Outliers: Performance vs Productivity, The 4-Hour Workday, and More Wood Behind Fewer Arrows
Daniel Scrivner and Chris Sparks discuss holistic performance over brute productivity, how reflection can help you level up, and identifying key bottlenecks.
Audio recording below (58m). Full transcript following.
Podcast Transcript
Note: transcript slightly edited for clarity.
Daniel: Welcome to the very first episode of Outliers. I'm your host, Daniel Scrivner, and I could not be more excited about today's episode. On Outliers, we decode what the top one percent of performers have mastered and what they've learned along the way. In each episode, I dive deep to uncover the tools, habits, routines, and hacks that we can all apply in our own lives today.
And today, I'm talking to Chris Sparks. We explore productivity versus performance, the power of reflection, and building your own personal flywheel, as well as how to spot the bottlenecks that are holding you back and preventing you from making it to the next level. Chris is one of the top twenty poker players in the world. He's played over two million hands of poker, and he's had thirteen first-place finishes in his career so far. But that's not all. He's also the founder of the Forcing Function. There he works with many of the world's top entrepreneurs and investors, teaching them how to apply elite poker frameworks for world-class performance in business, investing, and life.
Chris is the author of Experiment Without Limits, and soon he's launching an exclusive training program called Team Performance Training. There you can join a small group of ambitious leaders to work through twenty-four hours of high-performance training together, and it includes one-on-one coaching directly with Chris. I've worked with Chris as a coach, and he's incredible. I would highly, highly recommend it. If you're interested, you can learn more at forcingfunction.com.
Without further ado, please enjoy this wide-ranging, all-over-the-map conversation with Chris Sparks.
So Chris, I am so excited to have you on the show, and to kick things off I wanted to share a little bit of a background. I was introduced to you I think about three years ago now from our mutual friend Zach Cantor at Steady. The context that I had then was Zach said he was working with a productivity coach, and immediately my first thoughts were, one, "I don't know what that means," and then my second thought was, "But I'm super interested." And I think the thing that stuck out for me is I feel like so many—When people think about coaches, so many people immediately jump to this concept of like a life coach, and it's someone to help you in kind of an amorphous way. And my experience working with you is very different from that. I would consider it almost like working with a personal trainer, that's there to kind of like watch you perform, help give you feedback.
And I took so much away from working with you, and there's so many things that I still apply in my daily life. And so with that, can you share a little bit of background around the type of coaching you do, the type of clients you work with, and how you work with them?
Chris: Hey, guys, and Daniel, thank you so much for that intro. It's super exciting to be here and talk about some of my favorite topics. So I'll take a quick step back as far as who I am. I'm most known for being a poker player, as Daniel mentioned. I once was one of the top poker players in the world. I'm still pretty high up there, but it doesn't consume all of my time as it once did. My primary focus for the past three years has been my consulting company, the Forcing Function. And I like to think of my day-to-day role as deconstructing the commonalities of peak performance.
So, I'm privileged to work one-on-one with some of the most successful founders, executives, and investors in the world, and I try to both deconstruct and distill down what allows them to be successful into principles that I can share widely, as well as try to identify things either from my personal experience operating at the highest levels of poker or just from observations and patterns I've observed across their peers as ways that they can accelerate their performance even more.
As Daniel mentioned, the word 'coach' comes with its own connotations, good and bad, and I like to think that what I do is innately quantifiable: getting on the same page as far as a north star to head towards and finding a way to track progress towards that goal. And I really think that's a good way to think about the difference between productivity and performance, right?
When I first started (back when Daniel and I met) I definitely thought of myself as a productivity person. That led to having a lot of conversations around tactics and tools and habits. I think all of that stuff can be useful, but it is rarely the highest-leverage intervention. And now I think of what I do as much more performance, which is there's a goal or a destination that someone is trying to reach, and I see my job as a third-party objective observer to help them reveal the most direct path towards that goal, and that we can achieve anything if we become the person capable of achieving that goal.
So, identifying a more effective path to get there, which sometimes is not the most productive path. Right? It can be quick and dirty. It can require changing what that goal looks like or the paradigms even used to shape that goal, as well as uncovering all of the roadblocks, known and unknown, along the way.
Daniel: Yeah. It almost sounds like maybe one way to think of it is you've kinda had your own transformation and your own journey of kinda thinking about it maybe a little bit more one-dimensionally, and now it's much more like quantum physics, where you're thinking about all these different realms, how they intersect, how they feed into one another.
Chris: Absolutely. It's means against ends, and I think a lot of productivity is almost a gateway drug for people, in that there's this fascination of, "If I master this tool, if I acquire this habit, all of my problems are gonna go away." And you know, I like to say we're the common denominator in all of our productivity struggles. That, you know, no tool, no system, no new routine is going to change anything, until we ourselves change.
It became me realizing that all of my knowledge wasn't actually changing the results. I couldn't just tell someone step-by-step to follow something. There was an experience that I needed to instill or incept them with in order to instill a new principle that allowed them to make those types of decisions on their own.
I see myself as kind of post-productivity, where I look back a few years ago, and my obsession with all of these tactics maybe is instrumental, but certainly not the way to instill or accelerate change the quickest.
Daniel: I think that's a wonderful way to encapsulate. As a little bit of an aside, you know, I feel like my own journey has been very similar, where I feel like for a while just focusing super-myopically on productivity, and it felt to me kind of in hindsight like it was almost taking the brute force approach to trying to get more done, where you're just focusing relentlessly on how can you push yourself harder, how can you potentially get more things done, instead of going up a couple layers and operating a little bit more strategically or being able to navigate up and down.
