How to Conduct a Powerful Annual Review with Chris Williamson
Chris Williamson is the host of Modern Wisdom, a top 20 podcast in the UK with 2.5+ million downloads. He owns an events company and teaches his clients how to discover their purpose and get the most out of life using findings from performance, fitness, and psychology.
For this special edition of Forcing Function Hour, Chris Sparks and Chris Williamson took you behind the scenes of their 2020 Annual Reviews.
Doing an annual review is the most impactful thing you can do to prepare for a successful year to come. It's the perfect time to reflect on lessons learned, celebrate wins, and put failures in the rearview. With these emergent insights in hand, you can then create your vision and design your goals for 2021.
See below for the audio recording, resources mentioned, topics, and conversation transcript.
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Resources and links mentioned:
Modern Wisdom Episode: How to Properly Do an End of Year Review feat. Chris Sparks
Brian Muraresku’s The Immortality Key
Additional Forcing Function links:
Experiment Without Limits (peak performance workbook, free download)
Performance Assessment (quiz to reveal your greatest opportunity for growth)
To check out our previous Forcing Function Hour episodes, click here.
Topics:
(04:13) The importance of annual reviews
(13:53) Systems that contribute to progress
(23:23) Growth as an area
(38:37) Each section has a North Star
(42:36) Satisfying your curiosity
(48:20): Q&A
Conversation Transcript:
Note: Transcript is slightly edited for clarity
Chris Sparks (00:05): Welcome to Forcing Function Hour, a conversation series exploring the boundaries of peak performance. Join me, Chris Sparks, as I interview elite performers to reveal principles, systems, and strategies for achieving a competitive edge in business. If you are an executive or investor ready to take yourself to the next level, download my workbook at experimentwithoutlimits.com. For all episodes and show notes, go to forcingfunctionhour.com.
Today I'm honored to have Chris Williamson. He's the host of "Modern Wisdom," a top-20 podcast in the UK. He's had a killer year, 2.5 million downloads. And his deal is he's going to show you how to discover your purpose and get the most out of life. So highly recommend checking out the episode. We'll drop the links in the show notes there. Some wonderful episodes from some of the leading thinkers in business, sports performance, psychology, relationships, and more, including yours truly. So, hey. I highly recommend checking out Chris's show. I think that Chris's superpower is his enthusiasm, his relatability. He, more than a lot of others that I know, talks about what he does. Like, he practices what he preaches. And I think he really brings some of these heady concepts back down to earth. Makes it relatable, makes it something that you can take action on. A lot of people talk about bettering themselves, having their best life, being all you can be, and I think Chris really lives, eats, breathes, sleeps it, and makes it into something that anyone can implement. So, yeah. Big fan of his.
How this episode came about: I'm pretty good at twisting people's arms when I need to. I was on Modern Wisdom recently. You guys might have seen that episode that came out on Christmas Day where I talked about my annual review process. And while I had the benefit of being on the air with Chris, I said, "Hey, I bet it would be a great forcing function if we came on together in a couple weeks and talked about the outcome of this process." And he was gracious enough to come aboard. So if you want to check out that episode where I walk through the exact process that we have for doing our annual reviews, you can check that out at forcingfunction.com/modernwisdom.
And you know, today our plan is what I'm calling "the anatomy of an annual review." So I want to demystify this process. I think it's very tempting to see a template, to see someone write out fifteen pages of, you know, what they learned from the past year and what their goals are, and feel a little bit intimidated. Feel a little bit like an impostor. And we want to demystify that this is super messy. Like when in actuality, in the behind scenes, you know, the template doesn't fully capture the type of process that you go through. It's uncomfortable, it's unclear, it's ambiguous, and we want to demystify that for you. And if we can show you how you can navigate the ambiguity, maybe we can inspire you to go a little bit deeper in your own reflection, or to set your sights a little bit higher for the next year to give yourself permission to get all you can out of this wonderful exercise.
So today's timeline. Chris and I are going to be having a little fireside chat for about forty, forty-five minutes, and we're going to be taking questions from you guys, live audience, via the Q&A function at the bottom. You can see the bottom bar there, so if you have a question go ahead and use that Q&A function and I'll make sure it gets answered, and if you see a question that you're interested in hearing, I encourage you to upvote that question, because I'm going to be asking the questions which you want to hear the most. Chat is open as always, so if you have something to share with us, make sure to use the "all attendees," and if you have to leave early, no worries. We're going to be going for about seventy-five minutes total. You can hop off, and you'll get the recording and transcript on an email on Monday.
All right. I think it's time to kick things off. What do you think, Chris? Welcome. Thanks for being here. Excited to dig in with you today.
Chris Williamson (04:00): Thank you, mate. Pleasure to be here. It's nice to be on the other side of the microphone for once.
Chris Sparks (04:05): I bet, I bet. We'll see if you still say that after I'm finished taking my shots at you.
Chris Williamson (04:11): Yeah.
Chris Sparks (04:12): So let's set the tone, I think. Talk to me . . . For you, when you sit down for your annual review, what are you trying to accomplish? Why is this something that's important for you to do?
Chris Williamson (04:25): I don't think I'm fantastically systematized with what I do. Any outward showing of being remotely effective is purely sort of by look and chance and kind of inefficient time and attention, and one of the things that I really admire and like and have benefited from from following your work is it really does help to give me some structure, it helps to sort of . . . It's a forcing function. It gives me just ways that I can utilize these really wishy-washy tactics that I know I should be doing, like constantly checking in and having these points at which I make sure I'm moving towards my higher goals and my daily actions are contributing to my long-term objectives. So for me it's the first time I've fully checked in with everything since this time last year. I don't have a ninety-day sprint review period, although that's one of the things I want to start using. But I always have been fairly disciplined with at least checking in one way or another. And I said this on the intro to our episode on Modern Wisdom.
I think everybody reaches the end of the year and thinks, "Right, I should be spending a bit of time here working out where am I at?" I'm in the same place, probably my parents' house or my girlfriend's house or my house with the same people, with the same dog, maybe with a bit more money, maybe with a new human in the room or whatever, but it's the same thing. So you think, "Right, okay, lots of things are the same, what's changed?" And that's why an annual review is a useful tool to do at the end of the year.
Chris Sparks (05:58): How did it feel this year? Obviously 2020 was a remarkable year in many ways. Was this process different for you this go-around?
Chris Williamson (06:09): I wouldn't say so. I would say this is the most disciplined I've been with it, helped in part by having a framework that I could follow straight through by yourself. Without that . . . Previously I've just bodged it. I've taken like a bit of Chris Sparks, and a bit of whatever else I find, and, "Oh, I like that from Tiago, and I like that from Nat, and that thing from David's fun." Having that meant that I was much more disciplined with it. No distractions of work. My business is in nightlife, typically, and that means usually the period, Boxing Day to New Year's Eve is very intense. This year that hasn't been the case, which meant that I had more time to dedicate to this. I purposefully booked no podcast recordings in that period either, and I had also scheduled everything to go out for the rest of 2020 before I went home for Christmas on the 22nd. So I had this real long period.
