Social Entrepreneurship & Innovation: Productivity for the Next Generation of Entrepreneurship
In this episode, Chris Sparks and Cory Ames focus on the personal improvement feedback loop. Chris discusses the discovery of these major paradigm shifts, his process to make daily progress, some strategies to assist anyone who feels stuck, and the most important lesson he’s learned from studying entrepreneurship.
Audio recording below (46m). Full transcript following.
Podcast Transcript
Note: Transcript slightly edited for clarity.
Cory: Hey, y’all. It’s Cory here with the Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation Podcast, brought to you by growensemble.com, our digital marketing, training, and consulting company that helps better business and better business people expand their impact through expanding their presence online. Today, I am speaking with Chris Sparks, the founder of The Forcing Function, a company which is empowering the next generation of entrepreneurship by transforming the way we think about work. At one point, Chris was ranked amongst the top 20 online poker players in the world. Now after leaving the online poker world, Chris trains a select number of startup executives to deploy the same techniques that he once used to gain a competitive advantage himself. Chris has spent years deconstructing and distilling the success of top-performing entrepreneurs, and now (luckily for us) he is sharing that knowledge in a free workbook, Experiment Without Limits. Obviously you will hear us reference this book multiple times throughout our conversation, and you can find all those links to get that yourself at growensemble.com.
Chris is currently hosting workshops and retreats around New York City, and is working with his partner, Mariana, on a second book, “Inflection Point”, which is a guide to sparking a radical shift in life trajectory. He’s set to release this book in 2020. In this episode, Chris and I dive into the depths of personal productivity, his practices, and philosophies that he’s come to develop since founding The Forcing Function and studying the success of these top-performing entrepreneurs. And so there will be a lot of nitty-gritty details in this episode, so I advise you follow along closely.
And so to help you out with this, I suggest you go over to growensemble.com/comp, C-O-M-P, so you can get our detailed episode companion. Our team goes back and listens to every single episode, and takes very detailed notes on all the takeaways, links, anything that you want from this episode, so that you can follow along in a more succinct and clean manner. If you’re walking the dog, if you’re driving the car and can’t take notes yourself, our team has already done that. So, again, that is growensemble.com/comp, or go to growensemble.com/podcast, and you can find ’em there too. All right, let’s dive into this conversation with Chris Sparks from The Forcing Function.
All right, Chris. It is a pleasure to have you here on the Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation Podcast. And for folks who are unfamiliar, would you mind introducing yourself and sharing a little bit about what it is that you do?
Chris: Hey, it’s awesome to be here. Thank you so much. My name is Chris Sparks. I’m the founder of a company called The Forcing Function, and we work to empower the next generation of entrepreneurs through workshops, retreats, and one-on-one customized consulting. I call myself a “peak performance trainer”. So I show business executives, entrepreneurs, how to accelerate the growth in their business by maximizing the resources that they have towards it and making sure that they’re working on the right things, that their efforts are on their top priorities. Mostly we do that through installing habits, creating systems, as well as removing any bottlenecks to process in their business, or you know, because all of these overlap in their personal lives.
Cory: Excellent. And so there was a thing that really stuck with me just in that little bit there, as well as you know, doing my research on you and The Forcing Function. So you mentioned this “next generation of entrepreneur.” So I’m wondering if we could start there. If you could share a little bit as to what that means to you, and so we can perhaps start with a definition?
Chris: Yeah. A lot of this journey begins with my own challenges and struggles, where I wanted to become an entrepreneur. I wanted to be able to put things into the world, but felt inadequate to the task. That there were all of these instrumental steps that I had added before I could just go out and do the thing. Sort of like the person who “Okay, well I want to do that, but first I need to get an advanced degree, and then I need to put in five years at a company.” Et cetera, et cetera. And I decided, “Why not just acquire these skills directly by teaching them to others?” At the meta-skill of, “How does one create something out of nothing”, what are the instrumental skills required to do that? What type of person do you need to become in order to be effective when you don’t have work being pulled out of you in a corporate context? That’s . . . This has been a three-year journey of discovery through both my own experimentation and working with some incredibly talented entrepreneurs, taking the best of what they have done, the best of what I have learned, and create that into a system that I hope anyone can implement.
