Danny Miranda: High-Performance Secrets from a Poker Pro

 

Danny Miranda and Chris Sparks spoke about how food affects performance, the importance of breath control, and what to do about your New Year's Resolutions in February.

Video and audio recordings below (1h11m). Resources mentioned, timestamped show notes, and full transcript following.

Podcast Transcript

[Note: transcript edited slightly for clarity.]

Danny: Chris, thank you for joining me, and welcome to the podcast. I really appreciate you taking the time.

Chris: Thank you, Danny. I'm really excited to be here.

Danny: So, as a high-performance coach—we're recording right now in late December, and I would imagine this time of the year is similar to a doctor who gets a call when something's wrong, whether it be a toothache or just the littlest thing. I'm sure your phone must be getting blown up from friends, family, acquaintances, third cousins that you met. Is that the case?

Chris: Yeah. It's a very interesting time of year, for sure. I feel like there's an existential angst that is pervading the collective subconscious, both—Hey. Obviously, 2020 has been a weird year. Priorities, values have shifted quite a bit. Perhaps the year didn't go quite as we had anticipated. And thinking about to what extent these conditions will continue, and we close this container of the year and start fresh next year, and how—What can we do? What's under our control to have next year go better, whether it's taking advantage of current circumstances or making oneself more immune or anti-fragile to external circumstances? What are the things that we want to do more of, or start doing in the new year? And I think most importantly, what are the things that we're no longer going to do in order to make space for the new, for the more?

So I'm definitely getting more interest these days, but it's a very different type of interest around—I think people—just like a birthday brings reflection, the end of the year (despite it being a completely arbitrary day) inspires reflection. It's an opportunity to ask the big questions of, "What am I doing on this Earth? What's important to me? What's a good life?" And this time of year, seeing family, you know, encountering multiple generations, older and newer, you get a little bit of a sense of your own mortality, a little bit of the sense of maybe things that we can lose sight of when our head's down working. Our health, our relationships. And we're forced to reconcile with this empty space. Right? People are generally working less, spending more time thinking, reading, say, "Oh, is what I'm doing right now what I want to be doing? Do I want to continue doing this? Am I on the path that I want to be?" So yeah, there's been a lot of wrestling with these big questions and doing the best I can to serve as a sounding board, whether it's reflecting back priorities and values or trying to play Devil's Advocate if I think someone hasn't thought through the other side.

Danny: Going on what you just said, how do you figure out when's the right time to play Devil's Advocate and when's the right time to push on something, and getting that balance? How do you figure out, "Okay, this is the role I should be taking in this situation?"

Chris: I think a lot of the role-playing comes down to conviction. I think one of my biggest competitive advantages is—it extends to a lot of areas in my life. Obviously, it originates from games and poker, but it really extends to investing and coaching these days: I am really adept at pattern recognition. I believe that humans at our core are very habitual or pattern-driven creatures, that if you put us in the same context, in the same environment, situation, et cetera, that we will tend to repeat the same actions. We will tend to have the same thoughts. And some of these patterns can be very beneficial and some of these patterns can, let's say, hamper our growth or cause us to be a little bit myopic in our thinking. And so what I'm always looking for, whether I'm talking with a friend, a family member, a client, is, "What is the pattern that is going to be repeated here, and is this a pattern which is desirable?" So where I play Devil's Advocate is if I think a pattern is being blindly followed without the intentionality necessary to say, "Hey, is this the default that I want to have?"

So, I really like—you had an episode recently with Kevin Lee, and he was talking about his experiences working with an executive coach. And the way I've always put it is I'm an objective third party. That it can be useful to have someone who's less invested in what you're doing who can help you take that outside view. The way Kevin put it is you help take someone out of this first-person perspective, "things are happening to me," to step outside of that and say, "What is the best thing for Chris Sparks to do in this situation?" Or, "Given the resources that Danny Miranda has, what should he do next?" It's like you're reading about yourself as a character in a novel. And being able to take this perspective is such a powerful meta-skill because it's only by being able to step outside the box that we put ourselves in that we can start to consider alternate scenarios—versus just blindly following the path that we happen to be on. It's a really good way as well to recognize these invisible decision points, where persisting in the path that we are doing every day is a decision, and every day realizing that we have the opportunity to change course and do something else.

And hey, that's what the end of the year is great for, even though it's an arbitrary day. This is the day that you can presumably (society tells you this is okay) to just completely change course and do something completely different. So I think that's the Devil's Advocate approach: without considering other options it's very easy to forget those other options exist.

Danny: It sounds like you're bringing awareness to the situation and you're—with awareness, we can then create change. So I'm curious, what are some of the ways that you personally create awareness for yourself?

Chris: I love this word, 'awareness.' You know, it's been a little bit co-opted recently around you know, mindfulness and presence. There's lots of words that kind of point to it. But I do think that this is the Jedi mind trick of all self-improvement, of all personal development, is becoming aware. In order to change something, in order to improve something, we need to be aware of two things. First, we need to be aware of where we are in this moment. What is the current present tense of where we stand? And the second is having a vision. Being aware of what we want, where we want things to be. And once we have a clear picture of current reality and our future vision, we can start to identify the difference between these two images. And being aware of these differences, our mind is automatically drawn to opportunities to reconcile these differences.

