Ali Abdaal: How To Be More Productive ft. My Productivity Coach

 

Chris Sparks and Ali Abdaal discuss productivity vs. performance, what it really means to win at life, North Stars and twenty-five-year time horizons, having an investment mindset, and the differences between happiness and purpose.

Transcript:

Note: transcript slightly edited for clarity


Ali: Alrighty. Theoretically, we are now live. Hello, everyone, and welcome to this episode of the Deep Dive live stream. And today, we are joined by someone very special. We are joined by Chris Sparks, who's actually my productivity coach. That's not really the word he likes. He prefers "performance coach." Chris, thank you for coming on, and welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Chris: Doing fantastic. Great to see you, Ali. Thanks everyone for joining. Really, really excited for this.

Ali: Yeah. Should be fun. So we're going to be chatting about our favorite topic, which is productivity. And I'm just making sure that the chat is working. Guys, can you hear us in the chat? If you can, give us a hello. Okay, it seems to be working for me. Good stuff. I need to enable my chat window. Where is my chat window? Window. Where is the chat? Why can't I see the chat?

While I figure that out, Chris, for the people who might not know you in the audience, can you give us an intro about who you are and what you do, and how we know each other, please?

Chris: Ooh, putting me on the spot here. Okay. So, yeah. My name's Chris Sparks. So lovely to meet you all. As Ali said, I am a performance coach. My company, Forcing Function, works with executives, founders, investors to get the most out of the day, achieve their goals most effectively, most efficiently, and I think most importantly to design a life full of freedom and purpose. My background is in professional poker, plus a bunch of startup entrepreneurial stuff, which I'm sure we'll get into. And, yeah. Ali and I have been working together to turn some of these goals he talks about publicly so bravely into actionable steps and habits and systems, and I hold his feet to the fire and give him feedback and occasionally can point out a blind spot or two.

Ali: Yeah, fantastic. So I've just got lots of questions for you, so we're just gonna dive into it. Firstly, why do you prefer to be called a performance coach rather than a productivity coach?

Chris: Well, I think it has something to do with the conversations that need to happen. So my idea, my perception of productivity, is that it is very surface level. When people talk about improving their productivity, they're dealing with symptoms rather than root causes. It ends up causing new symptoms, or switching one habit for another. I'm trying to think about, "What is the most important thing that I could be doing, and how do I make sure that that happens consistently, regularly, that I make the most out of that time?" And so while I think productivity is doing things, I think performance is my ability to get things done. 

And particularly on a longer timescale, I find that the interventions for performance tend to last much longer, and so that's really a shift that I have made where, hey. There are table stakes things as far as, all right, having some routines, things that get you to plan, do your most important thing of the day, but once those things are in place and relatively consistent, everyone inevitably runs into bottlenecks and roadblocks. And so that's where performance comes in. That's . . . You've already gone from zero percent to seventy percent. Or if you're, you know, a driving metaphor: you've gone from zero to sixty. And my job is to fine-tune that engine, to get you to the point that you are making the most of your potential. And let's say someone is already in the top one percent of their field, and they want to get to the top .001 percent. Well, that requires completely different paradigms, ways of thinking, behaviors—and without that third party objective observer to guide, it can be very easy to go off track.

Ali: Okay. That's interesting. So it sort of sounds like your definition for performance is similar to just my definition for productivity: doing the most important things, and doing them effectively. But I guess part of the wider conversation around productivity is often around the hacks and the keyboard shortcuts and the macros and things, which are, I think . . . Okay. You know, fine, it maybe makes you two percent more productive, but it doesn't move the needle.

Chris: I couldn't agree more. Yeah, I think it's much more a cultural perception. Everyone has their own definition, and that's why I'm really glad you started off with defining terms. I think it's the difference between means and ends, and I think there's way too much focus on means, rather than as you said, "What are you trying to accomplish, and what are the ways that you can make sure that those things get accomplished?" And there's way too much focus in my mind on last-mile problems versus, "Hey, what is actually going on?" So yeah, it's different definitions for the same thing, but I've found that performance, these visualizations of an athlete or someone who is at the very top, and, "What can I take from what's working at that level and apply to myself?" is a very different framing than, "What is wrong with me that I need to fix?" And I think the latter leads to more of the hacks which feel good, feel productive, but don't actually lead towards long-term change.

Ali: Nice. Great. So I'm glad we've started off with defining the terms, because that's something that I've always been curious about. I wonder if we can kind of dive into your background a bit. So you're a professional poker player. What was . . . how, what, who, what . . . what's the story there?

Chris: Well, the story, as many are, long and winding, but yeah. I had a bit of a gaming background when I was younger. Loved playing online games. I was the best in the world at a game called Microsoft Ants. Got into card games when I was, I think, thirteen, starting with Gin. So Gin's a two-player form of Rummy, and I was one of the best players in the world, achieved a perfect ELO rating in that, and some of my friends from Gin were like, "Oh, there's this new game called poker"—this is, you know, 2002, 2003 when poker was just going online—"and you can enter into tournaments for free and they'll give you money if you win them." And that just blew my mind as a thirteen-year-old, that I could win money playing a game. And that really accelerated when I got to college, where just poker was on every station, it was what you did if you were in university and a guy. If you wanted to hang out, you were drinking beer with friends playing poker.

That's where I sharpened my teeth a little bit, in these underground campus games. Started playing online a little bit more seriously, first tournaments and then cash games, so by the time that I graduated, I was paying off my tuition by playing poker essentially instead of sleeping, or occasionally, instead of going to class. Which, you know, now I can say that, but I wouldn't have admitted it before. 

I had this job coming out of college with Ford Motor Company. And this was, if you guys remember your history, at least in the States, 2008 was an interesting time to come out of college. I was on this reality show my senior year where I was able to meet the heads of Detroit's . . . This was Team Detroit, this was Ford's advertising agency, and got a full-time role there. I was gonna be able to help make television commercials, which was my dream since I was, like, super young. This was exactly what I wanted to do, all my internships, all the things I did through college were leading towards this path. And I get the call that, "Hey, you know, the economy's in the tubes, we're on a hiring freeze, we can't bring you on." So I'm sitting in Detroit, Michigan, in the winter, no friends, nothing to do. I say, "Oh, well, why don't I pick up this poker thing that I was doing on the side in college and see if I can make a go at it?" And went full-time. Started teaching other players, started investing in other players. Fast forward two and a half years of pretty hardcore effort and study, I was one of the top twenty players in the world.

Ali: Bloody hell. That sounds like a very small amount of time to become . . . Like if I imagine trying to become one of the top twenty tennis players in the world, it would take a lot longer than two and a half years. Right? Like, how did you do it so quickly?

Chris: Well, it wasn't completely zero to sixty. As I said, I had a lot of games background, which was transferable, from a young age. Things like, how do you read an opponent through a screen, how do you discern incomplete information, how do you manage your own psychology, how do you make decisions incredibly rapidly? I mean, the game that I had the most success with at a young age was an early version of StarCraft. So I was used to making macro- and micro-decisions, operating the metagame, manipulating opponents' perceptions from a very young age. But I think the real accelerant that happened in these two and a half years was teaching. I say often that the best way to learn is by teaching. I did over a thousand coaching sessions with a hundred of the best poker players in the world. And I don't exaggerate that. These were players who were just one step below me, and I learned as much from them as they did from me. 

And that's a big part of why I wanted to work on Forcing Function: to get a broad sample size of what really successful people were doing and to try to cobble together a system that I could use both for myself and for teaching to others. This process of working with other players, needing to compress the things that I did at a completely instinctual level into a system that others could follow, was really, really powerful in improving the way that I played. And I like to use the metaphor of a cache. If you think about a computer caching resources, I made all of these things that were intuitive very easy to access. It became completely unconscious. And so I could play, at one time, thirty games at a time, and just make really, really, really good high-quality rapid decisions every half-second for twelve hours at a time because that . . . It was all so accessible to me, because I had just had so many conversations about it.

I think that was the biggest accelerant. I also lived with four other really top players for a year and a half in L.A., and just lived, ate, slept, breathed poker for that whole time. And so this full immersion, and being around other people who were challenging me and growing as well, I think was super critical for that takeoff period.

