to you, if you have a document, you've been taking notes, great. If you haven't, now's a good time. Just write down one thing from what we've said today . . . Not even something I've said, but something that came to mind. Maybe you were inspired. Maybe you were annoyed and you uncovered an opportunity there. What's one thing out of today's call that you are going to implement? I'll wait.

Awesome guys. Love these answers. Keep them coming. Still taking questions in the Q&A. If you see something that you definitely want answered, go ahead and upload that. So I'll make sure to get to it. I'm going to be answering questions for about twenty minutes, and try to cover as best I can. If there's anything that I don't get today, again, feel free to email me directly. And as mentioned, I know we had this scheduled for an hour, so if you have to leave early, no sweat. Thank you so much for joining me. We're going to be sending out the recording to everyone on Friday, so hope you can stick around for Q&A.

First. This question's from John. "What's your process for quickly creating standard operating procedures?" This is a super key part of leverage, and it's been a lesson that I continually learn as part of this chapter four, with the small team. I don't know where I would be without them, for The Forcing Function. The first thing that I like to think about is just like storing as little as possible within my head. That having a centralized place that everyone can access that acts as sort of our shared brain, here are all of the things that we've found to work, and documenting those, and thinking of those as living documents that we're completely iterating and improving upon, and the more we get things out of our head, the more we see obvious opportunities to improve them. Creating that version one usually is just doing a screen share using a tool like Zoom or Loom (didn't realize those rhyme before), and then just talking out my thought process. Like, "Here is why I'm doing this thing. This is why this actually works better than this. Oh, when you're creating this, you might want to try to do this, but I found it didn't work, here's why." Just getting everything out of my head.

And then step two is the person who I'm training, who I'm teaching it to, we do it together. So, hey. Okay. Let's say newsletters for example. You know, newsletter is a big one that we've handed off. All right. I'm going to walk you through how I create a newsletter. And then here this next one, I'm going to have you create it based on the instructions that you gave, and I'm just going to watch and observe. And where you get stuck, I can point out, "Oh, well I forgot to mention this," or, "Oh, I guess this wasn't clear, let me explain that better." And we use that process of working through it together, kind of this paraprogramming approach to create a step-by-step process that someone as a third party who wasn't in on this call could follow without us. And that's the whole idea as a founder, is to remove yourself as the bottleneck. But even if you're the sole person in your business, the sole person in your career right now, it is so important to make the things that you repeatedly do super explicit, step by step, so you can improve them. 

This is something that I talk about with routines as well. It's something that people kind of laugh at me about until you actually see it in motion, is like, write out your morning routine step by annoying step. Timing, transition. What are the things you need to have in your hand? What are the things that get in your way? Identify all the sources of friction, and by the simulation process you can make these improvements outside of the system. The easiest way to think outside of the box is to remember that you've put yourself inside the box in the first place. So hey, if you write this out step by step, rather than when you're doing something in the real moment, it's like, "Oh, I have to finish this quickly as possible, I only have an hour before this newsletter needs to go out," okay, take a step back, let's observe this process, if you can cut this down a little bit, you save that time multiplied out forever. And once you start improving something, a moving ship sees new ports. You see other opportunities to improve it. But yeah, that very first thing is just to like get a really crappy rough draft down by just speaking it, getting it out of your head.

Christian, question. “What is the main difference between the goal generation in chapter one of Experiment Without Limits and the project menu in the time chapter?” So the purpose of the goal chapter at a high level is how to figure out what you want to want. And so this is broadly all the things that you can possibly achieve, deciding which is most exciting to you. So the goals chapter is kind of a systematic way going through, "Here are all the things that I could do, here are all the things that it's best for me to do, here are all the things that I'm going to do." And how to work down that list. And so once you're very clear on what you're looking to accomplish, this is where something becomes a project. And that's the difference between a dream and a goal, it has a set deliverable, something that's going to be different in the world and a set deadline. A dream is something like, "Oh, I want to write a book." A project is, "I'm going to send a rough draft to my editor by September 30th, and that rough draft is going to be at least thirty pages."