It's that—I like to say that focus is having the object of our focus in everything; that if we know what we are looking for—opportunities to bring our present situation closer to our future vision—we're going to see opportunities to make improvements, to make changes everywhere we look. That it's drawing our awareness to these opportunities. You know, this is a good opportunity to mention that this is the origination of my company name, "Forcing Function." It's a design concept where a designer intentionally creates an interface to draw the user's attention to an affordance, to something that the designer wants the user to do. And so it's bringing to consciousness this option. And so, hey. Obviously, we can't do something until we're aware of the option to do something. And you know, there's a few ways that we can train this muscle of awareness.

So I think these kind of fall into qualitative and quantitative. First, quantitative: the classic saying, which I very much believe, is that you improve what you measure. And there's lots of studies that support by just putting a number on something, you automatically improve it. Whether, hey. This could be your weight, this could be your bank balance, this could be your productivity level one-to-ten for the given day. This could be your conviction level, zero to a hundred percent on an investment. Once you've put a number on something, you're incentivized automatically to improve it. Never underestimate a rising integer. Say, for example, "All right, I realize today that I'm a hundred and sixty pounds." And I keep writing that down. Even if I don't have a goal to get to one-seventy or get to one-fifty, I'm automatically aware of things that are bringing that number up and down, and so automatically my actions start to align with my desired goal.

The more qualitative approach to awareness I think comes from externalizing our thoughts. I'm a huge proponent of journaling. Myself and a lot of my clients have gotten a lot of mileage out of The Artist's Way approach, of just emptying everything out of your brain without judgment, where the more bad ideas you get out the more good ideas that can emerge, and that everything looks less scary, more approachable on the paper.

So I have these notebooks full of writing which is just me getting everything out of my head so that I can deal with it once it's outside. The classic GTD saying, the brain is a poor storage device, I think this is very true. So by both seeing my thoughts, whether these are you know, values, priorities, fears, seeing those on the page I can become aware with them, and that puts me in a much better position to deal with them. And so, yeah. I think it all begins with creating awareness, and I think that's my biggest function as a coach, is to bring awareness to that which might be invisible.

Danny: You mentioned morning pages just now. I'm curious, how long have you been doing this practice, and what got you started with morning pages in general?

Chris: I'm fortunate in that my morning routine hasn't really changed in almost eight years.

Danny: Ah.

Chris: I somehow stumbled on something that works for me. I'll never claim that I've been a hundred percent consistent for eight years, but morning pages has been that anchor, the keystone of the keystone habits throughout that time. I originally discovered morning pages through—I took a Psychology of Creativity class in college. It was back, 2008. So you can do the math. It took me a few years for the practice to finally take route. What I loved about this class was that there was only one assignment in the entire class, was that one day, on your choosing, you had to teach the class. And you could teach the class anything that you wanted, but the entire one hour and forty-eight minutes was yours to try to hold the attention of the class and to demonstrate something that's creative. Which, you know, here's the takeaway: anything can be creative. We're all artists.

So, if I remember right, I did a presentation on flow where I showed—you know, I was very into YouTube videos at the time. I was showing like parkour videos and these, you know, the videos where people do the backflips over cliffs into, you know, dunking in their pool. And at the end of the presentation, the professor goes, "Well that was a really good presentation, but in one hour and forty-eight minutes other than announcing the title you never said the word 'flow' once, and maybe that is the best demonstration of flow."

Danny: That's a great story. Oh my god, that's hilarious. I'm curious, if you had to teach a class today, fast forward now, I don't know, twelve years, what would you teach that class on in the present moment twelve years later?

Chris: I think this is a really good perspective. As I try to write more often, as I more and more identify as an educator, I like to think that I'm speaking to a younger version of myself. What are the things that I would have liked to have known either to accelerate my progress or to reduce some of the suffering along the way? So you know, anything that I'd want to teach myself might be a little bit idiosyncratic. I think the younger that I go—as we approach, let's say, grade school—I have often fantasized about writing a children's book about habits.

You know, thanks to James Clear and others, habits are very popular these days, but I think there's a bit of myth around them in that it needs to be something that's super systematic, needs to be incredibly diligent, you know, use elaborate spreadsheets to track things. And that really I just think of habits as default behaviors. And so I try to take a little bit more of a holistic approach to behavior in both what do I want my default to be and how can I sculpt my container, these contexts that I find myself in, to make these defaults more likely.

And so you know, proverbial title that I can just think of on top of my mind would be, "Easier To Do, Hard To Do." So things that I want to do more of, being aware of opportunities to make those things easier to do. Things that I want to do less of, making those things harder to do. So the easiest example is diet. If I want to make good food, then having really healthy food in the fridge, or ideally even prepared that I can just put in my mouth without cooking and making all of the things that are unhealthy (whatever that definition is for you) non-accessible so I have to leave my house and climb a mountain in bare feet in order to get up there.

So I think that would be the youngest lesson that I would want, would be around habits. As I get older, I would like to move more towards teaching systems thinking. I think particularly in society, we tend to think very cause and effect when in reality the world is incredibly complex and the second order of thinking requires thinking about the conditions which emerge which lead to our deterministic behavior. That we aren't necessarily the author of what's going on; there's a lot of luck and noise out there. And understanding how we fit into systems and our existence within those systems, I think, it gives a lot of serenity to the things, you know, knowing what we have in control and out of control.

