JOSH: Hello, and welcome to Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg, glad you've joined us today. In this episode, Spencer speaks with Chris Sparks about the development of feedback systems for productivity, pattern recognition, and free will, as well as perspectives on risk and optimization for opportunity recognition.

SPENCER: Chris, welcome. I'm really glad to have you here.

CHRIS: Thanks, Spencer. I'm really looking forward to this.

SPENCER: One thing I'm really interested in talking to you about is your experience with poker and what you've learned from it. Can you tell us a little bit about your background with poker?

CHRIS: Yeah, so where to begin? There was an event we call the Moneymaker Boom back in the early 2000s, where all of a sudden poker was on ESPN all the time. There was a suspension called the whole card cam where poker came out of back rooms and became a celebrity spectator sport. Fortunately, circumstances aligned that I was playing before the wave came. I happened to be a freshman in college in 2004 at Ohio State. What do you do if you are a not quite 21 freshman in the dorms hanging out with a bunch of guys? We just played poker all the time. I came from a little bit of a gaming background; I was the best player in the world at a small game called Microsoft Ants, which was an early precursor to the Starcraft and Age of Empires type games, which I'm decent at, but not quite at the level of the guys playing in stadiums these days. It was a natural progression for me to move from Ants to becoming world class in gin, achieving a perfect rating in the gin equivalent of Elo. Some of my gin friends introduced me to poker, saying, "Hey, there's this game called poker you can also play online, and people are actually making money at it." That blew my mind. I was 16 years old, and I could play a video game and make money. I started off pretty innocently playing large free rolls, free tournaments on my parents' dial-up internet in my dining room. By the time I was 17 and started college, I already had some experience under my belt. I started playing underground games at the fraternity houses, and some of the other players I didn't think were particularly good started playing on a site called Party Poker and making pretty decent money. The bar is pretty low when you're in college; this is your beer money. I immediately took an interest in it. Fast forward to my junior and senior year, I paid off my college tuition. I was really doing exceptionally well. I had a fortunate, yet unfortunate, experience where I really wanted to make television commercials for a living. I was that really annoying, overambitious corporate kid in college. My management track role working in brand advertising at Ford's advertising agency in Detroit fell through, and the auto industry collapsed along with the economy pre-financial crisis in 2008 when I graduated. I found myself in hiring purgatory in Detroit, where I didn't know anyone. The thing that I was spending 10 to 20 hours a week on, usually foregoing sleep or classes, was playing poker. All of a sudden, I had no responsibilities and decided to dedicate myself to it full time. As poker became an 80-hour per week activity, it took me about a year and a half before I was playing in the biggest games in the world against the toughest competition. From 2008 to 2011, there was an event called Black Friday when online poker in the US got shut down. At that moment, I was ranked in the top 20 in the world. It's really a big part of the way I think about things. I think there are so many lessons that can be applied from poker to decision making, managing risks, understanding yourself, and understanding complex systems. It's a big part of the principles and techniques that I work with for investors and executives today: essentially, what does it take to become world class in something? How do you rise through the ranks and become someone who can show up every day ready to perform. My experiences through 16 years of playing high-level poker are a huge part of the way that I see that.

SPENCER: That's awesome. So I want to explore some of those learnings with you. But first, I wanted to ask, you were good at multiple different games. What do you think it is that makes you good at games?

CHRIS: I'm pausing because I'm not quite sure. What comes to mind is a huge thread that ties all of my work together, is understanding human behavior and trying to predict it. In essence, in these games, we're competitive and your skill is relative. There are two approaches: you can go after your own goals, or you can focus on the other person and their goals. In Microsoft Ants, it was can I accumulate resources while also slowing down the accumulation of resources from my opponent? For gin, it's how can I get my opponent to give me the cards that I need and prevent him from getting the cards that he needs to make this hand? In poker, it's very much how can I determine what my opponent is trying to get me to do and do the opposite? There's an understanding of what someone else is going to do before they do it. One of my favorite decision-making models is called OODA Loop. One of the coolest parts about the OODA Loop is that if you are reorienting to new realities faster than your opponent, then you get inside of their loop, and they are acting upon an outdated model of the world. They expect you to be in one place, but you've already moved on to the next.

SPENCER: Can you define the OODA Loop just so people understand what that means?

CHRIS: Sure. It comes from a fighter pilot named John Boyd. He was essentially looking at how do two pilots who are operating with similar machinery have an aerial fight in the sky? How do some pilots have exceptional records where they win hundreds of these battles without a loss, where you would assume the base rate is about a 50/50 chance? Realizing that that common skill was the ability to reorient to the environment faster, it's essentially taking into account new information and using that to adjust faster than your opponent. That being the critical skill is having a better model of reality and adjusting that model in a faster and more accurate fashion than your opponent. OODA stands for observe, orient, decide, act, these being discrete steps that one goes through in making any decision, whether it's crossing the street, doing an investment, or playing a poker hand. With each step in this decision-making process, one is receiving feedback from the environment. Just like any feedback loop, incorporating that feedback into the models, into observations, what you see and what you look for, into the way decisions are made, as well as ultimately the actions that are taken.

SPENCER: Can you walk me through an OODA Loop applied to, let's say, a poker hand or to another game?

CHRIS: Sure. A super simplistic poker example. Let's say in essence, poker is when someone is paying you off when you have a better hand than they do. The most expensive hand to have is the second best one, and a good hand, but not a great hand. A lot of this metagame or the game inside of the game is applying pressure to opponents and forcing them to make difficult decisions. The expectation is that the more difficult decisions someone is put upon, the more likely they are to make a mistake. A common aspect is to keep the aggression on, to keep doing what I call a half bluff, where you do something where you don't show them your hand, but you're putting them to a difficult decision. At a certain point, they're going to break and play back against you with a counter-aggressive tactic. The trick where the OODA Loop comes into play is that first you are observing their reaction to your actions, knowing what to look for, and you are reorienting to that based on what you know about this opponent and your history with them. Some opponents have been playing for years, where that breaking point is not only in a general sense but on that day, what is their current mental state at this moment? Then I'm deciding at which point I can anticipate that they're going to make a move. Once they're making a move, I want my aggressive action to be with a hand rather than a bluff. I'm anticipating that they're going to try to make a move against me. I want to have the hand before they react. It's punch, punch, punch, counter-punch type of thing. The action is, I take my foot off the gas as they are anticipating, hey, this guy is bullying me; he's trying to pick on me. The whole scenario works in reverse, where I am playing with the expectations that they have of my actions. I'm getting inside of their loop by bluffing at the times when they think I can't be bluffing. As soon as they've had enough of me and they say they have to take a stand, that's where I want to have that hand.

SPENCER: That's cool. I do very amateur mixed martial arts just for fun. What this reminds me of is this idea that you're kind of trying to train your opponent. Let's say you do a low leg kick, and you kind of hit their leg. It doesn't hurt them that much, but it's kind of annoying. Then you do another low leg kick, and now you've kind of trained them to expect these little leg kicks at certain timings. Suddenly, they're anticipating it. That means they're moving to block your leg kick. Now that you can predict that they're going to block your leg kick, you can actually use that to your advantage by faking a low leg kick and then maybe doing something else where they're now trained to expect it. Does that relate to this idea that you're talking about?