So I’ve taken the first step towards that, and open-sourcing that knowledge . . . What I call Experiment Without Limits, a workbook that I’ve just released for free to the public last week. So download in the show notes. And it’s the best of what I have learned as far as “What do you need to do in order to be successful in this game? What separates those who are prolific from those who are just creative? Or what separates those who are able to put things out into the world to those who just really have good ideas but are never actually able to complete a project?” And this whole process for me was I figured that if I had to show up and be valuable to others, that would be what I call a forcing function in order to learn those skills for myself, in order to add value. That by teaching I would have to learn. And I see as part of my life mission to empower the next generation of entrepreneurship.
I think that what we consider jobs is an antiquated notion, you know, of the previous generation. That you, you find a company and you work your way up. And even now the average person moves jobs every two years. My suspicion is that within the next generation, full-time employment will no longer exist. We will all be full-stack freelancers, and we will all be working for multiple companies or entities of some form, and we will need to have a personal brand, whatever form that may take. We will need to market ourselves. We will need to connect directly with customers. And so what we are now calling entrepreneurship is soon to be job reality. And I see so much, I’ll say disenfranchisement out there in people who would love to put something into the world, but don’t feel empowered to do so. They feel “I am not ready, I need to do all of these things first.” And my hope is that in sharing some of these systems that I’ve created, it allows people to raise the bar of their ambition, that they feel empowered to take on this problem that no one else can solve because there’s usually one thing in the world which we are uniquely qualified to do. But now with these tools, someone can feel empowered to tackle it.
Cory: And so you mentioned this as a three-year journey for you to start learning these meta-skills in how it is that you approach work. It sounds a bit overwhelming, for me, for one. But where do you feel like, or where was it that you started? So you had this desire to learn these types of skills, and you, you know, maybe had a vision for it. Where did you dive in?
Chris: I think everything can be overwhelming if you’re only comparing the delta between where you are now and where you need to be. But if you can break down the necessary steps to get there, it becomes just a series of one percent improvements. And where I started was I looked at “If I continue in the way that I’m going, what is the most likely outcome for me? What will my obituary say?” And being unhappy with where that path was headed. And I decided that I needed to change my trajectory. Right? So thinking of a graph. How can I accelerate the slope, increase the derivative so that I am making progress faster? That it doesn’t matter where I am now if I am able to add new skills in an increased manner. And so where I started . . . You know, most days I wasn’t getting out of bed before noon. At the end of the day, it would be hard to say you know, what or anything I had accomplished. I had very vague aims of what I wanted to do. No systems whatsoever for prioritization, capturing tasks, what have you.
All the days were basically completely improvised. And I woke up, decided what I wanted to do. Which sounds kind of nice in a magazine article, like “I do whatever I want every day.” But the reality was I would have you know, whole months which I look back and say, “What did I just do?” Like the time was completely accounted for. And the process which I outline in Experiment Without Limits begins with deciding what you want and then framing those goals in such a way that they are approachable, that there are clear next actions. And then once you decide what you need to do, you start to set up systems to make progress on that dimension easier. Right? You reduce the friction to taking action there. Once you decide the actions that you need to take regularly, you set up habits and then batch them together into routines to ensure that they happen regularly, with less effort.
And then I get into the later part, is all the things that come up along the way. “I don’t have enough time in my schedule.” “All these things are draining my energy.” “There’s too many things that are competing for my attention.” “I procrastinate.” Et cetera. That you can overcome these quickly, and so get on your way. But the process for me all begins with the hard work of “What do I really want? What would I like to accomplish in this life?” And the next step of “Who do I need to be in order to accomplish this?” And these differences between “Who am I now” and “Who I need to become” . . . These are opportunities. Right? The framing that we are already great. We are already good enough as we already are, and these are opportunities to do even more.
And so if I could give anyone one message away from this, is find a way to make some amount of small progress every single day. Is . . . I talk about this as a three-year journey, is . . . Like many days it feels like the progress that I make is so trivial. But I make some form of progress every single day. And if you ask anyone who knew me years ago, I am a different person. Right? I am a verb. Chris 2000 (I have to do some math) 2016 is barely unrecognizable to Chris 2019. And I would like to increase that half-life where I’ll be saying the same thing in 2020.2, right? In a year and a half, instead of three years. Right? To continue to increase that speed of shedding my snakeskin. But it all comes down to ensuring that I make progress on that important dimension every day.