Ali: Damn. Okay. Why did you quit?

Chris: Yeah, all of these are really fun stories that I would love to share with you at some point. The CliffNotes version is there was a day that we call Black Friday in poker, April 15th, 2011, where the feds shut down online poker in the US. 

Ali: Oh, gosh. Okay.

Chris: So it was no longer viable to play online poker in the US, and about seventy-five percent of the market was American, and it really hurt the ecosystem overnight. I was faced with what I saw as an inflection point—or fork in the road, to put it into a Robert Frost term: do I leave the country, keep playing, make a living out of this, or is this a sign from the universe that I should go and do other things? And, you know, very meandering tale. It wasn't an immediate decision, but I ended up using this opportunity to do a backpacking trip around the world, which was something that had always been on my bucket list, and had never been able to do because the opportunity cost was so high. So I spent a couple years traveling, and through that process learning a lot about meaning and happiness and why I was here on this earth. And I was fortunate that a lot of the players who I previously worked with in a coaching context went on to create businesses, and I was able to have this soft launch into entrepreneurship through having these conversations and getting an idea of what was behind the scenes, and that seemed like the place where the most impact was happening, was people who were putting things into the world.

And so, after two years of traveling, I moved to New York and I wanted to really immerse myself in the startup ecosystem, both on the operating and investing side, and that led to Forcing Function. These conversations that were previously, "How do we become better poker players?" became, "How do we become better business owners, better humans, what are the principles and techniques that we can put in place to ensure continuous progress in these areas?"

Ali: Nice. Backpacking around the world has been on my bucket list for a while as well. And I was planning to do that this year. And I was like, you know what, I'm gonna be a doctor for two years and then I'm going to take a break. Because in medicine in the UK, there's a very natural career sort of break after two years of being a doctor, and lots of people travel. But then the whole Coronavirus thing happened, so now I'm like, "Well, you know, traveling around the world is not really a thing anymore." And I had a period for like many months where I was listening to Rolph Potts's podcast and these other sorts of traveler-type people and just really getting the bug for travel.

This is a very sort of big, poor question, but what was that experience like for you? Like, traveling around the world for two years?

Chris: I'm trying to think of a way to encapsulate it. It varied so much from day to day.

Ali: Cool.

Chris: I look back on that time extremely fondly, and some days were peak experiences in the true form of the world. I mean I have some stories that today, if I didn't have a few very grainy pre-iPhone pictures, that I wouldn't even believe happened. It feels more like a dream than anything. And I had other days that were super lonely and isolated and like, "What am I doing?" The whole spectrum in between. My whole approach to this was, "Will there be a better time to do this?" And my perspective was it was only going to get harder. This was, you know, a rare moment for me where I had no dependencies. There was no job, no steady significant other, there were no constraints, I didn't need to be anywhere at any time. Just total freedom, and I assumed that that wouldn't be the case forever. And that's a good approach that I have for getting started on projects, is, "Is now the best time to do it, or will there be a better opportunity in the future?" 

So thinking about this context, obviously, today is not the best day to do around-the-world traveling. And you know, it's uncertain whether that full, free border will come back. I hope so, 'cause there's really only one way to truly learn about cultures and belief systems and philosophies which are very different from the ones that we have inherited, and that's to experience them firsthand on the ground floor. So I'm incredibly grateful for all the people that I met, either fellow travelers who I would tag along with or would rope along for my next country or people who were super gracious enough to host me, or to show me some of the best parts of where they lived, and to teach me some of the lessons that I never would have learned via Twitter and the internet, you know, sitting in my desk. That there are just so many different ways of looking at how to live and what makes a good life, that having all of those perspectives . . . I think that's the biggest thing that I take away, is the appreciation for diversity of experience and opinion.

Ali: Okay. So what about . . . What did that time look like? Is it you literally just have a backpack and you're deciding to get a one-way flight to, I don't know, somewhere, and then you sort of freestyle it?

Chris: Yeah. 

Ali: Yeah, 'cause—

Chris: Yeah, let's give an image. So it was a really, really big contrast, and I think a lot of it was crystallized with a bit of a quarter-life crisis. Just to set the picture, when I was living in the Hollywood Hills, I was splitting a humongous mansion with four other guys, we were hosting parties, doing bottle service all the time, I had my own gym and steam room and pool and hot tub in my room, to myself. Imagine a twenty-one-year-old who's never had money and now has more money than he knows what to do with, but also just internally a complete nerd and introvert, and it was just, "I'm going to do what people do when they're rich and partying in Hollywood, and emulate that." And then half of my net worth gets seized by the government, and I don't think I'm ever going to see that again, and the whole future of how I've built a career and a life and my whole identity is seized from me in one day. And I'm in total existential crisis, and wondering, "Hey, is this really the right way to find meaning and happiness? I might want to go the complete opposite."

And so I sell everything that I own, and I have five t-shirts and two pairs of shorts and one pair of shoes. Literally just a backpack, and I go from spending way more than I'd like to admit per day to spending thirty dollars a day living in, you know, twelve- to thirty-bed dorms with complete strangers and you know, from eating filet mignon and sushi every night to making pasta in the hostel dorm, walking everywhere, taking public transportation. It was a huge, huge shift, and I think part of it was proving to myself sort of the stoicism, that you put on the sackcloth and you ask yourself, "Is this really what I fear?" That, hey, like no matter what, I will find a way to find meaning and happiness in my life. I don't need all the glamor and the fame and the beautiful women and bottle service, I could find this anywhere.

So yeah, it was a huge shift for me in terms of lifestyle, and it put a lot of things into perspective for me as far as what I actually value versus what culture told me that I should value.

Ali: Okay. How does that feel, losing fifty percent of your net worth overnight?

Chris: You feel really stupid. You feel stupid. I think that so many . . . I talk about this a lot with decision making, that decisions always seem really obvious in hindsight, and if we don't capture our thoughts via a decision journal or even just a regular journal or a conversation with friends, then we might always be kicking ourselves for what we know we should have done. With the benefit of hindsight, it's like, "Oh, maybe I shouldn't keep, you know, half of my net worth sitting on a poker site which is licensed in a shady country that I've never heard of, and perhaps I should have seen all the writing on the wall that this was never going to last forever." But all of that is so obvious in hindsight. And so the biggest thing I felt was just total stupidity for being in that situation. 

The other one was just being completely paralyzed, and not knowing what to do, being completely overwhelmed with the options. I mean, there were some players who had their entire net worth on these sites and had to sell their balance for twenty cents on the dollar, because they had family and kids, they had bills to pay. And I was fortunate, I wasn't in that bad of a scenario, I still was doing very well, but it was totally . . . I felt totally blindsided. It felt unfair, felt like it's all over. The sky is falling, what am I going to do next?

The super, super silver lining of that is everyone talks about financial bubbles or pandemics or other crises which, you know, spoiler alert, there's going to be plenty more of those in our lifetime. It's really hard to know how you're going to perform in those situations until you've gone through them. It's really easy when you're reading a book on history to be like, "Oh, those guys are so dumb, how do they put themselves in that spot, it was so obvious." But until you've experienced it—like, "Oh, it's a little bit different than I thought." But going through that made me so much more prepared for the pandemic happening. I was able to reorient to reality much faster, and I think that experience taught me a lot about myself and how I can overcome a lot of adversity, but also the need to adjust to these changing conditions. That I was so anchored to this vision of the past that was so favorable to me that it was very hard to let that go.

Ali: Hmm. Okay. So did you ever end up getting the money back or was it just sort of gone into the ether?

Chris: Yeah. Can I share . . . I'll share one story today. Man. These are all so good, Ali, I can't wait to tell you these offline. So three years later, again, I was backpacking around the world. This was country number fifty, I think a hundred-plus cities. I'm sitting on this beach in Ko Pha Ngan, Thailand, where the Full Moon Party is, for those of you guys who have done some backpacking in that part of the world. I was just beach-bumming it. I was in this twenty-dollar-a-day bungalow on the beach where I stepped off my bed and my feet were in the sand and it was like, "Oh, this is just total Eat, Pray, Love bliss." And limited internet, but I walked into one of the hostels that had some internet, and I logged on, and I saw my bank balance, and I'm like, "Oh my god." The entire amount hit my bank account as a lump sum that I wasn't even expecting. It was like—just imagine a stork dropping it out of Heaven. And it's three years later. I assumed I’d never see this money again. 