Right? It's like something that is super specific. They call this a binary outcome, that an objective third party could look at that and say, "Oh, yeah, you did that." Or, "No, you didn't do that." And it's a super common thing that I see with a lot of executives because they haven't really clearly defined what "done" is, not having the end in mind, that deadline always gets pushed back, because there's always more things that can be done. So going back to optimize for deliverable, creating a forcing function around that deadline. And then once you have that project clearly outlined, right, what are the milestones? What are the things that need to be put in place? We'll use that rough draft example. So step one, have a topic. Step two, have an outline. Step three, start fleshing out that outline. Step four, turn that outline into a draft. Right? So you can see there are milestones that you can hit, and you put sub-tide lines on those milestones to see whether you're on track or you're off track. If you're off track, you can catch it earlier. You're not like studying the night before the final like, "Oh my god, I forgot this final was happening tomorrow." It's, "Oh, well, I see I'm a little bit behind my timeline. Do I change the timeline, or is there something that I can do to accelerate what I'm doing?” Make more of what I'm doing on the direct path towards the goal versus kind of wavering towards it. And that's the project menu: here are all the things that I can do towards this project. Here are all the things that I committed to. What is the thing that moves me along the path the most, and what is that next action that I can take immediately? That's the key to all planning, is knowing what is the next thing you can do. Just finding a way to keep moving.

I love this tip here from Alistair. It's like, “scheduling a minimum of fifteen minutes per day to do something, starting a new venture.” If you wouldn't mind me kind of troubleshooting that a little bit, context switching is awful. People don't realize how costly it is to just bounce between a bunch of things all day. So I think the biggest thing that someone could do for productivity is just have one priority for the full day. I'm always trying to think about, how can I have longer periods of extended focus? I'm thinking of focus as a muscle, where I'm trying to make those periods longer and longer. How long can I keep my eyes on the prize before I get distracted and check Twitter and check my email or switch to this other thing that feels easier and less scary? Continually building that muscle. And so honestly I think a lot better is rather than fifteen minutes per day, if it was like, "How can I set aside three hours one day a week . . ." Maybe it's Sunday morning or Saturday afternoon, or maybe it's like, "How can I spend the first hour of my day moving toward the new venture?" 

Rather than trying to find these little pockets and micro-managing ourselves, if you really know what's important, treating it like the most important thing, and that means giving it the time that it deserves. A lot of what I find with focus is like the first . . . You know, they say the first twenty minutes after you switch to a new task is just getting yourself back to where you left off. And so you really don't start to hit your stride until you know, minute thirty, minute forty-five. So I recommend an hour. And that's how I try to structure my day, is hour blocks. For each hour, what is going to be my focus, so I can minimize these transitions and maximize the intensity of my focus toward my most important thing.

Ken's asking, “talk about the notion of a forcing function and how I act as a forcing function for my clients.” Obviously, I wouldn't name my company after it if I didn't think it was something really important. At a high level, what a forcing function is is a big step that you take that instantly changes your defaults. Let's use the rough draft example. Easy way to fail doing something audacious like you know, publishing a rough draft, is just keep that goal within your head. No one else knows about it. You know, it's very easy to override that goal in your mind. If you don't make progress on it, it's really easy to justify to yourself all those things that came up that were "more urgent" or needed to get done. But if you find a way to externalize this goal, turn it into something real, so whether that's a public commitment or kind of a sub-deadline, say "Hey, good friend of mine who's another writer I respect, I am going to send you a really crappy rough draft on September 30th. So be on the lookout for that." Right? Taking this something, this goal that lives inside of yourself, and taking it into something that's real, something that you have to deliver on a specific date, or there's going to be real consequences.

I think the scale of what we accomplish in life is proportional to what we have at stake. So put some skin in the game. Have something online. And this is the way that I best serve my clients, is I take the things that they want to do, and I make sure that they have something at stake so that they have to deliver. It's crazy that if you have a deadline, something miraculously gets shipped. And the key isn't to have one big deadline this day where I walk out of my cave after years and unveil this to the world on stone tablets. You have these tiny sub-deadlines each of which is relatively low stakes but forces you to put something out into the world to get feedback on that and then to quickly iterate on that. Right? It all comes back to tightening these loops. So you know, again I'm happy to serve this function to you, and I think with team performance training there's going to be twelve forcing functions, twelve people you're somewhat accountable to, and twelve people who could potentially give you feedback on what you're doing. And so why wouldn't you take advantage of that opportunity?

But this is a function that you could do for yourselves, is find a friend, find somebody that you respect, use your social media platform, and just commit to something. And do it publicly. It's a really powerful mechanism to change those defaults, because once that goal is explicit and public, well, "Of course I'm going to take action on that." I don't need to think about whether I'm going to write today. I have a deadline. I have people who are counting on me. So yeah, it really takes a lot of that questioning out of it. It's super powerful, and something that I think is really core to accelerating progress in anything.