CHRIS: Absolutely. As you say that, I realize you had my answer of what makes me particularly good at games. I think I have an outsized ability for pattern recognition. What you describe as creating a pattern, lulls an opponent into a certain behavior and then disrupts that pattern once it's been established to your advantage. A lot of these games are about establishing patterns, but there is a false pattern, right? There is an overt extrapolation based upon past behavior, where they can only see the tactics but they don't understand the strategy underneath. A key skill in all games is both recognizing the patterns and knowing when to extrapolate them and when to rely on the more fingertip feel dynamic, metagame approach. This is a huge part of why I find I really don't even understand it sometimes, but my savant abilities to recognize core beliefs or behaviors that are holding my clients back. My assumption is that a lot of our behavior is pretty deterministic, in the sense that what we do and what we think is determined by the context that we find ourselves in. In essence, we are pattern-driven creatures. A lot of what I do with clients is to uncover some of these invisible patterns and then find ways to disrupt those patterns, either by altering the context that they put themselves in or by changing the narrative or the habitual response to those contexts.

SPENCER: It's interesting if you take that kind of outside view on your own behavior and start to notice, oh, whenever I'm in situation X, I do behavior Y. Whenever there are cookies on the counter, I always eat them, for example. That gives you the ability to realize that you are this pattern response system. You can start to learn to disrupt your responses by disrupting the patterns. If I don't need the cookies on the counter, then I'm not going to eat cookies so often. It also brings up this kind of thinking that I find super interesting, which is, imagine you're walking in the kitchen and you see the cookies. You can now have this reasoning: if I grab a cookie and eat it, then probably I'm going to be the sort of person that always grabs a cookie and eats it in a sufficiently similar situation. If I can resist a cookie now, that means I'm the sort of person that in this kind of situation won't eat that cookie. I can project that forward into the future. I find that to be a helpful trick to motivate myself to take action because I'm not just deciding based on this one moment; I'm deciding on how I'm going to behave in all situations that are sufficiently similar to this one.

CHRIS: Oh, man, I love that so much. Every decision we make echoes into eternity. Everything that we do makes it more likely we will do that in the future. So it's not that eating a cookie today is basically zero cost; it's not a positive expected value, but it doesn't really matter all that much. Where the true cost is, is that I'm reinforcing this behavior. The trigger happens, hey, I'm bored, I'm a little bit hungry, I walk into the kitchen and see the pantry, I see the cookie, and in response, I eat the cookie. Thus, you're digging a deeper hole. Imagine a river carving out the Grand Canyon; you've carved out a little bit more rock. Every time you're in a similar context, the cookie action happens. A way to take control and exercise your free will is to think, "Hey, is this decision one that I want to be echoing into eternity? Do I want to be making a similar decision all the time in the future?" I think that's a really cool way to shift into a curious mindset, understanding that your decisions have consequences. Being curious, "Hey, if I do the thing that maybe I wouldn't normally do, what are the second-order effects of that? What happens next?" It's cool. It's the way that I describe viewing your life as an experiment. The workbook that I created, Experiment Without Limits, is that a lot of these limits we place on ourselves come from being afraid to just try things and see what happens. The approach you described, "Hey, I'm going to increase this gap," right? A lot of meditation is just increasing the gap between stimulus and response. Wait a second, if I eat this cookie, what else is going to be true? What path on the decision tree does this put me on? Is that a path that I want to be on? It's not the initial decision itself that's costly; it's that you've put yourself on a different branch of the tree. All of these branching alternate realities are going to be not quite as good as the branches where you don't eat that cookie.

SPENCER: Yeah, exactly. It also reminds me of the distinction between an action and a policy, where an action is something you're doing in a particular moment in time, and a policy is a choice about how you decide that you're going to carry out actions in the future. I think that thinking in terms of actions versus policies can be really useful, especially when it comes to risk. For example, the action of going skydiving is actually not that dangerous. Sure, it's much more dangerous than walking to the store, but it's not that dangerous to go skydiving one time. The policy of going skydiving every single weekend, though, is way more dangerous than the action of skydiving once because now you're compounding that risk every single weekend. To first approximation, if you're taking a small risk and doing it 10 times, that's about 10 times more dangerous than doing it once. If you're doing it 100 times, like every single weekend for a long time, then that's going to be 100 times more risky. When there's an action, you can take on a lot more risk than when there's a policy. With policies, you have to be really risk-averse because if you take a risky policy, it's going to compound and eventually destroy you. Any reaction to that?

CHRIS: That's really cool. I hadn't heard that frame before in terms of policies. It could be principles, rules, or default guardrails; there are a lot of different ways to think about it, but their impact in protecting us from outsized risks is multiplied by the frequency that we are in those situations. Something that in a vacuum, as you said, is not that big of a deal. Skydiving is pretty safe compared to hopping into your car and driving to the supermarket when you think about it on a base rate basis. The issue is that if there's not an examination of how I make decisions about this type of stuff, what I value, and what trade-offs I'm willing to make, it's easy to multiply out a small risk across many different actions. Something that's relatively innocuous can become quite costly. This is the concept of the micromort that some of my friends make fun of me for thinking about. Micromorts are essentially a one in a million chance of death. A common one being, hey, driving is probably, up until the age of 40, the most dangerous thing that we're doing. For a long period of my time, up until recently, when I needed a car, I tried to avoid driving or being in a car whenever possible because, you know, it's inversion: if this is my most likely way to die, I'd like to do that as little as possible. There's a really pervasive bias in society towards results. Everyone sees a result, and we think, "Hey, this thing happened before that thing," cause and effect. We're so oriented towards something bad happening, "Okay, I need to not do that again," or "Oh, nothing bad happened, okay, I can keep on doing that," versus thinking from an expected value perspective. This ties into a moral luck aspect as well. Moral luck is like, hey, you can drive after drinking many times, and nothing is going to happen, but it doesn't mean it's a good idea. If you play that scenario out enough times, it's going to be a very costly scenario. Just thinking about, hey, process-wise, what is my expectation of taking this action, even if that expectation is not realized? In poker, this comes into play, and people have very wildly shifting standards of risk depending upon how they're doing in a particular session. Everyone in this room is familiar with risk aversion, but until you've experienced it, hey, I'm down tens of thousands of dollars, and all of a sudden, you become risk-seeking because that narrative becomes, "I want to restore this equilibrium that I've created," or "Oh, now I'm up tens of thousands of dollars, and I'm God, and everything I do turns to gold," and you start taking extra risks that you wouldn't normally do. Or, "Oh, I haven't seen a hand play for hours." If you're playing live poker, you can literally sit there and fold hands for 10 hours correctly because chances are lumpy; you can go a long time without getting a good hand. The tendency is that people have a hard time sitting on their hands on the sidelines. What becomes a very low conviction play turns into a very high conviction bet. People have a hard time sitting and watching the action; they need to get involved. The standards for risk loosen over time, where boredom is our greatest enemy. This notion of a policy in poker is, "Hey, these are the hands that I play. If I don't receive one of these hands, I don't play." The more you can stick to a policy like that with clearly outlined exceptions, that's how you avoid changing your standards and making risks that you might not make if you were in a better decision-making state. It's how you inoculate yourself against taking risks when your decision-making is clouded.