And I did the quick math, and it's . . . "Oh. With the amount of money that hit my bank account today, I could live on this beach for the rest of my life and never lift a finger for the rest of my life. I'm just completely set." And for the first time in my life —now, keep in mind, I've been backpacking for two years straight—it's, "Oh. Do I really want to keep doing this? Is this really what life is all about?" I wasn't forced to ask that question until I had that forcing function of, "Now you can do it. You are fully capable of doing this ad infinitum. Is that what you want?" And I realized that it wasn't. That there was some meaning and purpose that were lacking, despite all the happiness that this experience was bringing, so I booked a flight home, and that was the end of the trip. 

And I find that this is so true: needing this jolt, this awakening, this revelation of the sense of the possible—where for me, this was just totally like I was going after enlightenment, or a six-pack, which for me at least is something that's just completely unachievable—just chasing these cars and I wouldn't know what to do if I caught them. And for me, the idea of living out of a backpack, doing whatever I want, no constraints, total freedom, was my idea of winning at life, and for that first time I had had that option of doing it and said, "Oh, maybe that's not what winning is."

Ali: Damn. Okay. As an aside, to what extent . . . So I imagine a lot of the people you've worked with, including me, have this idea of financial independence as a goal at some point. Do you think it's useful to have a number in mind for something like that? Because certainly for me I've found that I don't think about a number, but the goalpost keeps on shifting.

Chris: The goalpost always keeps on shifting for everything, right? We're all playing an infinite game, we always need another car to chase. I think with financial freedom specifically, it's very important to define what that unlocks. It's something . . . I've seen a lot of goals in my days . . . I said the other day, and I really believe this, that I would be willing to bet money that if someone described their goal to me I could predict with very high accuracy whether that goal was going to be achieved or not, just based on how that goal was defined and the plan that they had of achieving it. And financial freedom is one that I see super, super often. But no one thinks about, "Okay, let's imagine that I hand you financial freedom, whatever that means to you. What do you do next?" What does that unlock for you? What does that change? Do you quit your job, do you do whatever you want, do you go and fight poverty, invest in your favorite charity, invest in startups, travel the world? What do you do with that? And it's so far off and unimaginable for so many people that they haven't really answered that question of, "Why do I want what I want? How does that help me? What does that achieve?" 

Defining what that is I find is very important. Is it the security aspect, that you don't have to worry? Is it being able to provide for your family? Is it being able to work on projects that are interesting to you rather than just merely lucrative? I find that defining that is really important because sometimes you can find a more direct path towards that goal. I find that when people say they want money, they really want something that they think money can provide them. And that leads to them paying an airport-level exchange rate on money to try to get the thing that they really want, because they're paying a much larger price, versus going to that thing directly. 

Now, to your question. I think that people are always surprised that the number is way lower than what they think it is. Right? It's like, imagine your ideal lifestyle, that, hey, you're able to do everything you want, you're able to buy everything you want, you're able to start a company, and you add up all those numbers, and the numbers are usually much smaller than what people think. And it's kind of a useful exercise, it's like, "No, I don't actually need millions of dollars to live a life that I'm comfortable, that I'm satisfied with." But I think the final point that I would make here is, how can you track progress towards a goal that is not well defined? Right? So once it's defined, it allows you to say, "Hey, am I on the right track towards it?" 

So, in startups, they have this notion of Ramen profitability. That if you ensure that the number in your bank balance is going up rather than down, you're on track. That's a very clear metric of whether you're on the path to the goal, and if you can get that right, that I am saving more than I am spending, the score eventually takes care of itself. Compounding is a beautiful thing. But everyone wants to have these goals, they're so far off that it doesn't really require much change in the present. And I come back to, "How can I get myself on that general trajectory now, and just have faith in that process that it will lead me to where I want to go, that I can take my eye off the ball and just make sure that I am staying consistent with it in the now?"

Ali: Hmm. Okay. Interesting. Yeah, 'cause in my head, I think I've probably mentioned this to you during one of our sessions, but it's like my whole North Star between age seventeen and age twenty-six was, "Hey, I wanna get 'financial independence,' defined as, 'I want to make a full-time living from my side hustle such that my day job of being a doctor becomes optional.'" And, you know, like a year or two ago I hit that point, and since then I just haven't really had a sort of North Star to use, as like a, "Well, why am I actually doing this?" "Well, I don't know." And for me, the default one has just sort of become, "Well, I guess it makes more money, and it's better to have more money than less money, because it's a bigger safety net."

And I just, I don't know. How would you go about thinking about an alternative North Star? Do we even need a North Star to live by, or . . . How do you think about that?

Chris: I think that goals are useful to the extent that they define your next actions. If it's clear what you are doing and what you're going to do next, I don't find that goals are all that powerful or all that necessary. I think where they are extremely powerful and extremely necessary is if it's not clear what you're doing in the short term, or what you need to do next. Something else that you touched on, but I'll expand on, is obviously we do things to serve multiple purposes. Right? Other than maybe some people on Wall Street, there aren't a lot of people who do something only to make money, and as I said, a lot of those people I honestly feel a little bit bad for, because there's a lot that's sacrificed, like I said, the things that they think they can get with money, in terms of happiness and freedom and meaning, that they won't achieve that way.

I like to think about my values, things that I'm trying to satisfy with my life, in portfolio terms. That, let's say hypothetically, these three things that I'm trying to find in a mission, in a career, is I want to find something that I can use to support myself and those I love. That's you know, financial freedom. Then I want something that I enjoy, that I look forward to, it gets me out of bed in the morning. There's some flow there, it's something that, "This is cool. I like learning about this." And then finally, okay. It's something that is useful to the world. I can have some impact. That things are better, I'm pushing the human race forward a centimeter or two because I was on this planet. There's a reason that I'm doing this. There's a mission behind it.

Well, it sometimes can be difficult to find that perfect Ikigai/Venn diagram intersection that has all three of those things in one pursuit. You don't need to get impact and get rich and do something that you really enjoy all at the same time. That those can come from multiple activities. You can have a portfolio that you combine in order to satisfy all of those. And I think, you know, a lot of my mislaid wandering was thinking that I would find something that I enjoyed as much as poker but that also added as much value to the world and also made me as rich. Right? That thing just doesn't exist, and so I tried to think about, "How can I create a life where I can satisfy these values?" And they don't all need to come from my career, they don't all need to come from my hobbies, all from one place.

And in your place, Ali, that's why I hinted this at the end, is I think you might have come at this from, "I need to make a certain amount of money in order to justify it." Just the opportunity cost of how lucrative being a doctor can be. That, "Hey, it needs to cross this certain bar." But in the process of crossing this bar, I assume from what you said, that you find this so much more meaningful in terms of having a great scale, interacting directly with so many people, acting as a teacher and an inspiration to many, that in the process of hitting this goal you found another thing to propel you forward which is much more intrinsic, and thus this whole sense of needing to hit this other milestone sometimes can lead us astray. Right? Cause us to do things that are a little bit less in alignment, a little bit less authentic. Especially when we're living in public, it's so important that it comes across, the reasons for doing things.

So, yeah. It's super nuanced, but I think that this idea of a North Star is really only critical when it comes to deciding a trajectory or a direction, that once you're confident in a path that you're heading, it becomes unnecessary.

Ali: Okay. How . . . So in your Forcing Function book, which I have somewhere here but not immediately to hand, one of the opening questions is this idea of imagining your life twenty-five years from now. I sort of did that exercise, and I found like a twenty-five year time horizon . . . How do you even begin to imagine a life twenty-five years later? That's like, how . . . How important is that level of forward-thinking in your experience?

Chris: Cool. Yeah. First, thanks for the plug. I'm gonna do the extremely corny like holding the book in my hand so everybody knows it's real—

Ali: Oh, you've got it. Yes, I wanted to do that.