All right. Taking a look at some of these lessons for today. So here's one that's really top of mind for me. Identifying and removing bottlenecks. So what does this come from for me? The underlying theory here is theory of constraints. Seeing your life as a set of interconnected processes, and that if one step in the chain . . . Imagine you have this linked chain. One of these steps in the chain is the weakest, and we're constantly doing things to take things that were already strong, and trying to make them a little bit better, rather than focusing on how we can strengthen our overall chain by focusing on our weakest link. And so how do you identify the bottleneck? In operations terms, this calls for looking for piles of work in progress. In business terms, it's where are people most waiting on you specifically to move forward? It's like, hey, maybe you have a bunch of leads but you're shuffling your feet to get back to them.

A client I talked to yesterday, his cash flow was fifteen days late because he had decided that he needed to be the one to send out invoices and he was too busy to send out the invoices to clients, so of course clients weren't paying if they weren't getting the invoices, and so this ten-dollar-an-hour-type task that he insisted on keeping to himself was costing him fifteen days cash flow—anyone who has a growing business knows how costly that is. And it's like, "Oh, this is literally what people are waiting on me for." 

How can I elevate that? So elevate it means, what are the resources I already have that I can shift towards making this bottleneck less of an issue? And so he said, "Well, I'm a little bit hesitant to completely hand over creating these invoices, because what if there's a typo?" And I'm like, "use an executive chef mentality: you can still see it before it goes out, but you don't need to be typing the numbers into Excel. You don't need to be typing their name and their address onto the invoice." And so something that was taking him ten hours a month is all of a sudden now taking him one hour a month. And it still has the same result, and he's still able to to take those extra nine hours and do something that he placed a value of a thousand dollars an hour on. And so that's pretty powerful to realize, is that we don't need to do more. I think so many people think, "How can I be doing more?" When really it's, "How can I be doing the right things? The things that are more important, the things that are higher leverage, and the things that can remove whatever's holding me back in my life and business?" 

Sometimes that just takes stepping outside of what you're doing and questioning it. Like, question everything. That's a really big part of the mindset of a poker player. Less certainty, more inquiry. Assume that everything that you're doing can be improved. And these are all opportunities, right? Don't get hard on yourself for like, "Oh, I need to improve all these things, I'm not enough." Like, that's the wrong way to think about it. It's just to be curious. It's like, everything is going great right now, but here are some ways that it could be going even better, and of all of the opportunities, which is the biggest one? Which is most holding you back? What can I take action on right now?

Thinking about that framework all the time is like, where is that bottleneck? What is one thing I can do to remove it? And that way most of the things that you do will matter. Yeah.

So questions . . . Prachetas. "Limiting and scheduling my self-exploration, fitness, and meditation time, and getting clear on what's my family to work time. Having a balanced schedule." There's an exercise that I love which I call "Hundred Sixty-Eight Hour Exercise," based on there's a hundred and sixty-eight hours in the week, and so I am structuring out what an ideal week would be, and what's my portfolio of activities, and how do I want to allocate my time across these important areas of my life? And so for me, it's career, The Forcing Function, mission. It's poker. Income. Investing. It's health. You know, exercise, diet, sleep, habits, et cetera. Relationships. Partner. Family. These different things that I want to prioritize, and I want to be balancing those. On an average week I want to be spending time and energy and focus on each one of those buckets, but realizing that life is messy, and a lot of time those allocations can be out of wack. And so for me ,once a month I'm coming back and looking at my portfolio and saying, "Oh, well you know, I say I want to spend ten, twenty percent of time with my partner, my friends on fun activities, on my habits. But I'm only spending five percent." We just bring that portfolio back into focus by rebalancing.

So, where is that time going instead? And questioning, like, hey, maybe this is actually something that's more important right now. Sometimes there's a big release, you know, a big project that's happening and things get a little bit out of wack. But that's why we always come back to, what is one step that I can take to bring myself back into balance? So if you have those ideals in mind, it's like, "Oh yeah, I wanna be spending this many hours on my habits, this many hours exercising, this many hours with my family, this many hours on project A, et cetera." And then if you're tracking your time . . . Again, this doesn't need to be accounting for every minute of your day—if you have an awareness of where your time is going, you can recognize opportunities to move from a lower priority to a higher priority. That's all it is, is just bringing yourself back into balance. If you know where your time, you want it to be going, just compare. And find a way: “Well, what am I doing now? What's one thing I could do to bring myself closer to this ideal allocation?"