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SPENCER: I've heard that there's a cultural idea in some poker circles, where if you're analyzing someone's situation together and saying, "Oh, I was in this game, and here's the hand I got and here's what had been played," that there's kind of a taboo against saying how it actually turned out, whether you won the hand or not, with the idea being that it's terrible to think about the outcome, because really what matters is given the information you had available, what was the optimal decision? The fact of whether you actually won or not can be highly misleading and depends on actual luck. What do you think about that?

CHRIS: So discussing a poker hand is only a scenario to examine the thought behind the decisions. The decisions themselves aren't as important as the rationale behind them. Those are the threads that you're trying to latch onto. There's this natural human tendency to say, "Hey, this thing went well, how do I do more of that? This thing didn't go so well, how do I do less of that?" Just avoiding that tendency altogether and saying, "Hey, let's examine the thought process here," with the understanding that if we hone and iterate on this thought process, the score will take care of itself; the results will play out over time. Everyone can tell you about the big hands that they lost, but the hands that they won, those get glossed over, no matter whether they got in incredibly bad as a low probability to win or they played it really well. All those games get lumped together. I coached hundreds of poker players, players who were extremely high-level successful professionals but still had lapses in the way that they thought about this. The really annoying question that I would ask when they described a poker hand is, "Why are you doing this thing? Explain to me why you're doing it." You can take what looks like the right action for the wrong reason. Say you're trying to bet because you want this person to fold, and they end up calling, but with a worse hand, and you win the pot. You're like, "Oh, I won money," but actually, you thought he had a better hand; you wanted him to fold, and that's why you bet. It was not a good bet, even if it worked out in your favor. Drilling down, it's the same thing as a coach: "Why are you doing that? What's the reason behind that? What are you looking to accomplish?" That is the source code for our behavior: the thought behind the behavior. If you can think about things the right way, the actions fall into place naturally. As I said, the money that you receive, chips, business, etc., all that stuff takes care of itself if you can nail down that thought process behind the decision.

SPENCER: This is often really hard for people in life when something goes really badly to actually think, "No, you know what, given the information I had and the information I could have easily acquired, that was actually the correct decision." The fact that it went really badly, okay, maybe if I made a mistake, I should have a moral obligation to try to fix things, but it doesn't mean that I actually did anything wrong. I think that's really hard to grasp on a deep level.

CHRIS: Yeah, I think about decisions in a book and context. Some of you might be familiar with the notion of a premortem and a postmortem, also referred to as Murphyjitsu. The premortem, think of this as a decision journal capturing my thoughts about the decision that I'm making. I might do this for a poker hand that I'm studying, or for a major life decision, like which city do I want to move to, or what's the next move going to be in my career? What are all of the thoughts that I have about this? Specifically, what are the assumptions that are implicit in making this decision? Trying to tease out what is the key or critical assumption that is driving my decision and calibrating a conviction level there, from zero to 100%. The cool thing is that once you put a number on that conviction level, you can think, "What new information would change that level of conviction?" This works in multiple ways. First, if you have extremely high conviction about something, and it is the key assumption driving your decision, maybe you need to pull on that thread a little bit: are you maybe a little bit overconfident in this area? Is there a really cheap experiment that you can run that would ensure that your conviction level here is correct? If you're overconfident on this one assumption, then the whole rest of this decision is called into question. This is both how you make better decisions by making these criteria explicit, but also by capturing the way that you're thinking about things afterward, after the decision has been made. You have some data upon which to reorient to the world. Thinking through the loop, you can look back at your thought process and say, "Was there anything that I missed? Was there anything that I could have known at the time that would have helped me make a better decision?" You can do this afterward as a postmortem: "All right, I'm going to be facing a similar situation in the future. What can I do next time for this to go better?" The real trick is this Murphyjitsu, which is almost this mental time travel of simulating the decision after you've already made it and saying, "Let's assume that I've made the wrong decision here, and this just goes completely wrong. What are some of the reasons why that could be the case?"

SPENCER: Just to clarify, you do that prior to anything going wrong? Trying to say, let's assume that this is going to go wrong? What are my best guesses for why, right?

CHRIS: Exactly.

SPENCER: So it's like a postmortem. But it's called a premortem because it's done before you've actually figured out what's happened.

CHRIS: Yes.

SPENCER: So one day, I want to ask you about digging in terms of experimenting without limits, and then connecting that to our discussion of risk. It seems to me that experimentation is incredibly valuable. But at the same time, some experiments can go horribly wrong. If we do a lot of them, and each one has a small chance of going wrong, that could accumulate into a lot of risk. So I tend to advise people to experiment a lot, but to focus mainly on low-risk experiments and to only do high-risk experiments sparingly. What's your thought on that?

CHRIS: Yeah, I'm with you. When I think of an experiment, I'm thinking, what's the fastest, cheapest way to validate my assumptions or to reduce my level of uncertainty about the path forward? This constant iterative process is, what is the next action that I can do to gain conviction in my current direction? How do I further validate what I'm doing? For me, I want to have constant tiny experiments running. I think where a lot of people go wrong is that they wait for too much certainty in order to make what they think of as a very large experiment, you know, a huge career move, a very big different approach, or rewiring a personality. Rather than thinking about something as a dichotomy, hey, do I try to build a $100 million business or sell all my possessions and travel the world? Think about what a tiny experiment that can be conducted in a very short time period, ideally seven days, which would give me more confidence in this direction. Keeping that loop very tight, and I say loop, I mean a feedback loop. You take an action, you receive feedback, and you reorient yourself to the world, incorporating that into your plan for the next experiment. The more of these experiments you can run, and the faster you can be running them, the faster you reorient to what you actually want. I do think that when you think about risky experiments, usually the biggest risk is the risks not taken. One of my favorite studies had people who were considering making a really massive decision in their lives flip a coin to see if they did it. Flipping a coin is completely random, but those who flipped the coin that said yes and then made that major decision were far happier than those who did not. We tend to wait far too long to do something. Jeff Bezos, in one of the Amazon shareholder letters, talks about this view: if you are waiting until you have more than 70% of the information, you've waited too long. Most decisions are, are you going to have chicken for dinner, or are you going to have steak for dinner? They tend to be reversible, and the costs tend not to be nearly as much as we think. Historically, on average, we are much happier having made the change than not having made the change. I think this experimental framing is so powerful because if we're within the confines of an experiment, right, we've decided, hey, for this next month, I'm going to try this thing, whatever that thing is, I'm going to swing dance, I want to intermittent fast, I want to learn this new programming language, whatever it is, you decide for that next 30 days, I'm going to act as if I am 100% confident in this direction unless I see this assumption invalidated. My whole focus for this next month is going to be in validating that assumption. I'm going to sprint towards that, knowing at the end of the 30 days, I could stop and say, I'm not going to do that anymore, or oh, this is going great. How can I double down? Most reflection dials back to this double down or stop. This ability to sprint, knowing that you're going to have the opportunity to stop everything and completely course correct, gets rid of all of this existential angst, all of this self-sabotage, all of this doubt that prevents us from moving forward at maximum speed. This is the main way that I have found to ensure that we're always moving forward: by always creating experiments.