Chris: It exists, it's a thing. Yeah. I spent six months . . . I worked with so many really successful founders, executives, and I was like, "How can I get everything out of my head into a format that people can put into practice?" And so I spent six months creating this workbook, a hundred pages step-by-step, everything that I do from goal-setting, building systems, creating habits, maximizing time and attention, that time of stuff. Accelerating learning. Everything that I know is compressed into this workbook, and it's free to download. So if anyone wants to drop a link in the chat, forcingfunction.com/workbook. You can go and download it for free. 

The prompt that you said: "Where do you want to be in twenty-five years?" And painting that picture, right, visualizing it, who are you? It's meant to be incredibly uncomfortable. That's another good question that I like to reflect on is, "Am . . . What am I willing to be really uncomfortable doing in order to achieve?" Most of the time, if you're going after something that's ambitious enough, there's going to be very uncomfortable moments, uncomfortable conversations. And, you know, are you willing to bear that discomfort? And the idea of that time horizon, twenty-five years, is that you remove constraints. That if we have the right habits and systems in place, I believe that we could literally achieve anything we can imagine in that time period. And so removing the "I should"s, the "I need to"s, it's . . . What do you want? Like if you could do anything, what would it be? And painting a picture of that without those constraints in place, I find to be really powerful, both for how that vision is very, very different than the trajectory that you're currently on, or the ways that it's incredibly similar, that you're already living your dream life. I think those contrasts are really powerful.

Work that I really love comes from a guy by the name of Robert Fritz. And his quote is, "It's not what the vision is, it's what the vision does." So what he means by that is it doesn't really matter all that much what is in your twenty-five year vision. What is incredibly important is that you have one, that you have something that you're moving towards, because what he refers to as creative tension. You have a clear picture of current reality, and you have a clear picture of where you want to be in the distant future, and those differences between those two pictures are glaringly obvious, and that generates a creative tension where you are forced to either adjust that vision or to adjust your trajectory to become in line with that vision. That's that intrinsic motivation that propels us forward, and so that's why I love setting just huge goals for myself in the long term, because that's incredibly motivating and it gives me something to head towards and it also gives me a lot of clarity as well as just confidence in what I'm doing day to day.

And we think about how that math breaks down, right? Twenty-five years. What is one percent of twenty-five years? That's the next ninety days. And so think about that framing. "In this next quarter, I only have to get one percent of the way there." So what can I do that gets me just one percent? It takes something that's a little bit over-ambitious, reaching for the stars, and really brings it down to reality. Just, "What's that next one percent step that I can take?"

Ali: Okay. If you're open to sharing, what are some of your twenty-five-year-time-horizon-type things that you want to have done?

Chris: Yeah. So, what has come out of this exercise for me is I want to be a teacher. I want to inspire many people around the world to quit their jobs and pursue their dreams. Not that I have anything against jobs, although I do think they're going extinct, it's that I think people wait too long before taking the plunge, and I'm happy to be that person to give them the nudge that, hey. You can do it. You have all the resources that you need. 

I think that there should be more people who are self-defined as entrepreneurs and content creators that are just . . . Putting more things into the world. More of our soul existing in artifact form. I find that that is my mission, to accelerate those people and to teach them what I have learned through pain and toil and lovely conversations like this one. 

Something else that's come out of it is I want to live a life of adventure. I love doing fun things, I love challenging myself, I love learning. I'm just totally intellectually promiscuous, and I like anything under the sun. There's no lack of depth to my curiosity. So I just want to be learning til the very moment that I'm in the grave. Every day I wake up and I'm a little bit smarter, a little bit wiser than I went to bed. And that last value was the one that came up a lot, was wisdom. I think this comes across in my desire to lead and to teach, but I think that particularly with ancient philosophy, with other cultures whose perspectives can be diminished in a Western-focused world, that there's just so much obviously scientific findings that translating those from papers into actionable steps, that there's so much wisdom out there just waiting to be plucked and translated and turned into principles that others can act upon.

And I think that all this wisdom already exists. It already exists within us, even, and I'm very excited about this life-long process of rediscovering that wisdom and sharing it in a form that I hope takes root in others.

Ali: Okay. That sounds like a very well-formulated and thought out . . . I imagine the process of coming up with that wasn't easy/comfortable. I imagine it took a lot of soul searching to get to that point where you're like, "You know what? This is the thing I want to go for."

Chris: Yeah. It's . . . I think it's really interesting with visions, what's there, but also what's not there. The dog that didn't bark. And that was really cool for me to see, "Oh, this doesn't involve some of the things that I might have leaned towards in my younger years." So in my younger years, I was very driven by status and fame and having ungodly amounts of wealth, and it was important to notice that those were not requirements to satisfy those visions, that those are just bonuses. Maybe they make the game a little bit easier to play, they're maybe a little bit of a form of cheat code, but they're not essential parts of the journey.

So I thought that was pretty cool, because you know, every day we're so just engulfed by everything, by all this noise. Everything that others around us are doing. And mimesis is so powerful that we can easily want what others have. And coming back to this vision, and what's in it and what's not in it, I find very useful for me. To put the blinders on a little bit, to stay in the lane, to trust the process, and not worry about what others are doing.

I think Naval puts this better than anyone, is that life is a single-player game. At the end of the day, I am the only one who's keeping score, no one else's opinion matters but my own, and I have to play the game in such a way that I'm happy with the way that I played it regardless of the result. So yeah, I find this really important to come back to, because it's so easy to lose sight of.

Ali: Cool. I can . . . Just out of curiosity on my end, what does a standard week look like for you these days? What do you do? I know you do the performance coaching, but what other aspects are there in your life?

Chris: Yeah, I don't have a lot of separation . . . I think that we're kind of similar in this regard: I view my entire life as something that can be repurposed either to share with others or in, you know, my favorite pursuits. So I have two full-time jobs and one part-time job. Full-time job, we've talked about, is executive coach, founder of the Forcing Function. I work with about ten to twelve executives at a time. Twice a year we run cohorts of Team Performance Training, which is a small group coaching forum. We're kicking that off again in February, if anyone is interested. My night job: I've kicked poker back off. I don't know if that was clear from the intro. I took five years off in retirement and I was lured back in. So I'm doing that as my nights and weekends type thing. That's probably another twenty hours a week. 

And then you know, I've been fortunate to accumulate some capital and deal flow, and I do some investing of my own money on the side. That takes up a ton of time. Obviously, trying to see friends and family, going on adventures (when the world cooperates). I love doing long hikes and bike rides and jaunts into nature, and I’m getting really deep into my meditation this year, trying to spend a lot more time there, do yoga every morning. I don't know, things that I just really enjoy that also happen to you know, put me on a path towards happiness and purpose. I try to make those a part of my life. 

But yeah, it's funny because if I talk about these three things that I'm doing, they've been pretty consistent for the past five years, which surprises people who've known me a long time, that the answer—you know, where I lived and what I was doing would change every couple months, and I was very tied to this identity of someone who's surprising and doing crazy things, and kind of settling into that there is really infinite depth within these activities has been really nice. 

So even though—coaching, investing, poker—these answers remain the same, every day I discover something new. In poker, for example, I've played two million hands over fifteen years. You'd think I see it all, but every day that I play, I'm reminded how I just know nothing. I am one of the best players, and I'm still completely terrible, because there's just so much to learn there, if I am willing to go deep. And that's why I say that the limiting factor, the bottleneck, is always my curiosity. That if I remember that knowing is the enemy of learning and put this hat on of "I know nothing," today the universe has something to teach me. This next person who I talk to could be a lifelong friend or enemy, I could meet the person of my dreams right now, this person has a superpower that's just waiting to be revealed and if I ask the right question, maybe they'll realize some repressed force within that gets unleashed upon the world.

This posture, I find, is just so magical, because you find the lessons in everything.

Ali: Okay. Why did you decide to get back into poker?

Chris: Yeah. The short story was I had a client who was a real estate investor in Hong Kong, and being a Mandarin speaker, he had gotten access to games in the Chinese market, and being the annoying and loving friend that he was, he kept sending me screenshots of his results. And I was pretty early on in Forcing Function, you know, I was getting a lot of meaning out of it, but certainly wasn't having the success that I am today. And it's like, "Oh, wow, those numbers are kinda tempting. Maybe I should hop on there and give it a look. If nothing else, I bet I can give him some pointers on how he can be making more." And so I got lured into playing these Chinese sites. Obviously, China was a huge booming emerging market, so while US, UK, other Western nations were pretty mature, it was like traveling back in time five years, only I know everything that I knew now.