And you know, what I've come to, over time, is you know, one way that I try to think about performance, personally, is almost as a reciprocal loop. Just this concept that there are different things, different skills that you have to master, that each feed into each other. And some of them may seem counter-productive if you just focus on just that thing, but if you bring all of 'em together and if you can learn how to be good at each you can get to something really special.
And you know, one way that I think about that is almost as, you know, you take planning, you take performance, you take recovery, and you take reflection. And I think when you do those things in a kind of reciprocal loop, there's something really special that comes out the other end, and what ends up happening is you end up being a better performer on a lot of different levels, as opposed to potentially just getting more and more "tasks" or more things done in a given day.
Chris: Yeah. I love that systems thinking approach. I do think a lot of things can be thought of in terms of loops. And you know, the loop that you've described, the planning/experimentation/reflection loop, I think is key to the acceleration of any skill. Acquisition to the achievement of any goal, that the tighter you can run through those loops where you come up with a plan, you collect data by experiment, you act, you see whether your efforts are leading to your desired results, and then look back, reflect. What did I learn? What would I do differently? What could I have done differently?
The tighter that process of going between planning, experimentation, and reflection, that determines the speed of which you do anything. And you know, speed kills in this sense. Not that we're competing against anyone, right? All of life is a single-player game. But to the extent that we all have ambitions and things that we want to achieve and that there are things that we can do, actions that we can take personally to achieve those, that is the hack. That is the trick, to constantly be planning, experimenting, reflecting. And the faster that we can iterate through those, the faster that we can do anything.
Daniel: Going a little bit higher-level and not thinking just tactically about productivity, but zooming out a bit and thinking about holistic performances, what I've found at least in my own life is a lot of my failure modes were—when I'm in a moment where I don't feel like I'm making the progress I would like to make or I feel like I'm at a roadblock—the thing I found most helpful in that loop I described is specifically reflection.
And maybe just to talk about that for a second, I find when I talk to leaders, executives, entrepreneurs, that for a lot of people reflection doesn't come up. It's not even kind of a thought. And what I've moved to, just . . . I borrowed it initially from the CEO of Front. And she shared a little while ago a framework that she uses, where she spends one day per week, and she blocks off an hour, maybe two hours to spend on reflection. And you know, when I started doing that initially it felt like, "Oh, wow, this is a huge miss. You know, one day per miss I'm going to take two hours of my day, effectively a quarter of my day, and I'm not going to be doing, I'm going to be reflecting." But there's a bunch of really counter-intuitive amazing things that come out of that. Like it's a time to ask yourself questions like, "What opportunities maybe am I aware of but I haven't recognized and I'm not capitalizing on?" And I found that to be one of the most effective, one of the most helpful things I do every single week. How do you think about reflection? How does that show up in your work?
Chris: I agree. This is something that is vastly overlooked. And a couple one-liners that I always like to try to distill this down to, and I think that achievement of a goal is a constant iterative process. You're always course correcting. And so implicit to that is having that feedback loop that we were talking about before, or, "Are my efforts leading me to my goals?" Not only "Am I going at maximum speed?" but, "Am I going at the correct vector?" But I think more people think more about efficiency rather than like, "Am I actually doing the right things?"
Like, I work with a lot of executives who claim that every single day every single minute is booked and there's no time to be extracted whatsoever. And the answer is always, "Well, you would if you had prioritized them. But consciously or unconsciously, you've decided to prioritize these things at the expense of these other things." And so the way to maximize how one uses their time is to make sure that a higher proportion of their time is going to their highest priorities. And I think that reflection is the best opportunity to do that.
Daniel, I know you being an investor, I'll drop an investing metaphor on you: I think time is kind of like an investment portfolio, in that certain times, our portfolio becomes overweighted towards one part. So we over-prioritize to one project at our company because of a deadline or because a client is screaming at us, and you know, another part of our portfolio becomes neglected. That reflection allows us to take a step back and say, "Well, how can I rebalance this portfolio? Is the way that I'm spending my time currently in line with my priorities?" And that's a kind of implicit to performance. Everything's a cycle of sprint and rest. Really important for that rest is consolidating lessons, so that those times that we actually are operating at full leverage on the right things, we can be performing at the best. It's much better to be operating at a ten out of ten for a couple hours a day.
I honestly think that no one actually can do more than four hours of good work a day. And the rest of the day is, "What should I be spending those four hours on?" And kind of clean-up, maintenance, systems improvement. There's a lot of people out there trying to work twelve hours a day at a fairly low level on fairly low-leverage things that aren't actually moving the ball forward. And so it's kind of counter-intuitive, but any time I work with a client I have them list out all of the things that they're currently doing, and I just like, put a line through half of them. It's like, "These are the things that you're no longer going to be doing."
And it's kind of like the "more wood behind fewer arrows" approach. Because you have that arbitrage where all of a sudden I'm working on things that are higher leverage, I'm not working more, I'm actually working less, but I'm having more results. That's very hard for people to do or internalize, and so for me, that's like the one hour of the week that I treat as, "This is the most important hour of the week." Every month I take three hours to step back and say, "Well, of these things that I'm working towards what's on track? What's off track? Those things that are on track, is there a way I can double down? Hey, this is going really well. Everything that I'm doing is having excellent results. Could I do that more?"