SPENCER: You mentioned briefly this idea of reversibility, and I think that's really key when it comes to making a decision quickly. Basically, many decisions in life can be easily reversed. You make a mistake, and you're like, Okay, I'm just going to not do that anymore. But there are some decisions in life that are very hard to reverse. For example, if you leave your romantic partner, you may never be able to get them back. Maybe you could, but maybe you can't, and even if you tried, it might jeopardize your relationship and it might be much worse. One key aspect is that with decisions that are reversible, you can make them much quicker, and maybe 70% confidence in the outcome is enough. Another aspect is what you might call the maximum plausible risk. There's always risk in anything we do; we could walk to the store and a brick could fall off the roof and kill us, but that's not really a plausible risk. If you think about investing half of your lifelong savings in an investment that has very high potential risk, if that went to zero, it could severely affect your quality of life and your retirement. These two ideas of reversibility or irreversibility and the maximum possible risk you're taking can help us determine the level of certainty we need. If something's not reversible, or if there's a lot potentially at stake, then we want to get a higher level of confidence, maybe 80%, 90%, or even 90% to 95% or higher. Whereas if it's quickly reversible and there's not actually that much at stake, then we could just do rapid iterative experiments, and 70% confidence might actually be optimal.

CHRIS: That's exactly right. First, this is encapsulated by expected value, which is how large is the upside multiplied by how often that happens, plus how large is the downside and how often that happens?

SPENCER: Well, that doesn't take into account the risks. I feel like expected value and risk are separate concepts.

CHRIS: It really depends. Sometimes it can be worthwhile to take a large risk if the gain is a multiplier of that. Obviously, you don't risk all of your chips; you don't put everything at risk. But you keep in mind, and again, a lot of this is dependent on value. Sometimes you want to value a small but closer to guaranteed outcome, while other times you want to go for something that has a low chance of occurring but has very high convexity, very high upside. Other times, you can take a big risk if the reward is worth it. Gamblers use what's called the Kelly Criterion. This is very common in the investing world as well, to determine what is the acceptable bet size, how much you can risk based on what your edge is. The obvious thing being there, the larger your edge, the higher your expected value from this bet that you're placing, the more of your bankroll you're able to place at risk. There are scenarios, let's say that if someone offered me a bet today where we're going to flip this coin, heads or tails. If it's heads, you give me everything that you own, all of your money, everything. If it's tails, I give you triple the worst of everything that you own. That is a positive expected value bet that I'm going to take every single time, partially because I know if I lost it all, I could rebuild. My math is failing me at the moment, and that's a plus million dollar plus expected value. I'm going to take that every time. Obviously, there's a little bit of reversibility there; you can lose it all, and it's super costly, but you could get it back.

SPENCER: I think for most people, that wouldn't be a worthwhile bet.

CHRIS: All of these risks are personal. In investing, they call this the efficient frontier. Essentially, every trade-off that you make is in order to get a little bit more return, right? To have a little bit of a higher edge, you need to take more risk. It's very rare that you can get an increased edge without increased risk. The hope is that you get additional units of edge greater than additional units of risk.

SPENCER: Can you define edge just to make sure that we're on the same page about that?

CHRIS: Edge is that you, on average, expect to make more than you lose. In a poker context, I have an edge. If we sat down today, Spencer, and played, I would have a long-term edge over you in poker. A lot of times, you are going to beat me, especially if we play for short periods of time. But the longer that I play, the more confidence I have that I will have more money than when I started.

SPENCER: Got it. Makes sense. So I have a question for you about games. This isn't a thought about a bit, that when you're first learning a game, and this could be a formal game like poker or chess, or it could be more like a life skill game in life. It seems to me that in the beginning, really the game is about not blundering. When you're a total amateur at chess, it's like just don't do something incredibly stupid. That's the main thing you're focused on. Then it seems to me that after that, when you're a little bit better, what you're trying to do is learn some strategy that you keep explicitly in mind in your head, right? You're just thinking about, Oh, I need to try to control the center or something like this, right? Then you get a little bit more advanced, and you start getting an intuitive strategy where you start being able to notice immediately, that's an opportunity. But what I'm wondering, since I've never become an expert in games like you have, what's after that? What do the next levels of being a master at games look like?

CHRIS: Well, exactly what you've described seems to be the case. I just started learning tennis, and a great example is if you watch two amateurs play, who wins the match? The person who wins the match is the person who makes the least unforced errors. Right now, all we are drilling is literally can I get the ball over the net and put it into play? Just keeping the ball in play. When you're early on in poker, that's why people play their preflop hands based off the chart. It's like play these hands, don't play these hands. It makes it really simple to reduce early mistakes and avoid getting involved in bad situations by playing the wrong hands. Those mistakes tend to compound. I think about progress in any field as a standard deviation analogy. Going from zero to 68%, the first standard deviation is how do I avoid making the big mistakes? Right, telling me how I'm going to die so that I don't go to that place.

SPENCER: You are referencing the fact that with normal distribution, 68% of the values fall within plus or minus one standard deviation from the mean, I think, right?

CHRIS: Exactly. I'm sure there's someone who knows more about math, and maybe my numbers aren't exactly right, but I believe it was 68. So how do you go from 68 to 85? Okay, I start to develop strategy, I start to kind of internalize some of these best practices, I can at least hold my own. Not only making fewer mistakes, occasionally I make a good play. To go from 85 to 95, okay, now I'm an expert, and I know all the best strategies and start to develop my own. Where I work with clients, and where I think a great deal about, is how does someone go not only from 95 to 99, so from three standard deviations to four, how do I go from 99, being in the top 1% in the field to the top 0.01% in the field? Once you get to that point, particularly in games, it is knowing who you are playing against better than they know themselves. I talked about this a little while ago: you are predicting what they're going to do before they do it. They are operating off of an assumption that is incorrect. As discussed with martial arts, you're creating patterns and then disrupting them. You're a few moves ahead of them in chess terms, and that is sort of the infinite game or the Red Queen type situation with poker. The bar of being ahead of your opponents is a constantly moving target; the tide is always rising. Not only do you need to be improving to get better, you need to be improving just to hold your place in the hierarchy, just to keep your rung on the ladder. That pace of improvement, that derivative, is ever accelerating. You have to get better at an increasing pace just to hold your own. This is where I would love to introduce this concept of centrality, which is a really key one in all games and investing. Buffett would refer to this as a circle of competence. Centrality means there are many scenarios that come up within the context of a game. Different situations can be roughly categorized; this is a situation that you know better than your opponent does. You've done deeper study, you have more experience, whatever it is. Think about this in tennis: you've just been to a fifth set tiebreaker more than your opponent. Not only do you not crack under pressure, but you know some of the mistakes that might come up, and you already have guardrails in place to prevent those. You have an absolute advantage in this vacuum moment. One cool thing is you want to establish as many of these centralities as you can — pockets or moats of your unique advantage. The next level skill, which you're referring to, Spencer, is that we spend more of the game play within my areas of centrality versus your areas of centrality. In a basketball metaphor, if our core competency is full court press, always pushing the ball down the court, really trying to look for three-on-two type situations, then we're going to run the ball and press the entire game because we have more experience that is more in line with our skills. When you get to the very top levels, it's all about matchups. How can I create matchups or maximize the number of situations where I have an edge, where the odds are in my favor versus when the odds are in your favor?