So despite taking five years off of a game which (it's really hard to exaggerate this) gets so much harder every year, where I think just to maintain my standing I need to be twice as good, to hop into this new ecosystem that was instead of moving forward in time I was moving back in time. That I just hopped in with five years not playing and immediately started winning. It was difficult not to continue that.

I think there was also a little bit of shame about my poker background. You know, poker is a pretty zero-sum game. A lot of my values shifted quite a bit with my travel and my forays into the startup world, and a lot of my friends—it used to be only poker friends, and now I didn't have any poker friends, and no one actually knew that I played poker. It wasn't something that I talked about, I kept it to myself. I wanted to fully envelop this identity of someone who is post-poker. And realizing, not only that it's pretty cool to have this level of success with something that so many people have tried to do, that so much of my life view and philosophy comes from the game. So many of the very helpful ways that I have of viewing the world come through my experience with poker. That it was something that not only it was okay to talk about, but also okay to pursue as part of my values portfolio. 

As we were talking about before, that with poker (and I'm crossing my fingers—it could shut down any day, it could shut down tomorrow, as I've experienced) as it stands today, because I'm still able to play high stakes poker and win more money than I need, it allows me to only do what I want to do, only work with what I want to work, do things that are incredibly impactful and meaningful, because I've solved for this financial part of my life. I can put a lot more of my energy and my time into things that aren't revenue-generating.

I find that it's a nice kind of balance for the portfolio. It's also just a form of productive procrastination, in that if I find myself having a hard time creating content, then I go play poker. Or if I'm not feeling the desire to play poker, maybe I'll work on my business. I have another option that I can justify.

Ali: Okay. Okay, just out of pure curiosity here, let's say I were a top one hundred poker player in the world. How much money are we talking, when you say high stakes poker? I have no number in my mind of even a ballpark of what this looks like.

Chris: The best players are making upwards of seven figures a year. I never quite reached that mark, but in my peak months, I was making a thousand dollars an hour.

Ali: Okay. That's pretty good.

Chris: Yeah, it's not bad.

Ali: And is that sort of playing one game at a time, or is that like having like eighteen monitors around you playing thirty different games at once? What does it look like to be a professional poker player these days?

Chris: The latter. It's a little bit more Minority Report with all the screens. So yeah, I wrote a post on this that I actually just published yesterday if anyone wants to it check out, called "Play To Win" on my website. Just to put it into context, if you're playing as you see it on a movie or a casino, you get twenty to twenty-five hands per hour. But because I'm able to play multiple games online from the comfort of my bedroom right here, I can get a thousand hands per hour. That each game, I get eighty to a hundred hands per hour, multiplied across eight to twelve tables. I'm getting fifty times more hands per hour, and I can earn one-fiftieth as much as I currently am sitting in person at a casino. Obviously, I make a little bit more. 

So that's the value of playing online. But the learning value is that I'm making a thousand decisions every hour, and immediately after, I'm told by whether they call or fold, the cards my opponents show to me, whether my assumptions were correct. Those assumptions are immediately tested and revealed back to me. So the feedback loops are incredibly tight. Even within the context of the session, much less over the course of the year, I'm improving these micro parts of my game all the time. And I think that that's really key, that our . . . The speed of our growth is proportional to the tightness of our feedback loops. How often and how accurately we're getting feedback on what we're doing. And so, yeah. When I'm sitting playing poker it's lots and lots of clicking. And so the higher the stakes that I play . . . If I'm playing what they call "nosebleed stakes," that it's so high that your nose bleeds, maybe I'm only playing a couple games, because I really need to pay attention in these games. If I'm playing at lower stakes, then I can be a little bit more autopilot, because I know all the players so well, I know all my best practices so well, I can just load up my giant screen with games and click away.

And there's so much that I don't know until I sit down. I think Woody Allen puts this better than anyone, is like ninety percent of success is showing up. I have some days it's very, very slow, I play for a few minutes, I'm not feeling it or there's not many games going, I hop off, go spend time with my partner, go outside, do things that are fun, recharge. Other days it's like, "Buckle up, this is gonna get wild." There's people who are spending lots of money, lots of games going, and I might play for twelve or sixteen hours straight, not leaving my chair, just clicking. And it's really hard to know, before I sit down, which one of those days it's gonna be.

Ali: Wow. Is that fun?

Chris: I love it. I love it. It's funny, I didn't have an appreciation for it until I tried to make it in the real world. "Oh, this is such a grind." Sitting in my chair and clicking a button, this is so boring. I think in my younger years I didn't have that sense of curiosity that I do now, and now that I realize how hard most things are, that they don't feel like playing a video game like online poker does . . . I really, really enjoy it. Like I said, I continually find it challenging. I'm always learning, and I said that there is no comparison for immediately having some skin in the game, putting some money at stake, making a decision before your time runs out, and immediately figuring out whether you're right or wrong. I don't think there's anything else that compares to that rush.

Ali: Okay. That's very interesting. So when you're playing these games, do you see the webcam faces of other people, or is it purely . . . Like, how do you tell when someone is bluffing, and stuff like that? Is that even a thing?

Chris: This is one of my favorite questions, and this is where I get super "woo," because of what most people talk about in terms of intuition, right? So I'm talking about serendipity, or manifestation, all these types of things, it's really just an accumulation of internalized experience. And so having played millions of hands, I see signal where other people see noise. 

So there are . . . all I see is just a person's screen name. That's all I know about them. I'm able to take notes on past behavior, but all I have to go off of is how fast they click, the numbers that they type in, and past patterns. And I just . . . I think it's my kind of savant ability, pattern recognition. It comes into play when I'm working with clients as well: I assume that we are deterministic pattern-following creatures, that free will is just a complete illusion, and that if we put ourselves in the same context we're gonna repeat the same patterns. And if I see someone following a pattern, it's like, "Oh, this has happened before, what happened last time," I'm usually about to disrupt that pattern and help put them on a better course. In the context of poker, something that just might seem completely meaningless for me has a lot of meaning, because I've played so many hands and I've seen the situation so many times before. And so even though there's a screen in between us, there's still another person on the other side of the screen.

And with this intuition, I'm able to actually tell . . . It's very hard to put into words in the real moment, but I can feel them. I can feel their current emotional state, I can sense them. And a lot of that sense is, "What are they trying to get me to do, and how do I do the opposite? How do I wildly disappoint them?" So that's why I said it feels so "woo": I can't see them. I don't have anything other than just how fast they're clicking and the number they're typing in, but I can feel that person. And that's really what poker comes down to, is that sense.

Ali: Okay. That sounds really cool. Okay. So we talked about why poker. Why investing?

Chris: Well, it's high leverage. I . . . The two things that I do for a living are essentially selling time. I can only make money when I'm sitting down in the chair, and as you reach a certain level of financial success, it becomes much better to you know, increase the percentage you're making on your current capital rather than accumulate more capital. So it's first just a constraint. But also I find that it is a really, really deep area of learning, that just due to cultural, financial incentives that most of the smart people that I know . . . I say "most." Many of the smart people that I know do something in the world of finance and investing. And so these conversations . . . I find it really, really interesting and fascinating on their own merits. There's lots of exploration of complex systems as far as the stock market and the economy and how all these pieces interplay and how complex behavior emerges in the form of prices and valuations and all this fun stuff. 

And I said, there's this similar sense of feedback, in that you are making decisions. And even if there's a reflexive post-modern nature to, you know, people place a high value on things like Tesla because other people place a high value on things like Tesla, you're getting immediate feedback on your decision-making. So I love placing bets. I think all of life, even perception, is a bet. And so investing, for me, is just another form of having skin in the game of what I believe and getting feedback whether those beliefs are in line with reality or not.

Ali: Okay. So would you call yourself an angel investor in startups? Like, what's the terminology that this would be?

Chris: Primarily I invest in other investors. All this stuff gets very meta. In investing terms, I would be an LP. So an angel investor invests directly in companies. I invest in those angels who find the companies.

Ali: Okay.