And just thinking about it is an iterative process. Not a heavy lift, not like, "I'm going to transform my life and re-shift my priorities overnight," but just like, "What's the next step that I could take to get there?" I can't emphasize that enough.

We got one time for one more question before we wrap. Thank you guys so much for sticking through this. It's really an honor to share this with you, and I said, I try to share as much as possible with you in this time, but remember like, what's the one thing you can do to move forward, and keeping focused on that. You can come back to the other stuff at any time. This is all opportunities.

AJ has a question here. “When Black Friday hit, what was the single best thing that you did to pivot?” So yeah. For those of you guys who don't know what Black Friday is, Black Friday was the day, and it will live in infamy in online poker history, where online poker sites where we were making a living, one day we woke up and the site didn't exist, and the government had shut them down. Not only were we not able to make a living anymore, but all of the money which we kept on the sites, which for some people was their entire bankroll—luckily for me it was only half my bankroll, but even that feels a little bit silly in hindsight—that, hey. This is all thrown into question. And what are we going to do? How are we going to make money? What are we going to do with ourselves? We completely optimized on this one variable. 

I would love to say that I woke up the next day and picked myself back up and immediately was on to the next venture. But, no. It was kind of a multi-month process of being really stuck and unsure, and it wasn't until I had friends kind of point out like, "Hey, here are the cool things that I'm doing, here are the interesting people that I'm working with, here's the projects that I'm doing—hey, would you be interested in helping out with this?" It's like, oh. I need to move on. I am stuck, I am anchored on this past version of the world that worked best for me, but I need to become attuned to reality, I need to reorient to what's actually going on and find a path forward. 

So that meant going back to the first chapter in the workbook, or starting from first principles of, given the way the world is now, given where I'm at, given the opportunities that I have, what do I want? What is the next North Star to head towards? And that was a long process of exploration. A lot of experimentation. I talked about that kind of the New York phase. I said, I worked on literally dozens of different projects for different companies, trying on different hats to see which one did I like the best, where I thought I delivered the most value. But I think the important thing was that once I figured out that I needed to change, I started trying things. I started rapidly iterating and framing life as experiment of, “Here's my best guess of the next thing that I should be doing, so what's the immediate way that I can test that? Let's start a project, let's do a collaboration, let's start writing and learning about it." It's very easy to try to over-plan this stuff by needing everything to be perfect before taking action. The best way to get perfect is to take action and then figure it out along the way. So I think that was my biggest takeaway from Black Friday.

And honestly, that whole experience of, the world has thrown me a giant curve ball—going through that once with poker was super incremental for me being prepared and ready to pivot my whole business, my whole outlook with what's happened this year with the pandemic and all the economic and social crises that are occurring, and how I can make sure that what I'm doing in the world remains relevant and useful to people. I think that process would have been a much longer one had I not been prepared to say, "Hey, the world is changed. It's not going back to the way that I want it. There is no new normal. But let's reorient, let's figure out where things are heading and how can I best position myself in what I'm doing to be useful for this new world that we live in?" I always think that's a good question to be asking yourself: "What can I be doing to be most useful? How can I reorient? How has the world changed that I'm in denial about?"

So yeah, hopefully that works for you, AJ. And again I would . . . That story is super compressed, and it makes it feel like it was an easy process, you know. I shared the timelines, it's a multi-year process. But if you think about the super long-term, the infinite timeline, that you have literally the rest of your life to figure this stuff out . . . Right? You're not behind, you're not going to be forgotten about, you're not going to lose the opportunity, you're just going to continue to level to take on larger and larger problems—it gives you the permission to explore, to learn, to concentrate on the bottleneck. And that's all that really matters.

So, I've taken up more time than I promised. I really hope this was useful. If you guys have any feedback, questions, anything you want to share personally . . . If I can hold you accountable, if there's anything that I can do to help you, your business, your mission reach the next level, please, please, please reach out to me and let me know. I would love to hear from you, I would love to help. That is why I do this. I mean, this is not a business for me, this is a mission. So hey, if you enjoyed something I said today, if you found it thought-provoking, if you disagreed, please let me know. I would love to hear from you, and it would be an honor to help you guys reach the next level.

If you're interested in team performance training, no pressure. Just go to teamperformancetraining.com to opt in and learn more, or theforcingfunction.com/team-training to apply. It'd be great to hear from you, and I hope a couple of you guys will be a part of what we're creating next September. Thank you so much for being here, and see you guys next time.

 
Chris Sparks