Things that are offtrack, ask, "Hey, is this actually still a priority?" The easiest way to clear up time is just to decide not to do something anymore, and as you said, if you can keep that loop tight, you know you're constantly improving, and that's the only thing you need to solve for. If you know that you're improving in the right areas, you don't have to do everything else. The score takes care of itself. But you have to be in it for the super-long run, because it's a lifetime process.
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You shared a ton there. I mean a couple of things that just sprang to mind for me is it feels like, you know, focusing on performance, kind of taking time to reflect, is almost this kind of never-ending process. At least, this is one of the ways that I try to think about it, of becoming the person that will get better opportunities. Becoming the person that will be more effective.
Chris: Yes.
Daniel: And that is really the meta-goal you're working on. It's not just getting more done at my particular job, or taking this thing I would like and taking it from zero to one. It's working at that meta level. So, one thing I have to ask as just a follow-up question on that. It sounds like you do some sort of weekly reflection that's a little bit more brief, and then you do some sort of more in-depth monthly reflection. Can you share what that looks like, you know, weekly, monthly . . . And I don't know if you do one quarterly or annually, but just kind of how you think about that, and then maybe give us a sense for some of the questions you might ask, or some of the things you might think about at each of those moments in time?
Chris: Yeah. So I'll start with the questions, because I think from that seed you can build out a lot of the structure. I try not to get too specific about my own routines, because I think the temptation is to take something on wholesale rather than build it up from the ground. The three questions that I think all reflection reduces down to is, "What's going well? What's not going so well? What did I learn?" So you know, it's pretty self-explanatory. What's going well? The key there is to celebrate what's working. We rarely reward ourselves or really acknowledge all the things that are going great, and that's a lot of sticking to something and not burning out. It is recognizing like, "Hey, the things that I'm doing are leading to results. They might not be at quite the speed that I'd like, but it is clear that things are different because I am doing things."
Daniel: Right.
Chris: So as you acknowledge the things that are going well, the wins, automatically you bring awareness to opportunities to double down in those areas. I think all reflection kind of is about like, double down or stop? And so things that are going well, is anything I can do to make that going even better? So you know, "I'm in the best shape of my life. I feel amazing. I work out for thirty minutes a day, and it's like, oh, I don't have to do much else." And it's like, "Whoa, you're getting that with thirty minutes a day, well, what if you did forty? Or what if instead of doing—you kept thirty and you upped the level of intensity a little bit?" Right? There's always something that you can do. And a lot of times the answer will be, "No, I'm already happy with this.” I think on average, consistency is key. So if there's something that you can stay consistent with, and you think that this is clearly not the bottleneck, clearly it's not something that's holding us back, well, great. Let's put that aside and you know, move on.
But sometimes you'll identify, "Oh, I can do this tiny change and I'll have even more results. It doesn't require much effort, but it has a big output. It has high leverage." I'll give kind of an example for each of these, maybe, to illustrate them a little bit. So I've been working on solidifying my meditation practice for a long time. It's been my most inconsistent habit. It's like I . . . Rationally, I know that this is something that is going to extend to everything that I do. Presence in conversations. You know, as a poker player my job is to make good decisions. And so the extent that I can be in the room and fully mindful of everything that's going on, I make better decisions, I make more money. It clearly ties to my bottom line—much less, you know, getting to enlightenment and self-actualization and all that other fun stuff.
But I couldn't stick with it. And so it's like, "Well, the times that meditation is going well—the times that I do it, it's going well. But I'd like to do it for longer and I'd like to have more intensity with it." And so what did I do? I just found someone who was a meditation teacher and he . . . You know, he talks about meditation, he gives good frameworks. He's a Buddhist scholar. And we just sit on Zoom, and he sort of watches me meditate in my chair. And that feels weird, but just the aspect of someone watching me sit with my eyes closed, it's like . . . I know . . . Obviously I'm gonna show up, 'cause it's a call. It's on video, I'm gonna be dressed and ready to go. But that whole time, that thirty minutes we're on, I'm gonna be making the most of that time, and really intensely thinking and I mean, acting in a meta-cognitive way. And then I'm thinking about my experience, and . . . You know, I wanna have a question, I wanna have something to share. And so that just simple change, putting that forcing function in place, turned what was already a win into something that's like . . . exploding gains. And you know, it's just been—
Daniel: That's amazing.
Chris: —my best year of poker in a long time. I’m having all of these ideas pop into my head, and it's wild. So, number two. What's not going so well? So this is never as fun, and so that's why . . . Whenever someone's doing like a longer-term review, so you're talking about a longer time scale, so like a ninety-day, or an annual review, I'm like, "End of day one. All right. Let's celebrate all the things that are going well." And then I'm gonna step back and like, need a little bit more time, different mind space for what's not going so well.
This usually bears down to, what are thing that I "should" be doing that I had in my plan, but that for whatever reason aren't happening? And usually, my default decision is, "I'm just not going to worry about that anymore." Like, don't care. This other thing is not as high of a priority, and so just put it out of my mind, not worry about it. Sometimes, it's . . . "Well, this actually is a really high priority, and it's not good that this isn't going well." And so that comes down to, well, "What's something that I can put in place to make this more of a default?" Usually that's some form of calendar blocking or creating constraints around the things that I would like to do instead. Creating some accountability around it. So maybe I'll have a public goal or, you know, launch something that creates a deadline. Or to the other extent, it's thinking about, well, "What am I doing instead that's a lower priority? I'm gonna stop doing that instead, to make space for this."