Chris: I think that my—one of my critical skills as an investor is people. I think I'm pretty good at picking horses. A lot of my coaching is picking horses, that I'm giving a little bit of a nudge to people who I think are going to go on to incredible things, no matter whether we work together or not. Maybe I give 'em a little bit of a boost. I'm betting on people. And I think this form of investing is way higher leverage for me to find the people who have these unique product insights, who already have this network in place, rather than needing to go out and build it myself. So yeah, that's the idea, is I'm trying to invest in people rather than companies.

Ali: Okay, cool. So if someone like Naval, who's an angel investor, he would have a bunch of LPs who are feeding him cash, hypothetically, and then he would go out and actually have the conversation with startups and decide, "Okay, I'm going to invest in Notion," for example.

Chris: Exactly.

Ali: Okay, cool. Yeah, the investing thing is something I've recently become interested in, because like, you know, it's like the Robert Kiyosaki of . . . The final quadrant is where your money makes you money, as opposed to your time making you money or the products you're creating making you money. And I've been toying with the idea of if it's possible/doable/reasonable to invest in other creators, and I know a lot of people are starting to think in those ways. I'm thinking, you know, if I've got friends who want to start YouTube, can I invest, let's say, ten grand for like ten percent of their business, whatever that might look like, give them a boost up, do some collabs with them, give them the advice and coaching they need, and just sort of . . . It would even kind of be fun, and it would be an interesting way to leverage my capital, but also my expertise, and the fact that like when you have an audience you can then use that to boost the value of the things that you invest in.

Chris: Yeah. First, I think it's a great experiment. I think good investing comes from proprietary deal flow. So building up an audience, being a value-add investor, in that, hey. You are going to accelerate someone's process of reaching a certain level, right? Show 'em where the holes are in the ground, help them to get a good kind of flywheel in place, maybe give them a boost using your own audience. These are ways that you can have proprietary deal flow. This is an area that I don't have a ton of firsthand knowledge about, but I do think that ISAs, income sharing agreements, are going to become increasingly prominent as we think about not only here in the Western world, but in emerging markets where you have incredibly smart and well-educated people who don't have access to the same resources or opportunities or haven't been dealt as good a hand, if you can remove some of these barriers to entry, these people can go on to some pretty wonderful things. 

So my personal experience in the poker realm was finding players who I thought had a lot of talent. I talked to them and their thought process was really dialed in and was clear. This was someone who's gonna work hard and they think about things in the right way, but due to constraints—they had high lifestyle expenses, family or otherwise, or they were still very early in their career and didn't have much capital—that it was gonna take them a while to work their way up the ladder. And so I was able, by completely covering their downside . . . I put up all their capital, and working with them directly, it's like, "Hey, download my brain. Here's everything I've learned about poker. This way, what might take you three years could take you three months," I was able to create a very win/win approach, in that they were able to really accelerate that journey and still have some of the upside along the way. And for me, I was able to make some money while I sleep, and by teaching, was improving my own game. So yeah, I think setting up those win/wins was really critical.

How it wouldn't have worked was like, let's imagine that I wasn't a good poker player. Well, then I wouldn't have had any value to add, right? At that point, money is a commodity. And so I think as we are seeing right now, that every audience is becoming a brand, is becoming an investment platform. You see lots of people raising funds, building businesses that are sprouted out of having a dedicated audience that is very domain-specific. Like, riches are in the niches, so to say. If you build a really high-quality, dedicated audience, the sky's the limit on what you can do with that. And I think that it's so great what you're doing as far as “guide not guru,” as you put it. Sharing behind the scenes, demystifying some of this stuff, that it's really not that hard, not all that scary, and that it really just comes down to a good process that allows for consistency. So hey. I mean, I'm all for it.

Ali: Nice. Can . . . How do you . . . Once you've sorted out your economic engine on the poker front, or hypothetically if you were a YouTuber, how do you think about continuing to charge for things like services and courses and coaching and things like that? That's something I've been thinking a lot about, and I wonder what your take on that is?

Chris: As far as when you don't need to charge, how do you think about continuing to charge?

Ali: Yes, exactly. Yeah.

Chris: Well, I can only talk from personal experience. I like to think about this as a barbell approach, where I completely open-source everything that I know and give it away. So the workbook, everything that I talk about, all the content that I share is literally the best stuff that I know. I hold nothing back and I give it all away. Anyone can access it for free, the same things that I talk about with my clients. But the limiting factor is I can only work with so many people at a time, and so I need some form of filter or cover charge to just, you know, optimize for that constrained resource. 

And so I have . . . Like, the majority of people, and I help people all the time via email and social media, and my DMs are always open. Like, I'm always happy to give advice and feedback to anyone, especially if they're trying to put these things into practice. I've helped hundreds of people who've done exercises in the workbook for free, just because I really enjoy it. But as far as working one-on-one, there's a huge energetic exchange there, and so that's priced to the point that most people won't be able to afford it, just by the nature of it, but the people who can afford it generally are working on pretty big things. There's a lot of ripples created by giving a small acceleration to these people because they generally have some scale in terms of what they're doing. 

That's what I think of in terms of the barbell: I either completely give everything away, or I charge a large amount for it. But you know, I think for me the nice thing is that I don't have to work with anyone. There's lots . . . I turn down more people than I take on. I think that's the cool part about operating from a position of abundance, is that it's a hell yes or no. You don't need to do anything. 

The other . . . I always tell someone, if you are not absolutely thrilled with the value that we're delivering you, full refund. Immediate, no questions asked. It should be a complete no-brainer, 10x ROI, or else you know, go talk to someone else. There's plenty of people in line.

So yeah, I also do think it's hard to overestimate investment. Investment comes in many forms. Could be monetary, could be time, could be energy, that for better or worse we value something that we've invested in, and so if there is no investment there's generally no buy-in, there's generally no change. Having something at stake usually is a good precursor to putting things into action.

Ali: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Like I've been . . . As I was saying to you during our calls, I've been toying with the idea of doing some one-on-one coaching, but the thing that's been stopping me from doing it is I think I'm probably thinking about it in the wrong way. I'm thinking about it as, "Okay, what do I have to charge for this to be worth my while?" And that number is too high for me to put out publicly, because it would just look really bad, and I would feel very uncomfortable charging that amount. And opportunity cost: in that one hour I could be doing a one-hour coaching call, I could instead have planned out an online course, which would have like a 20x return on that time, or things like that.

But then I did a sort of free coaching session for one of my YouTuber friends yesterday evening, and it was really fun. And I was like, damn. This is something I would actually do for free because it's fun, and if it's the right sort of person who's taking the advice nicely and it seems to be helping them, then I feel good cause I feel like I've added value to them, they feel good cause they're getting value out of it. 

And I've been working with this other guy. Do you know Sean McCabe? Okay. So he does a lot of like, content stuff, so he's been helping out on coaching systems, processes, that sort of thing, and the way he was saying it was, well, you don't . . . The way he approaches one-on-one coaching is that it's more to build the relationship with the individual because they're a cool person that it's kind of fun to work with, as opposed to because his time is worth X hundred dollars an hour. Is that how you think of it?

Chris: Yeah, I completely agree with Sean. I think most of the benefits are intangible. For me on an hourly basis, it just doesn't make any sense at all, but I do it because I love it, because it propels me forward, because I learn an incredible amount, because I build really deep and meaningful relationships with people who I admire and respect that I hope will last a lifetime, and because I hope it's my small way of giving something back of what I've learned. That just . . . There's no substitute for a one-on-one connection and the level of impact and acceleration that can happen there in that relationship, and I love it. It gives me a lot of meaning, it gives me a lot of purpose. It gives me energy. I find that that's a very good filter for if I want to work with someone: do I feel energized or drained after the conversation?

And yeah, I come back to what I said before: I think you fall into the trap of trying to satisfy all of the parts of the portfolio from the same experience. That we can get different values from different places.

Ali: How did you first get started with the coaching thing? Or how does one get started with it? Like . . . I'm asking because if I want to get started with it, I feel if I were to just post on Twitter and put out a Google form, it would get inundated with stuff, and I would be like, "Oh my god, I'm drowning in . . ." How, yeah. How would you go about it?