Cory: And so you have this, this system now, and I went through Experiment Without Limits, and there’s wonderful, wonderful detail in there, so we’ll dive more into each of those specific steps. But you mentioned . . . You weren’t getting out of bed until noon. You were kind of taking each day as it came. You have this system now, but I’m interested in the trajectory of like, what, you know, what came between those two? You know, so what . . . Was there any sort of inflection point or anything like that to where you were you know, very honest with yourself, being like, “Wow, this does have to change, and . . . ?” ’Cause I assume you didn’t know or understand so intuitively this system you built now three years ago, right? When you were waking up at noon. So what, maybe, were some of those initial steps, or maybe I guess like turning point moments for you that had you really start to understand and learn this system?
Chris: Sure. So I’ll start with the high level, and I’ll give some specific examples. So how this works is we have a feedback loop where progress is . . . The speed of progress is determined by the tightness of the feedback loop. So a feedback loop is measure, act. And so the personal improvement loop is “reflect, act,” (what I call experiment, try things), and then “plan again.” Right? So we’re planning “What am I going to do?” We do it, we’re measuring, we’re collecting results. “Are my efforts leading to the results that I would like? Am I headed on the right path?” And then I reflect. “How could that have gone better? How can I do that, you know, better, stronger, faster, et cetera? What have I learned for next time?” And then I create the plan. And the faster that I can go through this plan-experiment-reflect-plan-experiment-reflect cycle, the faster that I grow. Right? So all of these changes come down to putting these loops into place.
So picking any dimension in your life. One, let’s say health. Like “Man, my energy in the afternoon is terrible.” All right. What are the potential bottlenecks there? Well, first, I was getting four hours of sleep a night. Well, all right. How do I get to eight? Starts with, “All right, I need to get hours of time in bed.” And so let’s start there. How can I structure my schedule so that I’m in bed for nine hours? And then how can I make those hours as useful as possible? So reducing exposure to devices, having a hard work cutoff, improving my environment, getting my efficiency, where the amount of time that I spend in bed, more of that is spent sleeping. All right, so I get some decent sleep. Well, my diet is still crap. How do I improve that? I’m going to audit all of the macros. Where are all of my nutrients coming from? Where am I lacking? Any time that I feel bad, what did I eat? Can I trace that back to the source? What are the ingredients? Can I do an elimination diet to test whether eliminating these ingredients has an effect on my energy?
Right? I’m intentionally going fast, and this is like a montage of this process that happens over a series of months. But first, what happens is I identify the bottleneck first, in this case, “energy,” the sub-bottleneck being “diet”, and then I try things, I take steps to see what of these actions has an effect. And so imagine that I am doing a dozen of these experiments at any given time. Hopefully, they conclude within a designated thirty-day period, but some of them have been going on for years, where I still haven’t figured out the thing that will actually make a difference. But the fact is that I’m constantly trying things. I’m constantly collecting data. And as I find something that works I double down on it.
Cory: I mean, so for you with the actual story, like in your life, like what did that look like? Not just the system. Did you have . . . Did you already know that this was how habit loops and feedback loops worked three years ago, and you just implemented it? Or where did that information come from, and how did . . . You know, what were your first interactions with the feedback loop like? I guess I’m curious, you know, not just, like the systems beyond it, or the meta systems there, as to how you’ve come to be where you are, but actually like . . . What was the story behind that? You know, where you are geographically, and did anything monumentally shift in your life, personally or otherwise?
Chris: Oh, man, there’s ten rabbit holes, we could each cover a half-hour there. So I’ll pick a couple, and yeah, I hope the audience will indulge me, keeping it . . . Starting in the abstract, ’cause I want to give a principle that if applied can completely transform your life. If I drop five of these in the call today, and maybe back it up with an example or two, our time will be well spent.
So first, we’re talking about habits and environment, where all of our behavior is deterministic. Everything we do is determined by context. And so one of the huge paradigm shifts that I had was the environment that I was in (whether that’s people that I’m around, a physical space, et cetera) was not supportive of my goals. That, using the term from earlier, there was too much friction to doing what I wanted. There was too much willpower required to stay the course. And so a big part of my efforts were, “How do I change my defaults? How do I put myself in contexts where my future self makes the choices that I would like to make?” And there are myriad ones of those.
