Modern Wisdom: Productivity Without Limits

Chris Williamson of Modern Wisdom talks with Chris Sparks about his workbook, Experiment Without Limits.

Audio recording below (1h10m). Full transcript below.

Podcast Transcript

Note: transcript slightly edited for clarity.

Chris Williamson: Oh, hello, friends. Welcome back to Modern Wisdom. My guest today is Chris Sparks. He is a productivity coach, and one of the ex-top-20 online poker players in the world. So he's coming in with a couple of big credentials. Today he's taking us through his new e-book, "Experiment Without Limits: Personal Experiments For Peak Performance and Productivity." Chris has essentially compiled a list of all of the best approaches he's found over his productivity career, and put them into an e-book. And today we're going to go through them, including setting goals, designing systems, building habits, creating routines, maximizing time, attention, energy, overcoming procrastination, the mental game, and how to accelerate your learning.

I generally can't believe that this e-book is free. It should be a five hundred quid course. I'm also not getting any kickback from this, but you one hundred percent need to go and download it. It is unbelievable. Link is in the show notes below, and I'm actually going to be going through this e-book over the coming months step by step. So if you want to do it with me, feel free to drop a message, @ChrisWillX, wherever you tune in. And we can do like a productivity book club thing. Action-based productivity book club, and be all accountable to each other. 

Also, this episode is brought to you by The Protein Works. Huge fan of them, and they continue to support the podcast. This time they are giving away one loaded nuts tub of amazing peanut butter every month for an entire year. So that's a year's supply of peanut butter, and it comes in all sorts of awesome flavors, like white choc-fudge, and chocolate brownie. They're essentially peanut butter on . . . I don't want to say 'steroids'. That's probably bad for The Protein Works, isn't it? It's peanut butter upgraded. Upgraded peanut butter. But it's unreal, and you can get a year's supply of it for free. All that you need to do, wherever you are tuning in leave us a review. That might be iTunes or Stitcher. Head to the app, it will take you literally five seconds to leave us a review, and you will be entered into the competition to win an entire year of free peanut butter. Also, if you've already given us a rating, you will be automatically entered into the competition, so do not worry. If you haven't, I bet you can go and do it in the time it takes for this intro music to finish, so crack on. And while you're doing that, please welcome Mister Chris Sparks.

I'm joined by Chris Sparks, founder of The Forcing Function and former top 20 online poker players in the world. We are talking all things productivity. Chris, welcome to the show.

Chris Sparks: Hey, Chris. Hey, guys. Thank you so much for having me.

Chris Williamson: Absolute pleasure to have you on. Recently had one of your peers, Tiago Forte, talking about tools. Also had Nat Eliason, host of the Made You Think podcast, saying that you and Tiago were the only two people in the world that he listens to about productivity. So no pressure, mate. No pressure.

Chris Sparks: Thanks, I'll do my best.

Chris Williamson: So why don't you give us a little bit of a background? Before we delve into the dark world of productivity, why don't we hear a little bit about you?

Chris Sparks: Yeah, certainly. So I kind of got into this through the side door, as you mention. I think a lot of people know me for my online poker career. I still play at a pretty high level, but I had my peak right before the event we call Black Friday. So you know, 2008 to 2011, and I learned quite a bit during that time about what it takes to perform at the highest level, and I realized that the people who were doing things that I saw as shaping the world were all becoming entrepreneurs. Some of my former poker player friends included. And I wanted to find a way that I could take all of the things that I had learned about peak performance and find a way to accelerate the growth of these people who I thought were putting things into the world that needed to exist. 

And so that's how I stumbled upon founding The Forcing Function, where I take everything that I have learned about how to produce at a very high level, so become the sort of person who can accomplish anything that you want. Whether that's installing habits of systems or just removing roadblocks to accomplishing one's goals. And I've created a system, which I've put together in my just-released book, Experiment Without Limits, which I'm happy to talk about. I work . . . I do workshops, I do one-on-one coaching, and it's something that allows me to have, you know, really interesting conversations just like this one. I get to learn something new every day.

Chris Williamson: Yeah. Well, don't speak too soon. It might not be interesting. I might bore you to sleep. But I totally get it, man. The world of online poker seems to be like a bit of a breeding ground for people that are polymaths in other areas or people who are really extreme high performers. Think a lot about Josh Waitzkin as well. Former chess prodigy, now turned executive CEO, coach, and all that sort of stuff. It's seems to . . . There must be some real intellect in there.

Chris Sparks: Absolutely. I mean I'm a huge fan of what Josh is doing, and the way that I see it is that there's so many things that are transferable. I mean you see this in Silicon Valley, you see this on Wall Street, that poker is generally a training ground for business. And that's the way that I see it. As entrepreneurs, what we're doing all day is really making decisions. Right? Decisions on what to focus, decisions on what audience to go after and how to reach them, where to spend our limited time. And I see poker as a very important framework on being able to make better decisions with imperfect information. 

And so when you're playing poker at a high level, not only do you have to beat other players, but you have to conquer yourself. That we are the common denominator in all of our productivity struggles, and so understanding what our own triggers are, understanding how things can go off the rails, or you know, on the positive side, what are the conditions that allow us to have peak focus? That allow us to have peak energy? And how can we recreate those conditions? Where if you understand what you're trying to accomplish, it's more or less understanding "What are these conditions that I need to have in order to put myself in a position to accomplish that?"

Chris Williamson: I totally understand. So when you were going through online poker, and you were looking at the potential for The Forcing Function, who were some of the people you mentioned? Josh. Who were some of the other people that you thought "Wow, that's someone that I really need to learn from or someone whose particular stance I really respect", or you had admiration for like that? Is there anyone who comes to mind that you thought is a role model in that.

Chris Sparks: Oh man. That's a really good question. You know, I'll take a step backwards in how I approach all of this, is I see my personal system as a collection of the best of other people's systems. So as a poker player, what you're doing is any time someone makes a move against you that puts you on your heels, but you're not sure what the right response is, you realize "Hey, if I don't know what I'm supposed to do here, this is probably a good thing to be doing to other people." Right? That you've probably stumbled upon a good strategy, even if I don't understand it yet. And so looking to emulate one part of that strategy until you can internalize the reasoning behind it. Right? 

And so in the same way, when you're looking at, you know, "Who do I want to emulate?", I always start from, you know, "Do I want this person's life?" Right? This person giving advice, like, do I want to have a life that's similar to theirs? Where none . . . No, like, one dimension can be taken away outside of the whole system. Right? So people look at someone who's hyper, hyper productive, but the question is, you know, do you want to be that person? The answer is no. Right? Classic example is everyone really admires Warren Buffett. No one necessarily wants to be Warren Buffett. Right? I mean maybe Warren Buffet fifty years ago. But I digress. So where I'm looking for is, "Who are people who are living in a way that is in alignment with the way that I would like to live?" And high level, I want to be learning every single day. I want to go to bed slightly better than when I woke up, as far as "I know something else. I've discovered something new about how the world works. I understand myself a little bit better."