SPENCER: This relates really well to something that my martial arts teacher taught me about, which is this idea that oftentimes the greatest martial artists are ones that force you to fight in their style. The idea is that they're the best at their style. So they can't beat you your style, but they can beat you their style, and they make you play their game. He gave me an example of this, which people say is true, which is that a great martial artist one day shows up at a dojo and challenges everyone at the dojo to a fight one at a time. He starts with the white belts and fights each of them one at a time. Then he works his way up to the higher belts, all the way up to the black belts, and beats every single one of them. The really insane thing about his fighting is that he does the same move on every single one of them. They know exactly what move he's going to do, and yet he's so good at doing that one move that even though they know it's coming, they cannot stop it. He forces them to fight in his exact game. So yeah, I love that.

CHRIS: I love that. It touches a little bit on explore-exploit. A lot of success is exploring lots of paths and finding where your outsize advantages are, and then finding as many ways as possible to exploit that edge until that edge disappears. I'm a huge Japanophile. In the apocryphal tale of Musashi, the greatest swordsman who ever lived, that's what he would do. He would go to all the dojos and challenge the greatest fighter that they had. Where he was a strategic master was that he took it away from, you know, he was visiting them on their home court, subtly manipulating them out of that comfort zone into places where he had a unique advantage, advantageous terrain, or installing conditions onto the match that subtly put the odds in his favor, or really throwing off, showing up hours late to the bout, all these types of psychological maneuvers in order to shift the field play into where his unique advantage was. One more aspect of this, what I've tried to touch on is first, not only spending more time in your area of unique advantage, but identifying when the odds are in your favor and being able to place more into the middle to be able to bet larger. Card counters, I'm not a card counter, but I know many professional card counters, including some of the original MIT Blackjack Team that got famous from the Bringing Down the House movie. A lot of people don't know about blackjack is that the house has about a 1% edge on you, on average. Card counting is powerful because based on the cards that are in the deck, there are certain times where you now have a 1% edge. It's a small edge, but it's a real one. Being able to count the cards, that edge is what these guys do. They're betting the minimum, say they're betting $10 a hand. Then they notice that the odds have shifted in their favor, and now they have a 1% edge. So now they start betting $1,000 a hand. That 1% is magnified during those moments where they have that edge. That's how a lot of card counters get discovered. It's a little bit suspicious when these guys are betting $10, and then all of a sudden, they bet $1,000. One of the key skills is not only maximizing the frequency with which odds are in your favor, but being able to have more at stake when the odds are in your favor.

SPENCER: Once you take into account the risk of having your legs broken from counting, I'm not sure it's worth it anymore. But that's a really well-said strategy. If we bring these ideas back to everyday life, what we're really talking about here is, one, know what you're good at, and make sure that the things you're doing are really leveraging the things that you're better at relative to others. Play to your strengths. Second, if we think about opportunities in life, it's not like every day you have equal opportunities. Every once in a while, you're going to have an opportunity that's way better than almost any you're going to see in your life. That is the time to strike where you can really create enormous value. Most of the opportunities you're getting, maybe they're not that great. If you try to take too many of those, you might walk out of the room before being able to go big on the big opportunity.

CHRIS: That is so well said. Two key concepts there that I just want to underline. First, I think a lot of what is called productivity is just knowing what you do well and finding ways to lean into that to leverage it. Usually, that comes by finding ways to complement your strengths, either by partnering up with someone who has complementary strengths or by choosing a pursuit that allows you to do most of what you do best where you have the greatest leverage. On a more macro level, as you said, I think everyone has these few moments where there's a split second that really matters where the opportunity presents itself. It's such a slam dunk opportunity. You might get 20 of these in a lifetime. The way that you are able to take advantage of these huge opportunities is to think of them as waves coming to the shore, giant waves to surf. You can't get to that wave if you're not already in position; you need to be paddling. In order to seize these temporal opportunities, you need to know what they look like. That means doing the hard work ahead of time to identify the opportunities you're looking for so that you can recognize those opportunities when they come. You can feel very confident saying no to the 99% of opportunities that aren't high leverage, that aren't high edge, so that you can have the space to fully get behind and seize these opportunities when they come. That notion is just so powerful. Once you get to a certain point, success is determined not by what you say yes to, but by what you're saying no to, because that creates the space to be able to say yes.

SPENCER: Absolutely. The importance of slack is really great. That means slack in terms of time and slack in terms of resources. If you have no free time, then when that huge opportunity arises, you can't take it. If you're living paycheck to paycheck, which unfortunately people can get stuck in a cycle to no fault of their own, it's going to be really hard to suddenly make that investment that could pay off huge because you just don't have the slack to do stuff. I think trying to keep enough slack to take advantage of opportunities is also really important.

CHRIS: I really hammer my clients on this. I'm always trying to find ways for them to do less, to say yes to less, to take things off their plate, to take more time away from their devices and work, to create this slack. This is not only to think about the opportunities that are on the direct path to where they want to go, but to have the space to pivot to these opportunities when they present themselves. The less slack we have, the less we're able to course correct when these opportunities come. We're seeing this play out in real time with the pandemic. All of our systems were optimized for minimum slack, just-in-time manufacturing. How do we minimize expenses, but not thinking about the hidden costs of handing off all of our core competencies to geopolitical partners who are not necessarily aligned with ourselves. We're seeing all of those second and third order effects play out now. We have this massive crisis, and because we are a giant train, we aren't able to change the course of that train to meet the demands of this crisis because there was no slack. Unfortunately, the slack has had to create a tie, stopping that train completely. So, yes, a very clear, historic example that we are living through of the downside of not having slack.

[promo]

SPENCER: What do people get wrong when they're trying to be more productive?