Daniel: Sure.
Chris: But just making some change that changes my probability of this going better. This leads into number three, which is, "What have I learned?" And so this could apply to number one or number two, but this is just like, "Hey, the things that are going well, what are those conditions that allow it to go well? How can I repurpose those conditions towards something else? If I found, you know, this structure of having accountability around meditation works, well, can I extend that accountability structure to something else, where okay, now I do that with workouts, I do those over Zoom, and all it is, is just that I have an appointment that I have to show up for and I work out instead of sometimes skipping. With this thing that's working in this other area of my life, how can I export or repurpose that?
Daniel: Yeah.
Chris: And it's interesting that we find these patterns once, they keep popping up in our life. Both good and bad, right? What we do in a previous context we tend to repeat in other contexts. So the nice thing is that if we learn something that works for us, all we have to do is just find other contexts in which it will work. And so the muscle that I find really valuable here, it's almost like a cheat code. It's like a mental time travel. The way that you save maximum time is make mistakes in simulation rather than reality.
Daniel: I love that.
Chris: Once you discover a pattern, say, "Well, that's interesting. If all I do is just say, "Today I'd like to have a workout," and . . . “Well. What are the chances I think that's actually going to happen?” Well, you know, based on past experiences, maybe that's like a fifty percent chance. You know, it depends how I feel, what I ate, how I slept. All of these other outside factors. Well, what can I do to get that from fifty percent likelihood to seventy percent likelihood? It's like, "Oh, well you know, I set an appointment where I'm meeting with someone," or even I choose the time, or I have everything set out, like my workout clothes, et cetera, now all of a sudden it's an eighty percent likelihood of happening.
And that time didn't have to elapse. I didn't have to go another month to discover that work, I just had that simulation in my mind, and just my confidence level . . . This works in investing as well, if I get above that seventy percent threshold of, "I'd be really surprised if this didn't occur," then I'm, "Okay, good. I can move on to the next thing." And that's how you identify what's the core cause or what's a really key intervention that we can put in place to ensure that our future actions are in line with our present goals.
Daniel: One thing I think that is not talked about enough, in productivity or just any area of life, is that we are all wired incredibly differently, from like we're motivated by different things, we're driven by different things, we have things that excite us, we have things that repel us, and I think that so much of performance as opposed to just productivity is, you know, a lot of that is just this never-ending experiment to figure out more about yourself and put that into use.
And so what I love about that as well, too, in my own experience when I kind of had that "aha" moment was achieving more became no longer was it about beating myself up for all the things that I wasn't doing well, and all the things that were going poorly, but it was much more this exercise of like . . . No. I'm not broken, there aren't all these things that need to change with me, I just need to listen and take in a lot of information, do a bunch of experiments in the areas of my life where I really want to move the needle end, know and kind of understand what works well for me, and then embrace that. And that becomes a process of . . . One, it's much more compassionate. You're actually loving yourself in that process. But I think the other thing too is it just seems so much more effective.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, the emotion driving not only (let's say) curiosity versus guilt or judgment, not only is it more effective, it also makes life a lot more fun. Right? The habits, goals, our companies, ourselves, all these are instrumental. And it's good to remind ourselves of that, right? The longer the time scale, the more that we can excuse short-term lapses as inevitable and try to extract the lessons from them, so hopefully we don't pay tuition over and over again. We've already had the lesson once, let's try to put it in practice.
Daniel: When it's no longer pass or fail.
Chris: Yes.
Daniel: Which is another thing that I find that I just love about that, is you're just playing a different game.
Chris: Yeah. All these dichotomies are false dichotomies, and it's converting this finite game of, "I'm trying to accomplish this goal, I'm trying to build this habit," into the infinite game of, you know, "I wanna live a good life." And all of these are steps towards that, and these are all lessons that we use towards that infinite game. And the notion of not paying tuition multiple times I think is really useful, because like you said, in a certain way, right, there's prescriptions or principles that tend to generalize across people. So generally, you know, starting with your most important thing tends to work really well. Doing deep work before doing more reactive work tends to work really well. There's certain principles that you can use and adapt to make your own. But a lot of performance versus productivity is "what are the conditions that work really well for me? How does my best self show up? When I've gotten things done in the past, what are the commonalities there, and can I put those back into place?"
That's kind of one of the trick questions that I have that has a lot of mileage, is I ask a friend, "Think back to the time that you were most 'productive' in your life. You know, what did that feel like? List out five things that you were doing then that you're not doing now." So maybe you were waking up earlier. Maybe you worked on this project first before other projects. Maybe you had friends who you were working on it and collaborating with. Just identify—You know those games where it's spot the difference? You have the two pictures, and you're circling in one of the pictures where there's something in one of the photos not . . . Just, like, what was different at the time? And like, that's the low-hanging fruit. That's the place to start, and you already know what was working well for you. Start there. You don't need to find a solution outside of yourself, read another self-help book, scan Twitter. Those are things that are working for other people.
Daniel: Yeah.
Chris: All of their advice, even everything that I'm saying today, comes from my own personal experience. Right? Knowing thyself starts with knowing what works well for yourself. Starting there.