And so when I'm looking for examples, I'm looking for people who embody that. Now that being said, it can be really interesting to look at true believers, people who have a fully fleshed-out system. Let's see, a couple people who come to mind . . . I mean I'm, as far as productivity goes, a huge fan of David Allen. Don't necessarily want to be David Allen. Huge fan of Nassim Taleb, don't necessarily want to be Nassim Taleb, but I can take off pieces of their system. People who are very, very opinionated about all things, what are the things that resonate with me, and how can I integrate pieces of what they're doing into my own system? I think a big error that many people make, that they get onto this personal development treadmill, is that they keep switching systems wholesale, rather than taking off pieces of what other people are doing, forming what I call "small experiments". Like if I add this, if I make this small change, does it have effect on myself overall? If it does I can double down. If not, I stop it.

And where a lot of people see are like, "Oh, this new tool, this new system . . . Like this is going to change my life. This is going to solve anything." And the problem is that none of these things are going to solve your own problems, because we are always the common denominator. And the ironic thing is that this incremental approach, in that I change one small thing every day in a positive direction, adds up to compound returns. And that's the true way that progress is incredibly accelerated. Not these one-time heavy lifts of "Today's the day that I change everything" type of stuff.

Chris Williamson: Yeah. I mean I'm laughing for a number of reasons. Firstly, because Jordan, who is one of the guys that took part in the Modern Wisdom project, often uses a quote from Naval, which is talking about you can't just have a piece of someone's life, you have to have the whole. And that . . . Just for people that are listening, it's a really lovely tool to use. And especially . . . I've done a little bit of reality TV, I swim in waters of Instagram influencers and stuff like that, and a lot of people desire that, right? Like they look at that person and they think, "Oh, that's a cool life", or "That person's got this and that going on." And it's like, I'm telling you from first-hand experience, that a lot of those people, you would not be able to be paid to have their lives. It looks good. Some of the bits are great. But some of the bits aren't. 

You're totally right as well. The person who's incredibly industrious . . . You know, you have no idea what Elon Musk's relationship with his father's like. You have no idea what Elon Musk's bed routine in terms of his headspace is like, on a nighttime. Yeah, it's great to say that this guy is taking us to Mars, and that he's making . . . That Tesla's this amazing, cool company. And he is. But you only see, especially now, with how curated social media feeds are, you only see what people want you to see. And then when there's a scandal and something happens and it comes out that Jeff Bezos has been sending dick pics around, or whatever it might be, like everyone's super shocked, because we never get to see that side of people. And I think that a much more rounded view, and seeing things in that way, is a lot more interesting. 

Another one of the reasons why I'm laughing, and I'm sure a lot of the listeners at home will be, we have an entire series called "Life Hacks". Now these are to be done in a very piecemeal fashion. Like we literally did one the other day, which is "How to make the best toastie". Like how you make the best toasted sandwich. And we all gave our opinions on the best toasted sandwich. And then sometimes we'll do things, we'll use tools for such a short period of time that in between recording the episode and releasing it, which is usually maybe two to three weeks, we'll have gone from the new relationship status, loving it, to not so sure about it, to no longer using it, and then I'm about to publish the episode. And I'm like "Oh, god, I might be talking about something I don't even use now." So yeah, the . . . Falling into the trap of "This is going to fix all of my problems" is such a huge big deal. 

And you see this all of the time, right? Like some of the guys that are in the office that I work in will come in with something that they believe is going to be the solution to what it is that they do. One of the lads got hold of a shit ton of Modafinil the other day, and they're all doing their re-sits from Uni, because they're big party boys. And they came in, he's like "Man, like let's get on this Modafinil, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that." Guys, all of you are taking Modafinil, and you've got your notifications on your phone next to your laptop. Like, is no one else seeing what I'm seeing here? Like don't focus on the quick fix, focus on the big problem. 

But yeah, I think so much of the stuff that you said there really strikes a chord with my experience as well, personally. And it's difficult not to get seduced, right? You see that clickbait title, like . . . You're putting your hand up, yeah. It's like . . . For me, and perhaps for yourself as well, it's the equivalent of like, I don't know, like a hot girl advert or something, and you're like "Oh." It triggers something in me so primal. Like, these ten new productivity hacks for iMessage, and I'm like "Oh, gotta see these new productivity hacks for iMessage, I gotta go and have a look." And then I get in there and I'm like, "You've done it again. You got clickbaited. You thought it was gonna be really cool." But yeah. Honestly, I've seen everything. Personal observation and personal experience, I totally agree.

Chris Sparks: Cool. Couple things there I'd love to touch on. So many interesting threads here. First you mentioned Naval, and one of his favorite ideas that I really try to internalize is this idea of a single-player game. That the only thing that matters is our internal scorecard, and how our own personal definition of success. Right? And that it's impossible to look around and determine whether people around us are successful, because we don't know what their goals are. Right? We're continually projecting based on our own definitions, and as you alluded to many times, we don't take the cost into account. This is what I call 'differentiating goals from dreams'. You know, it's everyone wants to be a rock star, no one wants to play three hundred shows and live out of the back of a van for a year, right? It's like everyone wants the results, but no one wants to put in the gym time. And the reason that we keep kicking ourselves is because we haven't reconciled "All right, well if I want to achieve this goal, this is what it's gonna take, and more importantly due to opportunity cost, here are all the things that I'm going to have to give up." Right? That life is just one delicious buffet, but you can't eat it all. You have to pick and choose to do some things at the expense of some things you also want to do, but not quite as much.

And it's this nefarious justification in the hindsight mirror that what we're doing is okay. It's like "Oh yeah, that time I spent reading, you know, how to hack iMessage productivity hacks, I'm really glad that I read that." But was that how you chose to spend your time in advance, or are you just backwards rationalizing what you decided to do?"

Chris Williamson: Post hoc-ing the shit out of it, yeah.

Chris Sparks: Post hoc-ing, right. Where so much of our mental bandwidth is dedicated towards backwards rationalizing, "Oh, yeah, that what I'm doing is great." And that's really, really the importance of planning. That everything reduces down to "What do you want?" And once you understand that you can get yourself to want anything, it's "What do I want to want? How do I sculpt my environment so that my values automatically coalesce around what I'm doing?" And it's this fear that I have, being in this productivity game, that so many people follow and listen to things like this as entertainment. As "I am going to feel better listening to this because I have all these ideas, that . . . Oh, if I start hugging people for five seconds instead of three seconds I'm going to have a little bit more empathy, and if I lower my voice one octave I'm gonna have twenty percent more trust", when actually doing the hard work of looking down and understanding what do you want, and thinking about skill acquisition as a just-in-time process, what are the skills that are in the way of accomplishing your goals, and worrying about those, rather than having this, you know, giant collection of things that you might actually use someday.