And then finally, I think the third class that I would teach—this is moving up towards a more capstone-level class—that I think is something that's really essential and again, very overlooked by I would say even many of our politicians and many people who manage in the billions of dollars, is expected value thinking versus results-oriented thinking. So just when we make decisions, thinking about our process, our underlying assumptions, that what has occurred, our current version of reality—this dimension that we're living in—is just one permutation of infinite worlds which could have occurred. And so, if something has gone well it doesn't mean that it was a good decision, and when something goes badly, it doesn't mean that it was a bad decision. We live in a society—particularly in the US—that believes that when things go well we did great and when things went poorly we did poorly, and thus there's a lot of missed opportunity for improving decision-process to catch more assumptions to reveal more blind spots upfront, and to stop repeating these same patterns over and over again of poorly-aligned incentivized decision-making.

I think that's the biggest lesson that I've taken away from poker, with variance being an incredibly harsh mistress. If you get punched in the face over and over by luck, you start to respect it. And so knowing what is under my control in terms of decision-making, trying the best I can to predict these potential futures and the respective likelihood, I think I have really trained this muscle of decision-making, that I make much fewer mistakes in reality versus in simulation because I understand the full spectrum of possibilities.

Danny: That was the biggest takeaway for me, when I read Thinking In Bets, by Annie Duke. And particularly the example of Marshawn Lynch running the ball in the Super Bowl, Pete Carroll getting, you know, absolutely hammered by the media, and what happens is she explains how Pete Carroll actually made the right decision, even though the outcome ended up terrible for the Seahawks. I thought that was such an incredible example as a sports fan, and it blew my mind. And I was like, "Wow, okay, what we do, our actions, don't necessarily equate to outcomes in terms of good and bad."

Chris: Absolutely. So there's two things to take away from that anecdote. I think the first order idea is, hey. Let's say we're going for fourth down, or it's going for a two-point conversion versus an extra point, and we're thinking about the expected value. On average, how many points does this play get? Right? And so going for a pass versus a run. And again, taking into account you have to predict your opponent's counter to your move. Right? So if you go with the best play option every time (let's say hypothetically your best play option is just to run the ball up the gut) well, they're just going to put all of their defenders right at the line and clog the middle.

And so you see this in poker all the time, where the best play in a vacuum is not always the best play, because it causes your opponent to adjust. That if you are never bluffing then your opponent should be never calling. That you need to be taking plays that are suboptimal in a vacuum, sometimes, in order for your overall game plan to work the best. And so let's even put aside that running the ball was the best play. It could be correct to throw the ball even when it's not the 'correct' play. And this is just classic second-order thinking, because you have to take your opponent's adjustment into account. Right? You have to have the threat of doing other options.

So that's just like the complete basic thinking. The other third-order perspective on this is how many decisions—public—Let's say these are large corporations or investors or politicians, where people are completely choosing suboptimal options because they don't want to be exposed in the court of public opinion. This is usually referred to as, "No one gets fired for buying IBM." This is why upstarts have a hard time, this is why first-time managers have a hard time raising funds: because no one wants to be seen as the person to take a contrarian bet. It's better to be consensus and wrong sometimes than to be contrarian and right, when it's required to be contrarian and right to escape the herd in order to have the outsize returns that allow you to have an outlier life. But no one wants to be publicly wrong in an idiosyncratic way, so it creates a society of herd behavior where everyone makes these consensus decisions because no one wants to be publicly questioned.

And so we see this on Twitter, where no one wants to speak up because they're afraid their words will be misconstrued, that they'll be torn down by the mob. It's just—these perverse incentives are everywhere, where because everyone is so worried about being judged on their results they make suboptimal decisions.

Danny: It reminds me of Jeff Bezos and thinking in terms of long-term. Thinking—not caring about the shareholders in the short-term and being willing to forego short-term gains for long-term way more gains. You know? So that's kind of where my mind goes to on that. Switching gears a little bit, you had a great quote that just stuck with me when I was doing research for this conversation that I really need you to talk about, which is, "A minute in the evening is worth ten in the morning." This goes back to habits, but I think it is so important to internalize, and I really would like to hear you talk a little bit more about it.

Chris: Yeah. So the essence of this is time arbitrage, where we—Another societal defect, in my opinion, is that based out of the cog-in-the-machine, Industrial Revolution-type thinking—you know, "They Live," work eight hours, play eight hours, sleep eight hours—that we just fit into an industrial process, that work is measured by the number of hours worked rather than the output of that work. Where, hey. It is very possible to "work" eight hours, and get nothing of value done, and it's very possible for me to send one email or to make one call or to write one paragraph and do more work or have more productive output than an entire eight hours of work combined. Right? Hours are not created equal. And so that's the first conclusion: time falls on a power law. Doing the most important thing we could be doing is more important than the rest of the things we could be doing combined.

It's a really crazy idea to internalize. And so once you realize that, that our time can be infinitely more valuable, you think about, "Well, what are the other dimensions of what I can get done?" For me, there are three pillars. Time, Energy, and Attention. And so thinking about, "Hey, if I'm controlling for Time by doing the most important thing I possibly could be doing, given where I am at this moment, how can I maximize my other resources towards getting more things done effectively? And that's—I want to maximize my energy levels, I want to maximize my attentional capacity. And so just like the universe is converging on entropic heat death, the day gets more complicated as it goes on. Right? The day will never be more simple for most people than that first hour or two after they wake up. You can go a little bit slow, you haven't been infected by news, social media, email yet. Your mind is a little bit clear. You have a little bit more freedom to set your own priorities. You probably don't have any calls or meetings.