Daniel: One thing that I wanted to come to, the overarching concept of thinking more about second- and third-order consequences or second- and third-order impacts and not first, and just to maybe try to tie a couple things together, I have long neglected exercise in my life, and I've tried to make a massive course correction there over the last year. The whole thing just seems really silly to me, and now in hindsight that I've got it working, my overarching thought is like, "Wow, there's no reason this couldn't have happened sooner." But I think the couple of things that unlocked it for me is just changing the way that I thought. So as a couple of examples, you know, previously my whole idea was like, "I just need to make it to the gym for an hour." That's the only thing I focus on, need to make it to the gym for an hour. And then my goal is to try to do that as many times a week as possible. And I would just fail at that again and again and again.
And I would try to think about, like, okay, well what is it? There's . . . Do I need to wear my gym clothes to the office? Do I need to have a time on my calendar? One thing that I love, that I've just been thinking a ton about, and it relates to exercise, is there's a concept in exercise of this kind of minimum effective dose. And those words, I love. There's a whole other body of research that's just around "what is the least amount that you can do to still see the benefits?" And I think that's just an amazing exercise. But the way I took and latched onto that was just this notion that I don't need to go to the gym for an hour. I focus on little things. And so some of the things that I've been practicing is, every hour I'll try to stop and do a hundred jumping jacks or forty air squats and you know, I have a dumbbell or barbells or a kettlebell in the office, and I'll try to do that. And if you just literally do five to ten minutes at a time, and you space that out throughout the day, you get an amazing workout, you show up more energized to your next meeting. What are some of the common pitfalls you see of people getting stuck at that first-order analysis phase and not moving on or viewing things from that second- or third-order?
Chris: Oh, man. I mean, there's so much good stuff there. I just want to underline a couple concepts which you highlighted there. I think first is you introduced this binary outcome. Right? Either success or failure, when there's a whole lot of grey in the middle. And that a lot of us, especially high performers . . . I think the higher the performer that you are, a lot of what makes us have outlier-type outcomes if inversed become these too-outlier negative outcomes. And we turn inward, become judgmental. Our greatest strength could be our greatest weakness sometimes. Knowing that a lot of us have this dichotomous black and white thinking, I think an easy way to get around it is making so we cannot fail. Right? Making the bar so low that we can't say 'no.' This is something that's commonly talked about in habits. I think a lot of behavior comes down to building a habit, right? You stick with something for long enough in order to start internalizing the benefits to the point that it becomes part of your identity and you no longer have to try to do it. You just do it.
But that's a long process. And as we were saying, thinking about this as an infinite game, thinking of wanting to get and stay in our shape and be in our bodies for the rest of our lives is something we're going to be continuously improving upon. It takes a lot of the pressure off to have immediate results. And I think in a figurative sense, these expectations become a prison for us, because we are constantly judging, "Well, I should be having more, I should be doing more, why am I not having the results that I like?" Instead, we trust the process. We think about, how can we get started? How can we take one more step? There's this notion, especially in Silicon Valley, of these quantum leaps, or you know, '10x's. And I think when it comes to the self, it's incremental, but all the time. Right?
Daniel: Yeah.
Chris: There's one percent every day. You never underestimate the power of compounding. And I think with working out, it's much harder to go from zero pushups a day to one pushup a day than it is to go from one pushup a day to a hundred. It's very easy to add on once that initial micro-habit has been built. And so, you know, floss one tooth. Do one pushup. Write five minutes. Right? Start super small to the point that you can't say 'no,' because a lot of the internalization of the benefits takes a long time, and it takes consistent input. Right? You start to build correlations like, "When I do this habit, this is how my day goes. When I work out, or don't work out. When I get eight hours versus when I don't get eight hours." It takes a while to internalize that difference, and so it's important to stick with it long enough in order for that difference to be apparent, and that means really starting small.
In an actual sense, this is the heavy lift that I think a lot of people fall prey to. Say with January 1st, 2021. Half the world is like, "This is the year that everything changes." And this is the classic, like, we fall to the structure of our systems. Right? We always will take the path of least resistance. And if all that we've done is just draw up this store of willpower, which is sure to expire as soon as the context is imperfect, then we're never going to stick with something. And so that means rising above the level of our system. It's like, how could we create supporting structures so that this thing that I want to add into my life can become a default, can become trivially easy? And releasing this expectation of short-term results, because we're thinking on such long time scales that having results right now really doesn't matter.
So, full transparency: I had never even seen the inside of a gym until, let's see. 2011. So yeah, at the age of twenty-one, never even been inside a gym. That was a big leap for me. And what finally got me over that hurdle, other than seeing, like, meeting other professional poker players, when I started my ramp up the ladder, where, "Oh, like me sitting all day in a chair drinking a two-liter of soda every day eating pizza, and these guys are like jacked and they're actually able to play long sessions and make good decisions and not tilt," it's like, "Oh, this would be worth a lot of money for me to go into the gym." But that wasn't enough to get me there. It was seeing that, "Well, if I do this over the course of a lifetime, what am I going to look like at age eighty?" Like, I might actually add decades of high quality of life onto my life. I want to be peaking when I'm eighty. I don't want to be at my peak now.
That's when it really hit me: the sooner that I can install this habit, the results now are great, but results in fifty years of compounding, that's gonna be insane. And I think having that long-term mentality really helps. Because you're going to miss days, you're going to travel, you're going to have things that come up, and if you have that all-or-nothing approach, that's when people completely fall off. It's the difference between a sprint and a marathon. If you're in it for the marathon, like sometimes your legs are gonna cramp, you're gonna have to slow down to a walk, you're gonna get off course, but you just pick up where you left off.