Chris Williamson: The point about using it as entertainment is so right. Like you don't know the people that wrote the . . . I do the show with, but it sounds like you do. That all of us are the same, and Johnny and Yusef are both too sort of real . . . And George as well, one of the guys that's part of the project, very, very focused on the results. I don't think I can get any of them to read a fiction book. If Cal Newport or Ryan Holiday or whoever brings a new book out, they'll be straight on it, and bizarrely I think it applies a lot of pressure to them. And some listeners at home might be striking a chord with this too. Unless they can see a direct result from the investment of reading something, a lot of the time they're not going to read it. It's reading for this weird profit sort of sake. And I caught myself doing that, and then have managed to backtrack quite a bit. The rule, for anyone who's listening, the heuristic that I've used, is that I will read nonfiction by day, but by night I'll only read fiction. Or story-based stuff. Just, I don't want my brain sort of sparking away in that sort of a manner just before I'm about to go to bed.

But yeah, like . . . One of the problems with that is if the only time that you read is to read to make a profit, there's an awful lot of pressure on what you're reading. Like unless you can do recall, and unless you can do recall with high fidelity, and then unless you can implement, there's always this like . . . You're always gonna feel guilty. Or at least I've found myself feeling that. Like "Oh, you read five chapters of Cal Newport's Deep Work, but only implemented one of them. What a waste." Because this desire for profit on the back end.

Chris Sparks: Yeah. And I think doing anything out of a sense of guilt is really poor fuel. I try to identify anything that I'm doing out of a sense of obligation or fear and ruthlessly eliminate that, because I want to enjoy everything that I do, or it needs to be very clear towards my goals. And putting this pressure on yourself, that "Oh, like I need to be extracting the maximum value out of everything," is not only irrational, it's not healthy. That we need to relax, we need to recharge, we need to unplug, and everything doesn't need to exactly tie to a goal. I mean I'm really big on reading fiction. I've actually cut way, way down on reading nonfiction, because . . . I mean any book, especially around two hundred pages, doesn't actually need to be two hundred pages. It's a twenty-page blog post with a hundred eighty pages of examples or stories around that. Does that sound a little bit like fiction to you? Right? It's a very blurred line. 

And when you're thinking about how do you actually maximize your time reading, sometimes reading the thing that takes four hours is actually going to be a lower hourly ROI than something that takes twenty hours, because the twenty-hour thing is high quality enough, and it transforms the paradigms with which you view the world enough, that everything you do changes after that. And that's why I really love fiction. Plus that I happen to enjoy it and I want to read things that I enjoy. That the subset of books that exist in the world that are both important and useful and enjoyable is far larger than the number of books that I would love to read. I mean my reading list is gonna be thousands of books long before I die, and I'm perfectly okay with that.

Chris Williamson: Yeah. Yeah. Totally. I read a . . . So it's sacrilege, I know, but I only read 1984 last year. And that book, some of the conclusions that I drew from that piss all over so many nonfiction, like, productivity books. So much stuff that came out of that . . . And I was like "This is as useful if not more useful than something which designed itself to be productivity." So.

Chris Sparks: Yeah. And the whole notion of speed reading, that you can extract information faster. The point isn't to extract the information, the point is to prompt yourself on your thinking and to sit with it and think about ways to apply. And it's the more time you spend with a book, the more you get out of it, and it actually has compounding returns rather than diminishing returns. I mean that whole notion of, you know, "How do I take in information faster? How do I listen to this podcast at 3x instead of 2x?" This—

Chris Williamson: Yusef, Yusef, you've got this on at two and a half x. I know you do. I know you've got this on at two and a half times speed, and Chris is telling you to slow it down right now.

Chris Sparks: Yeah. And I mean man, I have so many rants today, it seems. 

Chris Williamson: It's fine, we can just keep on doing it.

Chris Sparks: A good rule of thumb is people chronically underestimate intangible value. Right? This familiarity that I'm sure a lot of people have with Goodhart's Law, that once we have a measure, it ceases to be a reliable measure. Because we overoptimize around that. Think about, you know, you were talking about Instagram. Think about once you decide that followers is an important metric, you start to overoptimize towards followers, versus thinking about "How do I increase engagement? How do I get these people to convert to something that I want them to do?" Et cetera. That if we can understand, "What are these things that are bringing intangible value to us? Things that we can't necessarily measure but have an effect spread across our entire system?", we can find ways to unlock hidden value, because everyone is over-tied to things that are very easy to reduce to a number. And I think this is probably a good transition to talk about Experiment Without Limits a bit, is the huge reason why I decided to start it is, because I felt myself falling into this trap over and over and over again, is, "I can't do anything to help people. I don't know enough. I'm not enough of an expert. What do I have to offer?" Thinking that knowledge is the limiting resource for people.

And if knowledge was the limiting resource, man, like these people who are reading a hundred books a day, like . . . Why aren't they going to space? Clearly there's something else that's missing in that equation, and that it's action. Right? That knowledge is only useful to the point that is getting in the way of acting, that we don't know what to do. And I realized that, you know, from poker. All we do is hoard information. That that's how we win against our opponents, is this information asymmetry. That I was carrying this over to my personal life. That I was hoarding my information, thinking that I had the secret. Then I decided, it's like, I want to burn these bridges by open sourcing everything that I know. And so I took . . . If I could only . . . You know the old, if we lost all information about science. Feynman is . . . Okay. We'll . . . We know the universe is made from atoms. We can build everything up from that. How it was like . . . If everything we had learned about performance was forgotten, what could I share with people so they could build up from that and find a way to build upon these principles, install them in their lives?

And so that was the birth of Experiment Without Limits, is "Here is everything that I know. Like, take it for free." And my hope is that this will illuminate the opportunities that people have, and actually spur them to take the action. Where the knowledge itself has no value until they actually act upon it.

Chris Williamson: Yeah. So having gone through Experiment Without Limits, one of the things I have to say first off is it's very action-focused. Every page is a task, every task has a time predictor of how long you think it's going to take you. This augmented, ancillary information, which is like, "This is something that you might want to do when you're doing this," and all this sort of stuff. A really cool point. I'm in the middle of writing my first ever online course, and a really cool point that I came across was from LinkedIn, and it said that the word "strategy" or "strategist" is in the top ten bio-descriptors in all of LinkedIn. Top ten words, "strategy" or "strategist". But "executor" or "execution" doesn't even feature in the top one thousand. And I think that that asymmetry of people who like to plan versus people who like to do, people of talking versus people of action . . . I think that you've hit upon a real gem there, which is just by doing stuff and learning by doing and just trying things out, you get a lot further than kind of this circle jerk of information/reading/whatever it might be.

