Decide Like A Pro

 

In this webinar, Chris Sparks shared his five-step system to Decide Like a Pro. Chris has taught this system to successful portfolio managers, traders, and executives—now it’s your turn.

How are the best decisions made? Can this skill be taught?

These questions drove Chris Sparks to create Team Performance Training, a ten-week program teaching fifteen executives how to multiply their output, build high-performance architecture, and systematically ship projects faster.

You make hundreds of decisions every single day. Consider this: even a small upgrade to your decision-making skills can create a staggering difference in your long-term trajectory. Think of yourself as a ship—a small shift in your orientation results in a massive shift to your final destination.

This free training is 45 minutes followed by audience Q&A. 

Please note: due to technical difficulty with the video, only the audio recording is available.

Video recording above; audio recording, resources mentioned and full transcript below.

Transcript:

Chris: All right! Hello, everyone. Honored to have you all here, very grateful to have such a great crowd for a topic that is very near and dear to my heart. So my name is Chris Sparks, and this is "Decide Like A Pro." Before I jump in, I'd love to just give a short introduction of who I am and why we're here today. So I'm the founder of a company called Forcing Function, and at Forcing Function we do executive performance training. I like to think that we are deconstructing excellence, and in the past five years I've found that elite performers share three qualities. They visualize: they have clarity on their vision and how they will achieve it. They prioritize: the important things in their life and their business come first. They know how to optimally allocate their limited resources. And then finally they systematize: turning everything they do into a process. And this allows them to continually iterate and improve over time. Visualize, prioritize, systematize. That's what we teach here at Forcing Function.

Today's training is a celebration, 'cause we are launching the third cohort of our group program, Team Performance Training. This is a ten-week group coaching experience that kicks off three weeks from today, and this is where I teach you my system for elite performance from the ground up. This is not another course. You are alongside a curated group of fourteen smart and talented executives, founders, and investors, and we give each other feedback as well as I support you in the implementation of my VPS system so that you can visualize, prioritize, systematize your own life, your own career, your own business.

Team Performance Training is our flagship program. I'm super proud of it, so I can't help but beam a little bit as I talk about it. Because of the hands-on nature, we only accept entrance into Team Performance Training by applications only. So, those applications are open for the next twelve days. So if you're listening to this, you want to take yourself to the next level, highly encourage you to go to teamperformancetraining.com, check out some of those testimonials just to get a sense for the amazing outcomes that are possible for you.

Now that the public service announcement is out of the way, just a couple of logistics. I'm gonna give you a forty-minute presentation today followed by fifteen minutes of Q&A. If you have any questions then I would highly encourage you to ask them. Please use the Q&A function at the bottom. Anyone listening, you can check out that function, see what questions everyone is asking, upvote those, make sure that those questions get asked. And today because we're a larger group, I'm gonna be leveraging the chat to hold you accountable for actually putting this framework into practice. So please, change that chat to "everyone" so we can all see it.

Today is like a single-player version of what a typical Team Performance Training session looks like. So, sorry if you wanted to just listen to this super passively, hide in the back row. That's—this is not the time for you. I'm going to be pausing, and I'm going to be waiting for you to work through these steps together, and to put something into the chat—both so I can make sure that you're doing it, but also so I can give you some immediate feedback to push you through some bottleneck that you have in your decision-making process.

So, please, don't make it awkward for me. Like, I don't wanna sit here, have some silence, wait for you to put something in the chat. Be present, be here in the room participating, engaging, it will make sure that you will get the maximum out of this next hour. And my goal is to make sure that you have one decision that's top of mind for you, and you can walk away with a lot of clarity on that decision. Maybe even make it and take that next action right after you hop off today.

Now, just in case you have to leave early, we're recording this, we're going to send it out to everyone via email with a transcript on Friday, so if you have to bounce early, your loss but no sweat. You'll be able to watch it later.

First, before I teach you my system, I want to tell you why I think decision-making is so important. Why should you be paying attention, on the edge of your seat, right now? I believe that an executive's primary responsibility is to make decisions. So, whether that's building your product and how you want to design it, where you choose to invest your personal capital or who you choose to raise money from (if you're a founder), who you add to your team or the team that you decide to join, these are the true leverage points in your life.