CHRIS: That's a longer answer than what they get right. I always try to go with my first answer on these. I think people think of productive actions as ends rather than means. It's this hypothetical end state that someone is moving towards, the classic approach where once I learn how to be productive, all of my other problems will somehow go away. This is the instrumental skill. I really like to differentiate productivity from what I do, where there's this expectation that I'm going to come in and recommend tools or, you know, here's some hacks, here's some different routines that you can do. I think there are some interesting fundamental building blocks that come from that. We can dive more into habits and systems type stuff, which is just fundamentally how do we get ourselves to do things? I think those principles are really interesting because you uncover one pattern and see ways to apply that pattern elsewhere. I tend to find that those who are most enthusiastic about becoming productive are generally the least productive in actually accomplishing things.

SPENCER: Interesting.

CHRIS: I talked about this in a post called the perils of over-optimization. I see this tendency; I imagine a lot of people listening to this episode will fall into this bucket of being biased towards perfection and really planning things ahead of time, trying to create the perfect system, trying to find the exact right tool for the job, you know, here's my ideal day, and really trying to do a lot of that heavy lifting up front as far as what do I need to do to be productive? I always want, anytime I get advice, to ask, do I want this person in my life? Something that I found super interesting is that a lot of the people who have actually taken productivity concepts, when I see behind the scenes, you know, I go meet them, I stay with them, or we have conversations, they actually aren't that much more productive than a lot of people who don't think about this stuff all the time. It's really kind of simplistic and annoying because, you know, it's true that the key to productivity is just taking action, and that we create all of these substitutes for action. What I'm always looking for is how can I incorporate feedback into everything that I'm doing, where I'm always finding some way to move forward in every area of my life and collect feedback on what are the things that I'm doing that are most leading me to where I want to go. I can double down on those, and presumably, something that doesn't make it into that group is something I can just stop doing, reclaim those resources, and put them somewhere with a higher ROI.

SPENCER: Just to make sure I understand, what you're getting at is that a lot of people approach productivity by saying, let me optimize every little variable, when in reality, a lot of times, the way to be productive is to just have a strong feedback loop to see whether what you're doing is actually taking you in the direction where you're trying to go in an efficient way. Do some stuff, see if that feedback loop is working, and then make adjustments from there? Is that what you're getting at?

CHRIS: Yeah, that's a really good way of putting it. Thinking about velocity versus speed, right? Everyone wants to move faster, but velocity is both speed and direction. The problem is a lot of people will sprint really quickly but then realize that they're doing completely the wrong thing and need to change direction. All those systems that they had built up get abandoned, and it's starting off at square one versus having something that's lightweight and flexible. That way, as we naturally course-correct and reorient, we can repurpose what we have that's working and continually build off of that. We never find ourselves back at square one because we're constantly reorienting and not having to scrap. I think about a lot of what I do as a kind of post-productivity, where productivity learning is somewhat of the gateway drug for figuring out what works for me, what are the conditions that allow me to be successful, and what do I really want? What are the trade-offs that I'm willing to make in order to achieve that? What I think about in terms of high performance is the most direct path to get where we're going. The fastest path between two points is a straight line. Implicit to that is having a directionally correct way that we are heading, that our actions are moving ourselves down the path. Imagine hairpins going up the mountain, constantly going back and forth really quickly. It's better to be deliberate and intentional but head in that correct direction. The cool thing is, the better idea we have of where we want to be, we can usually identify a more direct path, and there are things that we think are instrumental towards that but really aren't necessary. The classic one that I talk about is a lot of people treating financial freedom as a terminal goal rather than an instrumental goal, where clearly financial freedom unlocks a lot of opportunities, but it's not an end in and of itself. If you treat money as an ultimate goal, you're ultimately paying a really poor exchange rate on the things that you want from money, such as having impact, where kind of what you want, etc., then you can generally go after those things in a more direct fashion.

SPENCER: It's funny, the two topics that come up on this podcast pretty much every single time are instrumental values and intrinsic values, and probabilistic thinking. I actually have a way of thinking about productivity that I don't think you're familiar with. My guess is it's quite similar to what you think about it, but I'd be curious to just explain it to you quickly and get your reaction to it. How does that sound?

CHRIS:: Absolutely, yeah.

SPENCER: Cool. The way I think about productivity is with a simple formula: productivity equals time times efficiency times objective. I'll just break that down a little bit. First of all, what is productivity in that equation? Productivity is basically the amount of value you're producing each week according to what you care about, according to your own intrinsic values. So I'm saying that productivity is equal to time times efficiency times objectives. What is time, that's just how many hours you're working each week. There's a classic mistake people make, which is they say, to be more productive, just work more hours. Because it's such an obvious lever, I think it's overused, just trying to put in more hours. But there are two other factors in the equation that we can also adjust. The second is efficiency. Efficiency is the number of units of work you get done each hour. Depending on what you're doing, it could be the number of words you write or whatever unit of work you're doing. That's the second lever because if in each hour you can somehow get more words written or more emails responded to, that's going to make you more productive. The third factor is objective. Objective is basically what you were talking about with the idea of velocity being a direction, where speed is just a magnitude. The objective is the amount of value that each unit of your work creates. Another way of thinking about that is how good is the direction you're headed? In your framework, efficiency is kind of like speed, and objective is kind of like the direction you're going. If you multiply all these three things together, time times efficiency times objective, that's basically how much value you're producing each week. I'm curious to hear your reaction to that because I think often people spend a lot of time optimizing number one, which is the time, and not nearly enough time optimizing the objective, which is where they're trying to get to.

CHRIS: I 100% agree. First, underlining that productivity is self-defined. We're all playing single-player games. One person's definition is going to be different from your own. Really nailing that in, and he's like, how do we define success? Everything works backwards from that goal. I agree with your first two buckets. For sure. I think these are way overemphasized. First, how do I work more hours? Second, how do I be more efficient? A lot of those gains tend to be sublinear. The main bucket, and where I work with clients primarily, is what you refer to as objectives, which is essentially what are the activities that you are doing. There are some activities that lead you to your goals faster and more directly, and others have greater leverage, have greater average value, etc. A lot of improving the way that you spend your time is just working on higher average important priorities. You can work less but accomplish more. It's an arbitrage, right? If you're putting $1 value, everything can be somewhat reduced down to this dollar value per hour. If you have something that has an expected value of $1,000 an hour, or you're doing all these things that have an expected value of $10 an hour, either they're not worth that much, or you could easily pay someone to do them for you, right? Delegate, etc. There's a 100x return in getting rid of one of these $10 an hour activities and replacing it, arbitraging it with a $1,000 an hour activity. This notion that the way we spend our time falls on a power law, that the most important thing you could be doing is more important than everything else combined. That's where the greatest lever, the greatest opportunities are for someone who wants to become more productive, is to really carefully audit the way that they spend time.

SPENCER: Absolutely. To use a metaphor, I think maybe make it a little simpler for people. Imagine that you're a writer. Time is how many hours you work per week writing. Efficiency is how many words you get done, and your objective is, what are you writing? Are you writing an article about this? Are you writing an article about this other thing? Bringing in the power law idea, chances are the different things you write are going to have wildly different reactions, and most of them maybe will have not much reaction, not much value produced. But then every once in a while, you might have a blockbuster article you wrote that gets 50 times more views than your average article. If you can do more of those, that's going to move the needle much more than working an extra five hours a week.