Chris Sparks: That's my hope. I'm trying to get myself out of the treadmill. These are all the things that I follow, and I keep coming back to them, and I know that if I think that one of these hacks is something that's holding me back, I should just redo one of these experiments instead. That I'm clearly missing something obvious as far as an opportunity or bottleneck.

Chris Williamson: Yeah. I get it. So let's take us through. What do you think people need to know first, from Experiment Without Limits'? Or if you were doing a productivity MRT for someone, if you were having a little bit of a breakdown, taking them into the garage, looking under the hood, where would you start?

Chris Sparks: Yeah. So I would say it breaks into two parts. So the first part is the fundamentals. Right? So you need to have the fundamentals down before you start optimizing. Right? Thinking about your co-producer who's taking Modafinil before he hasn't turned off his notifications. Right? There's these last-mile solutions that everyone wants to jump to before they have a strong foundation, and for me the foundations are goals, systems, and habits and routines. Right? 

So first goals. I structure out how you can figure out what you want and how you can frame it in such a way that it's achievable, it's actionable, that you know when you will have achieved it. Right? Once you know what you want, you have a very easy litmus test for things that are on the path and are not on the path.

Systems are more or less my way of thinking about "How do I accelerate progress around that path? How do I make it easier to make progress?" And it really focuses on these three key principles of leverage, bottlenecks, and feedback loops. So leverage: How do I get more for less? Bottlenecks: How do I identify what is most holding me back? And then feedback loops: How do I know if I'm making progress? Right? How do I know if my efforts are tracking towards my goal.

Habits and routines. You know, everyone knows how to create habits, knows how to create routines, but it's something that is very easy, but not simple. And so I'm really trying to break down "If you follow this system you will be able to install a new habit every month". Right? That's twelve new habits a year. How many people start twelve habits a year? Thousands. Millions. How many people actually add twelve habits a year? I would say, you know, one in a hundred people. And all it comes down to is just adding one at a time and making the . . . Everyone knows kind of the power of habit, but people actually don't think through and practice and plan out when they create a habit what the trigger is. How do I make it ridiculously easy to do? And why am I doing it? And I kind of outline those in step-by-step formation. 

And then the second half, the assumption is once you have all of these placed, that the system is humming, running well, how do you optimize? So you have your key resources of time, attention, energy. How do you maximize those? So time is really getting your planning and reflection down. So I call this the cycle of "I plan what I'm going to do, I have that experiment, I collect data, I reflect. How did that go?" And based on that everything is a double down or stop. And so I'm constantly having a bunch of these experiments going one in each dimension so that I assure progress in all the things that are important to me.

Attention. You're talking about notifications. Attention is primarily about understanding that everything that is not your top priority at this given moment is a distraction. So how do you create a default so that the thing that is the most important thing right now is the only thing you are going to do? And everything else, you make it harder. You add friction to it.

Energy. We were talking about last mile. How do you get your sleep, your exercise, your diet nailed in, automatic, solved, so that you don't even have to think about it? And then we can talk about, you know, what do you do next as far as, you know, caffeine, supplements, et cetera. But, you know, ninety-nine percent of the value unlocked there is sleep, nutrition, exercise. And then I go into what I call more mental games. So this is a lot of crossover from poker, in your motivation. So how do you get yourself to do hard things? How do you show up? When things aren't going well how do you get yourself back on track? How do you debug yourself? So getting into procrastination, getting into, you know, ensuring accountability and consistency? 

And then my final is probably my favorite chapter, in that a core belief for me is that we can become and achieve anything that we want, and the meta-skill there is learning how to learn. That the only thing that's in the way of our goals is the skills necessary to achieve them. So in the final chapter "Accelerate Learning," I break down my process for self-transformation and "How do you acquire any skill in an extremely efficient manner?"

Chris Williamson: Recently we had Scott Young, author of Ultralearning, on. Last year I had Peter C. Brown, author of Make It Stick. Tiago Forte's been on earlier this year. James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, has been on earlier this year. It does seem to me like everyone is kind of circling around a lot of the things that we're talking about today. Why do you think it is that so many people have this . . . I don't wanna say 'obsession', but I'm gonna use the word, this obsession with optimizing and productivity? Obviously we all want to get more done in less time, but is it just that no one, or a lot of people aren't finding the solution or sticking to the program, and therefore there's constantly a gap in the market for someone to come up with something new? Is that why? Or is it something else? I wonder whether you've thought of that.

Chris Sparks: I'm happy to guess. I would say that there are a couple different schools of thought. Right? So why now? Why are people so interested in optimization? I think it's this, you know, transparency due to we can see what everyone else is doing, and it's never been easier to compare ourselves with our peers, and particularly to compare ourselves with the best possible version of our peers. What they want us to see. And so I think a lot of it really is driven by competitiveness, in that we are relativistic creatures. Right? We are concerned about our position in the pecking order, and we want to improve relative to our peers. Now the positive spin on that, you know, why habits, why now, a lot of the research on behavioral change is so well established in the psychological literature, and really has not changed since the '70s. Right? The best practices today haven't really changed all that much in the last few decades.

Now this will put a . . . counter to what a lot of magazines and articles will tell you, right, like Men's Health needs to put out a new workout every year . . . Sorry. Every episode. And there needs to be a new diet for people to try. People are going to go through phases, but the core habits underlying these behaviors, the science there has not changed at all. And why I think people are so interested is because we feel like we are powerless. That more and more of what we do every day feels outside of our own control. Right? We are drowning in messages, we're drowning in e-mails, there are so many things that we could be doing, and we've never been more aware of all the things that we quote/unquote "should" be doing but don't have the time to do. We don't have the energy to do. And so we look for solutions outside ourselves. Right? Everyone becomes a true believer of a system, and I think a lot of people finally settle on, you know, what my consensus belief is, that the solution lies within ourselves, and that if we can become the sort of person who can change our behavior as needed, who can learn any skill, that we increase our own capability. We feel more confident moving about the world. We feel, you know, less self-conscious and exposed when on the internet.

And I'm very, very supportive of this movement, but as always like my concern is that people treat it as entertainment, as they read about the solution and think they've accomplished it. Right? The knowledge is not the action. And that's my hope, is . . . You talked about James Clear. Like, I read James Clear's book, and for me, someone who's been immersed in this world, I think, "Well, there's not really much new that's here, but he has put it more directly and concisely than just about anyone else, and it has reached a very wide audience to people who can actually implement, put these into focus.” And you know, that's my hope, is that people don't treat this as a beach read, but they actually go and take the next step, say "All right, given this information, how do I apply it? What is the next step? What's the action that I take?"