You mentioned that you go away and get like a cabin in the woods and put a kimono on, or whatever. I didn't go that far. But I did decide to dedicate a little bit of . . . I gave it a little bit of symbolism, you know, and kind of made it a bit of a pilgrimage. I moved . . . I sat in a different place. I didn't just do it in my desk. You know, I like made sure I felt good on the morning before I did it. So I tried to add some ritual to it. It sounds really . . . I don't know. It might sound like you're giving it more credence than it's worth. It's not a funeral or a baptism or something. But at the same, like there's not much that we do give ritual to now. And it's actually kind of cool. Like no one else is gonna see it. They're not gonna see that I was . . . You in your kimono or me with like my cup of tea or whatever sat down in the seat. But yeah, it was good. I really enjoyed it.
Chris Sparks (07:53): I love that. I think it's so important to create a ritual around it, because it's putting yourself in a different headspace. I think it's very easy to get stuck in the day-to-day, and thus we tend to either think about things . . . What's happened very recently instead of zooming out to the full extent that we can. A year is a long time. It can be very easy to think about what's happened in the last couple weeks and extrapolate that out the whole way. Or the same way to . . . By taking ourselves fully out of our own context, like you said. Creating some space that you didn't have urgent things going on, being able to step back from usual work context, you're able to see things from a different perspective and perhaps consider options that you normally wouldn't.
You know, I'm curious, was there anything that really surprised you this year that came up?
Chris Williamson (08:54): I was surprised mostly . . . Relationships for me is the lowest priority. Only child, solo business entrepreneur, solo podcast host. I'm kinda used to spending times in solitude, and 2020 should have been a tightening of that bottleneck, but upon reflection one of the things I was really surprised by was I'd wanted to have more relationships this year, I'd wanted to make more friends and connect with more people and just spread the networks that I have in a way that's not just about being purely commercially driven, it's not me trying to find someone who can push the podcast more, who's a potential advertising sponsor or someone to come to my club night, which has been a lot of my relationships. As a club promoter, everyone is a potential customer, so for a very long time you actually see the world in this quite transactional kind of framework.
And, yeah. Given that we haven't really been able to spend much time, there's obviously been an upper bound on the type of friendships I've been able to build, but deepening friendships with people like Michael Malice, Douglas Murray, Andrew Doyle, Ethan Suplee, yourself . . . David Perell and me have gotten on really well, George MacKay and me went out to Dubai for a month. I got to go Ibiza with my friend Ricky. I went to Athens for my birthday and spent it at the Stoa Poikile (which is where Stoicism was founded by Zeno of Citium) on my birthday.
Like, I look back and I was like, "This was a year where there were a lot of constraints socially, but I was really happy with how I responded to those." And I think the other one, the other surprise (which wasn't a surprise in reflection, but just generally was a surprise across time) was in a health perspective for me, ruptured an Achilles in August, which is a fairly major injury. It's a twelve month recovery to get full athletic function back. And I wasn't . . . If you'd told me a year ago, "You're going to rupture your Achilles, how do you think you'll deal with it?" I probably wouldn't have been super confident, as someone who has catastrophic thoughts sometimes. As we all do. "Oh, one thing's gone bad, the world's going to end." Although at the moment it does feel like the world might end. Given that, I would've gone into a situation like a full Achilles rupture and thought, like, "This is not going to be good for me." But I dealt with it, like, quite robustly. I was really proud of the way that I got through it, and still am now, and I would go probably as far as to say that I'm a better human with more confidence with one and a half Achilles than I would have been had I never had it.
So, yeah. Those two things. The ability or the improvement that I enjoyed with regards to my social networks and then the way that I dealt with that injury.
Chris Sparks (11:40): That's brilliant. Yeah, I think that's a good thing to lean into, is the surprise. Because sometimes our intuition can steer us wrong, and then forcing ourselves to ask the question. And you mentioned on the positive end, something that you thought might have felt catastrophic, you were very surprised that you handled it very well, and I think that's probably a silver lining from this year, is maybe we had to rise to the occasion and find out that we had a little bit more in the tank than we might have expected.
I'd like to dig in a little bit on the relationships, because this seems to be one that came up for a number of people this year, where staying in touch (having deep, meaningful relationships) became a challenge, as usual context collapsed. The ability to see people to make things happen, you know, not wanting to be on the internet as much . . . I know personally when things got rough, you know, March through June, I kinda woke up and realized, "Oh, I haven't talked to some of my best friends in three months." And it was very easy for it to happen, because all of our normal contexts for seeing each other were on pause. And needing to find new ways to make these connections happen, and to reprioritize that. Something I talk about a lot is you recognize that you're out of alignment or out of balance in one area, and you try to reinvest resources from another area to try to rebalance yourself. So realizing, "Okay, I'm not prioritizing relationships to the extent that I'd like to, and that it's been a real bright spot in the rare times that I do initiate or do reach out and make something happen. You know, what can I do to invest in this area more?"
So you know, talking about the big wins that you had, would you say that there's . . . It was a habit or a system that contributed to you making progress in this area, or something that you're looking to emphasize more moving forward?
Chris Williamson (13:53): One of the things was a lot of intentionality. So, I made a decision that I wanted to spend more time with other people. Especially if you're introverted, which . . . I'm so confused about that term now I don't know even what to think of it. But if you are someone who is comfortable with spending time on their own and you have projects to work on, you can end up working yourself into a very big solitude hole, and you'll just continue to go. And if there's no one to pull you out of it . . . I know that, congratulations, you got engaged this year . . . But, you know, if there's no dog and no sort of family or relationship to pull you out of that, you'll just keep going. And it means that you have to be intentional, 'cause it's not just going to happen. And I decided I was going to.
So I'm looking at like some of the 'why's. So you've got your four steps that you go through. "What went well this year under relationships?" "Why?" "Was anything surprising?" And "What did I learn?" So I was looking at the 'why's. Sort of, what is the reason for the outcome that I got. The first one was acceptance that loneliness is damaging from a health and a mental perspective. So that was off the back of a number of different conversations I've had and some reading that I've done. Loneliness is as bad as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. I spent a lot of time, you know, thinking about my health. And I worked real hard to try to eat more vegetables this year, to try and have a more balanced diet. And I . . . The same as everybody who watched that Matthew Walker podcast on Joe Rogan and I like realized just how much I need to sleep.
So I'm dedicating all of this time, but as with a lot of things there's kind of big, glaring elephant in the room. It's the real uncomfortable thing that I don't want to eat. And that's exactly where . . . Like, I can add thirty minutes of sleep on per night, but it's probably not going to make anywhere near as much of a difference to my health as if I just see a friend twice a week. And so in terms of a structure, no. Not so much for that. But like some really cool learnings from that.
So, being social is easy with the right people, was something that I realized. A lot of people think that they're introverts, but I have a theory that most of their friends just suck. Like, if you've got rubbish friends, you don't want to spend time with them. Anyone's introverted if you're around boring friends, or friends that you just don't click with.
Another thing I learned: you have to make an effort. So a lot of the time I got really . . . I used to be resentful, and I still maybe am, to a little bit. I used to be resentful that I'm the guy that often makes things happen in my friend groups. So I'll book the flight to go abroad. I'll say, "Why don't we go for dinner?" I'll ask, "Why can't we do a this thing?" And I used to be like, "Oh, it would be so nice if I got invited to this thing." And I'm like, well, you have two choices. One of them is to be the guy that starts it and gets over the inertia, and the other one is for nothing to happen. So I have to deal with the world the way it is, not the way I would have it be.