Daniel: So next, I'd love to try to get a little bit more tactical. You know, come down a couple levels and just cover the idea of planning, and why planning is important, what that prepares you for. If we just think about kind of Type-A personalities, they think about planning and they're like, "Absolutely waste of time. Like, why would I plan when I can just jump right into action? And at the end of the day, it's all about the action and that's how I make progress." But I don't think that's the case. So what is your take there, and how do you think about that and frame that up?
Chris: We've been talking a little bit about meditation. I like the phrase, "Meditate for twenty minutes a day. If you don't have twenty minutes, do it for two hours." Right? The fact that you don't have time to do something means that it's actually more important. You have a bigger problem, you should be spending more time on it. That's a common thing when I work with executives is you know, not doing this planning, that could be at the micro-level of you know, "What am I going to accomplish today? Before the world catches on fire I need to respond to these other things that are coming at me." Or at the more macro-level, you know, "What's our ninety-day north star? What are we trying to accomplish? What are our key objectives and how do we track progress towards those?"
I think first is just treating that time like it's the most important. That other things come second. Where you have limited time, it becomes even more important to decide where that time goes, because by definition you're having to say 'no' to some things that are good, that have positive expectation, in order to go after opportunities which are better and have even higher expectation. And those won't always be obvious in the moment. It requires taking that step back. So that's a lot of where I start, is trying to force someone to slow down, to create slack in their schedule. It always takes a client off-guard when I mandate that they take a day off. You know, no phone, find a cabin in the woods, just bring a journal and just write. Just get things out of your head.
It's so easy to get tunnel-visioned as an executive, because there's all these things that are screaming for our attention, and just like our ancestors on the prairie were very geared towards change. Things that are yelling at us to be done, all of the urgent, that's where our attention is always going to be drawn if we don't know what we're looking for. And so because I've done that planning, I'm able to know what to look for and thus handle a lot of things coming at me at once. And the same is true for every executive. By deciding what's important, you're implicitly deciding what's not important, what's okay to be ignored, what to hand off, what to delegate, what to put off until next quarter. And the less that these trade-offs (because they're always trade-offs, right? You're giving off something that you want, in order to get something you want more) are made in advance, you're always going to be going towards the newest, shiniest object.
My brief time in the startup world in New York where I led marketing for a startup that will go unnamed, the founder had classic Shiny Object Syndrome, where the latest article that he had read or the latest campaign that we had run on the marketing side, you know, we had a day's worth of results, and all of a sudden this is the new thing, this is where we're going to drive all of our focus towards. Everything we were doing, we can forget about that. This is the new thing. And imagine that this is happening on an everyday basis. This is the way a lot of us live our lives, that every day is a new priority. And it's very easy to fall into this ping-pong mindset, as an executive, where whatever is happening is the most important thing at the time, rather than being deliberate and slowing down.
And so the question that I would say to him was, "Cool, that does sound like a great idea, that does sound really important. This is what my top priority was. Is this new thing more important than this thing that I was already doing?" And usually that answer was, "Well, no, I guess what you were doing is more important." It's like, "Good. Let's put that to the side, we stick it in our 'someday maybe' (in GTD terms), and we keep our eyes on the prize.”
A lot of focus is seeing the object of your focus in everything. 'Cause you know what to look for, you're attuned to that signal. You're aware. The way that we improve our focus is we put our blinders on. We have constraints. This is what we're focused on, and by definition, everything that's outside of the circle is not things that we're concerned about, and thus we can ignore them. And there's a lot of power in moving very quickly by knowing what to ignore.
That's the biggest benefit of planning: not only are you deciding what you're doing, but you're deciding what you're paying attention to.
Daniel: That's an amazing encapsulation of one of the most helpful things that I find just for myself, is making sure that even if I only have two minutes or five minutes to dedicate to it, because when you become a certain age you have family, you have other responsibilities, you don't always control your time and there's more things that can pop up. And so you know, my mornings . . . I'm not always able to kind of sculpt my mornings maybe the way I would like. But the rule of thumb I try to follow is, you know, I have to spend some amount of time putting together a plan for the day, and it feels like the two things I'm really doing there is, one, it's almost this mental act of setting a goal and almost rehearsing in my mind how the day's gonna go, which I find super-helpful later on, but then you alluded to this second piece, which is . . . I think all of us need constraints.
My take is you know, the more driven you are, the more energy you have, the more of a go-getter that you are, I think those people need tighter constraints, not looser constraints. Because there's just more . . . They see almost an infinite number of places they can kind of put their energy and attention and focus, so it's this natural act of constraining, but one way I might draw that out . . . Ray Dalio has a really interesting principle that I love in his book Principles where he talks about just this notion that you almost wanna think about making progress as like a funnel. And so at the top you have kind of your overarching goal, you have your strategy, then that breaks out in individual tasks, and one sentence that he says, but it's just so powerful, is he's like, "And when you think about it in that context, you know, your strategies should change less frequently than your tasks, and your goals should change less frequently than your strategy, which should change less frequently than your tasks."
And so it's really helpful to think about it in that context too, that your goals should be changing pretty infrequently, and that should be a pretty hard constraint. It should take a lot for you to be able to move that. And to me it just stood out as like, wow. That's a really powerful way to frame up what you're trying to do there and how those pieces interconnect.