Chris Williamson: Yeah. I think it would be difficult for someone to go through this and treat it as a beach read. It's so action-focused. There is a lot in there. Even just the use of some of the highlight tabs for particular tasks, and stuff like that. It's like if you've been to a restaurant and they've got like a featured meal, like a featured meal of the month. It's like your eyes immediately get drawn to that. If you're on a beach and you use this as a beach read, I will be impressed and surprised. Also what you said about James' book is exactly the first thing I said to him. I was like "Being honest, James, wasn't a massive amount that was new in 'Atomic Habits' to me, but I've never seen it all put together in the same place and displayed with such wonderful examples." And hopefully with this, this will be something similar.

So why don't we go through, and why don't you pick . . . We can either go through each chapter . . . Why don't we go through a couple of chapters, and why don't you give us your favorite . . . This is gonna be like making you choose your favorite child here. Why don't you choose your favorite task from within either all or a couple of sections, or something like that?

Chris Sparks: All right. Okay. So maybe we'll do . . . We've been talking about habits, so maybe we'll kind of start with habits and routines, and then I can switch to one of the more prescriptive kind of optimization chapters after that. 

Chris Williamson: Amazing.

Chris Sparks: So my key takeaway from "Habits" is that our future behavior is deterministic. Right? That it's . . . It's not only true, it's also useful to think about your future self as not having free will. Right? That you do not choose what you're going to do in the future, but that your actions are determined by the context that you find yourself in. Right? So to unpack that, we take actions now that change what we do in the future. Right? So one aspect of that is everything that we do makes it more likely that an action is repeated in the future. So thinking about habits, right, it's . . . I use this metaphor of a river digging a path through rock. You think about like the river that created the Grand Canyon over millions of years. And so on the good end, everything that we do reinforces that we do that again. Right? Every time we complete a habit that is positive, we reinforce our identity as someone who does that. 

On the other side, when we have something that we call a quote/unquote "bad habit" that we don't want to be repeating, realizing that we have carved a path through the rock, and that it takes time to refill that river with sand, but that every time we have this impulse and we say "no", the level rises a little bit. Right? So I think of this as an upstream effect, and that in order to change our behavior . . . I don't try to do anything in the present. I don't do things. I make things easier to do in the future, or if I don't want to do them I make them harder to do in the future by adding friction. Right? So if you understand and internalize that, you can change your behavior in any direction that you want. 

And so the how-to of that, right, everyone knows this: trigger, behavior, reward. But I'll just take, you know, sixty seconds to break this down into how do you actually implement that. So think about like . . . With the trigger, trigger sets it in motion. So we'll use good habits as an example, but use the inverse for bad habits. Like if you want a habit to happen, understand what triggers it and make sure that trigger happens. Make sure that you notice it, make sure that what you do next is very clear, make sure that you can't avoid it. And I have like a checklist that you can follow. Specific, consistent, automatic, unavoidable. And if you look at all of the things that you want to do and identify that trigger and make sure that trigger does all four of those things, the habit takes care of itself. You don't have to do anything else. Where people forget to do things is that they forget about their trigger and they don't have a system to ensure that that trigger occurs and that they notice it.

Behavior. At a high level, how do you make it as easy as possible? Right? So when you're first starting off a habit, I always recommend something that takes two minutes or less, so you have no excuses. And it is like auto-opt-in. Like it just happens. Like not worrying about the results, right? Everyone has this . . . Like, you haven't worked out. It's January 1st, and now all of a sudden you're going to go to the gym every day for two hours. Well, that's not going to work out too well. But if it's, "All right, you know, at nine AM after brushing my teeth I'm going to do five pushups every single day," right, how can you say no to doing five pushups? But before you know, you have a chain that you can start to build off of where five can become ten, can become "I go outside and do pushups," can go "I run around the block for ten minutes," et cetera. And before you know it, you know, you're an Olympic weightlifter.

The final is like reward. It's very important to understand why you are doing a habit. First, you know, connecting it to a long-term goal. You know, what . . . Why are you doing this in the first place? How is it tied to your goals? But also having an immediate reinforcement. So the intrinsic reward is, "Why is this important?" Extrinsic reward is, "Why does this immediately reward me?" So we've been using gym as an example. All right. So "I want to work out." Why? "Because I want to look good." Why? "Because I want to feel confident when I'm out." Right? Or "I want to feel better. I want to have more energy." Why? "So I can make more progress toward my goals, I can build my business, et cetera." The extrinsic reward is you walking outside of the gym. "Man, I feel really accomplished. Oh, this like sore feeling feels really good. I can post on my Instagram a photo of like how I look with my shirt off." Not pointing any fingers there.

Chris Williamson: Yeah.

Chris Sparks: "I can talk to a friend." Right? "A friend needs me at the gym, and I have that social aspect that feels good." Right? If you have these three elements in place, trigger, easy behavior, reward, you create a strong foundation for a habit that automatically expands with time, and the smaller and stronger that foundation, the easier it is to expand. But where people mess up when it comes to habits is that they take on too much too soon, and then anything happens . . . Right? They go on a trip, their schedule is too busy for the day, they miss a day, and all of a sudden they're stopping back at zero. As William James puts it, like, they've let the ball of yarn unroll, and they have to spend all the effort rolling that ball again.

Chris Williamson: Yeah.

Chris Sparks: So one experiment that I really love here . . . This is in the chapter four, “Routines,” right? Where routine is just a collection of habits that reinforce each other . . . Is that you actually walk through your routine and practice it. And so the example that I give that's a really common one for people is getting out of bed right away. And so I recommend people simulate waking up in the morning with their alarm and just getting out of bed, turning off their alarm, and going out their day over and over again before it's automatic. Practicing. And then hitting any ways that they could get off track and adding friction to those ways. Right? So making it really hard to hit snooze. And the more automatic it is, the easier it is. And people are like "Well, I don't wanna spend a half-hour practicing a routine." Think about, like, this half an hour could save you months in how long it takes for this to actually become solidified. So that's a really powerful one. I call that "offline training". Highly recommend.

Chris Williamson: That's cool. I've got so many little threads open here I have to go through here. So I'll work backwards. First off, my solution for getting out of bed has actually been to get a sunrise alarm clock (which I absolutely love, everyone who's listening will know that I'm a big fan of that), but it's on the other side of the bedroom. So to get up and turn it off, I've gotta walk over . . . It's also next to my window, which is next to the curtains. Open the curtains. If you're going to turn the alarm off, might as well open the curtains. I'm not getting back to bed. There's this huge window in front of my bedroom. Like, I'm not going to go back to bed after that. Also, please . . . I know that we're tool agnostic today. I'm part of the Chris Sparks ideology today, and we are tool agnostic. However, for the love of god, please do not sleep with your phone in your bedroom. Just put it in the kitchen. Put it somewhere else. 