This is the moment where you have most likely the greatest energy. Usually, our energetic peak occurs about two hours after waking, as well as our attentional peak, because we have fewer things that are clamoring for our attention. And, hey, you know, families, managerial demands (whether you're managing up or down), falling into the rabbit hole of social media and the messages, that attentional capacity and that energetic capacity tends to decrease as the day goes on.

And so that's the idea here: whether it's habit, working on your top priority, moving your side project forward, writing, whatever it is, my belief is that you are going to be ten times more productive in the morning than you will be in the evening. And so I see this all the time, particularly with younger clients. And, I said, I'm very much a night owl. I'm up 'til 3:00 or 4:00 AM many nights playing poker, so I'm far from immune to this thinking. But I see them staying up late hours working on things that are low importance that they end up just throwing away otherwise, when, hey. Just go to sleep, wake up a little bit earlier, clear your morning, and just work on one hour of your most important thing, and that will be a more important hour than the rest of your day combined.

It's really crazy to think about, and it really reduces down to when in doubt, go to bed and wake up tomorrow. So I said, yeah. It applies to habits. Like, anything I can do to make my morning go better the night before. Set out my clothes, set out my journal, write my plan for tomorrow. Anything that I can do to increase my chances of successfully following through in the morning is worth doing in the evening. If I'm working on something and I get the slightest inclination of being stuck—It's like, put a plug in it, come back to it in the morning. Guarantee if I sleep on it, let my subconscious work on it a little bit, come back fresh, I'm gonna break through this wall much faster.

So, yeah. Something that I really try to preach and put into practice is, "Can I shift my most important things from the evening up into the first part of the day?"

Danny: Yeah. I think you mention a problem that a lot of people who love what they do have, which is like you could do this forever. Like, I could have conversations with people forever, I could be working forever. Like, 2:00 AM, 3:00 AM, it doesn't bother me. But I know that in the morning, I'm going to be upset by myself in the night, because that almost is a different person. So how would you recommend someone shutting it off? And I know you mentioned in the past, you have this "work out" where you do a "work out" at 5:30, but what are the specific ways you would tell someone who loves their work to stop and put the work away for another day and save it?

Chris: Yeah. I love the concept of a guardrail, where creativity, productivity come from constraints. And I think that results are derived from consistent output. Writing is a classic example, but any form of work, people tend to fall into feast and famine cycles. Feast, where, "Hey, I have a breakthrough!" and just like spend the whole weekend coding, and then don't touch it for a few weeks. I've seen this time and time again, that one hour a day—Not only does it reinforce, hey, butt in chair, because you don't know what's going to happen until you actually sit down and start working, it removes this contextual constraint of, "I need to be motivated in order to get working." So just reinforcing an hour a day. It's like, finding that marginal hour, whether someone is at full time, they're trying to move forward with a side project, whether they're trying to write a book, it's like, just find one hour a day every day without fail. That's something that I really believe in and I try to practice myself.

Everyone's familiar with Pomodoros. And there's lots of talk about, hey. You can't get yourself to start? Set a timer and now you have to start. And I talk about this often, that, hey. Once I have this in front of me, I set the timer. Okay. All of a sudden I'm single-tasking. Like, turning that timer on is the hardest part of the work, 'cause it's me deciding, "All right, I'm going to do this for a set period of time." The way, way underrated part is the timer goes off and I stop. Right? I've given myself permission to stop in order to get myself to start, but when that timer goes off, that serves as a trigger. Do I want to continue doing what I'm doing? The opportunity to reflect is like, "Is this the best thing that I can be doing?" So that allows me to get away from the window dressing, like, moving deck chairs around on the Titanic-type stuff where it's so easy to rabbit hole on something that can be easily justified later, right?

Most of our cognitive machinery is designed to pat ourselves on the back. That, "Hey. I can stop any time." And recognizing, "Hey, how is my level of energy right now? How is my level of focus? Is what I'm doing really the most important thing I can be doing?” This alarm going off serves as a trigger for me to ask myself these questions. But if we never ask these questions, it's so easy to persist. You mentioned the concept that I talk about often, which is the concept of a hard stop. I think this is so critical in this new normal of working from home, to create some separation between our work and our person.

This is something that I think would surprise a lot of listeners: my biggest struggle with clients is getting them to stop working. Like, it's very easy to get them to work. Obviously, hey, they started businesses, they created funds. They didn't do this because they didn't love it, they didn't find some fulfillment. But the issue is they run themselves ragged. They sacrifice their health, they don't keep in touch with their friends or their family, they don't spend enough time with their kids, because there's always another thing that can be done.

Here's a little secret: you're gonna die with a very long to-do list. You look at most people's actions, and you think that their job was to empty their inbox or to cross everything off their to-do list. Like, no. These are just lists of things that we could do or people that we could contact in order to move ourselves forward, but our job is not to clear the to-do list. And so recognizing if I create this constraint of, let's say in my example, I only work from 11:00 to 4:30 every day. That's it. 4:30 I have a "work out." It used to be 5:30. I switched time zones, so now I have even an hour less. Even more of a constraint. 4:30, go workout, shower, change clothes, end day.

Most days I'm able to stick to that. So, the exceptions—it's important to have a list of exceptions. For me, it's if I have something that's pending or due that someone's waiting on me for the next day. But even then, I have another hard stop of 10:00 PM. Not playing poker, close the computer, leave the office, shut the door, turn off the lights. Like, hard stop. No devices for the day. Cut off. That having these cutoffs, surprisingly, increases productivity, because work expands to the time that you allot for it. If you give yourself from 8:00 AM to 3:00 AM to work, magically you're going to be spreading the same amount of work out until 3:00 AM.