You know, one recent one, as far as writing, I mean a big focus for this year has been writing and putting Experiment Without Limits out. But so much of writing is not enjoyable, and requires . . . And the returns are not, you know, predictable sometimes. Sometimes you sit down and nothing comes out. Other times you sit down and, you know, a whole page comes out. And it’s . . . A lot of it is just finding a way to get yourself down in the chair. And so every time that I try something I’m thinking, “Well, what of that worked? What could I try next time that might go differently?” So let’s say I intended to write today, but didn’t. Well, some of those reasons were maybe I didn’t put myself in an environment that was supportive of writing. Maybe I didn’t plan correctly, where I didn’t know what I was going to write about. Didn’t have an outline. Didn’t have a next action as far as how am I actually going to get started. Maybe I need to take a step back and say, “Why is it actually important for me to do this?” Maybe I can get some feedback from people as far as what parts of this are good, what parts need to be improved, so I can have something clear to go on.
I think about, like, starting The Forcing Function as a business. A huge paradigm shift for me was I was so afraid to sell myself. Right? It’s something we talked about when we were you know, talking last time, about the cognitive dissonance of being a marketer, but that the biggest weapon you can have for selling (and don’t get me wrong, as much as you think it’s disgusting you need to sell yourself in order to make anything of any significant impact) is to do something that you believe in. And a lot of my iteration has been around my mission, and why do I do what I do. What gets me out of bed in the morning? Where I think a lot of what was holding me back was there was no reason to improve, because why did I need to improve? Right?
At the time I was on a beach in Thailand for twenty dollars a day, and I could have spent my entire life on that beach and never changed a thing. And it took one day to realize, “Huh. Well, is this really what I want out of life?” And finding that answer lacking. And having a “why” that allows me to stick through the struggle, where a lot of days are hard. A lot of things that I need to do, I have no idea how to do them. I need to figure them out. But I have a strong incentive to do so that is a stronger carrot than the stick of, “Oh, the bed feels really nice and I’d rather stay here today.” Right?
And where we all started with this is this idea of a feedback loop. And so I’m always trying to get people to track, in some way. I really, really love the better practices episode that you did. If anyone listening to this hasn’t checked out that episode, I highly recommend you do, where you talk about the power of tracking. And so specifically in tracking your time and identifying the activities which are very high value, and what I call leverage. Right? Where you spend a little bit of time and you get a large potential return. And then conversely, to invert there. What are the things that take up a lot of time but don’t actually return all that much value? Do you really need to be doing those things? We talked a little bit about energy today, where there are things . . . Diet, sleep, exercise . . . Which increase your energy capacity. But so much of us as social entrepreneurs, like we are in the energy exchange business.
I mean, I say what I do is emotional labor. And some days it kind of straddles the line between therapist and you know, personal trainer and college professor on office hours, and maybe even a bartender on some days that are low. Right? And there’s an energetic exchange there, and I need to be my best self, in order that I can give of myself to others. That self-care is not selfish. But first I need to manage my energy, realize the things that are draining of it. If they are still a priority, I can protect those. I can make sure I have the most resources for them. And then I can recover.
I mean, there’s myriad examples packed in there, but the principles are as follows: Understand what is important. Make sure that it happens (regularly protect it), and have a way to track if what you are doing is leading to the results that you want. And if not, change course.
Cory: And so maybe that’s where we go, right there, as you mention those handful of principles. We’ve weaved in a lot of these different things, and I definitely think Experiment Without Limits is a great place to start, but if someone’s coming to you . . . You know, perhaps someone listening to this episode saying, “Chris, you know, like I feel overwhelmed. You know, again, I don’t feel like I’m making any progress. I have some vision or some semblance of that, and I don’t feel like I’m working towards it every single day.” What would be the handful of things, maybe the top three next actions that you recommend they take for some sort of personal, you know, analysis, and get them moving on the right track?