Like, probably the single best thing I've done in the last three years of improving myself has been not having my phone in my bedroom. And every time that I go away or I stay in a hotel or I'm on holiday, I'm reminded of why I do it. Because I forget. I just put it next to the thing and I set my alarm, I've got an alarm, and I'm like . . . I'll have watched five YouTube videos, and done . . . I've just fallen back into that old habit, right? But yeah. Please keep it outside of your bedroom. Moving back up, you mentioned about allowing yourself to sit with a good feeling, and to give yourself a reward. Rick Hanson, in "Hardwiring Happiness" episode eighty-something (sorry, Rick) . . . I did an episode with him on "Resilience", his new book . . . Totally stopped talking about Resilience and just went deep on Hardwiring Happiness. But Hardwiring Happiness, allow yourself to sit with good emotions (he suggests for between five and ten seconds) when you do something good. Let it flood your day. And I really love that. Another element of that which it forces you to do is to take time away from your phone or any other sort of stimulus, because you're quite engaged with the stimulus that is just you. And I think that's quite a lovely thing to happen. 

And then with regards to what you mentioned in the beginning, which is the upstream effort, a lot of people say to myself and some of the other guys that I work with that I am . . . Honestly, I'm such a bad procrastinator. At University all I did was hand my assignments in like on the day. I did a Master's dissertation in thirty-six hours, and I did eighty percent of the word count in the last thirty-six hours. I'm terrible. And the fact that I'm even slightly competent and able to do . . . The fact I'm able to get myself out of bed and get dressed in the morning is like fairly a miracle. But I do a couple of business and I do this podcast and I do a couple of other bits and pieces, and to some people that might seem like I'm doing a lot. And yeah, in the first place it was hard. Like when I started trying to publish one podcast a week, I was like, "Oh my god, this is taking a long time, I haven't got my systems in place, it takes me longer, it's effortful. Fuck, I keep making mistakes." 

And then I stepped it up. At the beginning of this year, I made a promise to the listeners that as long as I'm in the country they'll get two episodes a week. And then after a month, I was like, "You fucking idiot. Like why did you decide to do that? You've just like totally lynch-pinned yourself to this ridiculous workload." And now if I don't record two a week, I feel, like, lonely. I'm like, "Oh, hang on, I haven't spoken to anyone this week. I'd better do four next week." And I find myself, like, on Saturday morning I had the guy who created Titania McGrath, Andrew Doyle, had him in. And I'd only had four hours of sleep. But I was like, "I wanna get up. I wanna talk to Andrew." And I do that. And now the editing process is refined, and all the rest of it.

So yes, getting more things and fitting more things into your life is difficult in the first place, and that's why starting small is effective. But all the time, as you become more and more proficient at those things, and your processes either become more refined or your capability goes up, or . . . You know, going Tim Ferriss, perhaps you might start outsourcing some of this sort of stuff. Like all of that allows you all the time to do an Elon Musk. Like, Elon Musk might not actually work eighty hours a week. He might just work forty hours a week, but be able to do the work of eighty hours, because he's incredibly efficient with his time, or he might be whatever. So, yeah. Those are my thoughts there, Chris. I've run back up the line there, mate.

Chris Sparks: Yeah. Maybe we should talk about procrastination next.

Chris Williamson: Let's do it. Let's do it. I really need some help with that, yeah.

Chris Sparks: I think you touched on a very important concept, which is, you know, win the first hour, you win the day. That how you start the day really matters as far as setting the tone, and that having something that's important to you, that gets you excited and out of bed, is maybe the first important thing that you have. Right? That no amount of productivity techniques are going to get you to want to do something that you don't want to do. Right? So start with a goal that feels good, that's important to you. And that everything that you pick up, you need to put something else down. Right? That productivity usually comes from doing less things rather than more, but you do things of higher average importance. Right? And so you accomplish more by saying, "All right, I'd like to do both of these, but this is more important, so I'm gonna put my focus here first, and then I switch." I talk about this as serial rather than parallel.

So the key to procrastination is getting started. Right? Once you're moving, right, a body at rest tends to stay at rest, a body in motion tends to stay in motion. Just like do whatever you can to get moving. Think about this as a verb change. Like "I am going to publish a podcast" to "I am publishing a podcast." "I am going to write a blog article" to "I am writing." Right? There's a very subtle difference, and all you do is you write the first word. You open the document. Right? You take the very first step. And so conquering procrastination is finding the reason that you are not starting and reconciling that argument with yourself so that you start, and before you know it you're underway.

Chris Williamson: One of the things, to interject there, one of the things that Laura Vanderkam talked about, I don't know whether you're familiar with Laura's work, Off The Clock. So she's a time management expert, highly recommend. I'll send you the . . . I'm gonna get another play here. I'll send you the podcast once I'm done. And on that she has this really cool little way that she reframes things that she doesn't do. And a lot of the time people say, "I don't have time to do x. I don't have time to do y." 

Chris Sparks: It's not a priority.

Chris Williamson: Whereas she reframes that. Whenever she catches herself doing that, she says, "It's not a priority. It's not a priority." Because that changes it from being outside of your control to being in your control, and it forces you to question, "Actually, how much do I want this thing, and if I do want this thing and I'm not doing it, why?" I really like that reframing. It strikes a chord with what you just mentioned.

Chris Sparks: Yeah. I think that's a very . . . It's a very good thread that we've been coming back to, that you know, time . . . How we spend it is a reflection of our priorities, and that if we're not doing something there's a reason. Right? And getting in touch with that reason, understanding why, is a much more effective way of discovering why we are doing it. Or if it's even worth doing in the first place, so we can eliminate that guilt we're feeling about it, and you know, sleep better at night, be happier, et cetera. I love what you're talking about as far as Rick Hanson, where focusing on our subjective experience in "How can we make the things we're going to do anyway more enjoyable?", and the habit that he recommends is take literally one minute after you do something and just say, "Wow. Like, wasn't that great? Wasn't that fun? Aren't I glad I accomplished that?" And the transformation that makes me go throughout life saying "Wow, like, this is so much fun, like I can't believe I get to do this, I can't believe people pay me for that", versus like, "Oh my god, like Monday again, I gotta show up and do this and do that." Right? If we enjoy things, we eliminate a lot of this perceived activation energy to get started. 

I mean you touched on something that's very core to me, which I call as a "forcing function", where you put something in place that changes your default behavior. Right? Before your default behavior would have been "All right, well I'll put a podcast out when I feel like it, right, when I have time", but you've made this commitment to your audience that says "I'm going to put two episodes out a week", and then you have to reorganize your personal system to follow through with that promise. Right? You've created a new default, as like "Well, I'm going to find a way to put two episodes out a week. I have now created that as a top priority, and now my time will have to reflect that." And all this is . . . I talked about like the reflection planning cycle, is just regularly reflecting, you know, "Where is my time going, and is it in line with my priorities?" And if it's not, you rebalance your time portfolio. You say "All right, well I've been spending a lot of time on this thing that's not really important to me, maybe I should spend my time on something else that's important instead." Right?