Chris: One of my favorite quotes is, you know, "Life is a big giant buffet. You have to give up some things at the buffet in order to eat some things you want more." And I think that what you talk about encapsulates a few other very important principles. The first one: another benefit of having a plan is you have something to compare to. Right? It's hard to know how the day went if you didn't know how it was supposed to go. And something that we will find is that it’s easy to backwards-rationalize anything. A lot of our cognitive functioning is dedicated to reminding ourselves how great we are. How you know, we made great decisions today, we were so productive. Look at this big list of things that I crossed off. It didn't matter if any of those weren't our top priority, but look at all the things we've done. "I did eight hours of work today," rather than, "Well, if I can only accomplish one thing today and have the day be great, what would that thing be?" And you spend, I like to say the first sixty to ninety minutes of your day working on that thing. You could treat the whole rest of the day as a bonus, that the most important thing on your list is more important than everything else combined.
And so items numbers two through ten aren't like, 'nice to have's. They're distractions. This is a famous Warren Buffett story, where he's like, "You know, what are your top twenty goals?" People are like, "Dah dah dah dah dah. Oh, goal number nineteen, I wanna learn how to swing dance." You know. Whatever it is. And he's like, "Okay, so these five . . . " And I'll say it's like probably one to three, "These are the things that you're doing." And someone's like, "Oh, so like number five through twenty, these are the things that we do when we're not doing one to five." He's like, "No, that's your not-to-do list." Like, those are the most dangerous things of all, because those are the things you can justify in hindsight, is, "Oh, we redesigned the website," or "Oh, now we have a new recruiting page." Well you know, was that in your most important thing? Was that attacking your bottleneck? Well, no. It was literally a waste of time. And most of the things we do as work are wastes of time, because we don't just take a single minute to say, "What would move us forward the most? What's the most effective path?"
And, yeah. That's why planning is so critical, because the more rational we are, the better we are at rationalizing. We can look backwards and justify anything that we do. And the third let's say pillar of that loop, the experimentation, and why I think it's so critical. We've danced around it a little bit, but it would be nice to make explicit.
Daniel: Yeah.
Chris: All right, so we just talked about planning, deciding what we're going to do and how we're going to do it. We talked about reflection. How did that thing we do go? Can we make it go even better? Can we do something different? Right? But in between the doing of the thing I like to frame as experimentation, is that we're curious, we're constantly paying attention to, like, is what we're doing leading us to the place that we want to go?
And I know a problem that I used to have, and a lot of the founders that I work with have, is this Shiny Object Syndrome, is dramatically shifting the business model or the marketing plan day after day. I find that this experimental approach solves for that. It eliminates a lot of these daily existential crises and pivots in the opposite direction, because you choose an experimental period. So for me, I default to thirty days, where every month I set kind of general north stars, things that I want to work towards, things I'm going to try and see what happens. And I sprint as fast as I can for that thirty days, trying to have like this mental superposition of even though I'm only seventy percent sure, I'm gonna act like I'm a hundred percent sure, that like, this is the goal that I want. Right?
And this avoids me changing the goal every single day, because as we know with systems thinking, if you change the goal the whole system realigns itself in that goal. And that's very dangerous, because if you're changing everything, how do you know what's working? But at the end of the thirty days, I have the power to say, "I can scrap that entirely." That gives me the freedom to act as if I'm fully confident. And it's . . . So much of this comes down to having the conviction that what you're doing is leading to the place that you want to go. That allows you to remain consistent. I love the William James quote about habits, 'cause I think it extends to so much in life: “A single lapse is like letting a whole ball of string unfurl.”
Daniel: Wow.
Chris: You know, you're doing all this work to like build this string, just wrapping and wrapping and wrapping, and you fall off course, you lose confidence in what you're doing, you're starting over. You have just a big piece of string all over again. And this ability to know that you can course-correct at a designated time allows you to experiment and try things in a low-risk, fun, curious way. That if everything is this willpower, force yourself to do things, that's a sprint. That's not a marathon, that's not a long-term approach. So I find in combination, deciding what I'm going to do, doing it, being curious what happens, and then how did that go? Do I want to keep doing it, or do I wanna do something else? When that loop is closed, it allows for exponential growth.
Daniel: So I wanna now transition a little bit, and one of the things I love about working with you is you had a few like, simple, cheap tools that you recommended that at the time I was like, "This sounds so silly." And I've shared this many times now with many other people, and I commonly get the same reaction, of people like, "Oh, that sounds really silly."
But one of them was something super simple, which is literally a twenty-dollar cube timer that you can get on Amazon. And that is still something I use and like something that's core to the way that I work, is just . . . Yeah, you've got it right there. It's just this notion of you know, either time-boxing, so saying, "I want to do this thing, it's potentially an open-ended task, so I'm just gonna give myself this amount of time. I'm gonna work on it for thirty minutes, I'm gonna work on it for sixty minutes, and then I'm gonna stop," or the other one is trying something where it's more of a sprint, where it's like, "I don't have a ton of time to work on this today. I want to challenge myself. I may do one or two of these in a day and it's kind of a nice change of pace, but it's more just like I'm going to sprint on this and see how much I can get done in fifty minutes or thirty minutes," or just challenge myself and say like, "I know realistically it might take me, you know, twenty-five minutes. I'm gonna see if I can get this done in fifteen minutes."
But it's so simple and so powerful. Like, do you have other tools like that, and what are some of the either software, physical tools that you lean on in your life?