And then confidence around others is attractive, so I just spent a lot of time . . . Especially in Dubai, I basically spent no time on my own and saw people who were naturally outgoing, really comfortable in social groups, and they just have this gravitas. And I thought, "That's awesome. Like, that's really cool." Remembering that I've stood on the front door of a thousand night clubs and spoken to a million people. Like I'm not some sort of social leper. But it was a different sort of situation. Meeting people like Steve Bartlett, the ex-CEO of Social Chain. I was just so impressed with the way that he held a room, because he was incredibly comfortable in there, and there was this really interesting thing. We were sat on an oval table, and everybody had subtly shifted the angle of their seats to be slightly toward him, even if we were talking to someone away from him, everyone was suddenly facing him, 'cause that's where the power was in the room. And not power in some sort of Machiavellian sense, just like that's where the interest and the engagement was, and that's where people knew that that's where the value was.
So I thought this was all cool. And these are things which upon reflection, many of which I had realized at the time, but it's nice to have them synthesized in a place that I can go in, I'm in the right frame of mind, I can go in one go. So that's some of the ones from relationships.
Chris Sparks (18:04): That's gold, man. And I hope some of you guys listening can see, this is some of the value that comes of making these lessons explicit. Because hey, even if there are things that deep down we know, once they're on paper, once we've written them down or typed them, it almost creates an impetus to take action on them. We've admitted their realness to ourselves, and it creates a little bit of a dissonance of, "All right, I know this works, I know this makes me happy, more fulfilled, gives me energy. You know, why am I not doing it?" And generating that creative tension is essential for us to take consistent action.
You know, a couple things that I really wanted to underline that you were talking about here, I think first that this is the year recognizing mental health is just as important as physical health. I know for me therapy was critical, that trying to integrate self-care into my life again was critical. I mean, harder without being able to do the normal things I would, like going to a sauna, getting a massage. You need to find other ways to recover, and to treat that just as important as the sprinting. I think as you said, that was feedback that I got from others in my life where, you know, it's so easy to fall into this comparison culture of looking at the trajectories and the success of those around us and thinking, "Oh, you know, for me," (this is me speaking subconsciously) it's like, "Oh, I'm lazy, I need to be doing more, I need to be working harder, I need to be hustling more," and someone else pointing out who's like, "Oh, you're already balancing essentially three jobs and you never take any time off to just relax and be."
And you know, it's like on one hand I'd love to get nine hours of sleep a night and wake up early, but I also want to stay up 'til 4:00 AM and make lots of money playing poker. And it's just some of this process is just illuminating you can't have both. Like, you are implicitly saying that one is more important than the other, and I think this is a good process of forcing you to ask, it's like, "Are my actions in line with my values and my priorities?" One of these things needs to give. And, like you said, it's an elephant in the room that once you've acknowledged him you now have to wrestle him. You can't just keep denying that he exists any longer. So in order to make this thing happen . . . For me I want to write more, I want to sleep more, I want to see my friends more, all right. Something needs to go in order to make that happen. What is that? I can't just keep doing the same thing that I'm doing now and these other things. Like, one of these things has to give. I have to decide what's more important and then have my actions be aligned with that.
And I thought that was really brave. You were talking about, hey, being a little bit resentful for needing to be the person who made things happen, but when you were able to step back from it, saying, "Well, let's think about this rationally, either I make it happen or it doesn't happen. Which would I rather have? Can I get over myself and say, well, "I'd rather have things, make it happen." Like, that's just the way it's gotta be. And I think this is a huge lesson for me this year is the people who I most want to see and hang out with also want to see and hang out with me, but everyone's so busy and overwhelmed all the time that it's a huge gift to plant that seed and say, "Hey, this is something that's happening. Do you want in?" You know, "No pressure, it's happening whether you come or not, do you want to join?" That's a huge gift, as well as (as you said) being someone who is confident, who gives energy, who is present . . . Right? You can see everyone tilting towards that person in the room. Everyone implicitly is drawn to that.
And so sometimes . . . We talked about this in our episode. Hey, the best way to find someone you want to date is to become the person who's very dateable is the best way to build lasting, powerful relationships is to love yourself and to become someone who you think is worthy of love. Yeah. There was so much gold there, man, and I'm really glad this was a powerful process for you. I mean, coming into the New Year is there anything else you're doing as far as investing in relationships, seeing that this has such a big impact on you? Anything else you're looking to relate?
Chris Williamson (22:46): So I'm scrolling down here. I've got a couple of admissions to make. First off, that I didn't do it offline. I know that you created the beautiful worksheet, and it was all done, and I could write it out, but man. I hate writing, and my handwriting is so bad, and it really frustrates me and I can't write that quick. So I went offline. I turned my WiFi off, my phone was outside of the room, and I had full screen so I wasn't distracted, but I did mine on my computer. That was one the things that—
Chris Sparks (23:13): Three Hail Mary's, Chris.
Chris Williamson (23:15): Yeah. Another thing that I wanted to say that some of the listeners might be interested in, how I edited your process, was you had an "other" section at the bottom which was .. It's like, "career, relationships, health, and other."
And for me the section that made the most sense to put in there was "growth." Now, you could call that learning, wisdom acquisition, spiritual progress. Like, whatever. But for me it was talking about kind of like my daily habits. Like, the little things. Like, what was I doing? How has my meditation practice been this year? Like, how consistent have I been about getting up on time? How much have I read? How much have I learned? What's my inner monologue been like? What's the sort of things that I've told myself, the kind of assumptions that I make about myself? So that was what I put in there.
Moving forward for this year, in terms of relationships, it's a little bit difficult to be super certain about how everything's going to go, but just more of the same. Like, intentionality with friendships, with making sure that I actually do care about what's going on. So, for instance, have more regular adventures with friends and be alone less. That's my most important goal for next year. Might be difficult. The Q1, Q2, Q3 milestones are a little bit hard for me to pull out, but one night per fortnight spent out of the house with someone else, and then Q2 one night per week, and then a weekend in Q3. So basically it's just building up my tolerance to letting go of work, and that kind of speaks to the Type A mentality, the go-getter, that you've alluded to about playing poker or I've said, about how you'll just keep on grinding your face into the ground if you've got nothing else to do.
You have to have a forcing function to stop yourself from working. And I think this is . . . There's structures within structures that you need in life now, when you've got so much stimulus, so much abundance, you need to actually have time . . . It's a "what to relax" list, not a "what to do" list. So that's been part of it.
But a way to sort of touch on something that you mentioned there about how when you have a tightly-defined goal, very easy to see whether you're moving toward it. Certainly for this year, I've never had . . . 2020 will be the year where I worked out my core values and read "Essentialism" by Greg McKeown. And doing both of those things in the same year, it's . . . It probably would have taken me in total a week to do. It wasn't in the same week. But it was so powerful, because I'd never actually realized (firstly) that I can't do everything, and (secondly) what I'm trying to do from a foundational source code level.