Chris: Yeah, I think you have a very different problem than I had—I think if I would have said something it would have been total crickets, and that caused me to delay on making the plunge for an embarrassingly long time, because I was afraid of what people would think, or most afraid if, "Hey, what if I put myself out there, and nothing happens? That I shout into the void?" And the only thing that got me over this hurdle of, "Do I try this thing that I keep coming back to?" was someone asked to pay me. I just can't help myself. I love to teach. I annoy my friends all the time, because I just try to help everyone, and if I learn something I can't help but share it. Hopefully, they put up with it, enjoy it most of the time. But yeah, I was having these conversations all the time just for free. It was just like, hey. These are the conversations that I want to have, these are the interactions that I want to have, how can we help each other? How can we accelerate each other towards doing something with our lives? And yeah, one of my friends was like, "Hey, I bet I would be much more likely to put this into action if I paid you. Can I pay you?" And I'm like, oh, wow. This is actually a thing.

So I spent a half-hour putting together a Google doc of, "Oh, here's what you get with coaching, and we talked this much and it costs this much." And for the first six months, I didn't even have a website, it was just, you know, like, "Send me a Venmo." It was so super informal. But yeah, it really just came from someone asking, and me, I said, "Oh, this is actually a way to make money to do something that I'd do for free. Okay. Cool." And that just led to referrals, led to creating a website and a brand and some content, and it's kind of slowly buy surely compounded from there.

I think from your position, if the fear is being inundated is the issue, maybe you think, "Hey, who are the five content creators"—this is totally off the top of my head—”that I would love to work with? People who I already have an existing relationship with, I find what they're doing important, inspiring, I think they're on the right path?" You like the way that they think, you enjoy your conversations, and say, "Hey, you know, would you be interested in working together? Here's what I was thinking." I would go from that approach. As I've been fortunate enough to have more inbound coming in, I try to be a little bit more outbound-oriented in terms of who would I like to work with and how I can build a relationship with them.

Ali: Okay. I think for me, any time I even think about coaching, I always get hit with the Impostor Syndrome. That, "Ugh, what if I just suck at coaching? What if they don't get any value out of it, and what if, like, dot dot dot?" Do you ever feel that way? How do you get over that sort of thing?

Chris: Oh, yeah. Like, I'm not . . . I suck. I'm very comfortable sucking. But the thing is, I don't need to be great, because it is just already so valuable to have someone who's invested in you give you an objective third party perspective on what you're doing, to allow you to step outside of the day-to-day, view things from a little bit more of a ten-thousand-foot view, and dissect them and figure out what's going on, what's holding you back, what can you do to accelerate what you're doing, what can you do to support what you're doing? I don't need to be an expert or to be trained in the latest coaching techniques. I think all this certification stuff across the board is complete BS. I just need to be present, to be curious, and ask really annoying questions, and then shut up while they think about it and try to come up with an answer.

That's really all coaching is. There's no magic to it. Now, I'm lucky that, hey, doing this five hundred times . . . I mean I've had five hundred coaching conversations over the past few years, I start to get better about the questions that I ask and when and when to talk and when to shut up and the patterns that emerge where people keep tripping over themselves or the things that seem to generalize in terms of habit systems. I start to develop that intuition and that feel, but from day one, what I was doing was already really invaluable and useful, because it's so rare that people shift from this first-person to third-person perspective in their lives, that any forcing function to create the space to do so is already valuable in itself.

Ali: Yeah, I often think about the value of coaching. Like, I was counting the list. I have teachers/coaches for about fourteen different things now. And I often feel that like, even if they just didn't say anything, the fact that I'm showing up for an hour to talk through something is itself ROI positive, and therefore the coach just has to occasionally ask the annoying question, and then occasionally also gives some direct advice. And just like, damn. This is totally worth it. And it's been so much of a no-brainer, that anyone who's messaged me being like, "Hey, you talk about this coaching thing. Is it good?" And I'm like, "Hell yes." And most coaches also have money-back guarantees, that if you feel like they don't . . . Just get your money back.

Chris: Yeah. Can I comment on that? I think it's like anything. So therapists, nutritionists, personal trainers, acting coaches, speaking coaches . . . Like, there are people who can help you accelerate with everything. But when there are no barriers to entry, when someone can just self-define, unfortunately, most people aren't going to be that good, or aren't going to be a fit for you. Everyone has their own set of experiences and biases and specialties, and so don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. I always recommend before you decide to work with someone: "Whatever area of your life you want to accelerate, try multiple people. Get a broad sampling and see who you have resonance with. See where there's a fit, because that's the most essential thing." "Coach" is just a brand. I have people in my life who I think of more as like a council: if there is anything in my life that's important to me, I want someone to help illuminate my blind spots and accelerate my progress there. And I've spent a lifetime—and will spend a lifetime—cultivating relationships with those people in my life so that we can have that type of relationship together, that we help accelerate each other. Whether it's formalized or not, but that it really comes down to the willingness to experiment and to try on to see whether there's a fit.

Ali: Okay, nice. We've got another ten minutes, so just sort of changing direction completely, there was so much performance stuff I wanted to talk to you about, but we kind of got into the weeds of the other conversations in a great way. Ages ago, I wrote down the word "values," because you said that you feel like you want to be living in a way that aligns with your values. And the question I had was, how do you go about trying to figure out what your values actually are?

Chris: Good question. And man, I can't believe ten minutes left. That's the sign of a good conversation. It flies by. And you know, it reminds me of a . . . I did a presentation on flow. I was in my Psychology of Creativity class in college, and the teacher at the end says, "What a great encapsulation of flow, that you give an entire presentation on it without saying the word flow." And so what an awesome encapsulation of what productivity is, in that we haven't talked about productivity. I think that's wonderful.

Ali: Yeah.

Chris: So, so values. First, my lead-in is I think whenever we are stuck on a difficult situation and a difficult decision, difficult question, that really, it is what do we optimize for in terms of values? What do we most value, what value is most important right now? So it's like, where do you want to live next? What career do you want to pursue? What do you want to major in? It all comes back to which value do you value the most, because everything is a series of trade-offs. You give up something of something that you want in order to get something that you want a little bit more, or to get a little bit more of something that you want the same. That everything is giving up some to get some of something that you want a little bit more. And so that's why it's so, so critical to decide what you value.

An exercise that I really love that I recommend is you can find these lists of values all over the internet. So it doesn't even . . . I don't even need to bother to recommend one. They're all out there. What you do is you go through these lists, maybe there's a hundred different values in there, and you circle ten. It's like, "Here are the ten things that I value the most." And then you say, "All right, now cross a line through those five." Okay, now you have the five that you value most. And this becomes a little bit harder: "Oh, do I value freedom or security? Or do I value relationships or personal growth more?" And that's where you have to reconcile these trade-offs, that maybe I have to . . . When it's close between these two things that I supposedly value infinitely, I'm going to have to pick one. And so which one do I pick now? And you see where this is going. I cross off one. Now it's my top four values. Then it's my top three. Then it's my top two. Then it's my top one. 

If you decide what is most important to you . . . for me in order, the last time that I did this, keeping in mind that these values shift all the time, and that's what a good review process allows for is that your goals, your priorities, your values are going to shift . . . My top were: personal growth, defined as, "Am I achieving my full potential?" It was adventure, as in, "Am I doing fun and challenging things as a baseline way of being? That my default state is out of the comfort zone?" And then the third is wisdom: "Am I tapping into a deeper sense of why we're here and how we can live better lives with meaning?"

If I come to a decision point—and many decision points are invisible—a lot of success is realizing that you have the ability to course-correct at any time. It always comes down to, well, which value am I optimizing for here? Which value is most important? And so that's . . . It's like doing that hard internal work ahead of time that makes all of these future decisions so much easier.

Ali: Okay. Yeah. So I've tried these sort of value list thingies a few times. Do you . . . So for me often, freedom/autonomy comes like the highest on the list, and I wonder if that was similar for you at one point or another, and now it's shifted to the personal growth thing?

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Ali: Okay. Yeah.