It's like I say that relationships are really important to me, but I haven't been keeping in touch with my friends, I haven't been spending time with my significant other. I say my health is really important to me, but I haven't been setting the time aside to go to the gym, I haven't been setting the time aside to cook healthy food. Right? And all you do is you just bring yourself back into balance as far as putting more time into what you say is a higher priority. 

At a high level, this procrastination chapter is "identify why you are procrastinating and then get rid of that reason." Right? So the four categories are expectancy, value, impulsiveness, and delay. And so expectancy, that if I do this I will get a reward. Right? And so making sure that you can increase your perceived chances of success, or that if you do succeed there will be a reward at the other end. Value, that you enjoy what you're going to do, and that the reward you will receive is something that you place value on. Right? So how can you make what you're doing more enjoyable? We'll come back to the . . . I'll guess we'll use you as an example, if you don't mind—

Chris Williamson: It's fine. It's fine.

Chris Sparks: As far as producing a podcast episode. Right? So it's like, "How do I increase my chances that putting effort into producing a podcast will have the results that I want? How do I make the process of editing a podcast, which I know is a pain in the butt, more enjoyable?" Right? "How can I . . . You know, could I put on good music? Can I have a friend who has a podcast over and come and do it with me, et cetera?" Impulsiveness. This is the attention chapter in a nutshell, is like our ability to focus in the face of distractions. So we make these distractions harder to access. Right? Everyone knows that as soon as we have something we're procrastinating on that's the time that we wanna clean our room, right? That's the time we wanna organize our file structure. Like how do we remove these options from our menu? And then finally delay, a huge part of procrastination is like we have to do all the work, but this asshole in the future gets all the benefits. So how can we receive some of the benefits that we get from putting in this effort sooner?

And if you discover which one of these four is most holding you back, you can immediately put something in place that's like, "Oh, this is more enjoyable, this is more valuable." And all it does is it allows you to get started, and once you're moving you keep moving. So I call this "the procrastination algorithm". Notice why you're procrastinating. Try something. If it works, start working. If not, try something else. And it's funny, is that you just go through this process for like five or ten minutes, and you immediately start moving, because you discover "Oh, well this is why I'm not doing it. If I change this then I guess I will start moving." Versus like, you know, you start in hours or days or in you know, my case sometimes, you know, "Oh, I'll start this book months down the line." Right?

Chris Williamson: Yeah.

Chris Sparks: It's just like take that few minutes to like look at yourself and say "Why am I not doing this?" Recognize this is actually a good reason, but I can reason with this reason. Right? I can strike a compromise. And that allows you to get moving.

Chris Williamson: I get it. I totally get it. I love the idea, as well, what we're focusing on here with regards to procrastination, is the next step. One of the things that I use for me is, "What is the smallest next step that I can take that kind of puts me on the way?" So many of the guys that I'll speak to . . . So my company, we run club nights. We deal with a lot of eighteen to twenty-one students. We would call it Uni, you call it college. And so many of those guys are like, "Oh, man, like I've got this huge assignment to do, I've got this that and the other." I'm like, "First question, if you're struggling with it, have you made the file? Like have you created the Evernote or have you made the Word document?" "Oh, I haven't done that yet." It's like "Man, just do that." 'Cause that is the first thing. Before the reading, before the that. So, if you're listening and you need to do an assignment, just make the file. Like that is the next step that you can do. And you totally . . . I love the "body in motion stays in motion, a body at rest stays at rest." It is the third law of thermodynamics for procrastination. It's perfect.

So what have we got next? What's your next chapter that you wanna have a look at?

Chris Sparks: Oh, man. If you don't cut me off I could go on forever. I mean I would probably, because of the way that we started, I would probably end with learning, right?

Chris Williamson: Cool.

Chris Sparks: We talked about, at the high level, if we understand what we want to accomplish, we then identify, "What are the skills we need to acquire to accomplish this goal?", where it's very easy to fall into the trap of "Here are all the things that would be fun to learn today." It's like "I would love to speak five languages. I wanna be able to throw ninja stars. I wanna be able to do a handstand. I would like to be able to talk to fifty women a day." Right? It's like all . . . I had this long list of things that I'd like to do, but the question is which one of these is actually in the way of achieving what you want? So I call this identifying your highest leverage skill first. Like, what is your most important goal? What's the biggest goal that you have right now? And then create a picture. Like what is the version of yourself who is accomplishing this goal? Right? So like what does a day look like for them? What are they doing? What are they capable of that you are not yet capable of, right, whether it's not something you do or it's something that you'd like to do at a higher level? And then decide which one of these is most on the path. Right?

If you only picked to do one of these, which most puts you on the path towards like being this person who can achieve this goal? And that takes you down from, "Here is the long list of things I'd like to do" to "Here is what I am going to learn next." And each one of these skills that you acquire raises the floor for yourself. Right? They compound, in that every skill you acquire makes it easier to acquire complementary skills, and that by adding one at a time instead of dabbling in a bunch of things at once, all right, your speed of acquisition accelerates. And so starting with like . . . If I can only learn one thing right now, what would it be? And then you create a plan, and you decide, "All right, well how good do I need to get at this?" Right?

We don't need to become experts in anything. Sometimes, you think about 80/20 rule, that acquiring competence is enough to move on, and we frame this as a hypothesis. Like "I think that I can accomplish x, then I will be able to move on to the next thing." For me, you know, I'm trying to relearn Spanish. I say "relearn" because I've forgotten quite a bit. And so my test is, "I'd like to be able to have a half-hour conversation in Spanish with a local without them knowing that I'm learning Spanish." Right? And if I think if I can accomplish that . . . Anything beyond that is extra. But if I can accomplish that, like, I get most of the value. And so how do I get towards that? It's like, the plan is "What is the most direct path towards having a thirty-minute conversation with a native speaker?" It's probably having very short conversation with non-native speaker and then working my way up to longer conversations with more accent. But you see, once you know where you're heading, it's very easy to create a clear path to get there. And it's a much more effective way of learning.

So that's really what I recommend, is you know, for me my dream was I just wanted to spend all day learning things, but I realized like the only point of acquiring skills is using them. And so let's start from "What skills do I need and how can I effectively acquire them so that I can accomplish the things that I actually want to do?"

Chris Williamson: Yeah, there's an analogy that Yusef, one of the cohosts, uses, where he talks about his "ruthless indexing of information." And he says . . . He's gonna kill me if I get this wrong. I think his Evernote has like over a thousand summaries of one kind or another, and he's done two degrees, one of which was medicine. He runs an online business, but he also coaches people for online business, and then also is into like . . . Highly into meditation, all this sort of stuff. And you just think, like, there is this ruthless indexing of all this sort of thing, but it would be much more useful to have had ten books and implemented all of it than it would have been to have had a thousand and you can just reference it and then maybe remember some of the bits that we've gone through on that.