And moving into this year, you have the North Star in the actual annual planning section, which probably most of the people who are still going through the process, they're at probably maybe about that stage now. That's like one of the final exercises you get into. Having one thing that you're doing is . . . It's so useful. It's so powerful, because I'm waking up on a morning now, and I'm aware it's . . . I'm still in the kind of honeymoon period of the New Year's resolutions, but I'm waking up on a morning and I know like, "My goal is to be creating three YouTube videos per week for my channel by the end of the year. Down the pipe monologue videos, classic YouTube style." Like, what am I doing today that moves me toward that? Even if it's something that's not related to it at all. Yesterday I spent the whole day editing and uploading three podcast episodes, but I know that today that means I can do another couple of days of a video creative course that I'm going through, or this thing, or that thing.
So, yeah. Just getting that (I keep on using this word — I didn't mean to, but it keeps on coming up) that intentionality. Like, why am I here? Why am I doing my career? Why am I doing relationships? Why am I doing health?
So looking forward to the next year, my most important goal for that was a process goal, rather than an outcome one, reason being that I can't control the YouTube outcome, but if I'm creating three videos per week by the end of the year that would be great. In terms of relationships, have more regular adventures with friends and be alone less, which is made up of just intentionality, again. The easiest fitness or health goal, which is get my back and ankle to full fitness by the end of the year. And I've spoken to my coach, and said, "Man, like if by December my injuries are fixed, I will consider the year a win, no matter what happens." And then North Star for growth, reduce my phone use to one hour a day on average by the end of the year. So, those were my four little goals.
And that's it. Like, if all that this year did was get those things out of it, I'd be like, "Yeah, that's a success." I keep on telling people that listen to the show . . . We're back on lockdown in the UK, and the question that people need to ask themselves if they're struggling direction is, "What would have had to have happened by the end of lockdown for me to look back on lockdown and consider it a success?" That's the question to ask. "Oh, man. I just feel like I'm in lockdown, I'm not really going anywhere." Okay. What would going somewhere look like? Answer that. And most of the time people are, "Well, you know, just not being stuck in the house." And so I'm like, "Do you actually even care about not being stuck in the house, or is it about personal progress, is it about financial progress, is it about making connections with people?"
Define what it is, and it goes to what you said before. The forcing function of putting thoughts, these notions that we have, into words gives them a concrete sense, and it forces us to be precise and rigorous with what we're thinking. And so many people . . . This is something I've become increasingly annoyed at during the show. I hear these kind of just notions, emotions given form during a conversation with someone. Someone will say something, it's an opinion, I'm like, "You haven't even begun to think about what that is. That's just . . . Something, some threat response somewhere has manifested itself in words, and you've decided to blurt it out."
I'm like, that's so un-thought-through. And I'm just as bad with that as well. Like, I respond to things. You know, I'm worried about something, I'm scared about something, I'm happy, excited about something new, gotta tell everybody about this new thing that I've just seen. But if we take a little bit of time and we slow down and we think, "Right, okay, what is the one thing that I actually care about, can I put it into words, what would have had to happened by the end of this year for me to look back on this year and consider it a success in these areas?" And I've got it written down. If I do those things, I will consider 2021 a success.
Chris Sparks (30:08): I love that so much. There's so much there that I want to highlight. Yeah, that's one of my favorite questions. What will it look like? Creating a picture that the difference between, "Oh, things are going horribly, nothing's going forward" and "Oh, I'm very happy with how things are moving" is really, really small and nuanced once we actually put it to paper, and that can be really empowering to realize that that . . . There's not really that much we have to do to at least change our perception from you're moving backwards towards we're moving towards our goals. And as you said, thinking about what emotion is driving this can help to defang that emotion. Is it guilt? Is it fear? Is it loneliness? Is it some sort of, you know, "We're not good enough" type of thing?
Like, trying to get down to the core of that, we can reduce its power over us, which is so empowering. And yeah, that's the whole idea of this. Where I think everyone goes wrong with reflection and planning in general, but especially with an annual review and annual planning, is adding things onto the pile. "I want to do more, I want to do the same things I'm doing but I want to do more of them." And this is about removal. Subtraction. Stripping away the non-essential. If we want to double down on one area, we have to stop or pull back in another. And that's that power of the constraint of needing to just choose one goal, is it's very easy to say, "I wanna do these five things this year in my career."
And that's the easy way to make sure that none of those five actually get accomplished, because here's a little secret: as soon as you accomplish a goal you can pick a new one. It's not the goal that matters, it's having one specific thing to move towards that you can track progress towards. That's what motivates us in the short run, and this focusing mechanism, choosing less actually allows us to get more down, in that productivity is not about going after more, it's about doing less but in a more focused way.
And so, yeah. I love that you summarized, "Hey, if I do these few things, one thing in every area, the year will be successful." And how empowering is that? Because it takes it from something that's a resolution, something that's aspirational, to, "Oh, this is totally achievable. I can see very clearly this being achieved." And that allows you to stick with it.
And you talk about the core values exercise. I think this . . . This is something I'm integrating as part of like the vision section for this year, is I've found time and time again I have clients who struggle with decisions big and small, but every decision is about deciding what value is most important. That these kind of apples to oranges, you know, "Should I pursue my side hustle full time or stay in my highly paying career? Should I stay where I am or move to a different city? Should I keep dating a bunch of women, or should I optimize for trying to find the one?" That all of these questions are questions about what we value the most, and so deciding what value is most important allows us to move forward with conviction.
For me, I think it seems like we share a lot of our values, which doesn't surprise me. One of my favorite and most powerful and painful exercises that I do with a client is I have a big list of values. It's like a hundred things, totally covers everything, and it's, "Pick ten." You know, pick ten things that you value the most. And that's pretty easy. So they're going through. "Okay, leadership. Okay, excellence. Growth. Family." All right, now cross a line through five of those. Now you have five things that you value, you can only do those. And you can see where this is going. Okay. Now cross off another. Now cross off another one. Now cross off another one. Now, what is the thing that you value most in the world?
For me, it was growth, followed by wisdom and adventure. And it's, okay. Where in your life is it not obvious that you value the things the most. You say you value adventure. Are you really being adventurous? You say you value wisdom, maybe even modern wisdom. Are you going after that? How would your life look a little bit differently if that was your top value. And creating that dissonance, again, makes those next actions really obvious. It's like, I say that I value this thing, but do my actions line up with that?
And so that's what I love when you put in your 'other' "growth," is okay. Growth is a priority. If growth is a priority, what do I prioritize? It makes so many of those downstream decisions much clearer. So thank you so much for sharing that.
Chris Williamson (35:18): Yeah, man. It was . . . I can't believe, it feels like the second half of my life began when I realized what the core values driving the first half were. And yeah. So, curiosity is one of mine. Adventure is. Self-development, excellence, and self-care. I actually re-did it the other day, and I think I might swap out excellence for progress. Sorry, self-development for progress. But, yeah. It's really useful, and I enjoy now framing everything up against that.
And it's emergent, right? Like you can kind of be the bird in the sky or the frogs in the dirt, but thinking about, okay. What's the big picture? What's the daily instantiations of that? What's the medium-term goals? Like, all of this stuff, it's this complex diagram. I remember that one that you had about . . . Was it when people believed that the universe lived around the Earth, and they had an increasingly complex diagram of how the astrological bodies . . . Because Mars goes into retrograde and goes back the other way.