Chris: Cool. So let’s deconstruct that a bit. So I know you’ve done some coaching, so you’re probably familiar with this process. So let’s analyze this statement. “I feel overwhelmed.” Right? So there’s two components of this. First is the feeling. And a lot of this is putting yourself in a better position to deal with things. So this is the chapter which I call “Mental Game”, which is when things are not going well, how do you get yourself in the position in order to deal with them better? And I have a nice little checklist in there that I run through as far as “How can I at least make my perception of the situation better?” Right? Have a more objective view, rather than viewing everything through this distorted lens of being overwhelmed.
And so by stepping away from this, by taking more of a ten thousand foot view through these steps, improving my perception of it, I will then better be able to act. Right? So the first thing is that . . . Is step outside of the situation. You know, take the day off, et cetera, to decide what is truly the problem. Put yourself in a position to be able to deal with it. And then as far as overwhelmed, being very, very specific with it. So I mean one of my favorite exercises, I have it right next to me here, is I just put pen to paper and I just say, “All right, I’m gonna take one minute and say, “What are all the things that I feel overwhelmed about now?” And the glorious thing about paper is that nothing looks as intimidating on it as it does bouncing around your head when you’re running over the same mental loops.
So it’s like it feels like there’s a million things that I am overwhelmed with over now, but I can only think of five. Right? And so five feels tractable. And so I list all those out, and then I say, “All right, which of these five are most overwhelming me right now?” I’ll go through this exercise personally. So five things that are overwhelming me right now. One, putting on events and trying to get people to show up to things in person which are incredibly valuable, but you know, getting anyone . . . You know, herding cats, essentially. Two, how can I get my work in front of more people? Something that I spent six months on, but only a couple hundred people have actually done it. So how can I get it in front of them? And then part three is how can I get people to actually take the action? This is the existential reason for the company to exist. How do you inspire . . . How do I manage better? As you put it before, I’m still the bottleneck in my business. What are the things that I’m doing that others can do better for me?
And with all of these things, I feel completely overwhelmed at times, because I don’t know what the right answer is. I have to figure it out. I have to try. But by at least defining them, I can start to create a plan with how to deal with them, how to both increase my . . . Improve my feeling about them. It’s like, “Oh, that feels a little bit more tractable,” and start to create a plan for how that can improve, which . . . Just changing that from a negative feedback loop to a positive feedback loop, where things are moving forward, I feel like a positive trajectory completely changes the stance. Completely changes the feeling. Right? So much of our productivity is just extrapolating on our current mood. If we can change our mood from overwhelmed to, “Well, I’m busy but I’m making progress.” Like what a world of difference that makes, even if it’s just our subjective experience, which . . . I mean why else are we on this planet, if not to enjoy ourselves. Right?
So if I decide that . . . All right, the thing that’s most overwhelming to me is . . . Let’s say getting people to these events. That’s a low-hanging fruit one, and one that’s urgent for me right now. Well, why don’t I message ten people that I know who are really good at this and see if they have any suggestions? Maybe they’ll have some recommendations for things, and if nothing else they’ll reaffirm that “Hey, this isn’t rocket science.” That other people have done it before. And so what I’ve done there is kind of an abbreviated version of another chapter, which is “Procrastination.” And so procrastination gets a bad rap as far as like . . . Here are all of the things that I want to do that I’m not doing. What most people miss about procrastination is that it’s about getting started. Right? It’s changing this stance from “This is something that I need to do,” to something that’s already underway. Making that tiniest, tiniest, tiniest first step. And the first step there is uncovering, “Why am I not taking action?”
And I think you can find something to do, anything . . . Like, it’s much easier to see from the perspective of a moving ship. So I did something simple, right? I can send ten messages in five minutes. But it takes five minutes, but now it’s, “Oh, okay, this is something that I’m making progress on. I feel so much better about that.” So I can deconstruct that process, that . . . Hopefully it was instructive. It was in real-time. So sorry we’re doing it live. It’s important to understand first everyone gets overwhelmed. This is natural. Don’t feel bad about feeling bad. You’ll only make it worse. Take a step back. What can you do to feel better? Sometimes that means not working, believe it or not. You know, we need to have some separation. And then second, once we can view things a little bit clearer, what is one potential path forward? How can we start moving? And then once we are moving from this new perspective, everything will look very different.