But most importantly, productivity comes from sprint/rest cycles. And so forcing yourself to walk away from the computer to actually recharge and recover allows you to sprint faster when you're working. And surprise surprise, your best ideas, your breakthroughs aren't going to come to you while you're sitting at your desk at 2:00 AM. They're gonna come to you while you're in the shower or while you're playing a game or while you're going on a walk around the neighborhood or watching the sunset while you have a glass of tea. It's going to come to you in moments where you're completely disengaged in what you're doing.

And so taking this time away to recover is actually more productive, especially for the long run. It is like, we are not sprinting. We're running a marathon. And so I'm very conscious of, "What is the level that I can maintain every day without fail hopefully for the next eighty-four years?"

Danny: How do you convince someone that that's the path they should be taking?

Chris: Experiments.

Danny: Mm-hmm.

Chris: I think the function of what I can accomplish with a coaching client is proportional to the level of buy-in that I have. And so the way that I accumulate the social capital is by encouraging small and progressively larger experiments. Which is, "Prove me wrong." Hey, try working on your most important thing before checking email. Right? Yeah. Don't check your email 'til noon and see if the world catches on fire. Right? I promise it's gonna be just fine. Or, "Hey, try closing your computer at 10:00 PM and see how you feel the next day." If it doesn't help, don't worry. Don't try it again. But like, just try.

And I think that this is the approach to take throughout life, is constantly experimenting and being curious about what happens. Because there are lots of conditions that generalize across people. Right? Goal formation, habit formation, there are literally hundreds of studies on the best practices here. So if you aren't using SMART goals, if you're not creating contextually supported habits, you're doing it wrong. But in pretty much everything else, like diet, sleep, what you choose to do in your day, your productivity tools, there's so much unique snowflake opportunity where my role as I see it is to identify things that work really well for someone or things that get in the way of their output and to, again, try to make the good things easier to do and to try to make the bad things harder to do.

And so part of this awareness, as we were discussing: what conditions work for you? When you have a really good day, whether that's you're productive or you feel happy or fulfilled, you're excited to wake up in the morning, like, what's going on? What correlates with those feelings, and what can you do to recreate those conditions?

I think that's the next level, is once you've put in place, "Here are the things that work for basically everyone," think about, "What works really well for me, and how can I make that happen more often?"

Danny: You mentioned food as one of the levers you can affect, and I was really fascinated, because when I was going through your advice on your website I noticed you mentioned the Grandmaster Diet, which I assume has to do with chess players. And talk to me about this. How did you come upon this diet, if this is the one that worked for you, as something to focus on?

Chris: So this is referring to an article which really blew me away about chess grandmasters. So as a student of high performance and a top player in a very competitive field such as poker, I'm always looking to, "What are the best in other competitive fields doing, and is this something that potentially carries over to either what I'm teaching or what I'm doing at the poker tables?" And so a couple things that I saw that grandmasters were doing that really struck me as interesting. First, was the level of attention that they were giving to their physical bodies. So top players like Magnus Carlsen playing two to three hours of tennis every single day. I recently picked up tennis based off of reading this article, because tennis is an incredibly mentally intense game. Right? It's verbal jujitsu played out in racket form, and there's a really, really strong mental component to tennis, but obviously, you have to be incredibly physically fit. That playing a chess tournament, just like playing a marathon cash game session or a multi-day tournament, is a physical pursuit just as much as it's a mental pursuit.

And so it really emphasized, hey. Like, when I was in my early days of poker, I'll just give the total counter-example. When I was coming up the ranks, I had never been in the gym before, my dinner was whatever could be delivered to my room, so a lot of times that was pizza or other fried stuff. I was drinking soda to stay awake during sessions. And the more that I met other top players and realized, "Oh, you're doing things a little bit differently," or saw what the top players in other fields were doing, it's like, "Oh. My body needs to be a temple." Like, I don't put anything in there. I don't take caffeine, I don't—Like, every macro that I take is pretty carefully tracked. And it doesn't mean that I eat clean chicken breast and broccoli every single day, but I know from experience that my body and my mind are one. They are one and the same. And so the shape that I am in affects my ability to perform, and when my energy drops my attention drops and I make bad decisions.

Another surprising one that I found from the Grandmaster Diet piece was the level of attention they took to experimenting with the angle of their neck. That it was found that if their neck angle (imagine you're leaning over a board for hours) was too acute, not enough oxygen was making it to their brain, and thus they were likely to make blunders because literally their brain's not getting enough oxygen. So it was a good encouragement to experiment with chairs and different positioning of, "Hey, if I'm going to be sitting for eight to twelve hours, I wanna make sure that I'm able to maintain and sit in a position that's optimal, that I'm not having these energetic leaks occurring in my body."

So yeah, seeing what other people are doing in other fields I think is incredibly instructional because it illuminates these unknown unknowns. Like, these are things that I wouldn't even have known to experiment with that were opportunities for a competitive advantage until I saw, well, if someone else who's having these types of results are putting this much effort into it, it's probably something that's worth trying. And that's really how my poker game has built over the years, is I see someone doing something that's working really well, and go, "Hmm. Maybe I should be trying that too." And I do. And I'm just cobbling together all these mini-superpowers into one giant superpower.

Danny: Have you played around with any breathwork? Anything like Wim Hof or 4x4 box breathing—Anything like that in your pursuits for high performance?