And it looked like this unbelievable sort of spirograph thing in the middle. That's how I imagine if someone was to fully map how your values and everything else integrates, that's what I reckon it would end up looking like.
Chris Sparks (36:32): Yeah. So the model that Chris is referring to is, you know, for a long time, a lot of this driven by the Catholic Church, it was believed that the universe revolved around the Earth. That we are the center of all that exists. And as mathematics advanced, it became more and more complicated to try to have a model that put this out as a solution. That you needed to just make it more and more complex, and as soon as you put the sun at the center of the solar system, well everything became really simple. But this was just a conclusion that no one was allowed to believe in, right? You were a heretic. And so it was, "We will jump through millions of hoops in order to avoid asking these hard questions, or come to the conclusions that we're not allowed to have," when things become much more simple when we allow ourselves to value something that maybe is a little bit uncomfortable or a little bit different from where our identity has been tied to. That, yeah, sometimes simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, as they say.
Let's kind of keep going as far as your year to come. You started this process, and I want to continue, of let's imagine . . . All right. Today is January 7th, 2021, and we're talking on January 7th, 2022. And you know, we're catching up and you say, "2021 was an amazing year." And, talk to me. Talk to me about what this year looks like. But you know, we're talking in one year, so it's already happened. You've described some of these things that would make the year successful. I'd love to hear you just kind of give us a visualization of it.
Chris Williamson (38:29): Yeah, so traveling is something that I haven't done much of, and meeting new people and seeing new places makes me grow as a human. That's not one of the things that's actually down on my list. And this is something that I think . . . I'm gonna probably butcher trying to verbalize this, but you have your North Star within each of the different sections that you've got, right? But you know that there are some parts of your being that are so fundamental to who you are that you almost don't even need to write them. Like, I know that if flights open up I'm jumping on a flight and I'm going somewhere new and cool with someone I like. I'm gonna go on Trip Advisor and I'm going to book a tour around somewhere old. Around some old stuff. Right? Because that's what I do. So I don't need to write that in, but I know it's something that gives me happiness. And it's Tim Ferriss who says, "The good stuff sticks," which is why he's not into having a second brain on Evernote, he just knows the stuff that matters sticks. And this is kind of the same, right? So we have this source code that's underneath.
So that would be one of the things. I've done some traveling. I've gotten myself comfortable on camera to the point where I can continue to churn out YouTubes, live streams, I can continue to do the podcast, I've connected with the audience, I've found more and more good guests and I've added value to their lives. In terms of relationships, I've built my social circle up further, hopefully with some more friends that are like me, that like me, that want to spend time around me and do the things that I do. In terms of health, I've fixed my achilles, I'm back doing the sports that I enjoy, I'm back training. Hopefully the pandemic's away, so I can actually go to the gym as opposed to doing band workouts in the garage.
You know, just normal stuff. Having normal life like that. I have a TEDx talk coming up, which I haven't actually announced yet, but I'm allowed to say it privately. So I've got this TEDx talk coming up, which is halfway through March. I hopefully didn't totally have a breakdown on stage on that, and maybe some interesting speaking opportunities have come off the back of that, and maybe I feel comfortable enough to do public speaking now that I can actually start doing a little bit more of it. Maybe that's an interesting avenue for me.
So, yeah. It's just "do things that I enjoy." Don't overcomplicate things. Don't try and do more, just try and do less but better.
Chris Sparks (41:09): I love that last part. It's something that's coming up a lot for me, is I don't want to be doing more. I think it's so tempting to just keep setting my sights higher, and a lot of that means getting out of balance and working harder. And I've been starting to wonder, would it be okay to do less but to enjoy it more? Right, to enjoy the process, have my subjective experience of reality be a little bit more rich, right? To pull a little bit away, to be a little bit more present in every moment.
Would . . . It would be swimming upstream culturally, because everyone only sees the output. You don't see that—You don't see that internal experience, but it's something I wonder, and it's something I've been thinking about, how to reinforce my habits and schedule and the people in my life, is how can I just enjoy it more? And I think that's a really cool question. Something you said before that really stood out to me was, you know, I think we have these . . . Let's say these beliefs, these untested assumptions, these beliefs that can limit us. And you describe that, hey. People say, "Oh, well, hanging out with people can be boring, it's work, you can make small talk," but that, hey. If you're hanging out with the right people, it gives you energy. It doesn't take energy away. That maybe the question you're asking yourself is, you know, am I . . . Do I have the right people in my friends circle? Or, who do I look forward to seeing? Who does, time just completely lose all . . . Where do I lose all sense of time? It flies by. These are good questions to ask, is what gives us energy and what takes away energy? How can we do more of the former and less of the latter?
Last question before I hand things off to the Q&A. What do you think has given you the most energy this year, and you know, how would you like to have more of that in the year to come?
Chris Williamson (43:38): Satisfying my curiosity. I just get . . . It just lights me up, man. Like when I find a concept that makes sense of something that I didn't previously understand, it just makes me feel fulfilled and it just feels like I have meaning. Maybe that's me wanting to try and bring order to the inevitable chaos that is life, maybe it's the underlying sort of never-accepted academic that I once could have been, or whatever it might be. I have all these different reasons for why it might be the case, but I read some evolutionary psychology, and I find out about reciprocal altruism or about pair bonding or about how the dopaminergic system works, or whatever it is, and I'm like, "Wow. Like, that's a thing. That's in me. It's something that's been at the forefront of my consciousness since I was born, and it's got a name, and I've just learned it." Like, it's just so sick.
So obviously that's been facilitated by the podcast, and I'm definitely feeling now, I'm hoping now that over the last three to four years of talking to the most interesting people on the internet, that hopefully I'll be able to start repackaging some of this stuff in a new and novel way. And if 2020 was about absorption and learning, maybe 2021 is about repackaging and distributing. So hopefully trying to actually put some of the things that I've spent time learning about into my own words and into a language that I know the audience that I have can understand and benefit from, and synthesizing it. You know, an hour and a half podcast's great, but if you can . . . How can you strip that meat out? We're talking about essentialism a lot today, and getting rid of the fluff. How can I get that into a ten minute, fifteen minute video on YouTube which is going to reach, you know, 10x the people. And if they want to go and get Experiment Without Limits or Essentialism or whatever, like Ego Is The Enemy, they can go get it. But it's the thin end of the wedge to get them in. So yeah, I think that's it.
Chris Sparks (45:40): Satisfying your curiosity. I think a lot of ways of what we think of as intelligence is really just being really curious about the world. That you can always go deeper, that there . . . Someone always has something to teach you. Every experience, no matter how difficult, always has something to teach you if you're willing to be curious and learn. And I know personally whenever I get burned out or unmotivated, it's usually because I've let my curiosity lapse. That I'm just going through the motions, I've let myself lapse into this state of knowing. Right? "Knowing" can be the enemy of learning and growth, because I don't have to pay attention, I already know everything that I need to know, nothing is going to change my mind, there's nothing to see here, and that is an easy way to stagnate. And I think as we're saying, people across from us can pick up on when we're enthusiastic and when we're just there out of some sort of feeling of obligation. So a lot of these values that we talked about, you know, curiosity, growth, learning, presence, these are an ongoing practice. Things that we can forget or that lapse, and the practice is coming back to them.