So Chris, I've absolutely loved today. One question, and this might be a difficult one. A lot of people might be thinking . . . I'll bring it up, don't worry, I'll bring it on. A lot of people might be thinking, "This all sounds great, Chris Sparks, productivity guru, but I don't know where to start. I don't know what I'm supposed to do." Maybe they've got Experiment Without Limits in front of them, and . . . I think you say in that that it's not necessarily a chronological book, it's not necessarily done in order. And I know that if I was to say this to you, you would say, "Well, let's have a discussion about the bottlenecks that you are facing, and we will tell you to go on a chapter like that in that particular way." 

But I'm gonna ask you a more difficult question, and it is if you were to pick one of the chapters that you've got . . . So we have goals, systems, habits, routines, time, attention, energy, procrastination, mental game, and learning . . . If you were to pick one of those to give to the broadest cross-section of people, which one do you think brings the most results on the back end? If you could give most people one chapter, what would it be? 

Chris Sparks: Hmm. Well, no, that's a good . . . It's a very good question. I think I would have to go with goals. I really come down to that. Having . . . Everything progresses naturally from a strong foundation, and that a lot of wasted effort comes from not knowing what we want. So having a structured process in place for determining "What do we want to accomplish and how do we get there?" I think a lot of other advice becomes obvious, where if we have a clear idea of where we're going, we automatically identify opportunities to take action in that direction. And so while . . . I mean setting goals is primarily a series of prompts, which is just attacking this question from different angles of "What do I want," I think that everything reduces down to having a good answer of that question. That we cannot move until we determine where we're moving. So I think that's the chapter that's most broadly applicable to anyone, and then I think we can all, myself included, have more clarity on what we're trying to accomplish. 

You know, I believe that a minute spent thinking about what we want to accomplish returns 10x, and probably more because we don't go after things that aren't that important to us, and we go after things that we want in a very effective way. Now that being said, my idea with putting this out there is that it's useful to anyone no matter what stage in their own journey they are, and I have what I call "the performance assessment", which is a short quiz, which is free and available to anyone on my website. That’s theforcingfunction.com/assessment, where I ask the questions which will help you identify "Where is your current personal bottleneck? Where is your best opportunity for growth?" And anyone who takes a few minutes to complete that, I reply to what I think is the best experiment within the best chapter in the workbook for them, because—

Chris Williamson: No way, that's awesome.

Chris Sparks: Yeah. I realize, I mean, my estimate is that you know, it would take someone, you know, twenty to thirty hours to work their way through this. There's a lot here. And I think of Experiment Without Limits as a reference guide that people can come back to as needed, and that the most important thing is determining "Oh man, this is a lot, where should I start?" And so I'd like to you know, eliminate that sort of friction for people. I've said "Hey, based on what you need right now, I'd recommend starting here." So yeah, that's something that I offer to anyone. That's theforcingfunction.com/assessment. And yeah, Experiment Without Limits, which we've been talking about a lot today, I hope if it's something that interests you, you can download it for free at theforcingfunction.com/workbook.

Chris Williamson: Amazing. Everything which we have gone through today will be linked in the show notes below. I'll tell you what, I'm gonna finish on this note, and talking about the checklist that you have, and then the review on the back end, and then the subsequent book, Experiment Without Limits. You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of Jordan Peterson's online courses. Have you done those? Yeah, so understandmyself.com and futureauthoring . . . selfauthoring.com is so similar. It's like "This is what you are, and these are some of the things you need to know about you, and this is tasks that you go through." Did you ever think about that when you were doing this? It's just—

Chris Sparks: I haven't.

Chris Williamson: It's such a similarity. In an awesome way.

Chris Sparks: No, I'm honored for the comparison. I mean I'm a big fan of Peterson. I see this as many of the things that I talk about aren't my own invention. That this is a collection of what I have found, to generalize the most, from a variety of sources. Whether things that I've read, things that I've tried, things that clients do that works for them. And so I'm happy to hear that what I have to say is said elsewhere, because it's validation that what I have to say works. Right? It's like the value here is not in the information. The value is in the application. And so I say, it's like do any course that you're actually going to finish. Right? There's nothing out there that you can read that's going to change your life, until you apply it. And then, who knows?

Chris Williamson: Amazing. A good analogy that I remember there from one of the guys was that you don't go to an art gallery because the artists that made the work are in there, you went because they display a well-curated list of art, and this is the same thing. James Clear, Atomic Habits. Probably the best book that I've read this year in terms of nonfiction. Again, nothing . . . All that stuff's available online, but it's curated together and it's delivered in context and all that sort of stuff. 

Chris, man, today has been amazing. I know that I'm gonna get hassled to get you back on, so I hope that you're ready and willing for a second episode, because you will be getting an invite for it. Everything that we have linked will be in the show notes below. If we go to theforcingfunction.com/assessment and see if we can run Chris into the ground and totally ruin his day by making him do absolutely loads of these reviews back to us, that would be great. Links to Experiment Without Limits. It's only ninety pages. Something like that. Quite a short book. Ninety-one pages. Like it's ninety pages long, it's an eBook, and it's free. Read it on a kindle. Get it on your computer. I will be going through this. I'm actually going to be going through with a couple of my clients as well. So if you are listening and you want to go through it with me, feel free to drop me a message, @ChrisWillX, wherever you follow me, and I'll tell you where I'm up to. We can kind of do like a Chris Sparks productivity book club thing, and see if we can make ourselves a little bit more productive and our performance a little bit more peak.

If people want to get in touch, Chris, other than The Forcing Function, where can they find you?

Chris Sparks: Thanks for having me on, Chris. It's been an honor and a privilege. If you're doing a part two, I would love to keep talking about this stuff. Kind of check in, how things are going. And yeah, this doesn't need to be a solo journey. The science is really clear that if you have someone you care about, a friend, a family member, who's interested in these things, you do it—

Chris Williamson: A podcast host.

Chris Sparks: A podcast host, yeah. If you do it together, you greatly increase your chances on following through and taking action. So yeah, I highly encourage that. If something I said today, you know, resonated, you know, please get in touch. Like I said, my company is The Forcing Function, so that's theforcingfunction.com. I'm on all the usual social media channels at @SparksRemarks, and you know, I'd be happy to hear from you. It's like I put this out there to help people, and so if people are using this, tell me what's useful. Anything you've got out of it. Like, that's very useful feedback for me. And it would really be validating to hear that something I said today was valuable, something you've found in Experiment Without Limits was valuable. So yeah, send me a message. Would love to continue this offline, Chris. Thank you so much.

Chris Williamson: Amazing. Chris, until next time. Thank you, man.

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