Chris: Yeah, it's certainly shifted. I think I valued freedom/autonomy the most when I didn't have any, or at least I was perceiving that I didn't have any. The grass is always greener. I shared the story of when I was in Thailand earlier, where, wow. I have achieved ultimate freedom and autonomy, and maybe it wasn't exactly what I thought it was going to be. It wasn't all it was cracked up to be. And this is . . . We talk about meaning a lot. I'm super excited for your book. The most influential article I've read, all time, is from Roy Baumeister. It's about the difference between happiness and meaning. So this article is a summary of his wonderful research. Hopefully, we can link that in the show notes. But the idea that happiness and fulfillment sometimes overlap but are sometimes at odds, and things like freedom and autonomy are very highly correlated with happiness, but are very uncorrelated with purpose.

And so I realized that for me, purpose was more important than happiness, and that means that I was going to need to give up some of my freedom and autonomy willingly in order to achieve a little bit more purpose. But that this isn't always the case. You see some people who super burn out because they overoptimize on the purpose side of the spectrum, and these are the people who I have to force to take some time off. Go to the beach. Don't bring your phone. Tap into that life is beautiful and sunsets are fun to watch and birds are magical creatures. Right? Like sometimes we need to go the other side because we overoptimize on one side. Maybe you need a little bit more autonomy and freedom. That's why I said, allowing for these values to shift.

But in terms of my compass, I know (and this is part of the company name, is Forcing Function) that if I give myself too much freedom and autonomy, I'm gonna play small. I'm gonna hold back, I'm not gonna take as many chances, I'm gonna be a little bit too perfectionistic, gonna be a little bit too comfortable. That I need to be pushing myself, and reducing my freedom in order to do things that I find meaningful. That I'm willing to sacrifice this thing that I value in order to get something that I value more.

Ali: Okay. Yeah. I think . . . Yeah. Thank you for the Baumeister recommendation, by the way. I bought his book, Meanings of Life, which is his huge-ass sort of 1991 textbook about all of this stuff, and I was so excited to find it, 'cause it . . . Like, I couldn't find the ebook anywhere, it's not on Kindle, and I've never seen anyone in a self-help book reference it, and I was like, "Damn. This is a gold mine." And so I've been reading through his stuff a lot, thinking about these big questions. And I feel like for me this is . . . This difference between purpose and happiness, or meaning and happiness, is one area that I am still quite struggling with, because I feel like I don't really have a purpose that I'm living my life by, hence the question about like, a North Star. I have these things that, this portfolio, Ikigai-type things of you know, "These are the things that I enjoy and these are the things that have an impact and I want to be a teacher of some sort." But it doesn't feel like a nice, well-crafted sort of mission statement, as it were.

And life is like, very happy. Like, I absolutely love my life, but . . . Just before we were on this livestream, I'm doing this course at the moment called UltraSpeaking, to improve public speaking, and I was having . . . As part of that, there was a one-on-one coaching call with the coaches, and one of the speeches that I did . . . So, it's like they give you a speech title, and you just sort of make stuff up on the spot, and then change your intonation, and you know, various exercises. One of the questions was, "What's missing?" And I was like thinking about this, and I was like, I feel like what's missing in my life is a sense of purpose. Like, 'cause I feel I'm now at the point where I've over-optimized for happiness and no friction in anything and I can order takeaway whenever the hell I want because the ROI on my time is not worth cooking, and you know, that sort of thing. Do you have any thoughts on that sort of jumble that I've just thrown you?

Chris: Well, I mean due to quality, it's hard for me to say exactly what you're experiencing, but reading between the lines, I wonder if there is a mistaken sense of what a sense of purpose feels like, that there's some sort of magic switch and lights become a little bit brighter and everything just changes. And, I don't know. I think something that I have noticed is that it's not this constant inside of me that I feel purposeful. It's like, I have moments of clarity around it, surrounded by large pockets of self-doubt and confusion, and I try to focus more on the former. It reminds me, I was very fortunate to have a conversation with a monk in my travels in Japan, and we were all able to ask a question. It was a small group of us for this event in a monastery, and my question (which was translated to him) was, "What does it feel like to be a monk? Your purpose is so clear. You wake up and you go to your cave and meditate. There's no question of what you do." And he said, "I think that would be the thing that most surprises you, is how confused I am and how much I doubt the path I'm on. That what appears to be complete clarity is really just the mask."

And I think that's so true of everyone. Everyone is just sort of blindly stumbling around and occasionally we put our hands on the cave wall, and say, "Oh, okay. This is the general direction that I'm heading." Or, "Oh, wow. What's this feeling right now? Maybe this is meaning. That was pretty cool. I'm glad I did that. It was super hard, but yeah. I'm really happy that I did it." 

I don't know. I might just be spitballing here, but if there's anyone who I've seen who's kind of living in alignment with a purpose I would say it's you, and maybe it's just reconciling that maybe that feeling isn't all that you thought it would be.

Ali: Hmm. Okay. That's very interesting. Yes. This is something we should definitely explore on our next offline call that we have. Because when you were describing your purpose thing, I got a sense of, "Damn, you live every moment as if you're in perfect clarity with this vision." And I was like, "Oh shit, I don't have one of those."

Chris: No, no. It's . . . I really hope that's not what comes across. I am no Superman. I struggle with this all the time, every day. I have bad days, I procrastinate, I doubt what I'm doing just like everyone else, and it's just a constant practice to try to come back to what I'm doing, what I'm trying to achieve, why I'm here, and hopefully, to reduce this gap between, "Oh no, what am I doing?" to, "Okay, yeah, that's right. That's what I was doing." Try to reduce that as much as I can, to just bring myself back to that purpose. But, yeah. I wander and stray just as much as everyone.

Ali: Oh, fantastic. That is very reassuring to hear. And I think that's a great place to end this conversation. Chris, thank you so much for coming on. Is there anything you'd like to plug/share/any final ask of the audience, while we're here?

Chris: Yeah. I mean, first, thank you so much, Ali. Thank you guys so much for tuning in. I like to say this, I think this is just the beginning of a conversation, so if something I said today resonated, we'd love to hear from you. I'm pretty easy to find. Twitter handle, @SparksRemarks. We'd love to hear any questions, anything that you disagree with, anything that you found resonant. 

Two things that I would point you to first, if you liked some of these principles that we talked about today: my workbook, Experiment Without Limits, that I held up so annoyingly before, is available for free. You can download that at forcingfunction.com/workbook. And because of the timing of this, we're super excited to offer Team Performance Training again. So we're gathering fifteen executives. These are founders, investors, high-level, CEO-level people in companies, to work together to accelerate their growth. So this could be multiplying output, putting out projects faster, accelerating learning speed, this type of stuff. I'm going to teach everything that I know, and then it's going to be a Mastermind-type format, where we help each other illuminate blind spots, hold each other accountable. So if you're interested in that, you can learn more at teamperformancetraining.com. Applications open next Tuesday, January 26th. 

That's all for today. Yeah. Thank you so much, Ali. This was a true pleasure.

Ali: Good stuff. And we're . . . Are we chatting tomorrow, or the day after on your podcast?

Chris: We are live tomorrow. So that's a good thing to plug. If you haven't gotten annoyed by our voices and points of view yet, Ali has been gracious enough to come on my conversation series Lunch Hour. So we are going live tomorrow. That's 12:00 Eastern, which I believe is 6:00 CST. Is that right, Ali?

Ali: I've got it down as 4:45. So, 6:15.

Chris: Oh. I guess you want fifteen minutes earlier, because I know you have a hard time with video and audio quality. Right? I've gotta make sure you have your stuff together. All right. So 5:00 PM CST, Ali's coming on Lunch Hour, and our theme is "Learning In Public." How if you are sharing your work, if you are giving people behind the scenes on what you are doing, what you are learning, day-in-the-life-type stuff, this will accelerate your growth. So Ali and I are going to be sharing some examples from our personal life hopefully you can put into practice. If you're interested in joining us, you can register for free at lu.ma/lunchhour11. I hope to see some of you guys there.

Ali: Okay. I've just put it into the chat. In theory, it should be good to go. All right, Chris, this has been so much fun. Thank you so much, and I will see you tomorrow at Lunch Hour. Thank you everyone for tuning in. We'll see you next time. Goodbye.

Chris: See you tomorrow. Bye, guys.

 
Chris Sparks