And if you drill down, you recognize that we make hundreds of decisions every single day. Who we choose to spend our time with, the clothes that you wear, what you choose to put into your body, most importantly where you choose to focus your attention. All of these small, meaningful decisions that add up to a meaningful life. And this is the power of compounding, that every decision we make plants the seeds for the next decision. So if we make a good decision, we're going to find ourselves in favorable outcomes, which will lead to more good decisions. If we make bad decisions, that'll put us in unfavorable situations where we're likely to make even worse decisions. So we put ourselves on the best possible timeline every time by making good decisions. So simply, better decisions, better life. If you want to achieve financial freedom, if you want to avoid making some embarrassing failures, you want to just make sure you're focusing on doing the right things so you live a more happy and fulfilled life, starting with your decision-making process. And it's really important to note that decision-making is a skill that can be learned. People who are really good at making decisions are people who have practiced the art of making decisions.

So that's my hope today, is to translate, to transfer some of the skill that I've developed with working with these high performers over the years to make good decisions so that your decisions in your own life can be a little bit more bulletproof and be a little bit more aligned with your true values. It's like, I think of decision-making as this meta-skill. So I define a meta-skill as a higher-order skill, and it acts as a skill multiplier, right? This skill of decision-making multiplies all of the other skills in your life. So if you become a better decision maker, everything in your life will improve. The issue is most people approach decision-making in a vacuum. One decision at a time. Every decision is an opportunity to, "Oh, how do I make decisions on this type of thing?"

Well, if we think about things more holistically, we realize that no decision exists in a vacuum. Right? Everything is interconnected, every decision we make touches on every other decision. So this is the power of turning these recurring actions like decision-making into a process, because this allows us to improve the process that creates positive outcomes. We allow the score, whether that's the money in your bank account, the satisfaction that you have in your life, the quality of the people in your life, we allow these outcomes to flow naturally from having a process that improves over time. Every time we make a decision, our ability to make good decisions gets a little bit more dialed-in.

Today, I wanna teach you my five step process for decision-making. This is a process that I've honed over the last few years, and I've been fortunate enough to teach to dozens of high performers, whether these are portfolio managers, successful founders, top-level executives—this has gone through a lot of iterations, but I'm really, really excited 'cause this is the first time that I've shared it publicly, so if you have any feedback I'd love to hear it.

If you want to get the most out of today, and I really do hope you do, I want you to pick one decision that you want to focus on today. The decision itself does not matter. It can be big or small, but you will get ten times the benefit from the next few minutes if we work through an actual decision together. Now, to make sure you're doing it, let's try it. I want you to type that decision you have into the chat, and I'm going to wait while you do that.

So, what is one decision that you would like to focus on right now?

Okay, we got some good ones here. So, should we change careers? This is a big one. Should I launch a workshop? Where should I move to? Which clients would I like to prioritize? Should I take on more clients? What should I prioritize in my day? Should I become a professional investor? Should I have kids? How can I improve my communication? Should I make a large investment in equipment for my company? Should I stay self-employed or go full-employed? How do I support myself best from my coaching practice? Should I enroll in serious training? Should I go back to university?

These are some big questions. So maybe you won't get there completely today, but I at least want to give you some more clarity about what are the beliefs, the values, the assumptions that are underlying these decisions so that you can more quickly get to what is that new information that you need in order to feel really good about making this decision, or when will you be ready to make this decision? That's kind of the framing that I want you to have.

If you wanna be following along live with this process, we created a decision-making canvas. So you can download this, you can print it out, you can use it offline, this is something that is kind of a one page compression of this process. So I have a bunch of these printed out, and I use these any time that I have a decision. So feel free to refer to that or use that today.

My five step system, in a sense, or five, is hurdles, options, values, assumptions, predictions.

So briefly, hurdles: it's important to know when you are ready to move forward. What is that moment you know you have enough information, I can make that decision? Let's go.