Cory: So you know, from that realm of dealing perhaps with initial overwhelm, you know, what might be the sort of day-to-day . . . And again, I love that you do have Experiment Without Limits to reference folks to, ’cause it’s gonna be like a really wonderful bonus here for people to reference and review as we talk here, but what might be the day to day handful of practices that you know, an entrepreneur who has maybe distilled some of this overwhelm into clarity . . . The five, the seven things, whatever it might be, what are the day to day actions and practices they can take to move forward, as you were saying it?
Chris: So I’d first start with a little plug, which actually informs my answer. So I have a free quiz on my website, which is at theforcingfunction.com/assessment. So I call this “The Performance Assessment,” where the critical thing is figuring out what the critical thing is. Right? What’s most holding us back? What’s our biggest opportunity? And so in this quiz I ask a few questions which are designed to eliminate . . . What are the things that you are not doing but quote/unquote “should be doing”? Like what is the best thing . . . Of all the things that you could add to your life, what is the best thing that you could add? Or, actually subtract is more likely. And so anyone who takes this short quiz, I give personalized feedback to. You know, I write all these, I send all these emails. And I would love to help, if anyone is interested. So please check out that link.
And so I’ve been fortunate to receive a couple hundred of these responses, and reply to them personally, and I have got an idea of, “What are the commonalities, as far as what are so many entrepreneurs not doing that is causing this feeling of overwhelm that they should be doing?” And so I’ll zero it down to three. First is planning. And so this is on the macro sense. You know, what are my big goals? I like to think on ninety-day timelines. Right? If I can only accomplish three things this quarter, what would they be? This ten thousand foot view of, “What is everything working towards? What’s my north star?” Always having that in mind. Whenever else fails, wake up today, it’s like “What’s one thing that I can do today that will put me towards my North Star?” And then following from that, having a plan when you wake up. So planning the night before. So you wake up and you know what you’re going to do. You can already jump in. No waking up and deciding, “Hey, what am I going to do today?” So that’s number one.
Second is some form of routine. And so what I call this is, “What are the things that when you do them help you be your best self?” And so that could be exercise, reading, writing, meditation, talking with a friend. Many things that I probably couldn’t think of, but I’m sure are coming to mind for you right now. What are those things that when you do them you become better, right? You perform at a higher level? Have them so that you can do them every day. Put them as part of a routine. Ideally in the beginning of the day, because in the morning we have the least constraints. Right? Entropy accumulates throughout the day. As the day accumulates, it gets harder and harder to do things. So do the important things first. And if you create momentum by doing these important what I call “Keystone Habits” to start the day, it sets yourself up to have a good first day. I like to say, you know, “If you win the first hour, you win the day.” So having a really strong morning routine that starts to create momentum allows you to be your best self.
The third and final one that I would say is “Reflecting.” And so this comes down to just regularly looking back . . . First, celebrating things that are going well, because this is hard and it gets a lot easier if you look back and say, “Wow, look how far I’ve come. I bet these things that look hard right now are going to look very easy in the rearview mirror when I’m thinking about them later.” Celebrate your wins, and then look at your lessons, so you don’t make the same mistakes twice. And as I’ve said before, find a way to track. Is what you’re doing leading to where you want to go? And if you’re tracking in some form and looking over that regularly, you will commonly come across ways to do what you’re doing even better. So first plan. “What do I want to accomplish on a macro level? What am I going to do today?” Have some form of routine that gets you to your best self, and then regularly reflect. I like once a month, but the timing is up to you. You know, “Is what I’m doing leading to where I want to?”
Cory: Thank you for that. And so you talk about this planning, the setting goals, first and foremost, which a lot of people do. I’m sure most all the entrepreneurs here in some regard are setting goals. But why might their goal-setting not be as effective as it could be? What are some commonalities that you notice there, and maybe some adjustments or tweaks that they could make to get more out of the goal-setting that they are already doing?
Chris: So here I always like to focus on the concept of framing. I find that framing is very, very important in many things in life, as far as the actions that we take, where a subtle change in framing can make something very actionable or not actionable. And most people make a goal and it feels like the work is done. It’s, “Oh, this is the thing that I would like to do.” You know, think of the whole idea of a New Year’s resolution. It’s like, “Well I’ve . . . You know, I aspire to do it. It’s something that I want. Isn’t that good enough? Doesn’t that make me feel good?” And the goal is only the first starting point. And the whole purpose of a goal is to get you to take action on it. And so many goals just simply aren’t framed correctly and don’t inspire action. And so I’m always trying to have my goals and take the next step to, “All right, if this is what I want to accomplish, what does that mean that I’m doing now? What does a day in the life look like of someone who has accomplished this goal?”