You mentioned meditation. I love meditation as a metaphor, because the goal of meditation is not to clear your mind of thoughts, the goal of meditation is to realize how hopeless that that exercise is. To realize that your mind has wandered, and to gently bring it back. That that's the mental pushup. And I think if you guys take one thing away from some of the wisdom that Chris has dropped today, it's that this is an ongoing practice. So thinking about what do you want to come back to in the New Year?
I think now is a great time to hand things off to the Q&A. So I'm going to go in order of what's been upvoted first. If you guys do have any other questions, feel free to drop that in the Q&A at the bottom. So, Nathan asks, "Sometimes it makes sense to choose an outcome-oriented goal when you see the question, 'What's your North Star?' But would you recommend choosing an outcome-oriented goal, despite knowing that the process required is actually just as more important?"
Chris Williamson (48:36): I mean, this is a question for you, man. But in my horribly-uneducated opinion, I've played around with outcome goals a lot. That . . . Until reading "Atomic Habits," as a lot of people, except for maybe someone who's deep in the hole like yourself, before reading that book I'd just presumed that that was how you did goals. A goal is a goal, right? It's a . . . It's like the net with the posts, and you kick it in. Right? It's a thing. It's not a, you don't kick it and then it keeps going and then you kick it again. So for me, I get more . . . All of my outcomes this year, or all of my North Stars this year are outcome goals. Or, sorry. Process goals. Except for the health, and that's because it's just so obvious. I have a thing which is an X, I want a thing which is a Y. But everything else is, "Spend less time alone." "Learn to be comfortable around people more regularly." "Publish three YouTube videos a week." "Get myself . . . " Okay? All of the things.
And to me that is still an outcome. Like, that is an outcome for me to get a process built up. To get to that stage, I'm going to have to learn all sorts of things about writing scripts, about the camera equipment, about lighting, about how I need to prepare myself. Do I need to go for a walk before? How much caffeine should I have? All of that sort of stuff. That's still an outcome, and as a byproduct of it it just seems like a more robust way to go.
That being said, a big reason that I've gone for process goals rather than outcome goals is because I know that the outcome from that process will be what I want, so I'm maybe being a bit circular with myself here. A great goal would be to get 250,000 subs on the YouTube channel before the end of the year. I know the best way to get that is to publish as regularly and as consistently with as high a quality as possible. So if I just focus on the thing which is causing any potential success to occur, the success will take care of itself. So it can still be an outcome goal, I suppose. It's just a matter of terminology.
Well, what about you? What are your thoughts on that?
Chris Sparks (50:40): I think this is not an either/or, but a both. That the outcome goal, you work backwards towards the process, as we were talking about. And the reason that it's important to have both, as you alluded to, an outcome goal often is greatly outside of your control, but there are things that you can do that are within your control that likely will lead towards the goal. And so by tracking your inputs, you can see, "Hey, am I putting in the requisite effort?" Right? Just to use your example, if you thought it would take publishing three videos per week to get you to that subscriber count, and you saw you were only putting out one video per week, well. It would be pretty obvious what needed to change. It's like, "All right, well I haven't prioritized this to the extent that I thought I needed to." But let's say hypothetically that you're putting out three videos per week, but that subscriber count's not increasing at the trajectory that you like. Well, that's a good opportunity to say, "Hey, what else could I be doing towards this goal? Is there something that I can change? Maybe it's the videos that I'm doing. Maybe I need to up my quality. Maybe I need to improve my distribution."
And so, you can see how those two mutually self-support each other, is that you can see, hey. Both "Am I doing what I need to do in order to make progress?" and "Are the things that I'm doing leading me to where I want to be?" That they work really well in combination.
Chris Williamson (52:07): Can I get you to do a one-minute elevator pitch of why there is no growth without goals?
Chris Sparks (52:13): Yeah. The one-minute elevator pitch is that everything we do can be justified in hindsight. So it would be very easy . . . The example that I like to give is it would be very easy to say, "I want to become a professional comedian, and I watched fifty hours of Netflix comedy specials last year, and so that was fifty hours of work that I did towards becoming a comedian." Well, maybe you could have told some jokes, or signed up to perform yourself, or to you know, read some books, or study. There's usually a more direct path towards that goal.
And so, the line that I like from Alice and Wonderland, is, "If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there." But if you have a clear picture of where you're trying to go, at least you know if you're headed in the right direction or not. That there's lots and lots of evidence that says just tracking itself will allow you to make progress. But how do you track if you don't know what you're tracking towards? And so that's the first step, is, hey. Where do you want to be, and what's a path towards that goal? And if you're heading in that direction, hey. Then it's much easier to see, "Am I on the right path towards it?" Right? It's much easier to steer a moving ship, but everyone just kind of stays in dock, and that's why it's hard to make progress. And the people who I see as prolific, over and over again they're not necessarily always the most systematic, but they're certainly course correcting towards that North Star very often, always mindful of what they are doing that's tracking towards that goal, because we learn the most through action.
And I'm just dropping so many one-liners here. The final one-liner is, like, the speed of our progress towards any goal is proportional to the tightness of our feedback loops. Which is just a fancy way of saying you need to be doing things and seeing how those things go in order so you can do those things better. That improving that, your ability to make progress is how you make more progress faster. You accelerate.
And, yeah. Seinfeld is the perfect example, is hey. Everyone thinks that being a comedian is about being on stage and telling jokes. No. Being a comedian is mostly writing, just like being a surfer is mostly paddling. There's a lot of work, a lot of gym time that goes on behind the scenes in order to create those highlight reel one-liner joke moments, and without being really clear what that goal is, and what tracks toward that goal, it's easy to lose sight of that.
Chris Williamson (55:09): Dude, I think that you need your "There Is No Growth Without Goals" series of articles as an appendix to "Atomic Habits," because I think that that . . . It's about as close to a ten out of ten personal development book as I think I've ever read. But that made everything make a lot more sense to me, when I read your input on that. It's one of my favorite bits of work that you've done. Yeah. You need that. And we shouldn't deny ourselves the motivating force of it. I think if you absolutely adore habits and like adore process, then it kind of makes sense. But we get excited about that YouTube plaque, that 100k subscriber button. We get excited about the possibility of giving a TEDx talk.
You know, the outcomes are where the excitement comes from. And that, a lot of the time . . . Why is it . . . Like, people would be making New Years resolutions throughout the year if it wasn't for the fact that you require some motivation to overcome your inertia.
That's why the start of the year is so important. Yeah, man. It's good. It's in "There Is No Growth Without Goals." Everybody should go and read that. It's in the chat.