Two: options. What alternatives are you not considering? Maybe you've noticed this, but people tend to think about things in terms of, "Do I do A, or do I do B," when there are a lot of other options.

Values: It's important when you're making a decision, what are you optimizing for? What is your goal with this decision? What are you trying to achieve? That itself will bring a ton of clarity.

Assumptions: so a lot of decision-making is finding ways to reduce your uncertainty. All of your decisions are based on some beliefs that you have. If you can excavate these beliefs, you can discover what beliefs are valid, and what beliefs maybe aren't so valid.

And then finally, predictions: a lot of making a big decision especially is de-risking that decision. So thinking about the ways that the decision could go wrong and preventing those so that you feel more conviction about moving forward, there's less of a possibility of failure.

I'm gonna go through each of these in turn, and with each of these we're going to be leveraging the chat, giving you the opportunity to put this into practice in your decisions. So we're gonna keep on drilling down.

So, let's start with hurdles. Hurdles, in a nutshell, is knowing when you are ready to move forward. So the idea of a hurdle comes from investing. In investing, they have a hurdle rate, where there's a minimum required return that a project needs to hit in order to invest. If a project hits that return, take my money. If it doesn't hit, that's a pass. And the key here is that people delay making decisions, particularly really big ones. There's a lot of research that says if you're considering making a really big decision, most people do not regret making the plunge. Right? And the key is the faster that we move, not only are we likely to seize these temporally-bound opportunities, right—a fancy way of saying that opportunities don't last forever. We maximize our opportunity of success. We also collect more information, because we receive feedback from our environment, thus becoming a better decision-maker. What we want to avoid is making failures of omission. We want to make more failures of commission, being in the arena.

So, the key question here is, "How important is this decision?" If the decision is not very important, then good. Just make your best guess and move forward. If it's really important, have that threshold that you have that direct path in mind, where to hit. So this is a two-part question. I want you to type two numbers into the chat. So, a number from zero to a hundred percent. Zero is, "I have no freaking clue." A hundred percent is like, "I would bet my life on this." Zero to a hundred percent, how confident are you right now about this decision? How are you feeling about it, zero to a hundred percent?

Great. Wide ranges here. The number itself does not matter. The second question is, how confident would you need to be to move forward? So, if you're changing careers or you are changing clients or you are making a large investment, how confident would you need to be? What would your number need to be in order to say, "Yes, I'm doing this for sure," or, "No, I'm definitely not doing this?"

So the power is in the difference between these two numbers. So let's say that you were sixty percent confident and your confidence hurdle is eighty percent. This means that all you need to do is identify things that will bring you from sixty-percent confidence to eighty-percent confidence. This is when we get to assumptions. It's like, what new information would increase your confidence on this decision? This creates the immediate action steps you can take in order to make this decision confidently.

Number two: options. So, it's something that I've seen, this is a common thing that's said particularly about founders, is this dichotomous thinking. Thinking of decisions in terms of black and white. I like to give the extreme example of a client who asked me whether I thought he should try to build a billion-dollar business or move to Myanmar and move into an ashram and start meditating to find enlightenment. And you have these really big extremes that we put ourselves in, right? Do I stay in my really high-paying job or do I bet it all on black and pursue this idea that I've been thinking about? Well, there's usually a lot of options in the middle, there's a lot of space in that grey. And what studies have found is that when people are forced to generate more options than the two that they are considering, they usually end up picking one of the new options. It's kind of a funny thing. They weren't even considering this option, but if you force them to think of other things they could do, they start to iterate, they start to get closer to a way where they can get many of the upsides of their decision without all of the risks. And that's what we're doing in this section of options. We're trying to find the middle path for you.

So, I want you to give a—you know, take a pencil, take a piece of paper, and just come up with five options. Things that you could do. And this is gonna be uncomfortable. I want you to have some really bad ideas. Like, the whole idea is just to illuminate that there are a lot of possibilities here.