CHRIS: The example that I like to share, I think this came up in LessWrong as well, is I wanted to do stand-up comedy. I thought there were a lot of skills that could be gained: presentation, humor, being able to hold my own in front of an audience, etc. I thought, okay, if I perform stand-up comedy, this will be a cool way to both check off a bucket list item and learn some of the skills that I think would be important for other things that I want to do. Realizing, okay, well, I have limited time. What are the efficiency gains? I have no idea what I'm doing, but I can be really clear about my objective. My objective is I want to perform a stand-up comedy routine. There are lots of things that I could backwards rationalize later that were "productive" towards that. I could have spent hours watching comedy sets on YouTube, I could have talked to other comedians, but what's the most direct path? I write and tell jokes, and I see which jokes are funny. I tell more of those that are funny and discard those that aren't. I just keep doing the thing that's closest to actually performing. That's how you can uncover that there are activities that are much more on the objective. This classic, oh, I did eight hours of work. But what was the actual work done? Was there something that could have been done in less time, maybe more difficult, maybe more energy-intensive, but you would have made more progress in less time? Usually, the clearer you are about that objective, the more you can have activities that are in mind.

SPENCER: That seems much more efficient. A lot of times when we do these other activities, they're actually a sort of fake work or almost procrastination, right? You're like, oh, I have to watch a bunch of comedy sets on Netflix because that's going to help me with comedy, but maybe you're just trying to avoid the anxiety of actually working on your set. Absolutely.

CHRIS: Every action we take is serving us in some way. It's very easy to rationalize anything that we're doing. The more rational we are, the better we can rationalize. We can come up with reasons to convince ourselves of anything. That's why planning is amazing; it externalizes our thoughts. If you do something completely different, it's a lot harder to justify as having had a productive day. I see this all the time with clients. They list out 20 things that they have done, but they were numbers 21 through 40 on their list, and number one didn't get touched.

SPENCER: Talking about comedy sets, it reminds me of an interesting thing I heard a comedian say. Early on in their career, they were just trying to build on their pre-existing work. Eventually, they moved to a model where they would throw away their comedy every year and start fresh. This forced them to generate new ideas every single time and created a completely different optimization loop of what it means to do comedy. It's not just about holding on to ideas you've been working on for years; it's about generating original content. They felt that this pushed their comedy to the next level. Any thoughts about that?

CHRIS: I believe that comes from Born Standing Up , Steve Martin's biography. I think he's pretty unique in that he was pushing the envelope more than just about anyone. He was almost changing the definition of what people found humorous. These are things that hadn't been done before. There's a great risk to that, but knowing what his personal objective was is important. He wanted to create his own form of comedy, while someone else's objective might have been different, like wanting to make a lot of money. That's "The Tonight Show" type thing, right? You have a standard format that you optimize for. Or, if you want to become famous, you might become a pop star instead of creating progressive rock. Once you know what you're optimizing for, it affects the way you go about things.

SPENCER: One thing that makes me think is that if you really want to get good at anything, a lot of times quantity beats anything else. In other words, imagine you want to get really good at comedy. Are you better off honing one thing to perfection or just trying to generate three jokes every single day of your life? I suspect that while the optimal is some combination, if you had to pick one strategy, the quantity strategy often wins. Similarly, with writing, the person that writes every single day for two hours generally becomes a much better writer. I'm curious to hear your reaction to that. Do you agree with that?

CHRIS: The science is pretty clear on this. The classic study was you had a course where the entire grade was based on who could make the best ceramic pot during the semester. One group only had to make one pot, so they could spend the entire semester perfecting that pot. The other group was told to just make as many pots as possible. Across the board, whoever made the most pots ended up having the best pot. You see this a lot with writing; you don't actually know the pieces that are going to take off. Our tastes can differ from the market. This is something that I talk about frequently: the speed of your improvement in any skill is proportional to the tightness of your feedback loops, which is just a fancy way of saying the more often you get feedback on what you're doing, the faster you will improve. I always encourage, especially with this type of audience, to release things way before you're ready. Have the crappiest rough draft imaginable and have a couple of friends look at it. Have an MVP that's barely usable to the point of giving some new sort of utility, and see how people use it. Essentially, that is the race: how do you get from something in your head to something in someone else's hands? That's something that I've really had to reorient myself around. I have really strong perfectionistic tendencies. My sort of pipe dream is to go into a cave, read 200 books on the subject, do some deep thinking, meditate a couple of hours a day, and come out with one distilled, compressed principle that's written on a stone tablet. That's just not the way these things work. I really love the framing in the classic essay "You and Your Research", where he talks about the difference between open door and closed door. You have the sign looking at, hey, who are the scientists? Everyone's publishing a lot of papers because it's the dimension you have to optimize for. But who are the scientists publishing papers that actually change the way science is done, that actually move towards a new paradigm? You have a lot of scientists who were working with their door closed all the time, and they were publishing more; they were, "more productive". But the things they were doing were a lot less relevant than the scientists, I think, like Feynman, who is a pretty good archetype of this. A lot of the time was spent doing intellectual play and conversation and goofing off. But the things they did actually mattered because they were open to that feedback and were able to adjust quickly to it.

SPENCER: When I was doing my most recent TEDx talk, I recorded an incredibly crappy version of it just on my phone. Then I paid 20 people to watch it and critique it. I updated it, recorded another version, and then paid another 20 people to watch it. That was my little self-made feedback loop, which I found super valuable for honing it quickly without investing too much time and going in a direction that might be way off.

CHRIS: This is something that I think about a ton. It's what I call a forcing function. It's what I named my company after. I think it's a really important concept for accelerating progress. That presentation example is a key one. Anytime someone asks me for help with a presentation, that's the advice I give them: when are you giving the presentation? Set a date, two weeks ahead of time, and pick a group of people who are going to watch your presentation. It's going to be the worst thing ever; you're going to be completely embarrassed. But you don't know what you don't know until you have to stand up and talk about it. You want that to be as early as possible so you can direct your efforts to the parts of the presentation that need the most work. You're creating these false deadlines, these things you have to show up for, and find out how on track you are and what needs the most work. That's how you create those feedback cycles. By the time you give the presentation, a lot of those failure modes have already been ironed out.

SPENCER: Can you do a fine forcing function for us and talk about the relevance of that concept?