So you know, we’ve talked about writing. You know, I’d like to publish a second book early next year. Well, my schedule right now, where I write for a half-hour a day, is probably not going to get me there. But if I take . . . If I just said, “Oh, well, I’m gonna publish by next year”, and let’s say I had like burned the boats, and “All right, I have my net worth on the line if I don’t publish this book,” well man, that last two weeks before the deadline is gonna be miserable. Like, let’s think back to college. Right? We’ll get it done if we need to, but wouldn’t it be much more simple if I could take the steps now to turn this abstract long-term goal into, “What do I need to be doing now?” Right? “What are the actions I need to take?”
And so with framing . . . I mean everyone knows this concept of smart goals. It’s probably one of the concepts in productivity that everyone knows, but no one applies, is that, “Is it actionable? Is it specific? Will it be very, very obvious if you accomplish it or not? Like could a third party observer who doesn’t know you say without a doubt, “Yes, you did it.” “No, you didn’t.” Does it have a deadline? Right? We can’t get ourselves to do anything without a deadline. Put one of these in place. This works really well for anything. I mean anything you want to make progress on, I say, “Hey, can you take a look at this on Monday?” And that means I have to have something to show on Monday. You know, having a call like this. Oh, well, I’m not going to show up for this call. I don’t wanna be empty-handed. I don’t wanna disappoint you. Have some sort of deadline in place.
Is it measurable? Like can I know if I am making progress on it? This has been a common theme of the conversation. So you know, we’ll stick with the writing example, because it works well. All right. If I assume this book is two hundred pages, probably seventy-five percent of the time will be spent editing it, so all right, I wanna finish it in say eight months. That means I need to have a first draft in two months. Say sixty days to write two hundred pages. Assuming a third of these pages will be thrown out, that means I need to be writing five pages a day. Right? And so then I can start to think, “Well, is that really reasonable, for me writing five pages a day? Like what about when friends are visiting? What if I’m traveling?” So I go, “Okay, well some days I’m writing ten pages, some days I’m writing zero pages.” But you can see how this abstract goal reduces down to, “What do I need to be doing every day? What do I need to be doing now?” And you can start to think “Is this realistic?”
Or another way to think about it is, “What are the costs of accomplishing this goal?” Right? That’s the way to distinguish a goal from a dream, is, “Are you willing to pay what is necessary in order to achieve this?” We all wanna be rock stars. No one wants to travel the country in a crappy bus. Right? So what do we need to be doing regularly to make progress to that? The goal is just the first step.
Cory: And so I mean, as you go through all these processes and explain them in-depth, you know, something that comes up in my mind . . . And I’ve noticed this with my own you know, practices of personal productivity, you know, how do you rationalize, or what might a response be to someone who’s thinking, “I don’t know if I have this much time to apply to planning, reflecting, or anything like that”? What would a response be like that? Maybe you’ve had clients come and approach you with that at different points.
Chris: Common objection, so forgive me if you’ve heard this before, but it’s so good it bears repeating. Any time someone tells you, “I don’t have time” what they’re saying is, “This is not a priority for me”. And we are the worst assistants to ourselves, in that we jam-pack our schedule with more than we can possibly accomplish. And many times the way that we spend our time is not reflective of our priorities. Right? So I refer to this as an investment portfolio, in that you’re regularly looking back and then rebalancing the way that you are spending your time, and so that it’s more in alignment with your priorities. And so we all have the same twenty-four hours. Right? Opportunity cost is the biggest cost we all pay. That listening to this podcast at this very moment is coming at the expense of everything else you could be doing. So any given moment, make sure that you are doing something that is at least close to your top priority.