Chris: Yeah. I'm a huge proponent of breathwork. It's something that's become more of a focus in recent years. I'm fortunate enough to have a yoga instructor. Shout out to Vinny, who I work with privately a couple days a week, and we do a lot of different breathing techniques, box breath being one of them. I'm going to go blank on the others. The other one's more of a diaphragm-based breath where you breathe out the nose, so kind of really good for clearing out the sinuses type thing. A lot of my work on improving my speaking is really breath control, so being able to go longer without taking in a breath, being able to control vocal range using the breath. There's some really great studies that show that there's a breath/mind connection, that the speed of our breath is in a feedback loop with our mental state, and so that we are—What I mean by "feedback loop" is our brain is partially determining how we feel about our current situation based upon the speed of our breath.

Danny: Wow.

Chris: And so that means that if we can slow down our breath, we can slow down our thinking, and if we accelerate our breath, if we become a little bit more fight or flight, we can raise our energy level, we can rise to an occasion. But that's another dimension of awareness that I think a lot about, is, "Where am I on this spectrum of sympathetic nervous system versus parasympathetic nervous system?" Right? If you have a spectrum of full fight-or-flight on one side, and full delta-wave "I'm meditating in a cave" on the other, where am I at this moment in time? And the second-order effect of, "Where would be the right place to be given the situation that I'm in?"

Yeah, I do—I think that it is nontrivial to realize that every spiritual tradition has some connection to the breath. Right? Why do we pay attention to the breath when we're meditating? There has to be something there. Because there are plenty of other stimuli that we could use. And like I said, I think that that neurofeedback is a critical part of it, is if, hey. If we can observe our breath, in a way we're observing our mental state, and by observing our mental state, becoming aware of it, we regain some sense of control over it.

Danny: So—That was incredible, and I hope that people listening to that really took something out of it, because the breath is super important. Switching gears a little bit, I want to talk about—This episode I plan on releasing in February, and I'm thinking—We're recording right now in late December. So I'm curious, what are some of the pitfalls you see for people who have set New Year's resolutions or are starting a new habit and are excited about it, and now they need to get into that second phase, and they're like, "Okay, it's February, I've already been doing this a month," or maybe, "I thought about stopping." What are the common things you see in February for ways to keep going or stop—How do you think about February in terms of New Year's resolutions?

Chris: February is the month of disillusionment.

Danny: Hmm.

Chris: I think New Year's resolutions are a total trap where people fall off on setting intentions for the new year. First, they don't actually have full conviction that this is something they want to pursue inclusive of the cost of pursuing, and second, they don't have a clear plan of how they're going to make progress and stick to making this progress when they no longer have the burst in motivation that comes from, "2021 is going to be different, this is the year that I change everything."

That's why I say February is disillusionment, because it's the realization, "Oh, everything is not going to change overnight. It's going to be hard. There are going to be setbacks. And I'm not going to be able to do everything that I've committed to." So I think this is a good opportunity to review those intentions that were made in the beginning of the year, and say, "What am I still committed to, and what am I willing to give up to follow through on these commitments?" Often, in order to pick something up, to add a new habit, to add a new project, to accelerate progress in an area, requires deprioritizing something else. Putting something else down. And so this is the classic trap that I see so often, is, "I want to do everything that I'm doing right now, but a little bit more, a little bit faster. But, you know, I can't sacrifice everything. I have to move forward. I want more friends who I see more often, I want to double my follower count, I want to double my revenue this year. Oh yeah, and I want to spend the whole year traveling." Okay. Good luck.

You know, it's like, in order to accelerate one area, you need to decelerate another area. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, and the same as productivity. Productivity is just shifted from one area to the next. So any setback is a lesson. All disillusionment is an opportunity to say, "Hey, is this goal still important to me, and if so what do I need to change in order to put myself back on track?" And realizing that time periods are completely arbitrary. Like, you can start, you can pick things up whenever. There's no such thing as a bad day, a bad year. It's all in your head. So hypothetically you set a goal January 1st, "Hey, I want to have a six-pack at the end of the year," and February 1st you're twenty pounds overweight, well it doesn't mean that you're not gonna have a six-pack. It might mean you have to change your habits and your approach, you know, quite a bit, and maybe you need to accelerate that timeline. But also it means, "Hey, maybe I can adjust this goal." It either could be, "Maybe I need to reduce the scope. Maybe a six-pack in a year is something that I can't achieve, that maybe this is putting a little bit more pressure. Maybe I want to reduce body fat a couple percentages, or go a couple sizes down." Something like that.

Or it could be, "What was I trying to achieve with a six-pack?" Was it, "I want to be confident in my body?" Was it, "I wanted to feel good?" Is it, "I wanted to see if I was capable of doing something like that?" Maybe there's another approach, another project that could be taken on that would be a more direct path towards that outcome.

So, that's why I say all these setbacks are opportunities to reflect. Is it still important? If so, what am I willing to give up in order to get it?

Danny: I like how in that second question you're looking for the root of what is going on as opposed to addressing the symptom. And I think that's really important to think about.

You said just now that time is arbitrary and we set time frames arbitrarily. I totally agree. But you have said before, in your eighth point in your advice column, that you should commit to staying consistent with a new habit before raising the bar. I'm curious how you came to that conclusion of thirty days, and why you picked thirty days specifically.