Chris Sparks (56:19): And tapping into excitement. I think a good goal should feel really exciting, that just the prospect of moving towards it kind of gets you a little bit both nervous and afraid, but also, "Wow, that would be incredible." That's the sign of a really good goal, because I think the biggest constraint a lot of us have is having a really good reason to get out of bed in the morning, especially if you don't need to. And so having something that you're moving towards, something that's worth putting in the sweat, the tears, the struggle, because it's worth it. And choosing something that is big enough, ambitious enough, important enough to be worth working at. 'Cause it's going to be work, and that's why a lot of New Year's resolutions fail, is you know, everyone wants to be a rock star, no one wants to travel around the country in a crappy van for a few years playing five-person shows and eating pizza and drinking beer. You know, everyone wants to have a six-pack, no one wants to eat chicken breasts and broccoli for a couple years.
Right? It's like you need to reconcile, "If this is what I want, this is what it takes to get there," and if it's exciting enough that cost is worth it, and it feels good paying it, because you know it's leading you to somewhere you want to be.
Chris Williamson (57:38): Awesome, man. Awesome.
Chris Sparks (57:40): All right. Next question comes in from Fernando. So, Chris, what would you do, knowing what you knew now, if you were starting off again from scratch? I think this is something that you've told me, that in a lot of ways you are speaking to a younger version of yourself. So let's say you're early on in your career, you're getting started with the podcast. What's the advice that you would give yourself as you were starting off?
Chris Williamson (58:11): Yeah, very much everything that I realize and learn is just something I wish I'd known ten years ago. And I recently had to do an exercise for the YouTube channel designing the avatar, the perfect audience avatar, and I realized that I just . . . It was this guy called Jonathan, and I realized I'd basically written a version of me. So going back . . . I don't know, man. It's hard, because where I was ten years ago there wasn't the same facility that there is now. If it was me giving advice to me in the now but I was ten years younger, with all the knowledge that I have now, it would certainly be to realize the power of leverage. And I've noticed this, something to do with Naval on the next question. But the power of leverage, looking at how I can scale things.
One of the things that I absolutely detest about my normal business running club nights is it's so unscalable. There's no leverage there at all. Just because I'm the biggest club promoter in Newcastle doesn't mean that I can go to Manchester and do the same thing. It doesn't mean I can go to London. In fact, as soon as I go there, all of the skills I've gotten, all of the resources and assets I've got essentially mean nothing, because they're so geographically tied. It's all about who you know, and who you know is inherently left as soon as you go somewhere else. And there's only an upper bound on seven days a week, a million people that live in this city, so you can only do . . . That's it. You've got a limit on your scale.
So understanding the power of scale. I would certainly be reaching out to people that I admire a lot more and just asking them, "Hey, man. Like, I really love your work. Can I come and assist with you for free? Can I come and have a chat with you and take you for coffee at some point? Can I do a this thing? I'm in Newcastle, tell me where . . . Like, do you fancy a gym session? I'd love to buy you lunch." Or whatever it might be. But I'd do that more, because some of the best things that I've ended up doing. My relationship with you came out with the fact that Nat Eliason mentioned just in a passing comment that there's only like two people on the internet he respects for personal development, and you're one of them, and I was like, "I'm gonna reach out to that guy." And then that was it. So I was like, why not? That definitely . . . The asymmetry that you have by reaching out to people, understanding leverage, which I guess that's like a social kind of leverage.
Spending, realizing that there is no such thing as not drilling a habit as well. So there's a saying from Ethan Suplee's martial arts coach called "no bad reps," and it basically reminds us that you don't get the choice about not building a habit, you just get to choose which type of habit you're building, and the song that gets stuck in your head . . . Yesterday for me it was Logan Paul's new song, "2020." I have no idea how that happened. I had that song stuck in my head. But you have to realize that all thoughts work like that. Literally every thought works like that. The things that you think consistently will become your identity over time, so the sooner that you can catch those bad repetitions, the ones where you're not quite bracing in your glutes as much, and the ones where your hands are a little bit off on the bar, like you have those things in your day to day routine, and for me the number one weakness that I've identified is my phone use. I've realized it doesn't make me feel good, it's a time sink, I know that if I got rid of that downstream I would open up hours per day. That's the bottleneck. That's it. So I just go for that. Like that's the thing I need to fix. So kind of all of that figured into my growth goal, North Star for this year.
Chris Sparks (01:02:00): Yeah. It strikes me that everything can be inverted, and hey. Starting off it's easy to say, "Well, I don't know anyone and I don't have an audience and I don't know anything yet." But this can also be a weapon, a strength, is you have nothing to lose, and that as you said, it's something that I've experienced as well. That a lot of things that are happening are usually just whoever's bold enough to make an ask, to make that first move. That people love feeling like they're smart and helpful, so if you come in with, "Hey, this is something I'm looking to do, I'm looking for help. Do you have any advice?," you'd be surprised how helpful people will be, because people genuinely like being helpful, but it takes making that first move, and it takes a willingness to be uncomfortable. It's something that I tell myself over and over again, is that my progress is proportional to my willingness to be a little bit uncomfortable. We see this in the gym, we see this in our careers, we see this in creating content, is all the good things come from this good form of pain. As you said, there are no bad reps, there are just reps, so are you willing to put in those reps?
And, man. Is there a better way to demonstrate finding leverage than attacking things at the habit level? As you said, the way that we think, our habitual actions, thoughts, these shape our behavior, and the more often that we do something, how often and how long that effect compounds. You mentioned phone use. Right? If we can be slightly more intentional every time we look at our phone or touch it or pick it or open it up, that is going to be magnified . . . I mean, unfortunately for me and many others, dozens of times a day across likely our long hopefully future lives. You know, digital, corporal realities. So looking for these sources of leverage. What are these things that we do over and over again? And so I like to try to train myself to get an awareness of, "What is my habitual reaction?" Or, "What is the first thing that I do if I feel challenged or threatened? What's my response to that? Can I make that response a little bit more helpful? Can I introduce a little bit more intentionality between that gap of stimulus and response?"
So, really great place to start. And, hey, it can be a really good benefit to be starting off, because you have fewer bad habits. That's a good place to start as far as putting in the right habits, because you have so much time to compound.
Final question for you, Chris. Thank you so much for being here. This has been a wealth of wisdom, as I knew it was going to be, and so I really appreciate your willingness to be vulnerable, share what's going on with you, and to really kinda demystify this process. Our final question comes from Davis. Chris, how do you make sense of very high-level philosophies and learnings to boil that down and make that actionable so you can practice what you preach? I think you're someone who's really good at this, but I know it's something that I personally do find challenging, is you know, you highlight this one-liner like, "Oh, wow, that sounds amazing." But what do you do with that? Is there an example that comes to mind, something that you've found from Naval or from James Clear that seemed, "Oh, this is a really good principal." How did you go about putting that into practice?
Chris Williamson (01:05:53): Yeah, it's an awesome question, and I feel your pain as well, Davis. The sole goal of Eric Jorgenson, the guy who wrote the Navalmanack, was to make it the most highlighted book in Readwise history. So like you are . . . Your outcome are a function of his inputs. I think that we can maybe try and have an essentialist perspective even in what we learn, as well. Even within a book, even maybe within a book that's as dense as the Navalmanack within a page . . . It's like, "Wow, there's maybe ten cool things here that I could do with my life. But what's the one?" Let's say that I read an entire book, like "The Daily Stoic," or like "Ego Is The Enemy," or like "Atomic Habits." Maybe not "Atomic Habits," because I guess you kind of need all those stuff to go together. But especially with something that's very kind of disparate and pick up and drop and densely aphoristic like the Navalmanack, what's the one thing that you take from that?