And oftentimes, when someone says that they don’t have time, I say, “Well, track your time for a day. Send me what you’re doing. First you’ll probably reveal two or three hours that you’re completely wasting every single day.” Not like wasting in the sense that they’re disappearing, but that you’re doing things that if you had chosen you probably would not have. And then the final is that in addition to opening up that new time is that any minute you spend planning, any minute you spend reflecting, has a 10x return. Any minute returns ten minutes. First you make sure that you’re doing the right things. Right? The biggest way to waste time is to sprint as fast as you can in the wrong direction doing the wrong things. Take the extra time to decide what you actually want to do, what portions of that are the highest leverage and most important things to do. Right? And then once you have decided you can create a plan to ensure that you don’t have to duplicate work. You increase your chances of success. That you don’t need extra time to do planning. You save time by planning. Right?
And so another good one that’s often repeated, right, this comes around meditation, is, “Hey, meditate twenty minutes a day. If you don’t have twenty minutes, meditate for an hour.” Right? It’s like the fact that you don’t have time illustrates how much you need this. So yeah, an objection that I get all the time, and something that I am very conscious of with my clients, because their biggest bottleneck is not money but time, is you know, “How can I have every minute they spend with me return 10x?” The hugest part of that is making sure that they are doing the right things. It’s the dimension of time management that no one wants to talk about because it’s not fun. Right? Productivity is not entertainment. We all love these productivity hacks of, “How can I be more efficient and how can I do an Uberman sleep schedule so I have an extra six hours to work?” When the fact is like most people just aren’t working on the right things, and if they spent a little bit extra time making sure that they’re doing the right things and less time reading about this new system or this new tool which is not gonna change anything because they’re the common denominator, they’d be much better off. So yeah. Obviously one of my favorite topics. It’s like the question of not having enough time illustrates the need even more.
Cory: Right. I would definitely agree. And so along those lines, maybe talking to, you know, common experiences with clients, maybe a final question here before we wrap up. You know, now you’re three years into The Forcing Function and working with clients at such an intimate level, these entrepreneurs, what have some of these, you know, intimate working experiences perhaps taught you about entrepreneurship and maybe changed you know, your lens as to what you thought you knew about it?
Chris: Oh, man, I thought you were giving me a softball there. Well, I am actually writing on a mega-post about this as far as what I’ve learned about entrepreneurship that I’m excited to share, and maybe it will be out in time if I get my act together on it. One thing that I have learned that was very surprising for me about entrepreneurship, no one thinks they’re doing a good job at it. So I said I work with (they wouldn’t call themselves that, but I think of them this way) some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world. People who are doing incredible things, that for me it looks like they’re just running up walls. Like, “How do you manage to do that?” But for them, because we tend to discount what we’re naturally good at, it’s like, “Oh, well, doesn’t everyone do that?” And you know, “Why am I so bad at this other thing that you know, all these other people are good at?” Right? Everyone is naked in the mirror.
And it makes me realize that if this . . . These fears and insecurities and awareness and overwhelm of some people who are doing it so well, how pervasive is it in the world at large? That this impostor syndrome, this feeling of, “You know, man, am I ever going to get to the point where I’ve got it figured out?” And the secret is no one actually has it figured out, but the best find a way forward, find a way to keep putting things out, to fail more than the other person. And through that failure to learn enough to get to that next level, that is just a continual process of leveling up. And the people who I’ve seen who I call successful are those who have just gotten enough shots at goal and have learned enough through their failures to get to a point of competency. To get to the point where they feel comfortable putting things out into the world. And I mean, that’s my advice to myself and to anyone who is listening, is just to take more shots on goal.
Cory: Oh, wonderful. Wonderful reminder to end on. And so finally, Chris, I really do appreciate your time coming here on the podcast. Anything else you feel like we left out for it before we wrap up here?
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. I feel like I threw a lot at you today, Cory, so I appreciate you indulging me. I hope there was some really useful takeaways in there for listeners. I promise I don’t talk at this speed all the time. If there was anything that I said today that resonated with you, I would love to hear from you. As next actions, you’ve talked a little bit today about Experiment Without Limits. Highly recommend that you download it for free on the website, check it out. I think there will be something very useful for you in there. And if you’re not sure where to get started, highly recommend our performance assessment quiz. As mentioned, you know, I personally reply with recommendations from anyone who takes that quiz. If you’re interested in learning more about what we do, we’re at theforcingfunction.com. I would love to hear from you. I always see these at the beginning of the conversation. Super appreciate your having me on, and yeah. Good luck guys.
Cory: Awesome. Thanks again, Chris. We’ll make sure everything’s linked up in the show notes at growensemble.com.
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