Chris: Yeah. So the amount of time for a new habit to stick depends on the habit. I think a lot of this is a function of feedback loops. So the more often something is occurring, you can really compress that timeline. So for habits of thought, I think if it was given someone's full attention you could install that habit in about a week with just some ongoing check-ins and maintenance, whereas things that are a complete departure from our norm might take sixty, ninety days, et cetera.

And just to reiterate that the point from before is that all habits are contextual. And so what people are often horrified to discover—They go travel, they move apartments, and all of a sudden that habit that they thought was completely solid vanishes. And that being consistent with your habit for on average thirty days is really only ten percent of the way there. It's like you don't really have a habit, it's you have a habit when all these things are true. Right? When you're in the same place at the same time with the same people, et cetera. So I say it's a minimum of thirty days, because you need to stick with something for long enough in order to start to internalize the difference when the habit happens, when the habit doesn't happen.

A lot of these things can be very subtle, especially in the beginning. Exercise, journaling, meditation. If you're not super aware, it would be easy to do it for a week and say, "Ah, nothing has changed." But the power of these habits, like, doesn't come this month or even this year. It comes with doing them for decades. And so needing to stick with something for long enough in order to start to internalize, "Is life a little bit better when I journal, or when I meditate, or when I exercise?" Because there's going to come times when you're not going to want to do them, where you move and it becomes a lot harder to stick with them. And so this is the first step towards calcifying it as part of your identity. "I am someone who wakes up every day and writes." "I am someone who wakes up every day and goes for a run." "I am someone who goes to bed before midnight." Whatever it is. Like, becoming part of your identity, that's the end game of these habits.

And so the reason that I suggest the thirty days, another one is it's a good test of commitment level. It's like, if you weren't committed to doing something every day for thirty days, maybe you should question whether you really want to take on this habit, because if you aren't going to stay consistent you aren't going to get the benefits anyways, so save yourself the hassle. So that's why I like to try to get that conviction upfront, because if I'm not committed I don't want to take on something that I'm going to fail. Or, I could do something to increase my commitment upfront to allow myself to sprint faster.

So yeah, that thirty days is kind of a baseline. It's a good test for, "How committed are you?" And if you're able to stick with something for thirty days, it's really, really easy to build off of that.

Another thing that I'll add around habits which is often said but very seldom practiced is, again, the results of those first thirty days don't matter. What matters is that you're able to do it. So, hey, don't try to do a hundred push-ups every day for thirty days. Do one push-up every day for thirty days. If you can do one push-up, it's very easy to go to two, to go to ten, to go to twenty, to go a hundred. But start with that micro-habit of, "I'm going to do one push-up, I'm going to floss one tooth, I'm going to write one paragraph." Like, super, super small, and then once you have that foundation to build off of, it's really, really easy to build off of that foundation.

Danny: I'm going to play Devil's Advocate here for a second on that point.

Chris: Okay.

Danny: What happens—What—the opposite situation, let's say, of doing one minute of meditation is doing let's say thirty minutes of meditation. And what if at the end of the thirty days, the person won't see enough of a benefit from the one minute of meditation, so they'll stop, whereas if they chose to do it for thirty minutes a day they would say, "Wow, this is really life-changing?" So how do you think about that difference?

Chris: I think you're completely right, and this is not an either/or, this is a both/and. So I think meditation is an excellent example here, and it's why I encourage anyone who's getting into meditation to do some form of intensive retreat. I think in the past version of reality, going and doing a weekend onsite retreat where you do five-plus hours of meditation every day is an amazing way to accelerate your progress, as well as to just get a taste of how deep the waters go, and you know, the depth of the human experience is infinite.

Today, some of these experiences that you can do at home—you know, lots of brilliant instructors who you might not be able to encounter are now doing lessons over Zoom. And, hey, meditating in your home is not an optimal experience, but it's a decent substitute. So, yeah. I also think that this is very true, to see if you can get a sense of what is possible by getting one large dose upfront. It's like you said, like meditating for a minute a day you're not really going to see any benefit. You know, it's going to be very subtle. But if you can get a taste of, "Wow, I just saw into another dimension, maybe this is something that's worth sticking with," that's really powerful as well. So yes, I think there's the equivalent for every habit, is, okay, while motivation is the highest, see if you can seek out some forcing function, some experience which allows you to get that sense of what is truly possible if you continue with this habit.

Danny: Absolutely. So, before we wrap this conversation up, I want to ask about people who you get information from. Listening to you for the past hour, I hear some James Clear in there, I hear some David Allen. I don't know if these are influences of yours, but I'm curious, who are some influences? Where can we find the men who created this man, or the many men or many women who created this man right here?

Chris: Oh, it's so hard to single anyone out. I don't have any original ideas. I think everything is a remix, and I very much stand on the shoulders of intellectual giants. So, hey, the biggest compounding effect is what we consume. So, being very, very conscious of who we listen to and what we adopt into our own operating system of beliefs. I think the fields that I get the most intellectual leverage, first, I think is primarily systems thinking. And things that branch off of that as far as strategy, particularly Eastern strategy, like Sun Tzu type stuff. Operations management.

So I think my top recommendation for business owners is the book, The Goal, talking about bottlenecks or the theory of constraints. A lot of that is a branch off of obviously Buddhism, Stoicism, ancient philosophy. All of these are kind of branches on this tree of holistic, systemic thinking. I think very deeply about how to translate and apply what has replicated from cognitive science. So I said, the two most reliable places there are goals and habits. What is the science between how we achieve what we set out to achieve, and what is the science behind how do we determine what behaviors we do? And attached to that, how do we form attitudes, values, beliefs? Usually, it's a part of a feedback loop with our behavior, and what we do leads to how we see ourselves which leads to what we do. So if we can change our behavior we change the way that we see ourselves we change what we value, and thus life at a meta-level becomes what do we want to want.