So I guess last year from me, the heaviest mic drop would have been, "If you can't be happy with a coffee, you won't be happy with a yacht." I'm like, "Right, okay, that aligns with a lot of different things that I do. I need to remember that happiness and joy are to be found right now in the present. That hoping for some imaginary future in which I will be X enough to finally allow myself to be Y enough, rich enough to be relaxed enough, successful enough to not have to work as much, whatever it might be, like that future will never come. That future does not arrive. And if I can't be happy now doing the things that I'm doing, that I'm not going to be happy. So, find happiness now.
I think it's a way that perversely we actually probably . . . We give ourself an excuse to be miserable in the present by discounting the fact that we might at some point be happy in the future. And it's like, no. The elephant in the room is that you have to be happy now. Joy has to be found now. There is no future for you. There is just this moment, because when that future arrives you've spent now being miserable, and if you continue to move down that line, you're always looking, like a set of binoculars, you're never looking at what's in front of you, you're always going to be looking how many days, weeks, months ahead.
So when it comes to dense books like that . . . Not that they're not accessible . . . Both of those books, like, "The Daily Stoics" like the most accessible stoic book in the world, you read a page a day, and the Navalmanack . . . Just pick the thing that resonates with you. Like, think about what some of the words that have come up the most today have been. Forcing function. Intentionality. Essentialism. In the world of 2021, I think that the power goes to the person not who's able to get the most information, but to who's able to filter the most information. How can I get these vast, vast numbers of inputs and hypernormal stimuli, and from all of that noise create just the essence of the signal that is right for me. So you read a book, consider it as . . . It's not noise, but consider it as noise. Okay. The bar for noise has been raised so high. It's the 99.9th percentile. Everything's noise. What sneaks through? What is .01? Like, what is that?
That's what I'm going to do. And it may be "desire is a contract we make with ourselves to be unhappy until we get what we want." Or it may be, you know, what somebody says about leverage, or it may be some other thing. Like, pick that thing. So for me it was to do with finding joy in the moment, and then to repurpose that and to bring it back down to the way that you instantiate it on a daily basis. Like, "Okay, I have this great insight, I have this aphorism which is like the head of the pin that reminds me about this big fat concept behind it. What's the thing that I can do that actually allows me to deliver that? Like, if that's the virus, what's the delivery mechanism for it? What's the needle that I can plug that in with?"
So, for me something like I have a "to relax" list now on an evening time. So I've got Brian Muraresku's book about how he thinks Christianity was started by psychedelics. And it's like, I don't need to think about it, I don't need to remember it, he's coming on the show in a few weeks and I can just chill out and I'm gonna do that, and then I'm gonna go for an evening walk, and my housemate's gonna put some rugby on and we're gonna watch some rugby. And I'm like, right? That's a thing. That's me finding joy in the present, whereas if I didn't have "you can't be happy with a coffee you can't be" . . . If you can't be happy with a book about psychedelics being the origin of Christianity, you won't be happy with a yacht. I wouldn't have bothered with that. I would have just been, "All right, I finished with Chris. What's next? Let's do more work, let's do more work." It's like, no. Let's find some joy right now. So, yeah. Just raise the bar, pick a thing, stick to the thing, maybe it will change, go back to the book, we pick something else, and we move on.
And over time, you can actually compound . . . If you gave yourself an entire lifetime you might be able to do all of the stuff in the Navalmanack. But don't try and do it all at once.
Chris Sparks (01:10:48): I'm just soaking that in. Yeah, I think essentialism really has been a theme, is it's very easy to get overwhelmed. "How am I ever going to apply all this?" But that there is so much opportunity in a single line that if you pick the one and keep coming back to it, it'll have a transformative effect. That the reframing here is not, "There is so much," but, "How wonderful is it that there is so much that I have to choose from and the responsibility is what am I going to put into practice?"
Chris, this has been wonderful, as expected. Any last words, thoughts, anywhere you'd like to send people?
Chris Williamson (01:11:47): No, man. Just everyone needs to read more of yours stuff. Every time I read your work I end up having more clarity around what I'm doing with my life, so yeah. I hope everyone has, enjoys doing the review. Like, that's definitely one thing that I had to remind myself, that I'm doing this. I'm taking time away from the urgent to get on with the important. I'm also taking time away from the regular to do the ritual. Like, it's about doing something that's really meaningful to me. 'Cause I'll remember this. When I go back to read this in a year's time, I'm gonna really appreciate the fact that Past Chris did this. And enjoying the process, sitting down and just getting it done. Like, dedicating two and a half hour one day, two and a half hours the next day. Like just doing that, it's made a big change, and it really does help to clear things out.
So many of the problems we have are problems of abundance and not scarcity, right? Too much information, too much food, too much convenience, too much stimulus, whatever it might be. And exercise is like this, especially with the forcing function at the end of that, to be like, "Right. What's the North Star?" Pick a thing. You know, the one value. You have a list of a hundred values, you've got to pick the one value. You've got to pick the one career goal that if you can only achieve one of them this year this would be the thing. And as soon as you do that, you make everything else so much easier.
I've gotta drop my final thing for this year, which is another one of yours repurposed a little bit. That planning what you're going to do the next day the night before makes a big difference, but (and this may only be for people who don't have a call time to work) I've begun a sort of two to three hour deep work period in the morning which has been a part of my morning routine. So my morning routine and my work now roll into one, whereas previously I was training and cooking on a morning, and I'm having to eat some frogs because I hate cooking once I've got into my day. I'm like . . . It just sucks. And you've got to take like forty-five minutes and wash up pots and do all this stuff.
But I've written a full script outline for a TEDx talk in a week and I've recorded videos and I've written scripts and I've done all sorts of stuff because I'm just in the zone on a morning. And I'm not a morning person. I'm a club promoter. Like, I'm like the antithesis of a morning person. But "first things first" is gonna be like my productivity catchphrase, I think, for 2021. What's the thing? What's the one frog that I've got eat today? Like, let's eat that that thing first, and then for the rest of the day you're just like, "Doesn't matter." Like, "I've completed everything, everything's absolutely sorted, I don't care."
Because you know that you've nailed it. Whereas when you do it the other way around you're anxious for the rest of the day. You're, "Oh, god. I've got that thing, I've still got that video script to write, I've still got that TEDx outline to do." Whatever it might be. So, yeah. First thing's first, man. But, dude. Thank you for this. And thank you for coming on the show as well. Like, there's literally thousands and thousands of people who have done . . . Who had their New Years shaped be some random document that you wrote. So yeah. Next year you might need to put some subliminal message or something in, see if we can start programming everyone.
Chris Sparks (01:15:04): Oh, man. Such an honor. Love you, man. Thank you so much for being here.
Tasha Conti (01:15:09): Thank you for listening to the Forcing Function Hour. At Forcing Function, we teach performance architecture. We work with a select group of twelve executives and investors to teach them how to multiply their output, perform at their peak, and design a life of freedom and purpose. Make sure to subscribe to Forcing Function Hour for more great episodes, or go to forcingfunctionhour.com to sign up for our newsletter so you can join us live.