Chris: Yeah. First the cube timer. So I'm sure a lot of listeners are familiar with Pomodoros and the power of time-boxing, is that you know, time conforms to the space that we give it. Right? That classic Parkinson’s law, the task expands to the amount of time that we have to work on that task. Anyone who's worked on a team project knows this. You know, things miraculously get finished at the deadline no matter when the deadline is. Goes back to what we were talking about, habits, making it so low that you can't say no. So much of procrastination is a failure to get started. And so, you know, how do you write an essay? You write the first word, then you write the first sentence, then you write the first paragraph. And what I like to talk about is a verb change, where it's the smallest possible step, of going from "I'm going to do this thing" to "I'm doing this thing." A lot of that is just lowering the bar for how far I need to go before I can take a break, before I can celebrate.
And so for me, I default to operating in twenty-five minute cycles, following a break, but a lot of times I will set a timer for five minutes and say for the next five minutes I am only going to do this thing, and that works, 'cause like, "Oh, I'm really stuck between these two options. All right. For the next five minutes, I'm gonna write down all of the arguments for both. At the end of five minutes, I'm gonna make a decision." Because most decisions are like, "Am I having chicken or steak for dinner?" And I'm like, "Doesn't really matter all that much." But eventually, I get hungry, so I need to make a decision.
It's minimizing the time to allocate to something, creating that constraint, I just need anything to get started. It's setting that bar as low as possible. The opposite part of time-boxing, which I think a lot of people miss, goes back to what we were talking about in the beginning as far as running the wrong way as fast as you can, is that you limit the amount of time that you're sprinting with this interval: “Okay, now I'm going to take a step back and see if I'm going to continue this.”
For me a classic one recently is, I'm working on a new webpage, and it's very easy to get in the weeds with a new webpage, as I'm sure you know as a designer, Daniel.
Daniel: Yeah.
Chris: And so every twenty-five minutes it's like, "Oh, okay, well, is this actually the best thing that I could be doing? Do I really need to rewrite this paragraph?" And it creates that rail where things don't go off the rails. That being said, other kinds of tools or like cheap things that I think are pretty interesting, and the reason I think they're interesting is because, by experience, they install these principles. Like you were saying, like a simple timer that helps you internalize these principles of creating time boxes.
I would point everyone listening . . . I mean I assume there's going to be a show notes—
Daniel: Yes, absolutely.
Chris: And I have a popular post last year called "Top Resources For Productivity and Performance," and so that's the list of everything that I use with the rationale and how I use it. And so you know, definitely check those out. Themes that come to mind, you know, one, anything you can do to track, especially passively, is super useful. You know, never underestimate the power of rising integers. So you have like Oura Sleep Tracker on there, time trackers. You're checking where your time is going online. All these types of things that help make things that are subjective more objective, and thus help you make better decisions, I think are always very high-leverage tools. You know, varying to capturing ideas—I'm a super analog guy, so I have literally a yellow pad next to me that I'm just writing down any random thought that comes up during the day, and the key is, I want to minimize the amount of friction between having an idea, thinking of something I could do, and capturing it in some form.
And then I just go back. I do, I call it a 'sweep,' go through these notes and see if there's anything actionable. A one dollar yellow pad. For me, I wouldn't sell this pad for a thousand bucks.
Another one that that I'll talk about, especially for those who spend a lot of time online, are blockers. If you're starting with one, I really recommend Freedom. So during the hours that you're doing your work, especially your deep work, blocking all the things that could be distractions. One interesting correlation that I have found with the executives that I work with and their productivity is the first time that they check their email is the strongest negative correlation with how much they get done in the day. The earlier they check the email, the less that they get done. And it will blow someone away to discover that the world will not catch on fire if you do not check your email for a couple hours, but that if you spend a little bit of time on your most important thing of the day before you flip over to the world, those just feel so much more sane, your most important projects move forward. It's amazing, what that tiny shift will make.
Daniel: Do you have any final words you wanna share, and can you give people a few places where they can find you online, be able to follow you and work with you?
Chris: There's a couple places that I would direct you. I have a workbook that I think encapsulates a lot of the concepts that we were talking about today, in a form that anyone can implement. It's called Experiment Without Limits, and it's available for anyone to download for free online on our website, so that's forcingfunction.com/workbook. It's also available on Amazon at cost. I highly recommend the paperback version. Having a physical thing that you can write in tends to increase your odds of putting the thing into practice. But either place, I would say that we talked about so much today, and there's always all these places that you can improve yourself, and so it's easy to get overwhelmed and thus not take action. So we created a little quiz we called the Performance Assessment, which asks you a few questions about what's going on in your life, what's holding you back, the things that you have in place, and you know, through that quiz what it'll reveal, we think, is your biggest opportunity to improve your performance.
So you can also take that for free at forcingfunction.com/assessment.
If you are interested in accelerating performance, we do have an opportunity. I generally only work with a handful of executives at a time, but for the first time I'm opening up to a group for what we call Team Performance Training. I'm going to be leading this group for twelve weeks, it's gonna be executives, investors, founders, through my system for achieving peak performance. And we're gonna do lots of fun peer masterminds and uncovering each other's blind spots, and just pushing ourselves. That kicks off at the beginning of September, and applications for that are opening up in mid-August. So if you wanna receive more information on what all that's about, you can go to teamperformancetraining.com.
Daniel: And I would just reiterate, I've gotten a tremendous amount out of working with him, and obviously we've talked about a lot of concepts, but in a very general, broad sense. If you're interested in just seeing what this could do for you, could do for your performance, I guarantee you would take away some things that I'm sure are obvious, but a lot of stuff that's counterintuitive, and a lot of stuff that's highly tailored. Just things that would help you specifically. So I can't recommend working with Chris enough.
Thank you so much, Chris.
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