So yeah, I think going to the source, staying away from translations and airport-type books but looking at the actual studies and what are the implications is a really good way to get the best of psychology and stay away from the power pose, "Grit" type stuff which doesn't stand the test of time. And I think that the final place that I look at is who do I think is living a great life? I think holistically about people as well, where there are many people who would be considered conventionally or culturally successful that we wouldn't necessarily want to change places with. So I think the classic archetype of this is the rich but unhappy person. So I'm always trying to look at who are the people who I admire and envy in a healthy way? Who are the people who I would love to take their advice because I would want their life in some way? Right? You shouldn't take advice from someone if you don't want their life, because that's the position that their advice is coming from. And say, "Hey, is there anything that these people are doing, or what are the beliefs that they espouse that perhaps I should try on for size and see if they fit?"

That's really what it all reduces down to, is like, "Try it so you see what happens." So I'm always looking for examples, whether that's top performers in other fields, or people that I see have amazing relationships, are happy, feel fulfilled, putting amazing things into the world. Are there things that they're doing that I can adopt and try on for size? I think that's always a good place to start.

Danny: I love using that mental model as well. And just looking at people and saying, you know, "What are they doing with their life and can I also take something from them?" And the internet allows us to see so many different people in a way that's never before happened, where we can take something from this person and that person in different fields, and it's truly a blessing to be able to navigate the internet from that respect? Is there anything—Yeah. Go for it.

Chris: I was just going to reflect that back to you. Yeah. I think that that is the posture that we have to take: what a blessing that we can—if we are careful—be exposed to so many brilliant people and minds and opportunities. And I said, the internet can very much become a cognitive bias machine if we let it, that it just reflects what we already believe and know back at us, so it's very important to get outside of our filter bubble, and it's also very important to see that, hey, we are running our own race, we are playing a single-player game, and that others' success does not reflect on our own. That there is—The pie is infinitely large. We're not competing. It's very easy, if you let it, to become disillusioned by what others are doing. It's like, "Hey, wow. They're having so much better results, they're growing so much faster than me." This is an opportunity. Someone is blazing a path for you and showing you—Not only giving you a sense of the possible, what can be done if you choose to pay the same costs, but they're also learning some lessons on your behalf, and thus you can save yourself some time and effort by drafting upon those efforts and not needing to pay the same tuition that they had to pay.

So, again, that's always the framing, and again this is an ongoing practice for me, is to see all of the opportunity, and access, and learning, and experience out there as an opportunity. So yeah, I just wanted to underline what you said, because I think it's very easy for it to become a hindrance, an impostor syndrome, a—you know, we become afraid to be vulnerable and put ourselves out there because what will they think? Trying to adopt that opportunity mindset, I find, is the right way.

Danny: I couldn't agree more. And this has been such a pleasure. Is there anything that you'd like to mention before we wrap this up? I mean this has been such a wisdom conversation for me, and I'm so grateful for it. Hopefully, it was for anyone listening up to this point, but is there anything you'd like to add?

Chris: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much for being a great conversation partner and for diving deep into some of these questions which I think are so worth asking. If you've enjoyed the conversation and would like to continue it, there's a couple places that I would invite you to go to learn more. So my company, my day job, is working with about a dozen of the world's leading executives, and I teach them how to perform at a higher level. And if you'd like to learn a little bit more about what we do, you can check out our free workbook, called Experiment Without Limits. Forcingfunction.com/workbook. This is—I spent a year after four hundred coaching conversations and said, "Hey, what are the top performers doing?" And breaking that down into step-by-step instructions that anyone can implement into their own life. Free to download. Encourage you to check that out.

And with all this stuff, it's so hard to know where to begin, and so we created a quiz based on those things that I see top performers implement, where it will illuminate your biggest opportunity for improvement. Of all the ways you can improve yourself, what would have the greatest leverage? What would most put you forward to becoming a top performer? So we call this the Performance Assessment. That's also available for free at forcingfunction.com/assessment.

The final place that I would point you to if you're interested in potentially accelerating your growth—Like I said, historically I have only been able to work with about a dozen executives by referral. We're running the second cohort of a program we started last year called Team Performance Training." Applications should be opening up right about when this episode comes out. They open up on January 26th with a second cohort kicking off on February 17th. So this is a twelve-week group class where I teach you everything that I've learned about productivity and performance, and you're going to be paired with fourteen other leaders to illuminate your blind spots, hold you accountable, and teach you things that they've learned through their own experiences. It's a great program, I highly recommend it. If you're interested in that, you can learn more at teamperformancetraining.com.

Final mention is, I look forward to conversations like this so much, Danny, and if anyone listening, if you agree with something I said, it touched you, or most importantly if you disagree with something, if I'm wrong and I can be improved in the way that I think, please let me know. I hope this is the beginning of a conversation. The best place to get ahold of me to continue that is probably on Twitter. You can find me there at @SparksRemarks.

Danny: Awesome. And all those links will be in the show notes, for everyone who's curious. And, Chris, it's been so much fun. I've learned a ton, I'm sure everyone listening has as well. Thank you for taking the time, and I really appreciate you, man.

Chris: Really a pleasure. Thank you so much.

 
Chris Sparks