CHRIS: Sure. So I think of a forcing function as anything that changes your defaults. It comes from both mathematics and design. I like the design version the best, which is bringing to consciousness. I think of a design element that automatically draws the eye. Things that you can do to change the default will continue in the same vein; you have to show up and deliver something. I think this is the primary function of a meeting and how meetings can actually be productive in the sense of a stand-up meeting: you have to show up, and no one wants to show up empty-handed. Miraculously, there is progress in between meetings. The more often you meet, the more often people have to report progress. No one likes showing up empty-handed; the more you ask the same question, the more people are inclined to want to have a different answer for you. It's putting these things into place that make your behavior different than it might be. Oftentimes, they can take the form of externalizing something that you want to do. When I say externalizing, I mean it lives outside of your head and ideally has other people involved. The problem with a to-do or a long-term project living within your head is that, because we have an easy time of backwards rationalizing, it's very easy to keep kicking that can down the road, saying, "Oh, maybe that thing wasn't all that important after all. Maybe now's not the right time." But all of a sudden, we have a deadline that's been created; we have something we have to show up for, people who are counting on us. That creates a very powerful intrinsic motivator to show up and have something to show them so that we don't waste their time. It's a really easy thing. As far as leverage, just put this meeting in place, and all of a sudden, all the incentives have shifted. Now the default is to work on this earlier. It's the difference between having one final exam and a weekly quiz, where the tendency with the final exam is we slack off the whole semester, and then the day before the exam, we try to cram the whole semester's worth of knowledge versus spaced repetition: learn a little bit as we go.

SPENCER: We're talking about two ways that you can create your own forcing functions. One is for presentation; you could make a pre-presentation plan to give to your friends two weeks before. Then we talked about scheduling meetings. What are some other ways that people can create their own forcing functions?

CHRIS: I say there are major categories here. We talked about deadlines, externalization, and having accountability, or it's something that someone is expecting. We have to show up. I think another way is just having more at stake. The intrinsic motivators involve having other people involved, but it could just be the opposite, where we promised a launch date. If we don't hit that date, our customers are going to know; they're going to think less about us. We have to ship that. I think a lot of times, productivity is a function of how much we have at stake. It can be useful to over-promise to the point that we have to catch up to what others are expecting of us.

SPENCER: Reminds me of the website [stickk.com] (https://www.stickk.com/), spelled s-t-i-c-k-k, where you put up money that will go to some charity you hate if you fail at a goal. For example, "If I don't get my homework done by Friday night, then I'm going to give $50 to this thing that I really don't want to support."

CHRIS: A really silly one that I've been doing recently that's been really powerful is, I think my least consistent habit was meditation. For a number of reasons, I think that meditation is probably the best time I could be spending. It increases my ability to make decisions, improves my mental game, improves my serenity, and presents when I'm with clients. That's not even touching on the ultimate pursuit of self-actualization and enlightenment. For whatever reason, I was just having a hard time putting my butt in the chair and sitting there. The thing that I did is I have a friend with whom we have a Zoom call. I sit in my chair and close my eyes, and he sits in his chair and closes his eyes. As strange as it is, we're not even looking at each other. There's barely any discussion. Maybe we'll talk afterwards about how it went or anything that came up, but just the fact that he's counting on me, and if I don't show up, maybe he won't do it, is enough to take me from being about 30% successful with daily meditation to now it's 100%. It's pretty cool to identify these opportunities in your life. All I did was set up a recurring call, and I literally solved this habit for myself where now I don't even have to think about it. I just click the button when the calendar reminder pops up.

SPENCER: That's a really good technique. I found a similarly powerful idea in my own life. Many years ago, I used to start all these projects and not finish them. It was one of the most frustrating things for me. I think what was going on is that when you start a new project, you're really excited about it, and it's all shiny and new. Then you start getting into the details, and it starts not only being a little bit less exciting, but you also start realizing there are all these boring parts to doing it. Then some other project comes along, and you're like, "Oh, that's a new shiny idea." The way I solved this problem for myself is I basically just involved another person who will be let down if I stop. For me, that's incredibly motivating. Now, I can get myself to work on a project for years and really stick with it because I'm very motivated in that way. That being said, different people are different. Not everyone is certainly motivated like that, but for me, that's incredibly effective.

CHRIS: There are two things to unpack there. First, "lone wolf" tends to be a misnomer. Basically, any accomplishment of any magnitude, even if you only know one person who was involved, there are a lot of people behind the scenes who are working in complementary ways to make it happen. People who are successful come up together. Even in an extremely competitive pursuit like poker, there's a lot of collaboration that happens behind the scenes. The second point is just understanding yourself. I think that's where the post-productivity stuff comes into play. There are things that generalize across the board. Get a great night's sleep, have a morning routine, work on your most important thing first, and don't get caught in your email or social media while you're trying to do deep work. All the basic stuff that every single book on productivity has covered is completely unique. The really interesting stuff is that over time, as you're aware and observe what works, you notice these conditions that work for you. When I ship projects, when I feel happy, when the day goes well, these are the commonalities and correlations. The more you notice those things that go well or the failure modes, the things that prevent you from doing well, it's easy to reinstall those or take one area of your life that's working and export it to other areas. This skill of pattern recognition can be so powerful because once you uncover something that works for you, you can find all these other opportunities to apply it elsewhere or continue to double down on those results. If you understand that you're very socially motivated, you can find ways to integrate social accountability and interaction and collaboration into everything that you do.

SPENCER: I would add to that, I think it also illustrates why experimentation is so important. A lot of times you'll meet someone who says, "Oh, I tried this thing, and it changed my life. You've got to try it," and you try it, and it doesn't work for you. There's no one size fits all. Exactly. It doesn't mean that person is wrong. Sometimes we misattribute things; that's certainly a thing that happens. It may be that thing changed that person's life, but it just didn't change yours. You have to try a lot of different experiments to find the thing that actually works for you. Once you find that thing, you can start reapplying it. Because I know I'm socially motivated, I can use that in many ways. For example, if I want to make sure I don't avoid doing something, I can say to my partner, "Hey, can you make sure I do this by Saturday?" Then I'll feel like I'm letting her down if I don't do it. That kind of becomes a reusable strategy.

CHRIS: I couldn't agree more. You asked about stumbling blocks. Another key one that's related is people try to take on tactics wholesale, rather than trying to create the experiences or the experiments that allow them to internalize principles and remix them and make them their own. What works for someone else is a cool thing to try, but collect data and make sure that it works.

SPENCER: Chris, thanks so much for coming on. This was great.

CHRIS: Such a pleasure, Spencer. I love talking about these topics. I really appreciate you being an excellent conversation partner to explore these. Anyone listening, if you enjoyed this and want to continue, I think that this is the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one. Please reach out; we'd love to hear from you. My name is Chris Sparks, and you can find me at ForcingFunction, find me on Twitter at SparksRemarks, or you can also just send me an email directly, chris@theforcingfunction.com. If you'd like to learn a little bit more about what we're about, a couple of places that I would send you. First, my workbook experiment that limits 90 pages of what I have learned helps executives and investors achieve maximum productivity and performance. It's free to download [here] (https://www.forcingfunction.com/workbook). I've also written articles on some of these topics: over-optimization, how to maximize your productivity, working from home, how to build a service-based business, and how to make optimal decisions. You can find all those on our website. It's such a pleasure to be here, Spencer. Thank you so much.

SPENCER: Thanks, Chris.

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