So force yourself. Just write down like five things that you could do that you weren't already considering, and when you have those just take one of them and type it into the chat. What's one option that you weren't considering before? It doesn't need to be something that you're actually considering, but just like what is one other thing that you could do? And the question in the back of your mind is like, is this illuminating anything for you? Is there something that I wasn't considering, is there something that I might have been missing? Is there another way? Is there a middle path?

So I'm gonna pause here, give you an opportunity to think. Just brainstorm, get some things on the page, and type one thing into the chat. What's one thing that you were not considering doing before?

These are great, guys. So, looking for ways to experiment. This is really big at Forcing Function, where you can try on this big move and see whether you like it, see whether you wanna double-down. Does it mean you rent, instead of you buy? You consult, instead of starting the business? You take a course instead of jumping in headfirst? You set a date, so, "Hey, I'm going to try this and see if I get some traction"? You move in for a while, and see whether you like it. This—all this is doing is just illuminating, you have a lot of options here. And what we're trying to start looking for is resonance. Like, listen to your body. Is there something that your body is called towards? "Hey, this is really interesting, there's something here." Pull on those threads, right? All we're doing is just illuminating, you have infinite possibilities in the middle. See what possibility most excites you.

So, number three. I really, really like this one, is values. There's a lot of people talking about values, particularly this time of year. The question here is, with this decision, what are you optimizing for? Most difficult decisions are actually trade-offs between conflicting values. A lot of suffering in life comes from wanting it all, but if life is this large buffet, this infinite buffet, we will just be forced to give up things that we want in order to decide and get what we want most. So this is in every decision, I think what a lot of things come down to is, "What is most important to optimize in this decision?"

We have an exercise that we call the Top Values Exercise, and it's really powerful because not only do you think about what's valuable to you, you decide what you value most. What comes first for you, before everything else. Is it your family, is it your relationship, is it financial freedom, is it personal growth? Whatever it is, if you decide what you're optimizing for in this decision, the decision becomes a lot clearer. This is the classic saying, "Hard decisions, easy life," where if you make that really difficult choice (which, it's going to evolve over time, right? You're gonna mature, your values are gonna evolve, you're gonna evolve), but if you get closer to, "Why am I here? What do I value?", a lot of these other decisions cascade down and become really easy.

I give the example of, like, where do you live? Well, that depends on what you value. Right? For me, it was like, do I wanna live in a place like New York City or a place like Austin? A place like New York, wow. Like, amazing arts and culture, lots of ambition, lots of just really smart, intelligent people, but it's also really expensive. It can be a little bit stressful. A place like Austin, it's really conducive to health, great community, a lot more space, I have my own office. It's like, "Well, which one should I pick?" Well, that depends. What's more important to me? Is it more important to have health? Is it more important to have ambition? If I'm able to decide that, that allows me to move forward with confidence.

So I want you to type into the chat, this decision that you have in mind, what value are you optimizing for most? What are you trying to achieve with this decision?

You can see how this works, right? If you're optimizing for financial freedom, if you're optimizing for health, for equanimity, for sustainability, for growth, for legacy, once you've started to generate all of these options, you just pick the option which best satisfies this value. Right? You just—these decisions are really hard because we don't know what we want. So start with, "What do you want?", and then pick the option that most satisfies what you want.

So, it's really cool to think about, all right, as I say out loud, as I type, "this is what I'm optimizing for" thinking how does this affect your decision? Does it start to bring things into focus? I really do hope so.

Number four: assumptions. A lot of decision-making is finding ways to reduce your uncertainty about the decision. This is really what data collection, what bumping up against reality is all about, is having more conviction about what we're doing. This allows us to move at maximum speed. You know, there's the classic saying about assumptions that I won't repeat here, but essentially it's like the things that really steer us aside are the things that we assume to be true but we don't actually have a basis for that. If we have an image here, it's like here's the decision at the top, but it rests on all of these assumptions. And if we don't challenge our assumptions from time to time, it's like this code that's been programmed into us a long time ago that we never actually said, "Hey, does this code still work?" I mean, maybe it's from childhood, maybe it's this underlying belief that we haven't actually questioned. But if we excavate what is hidden behind our decision, we can start to see what our decision rests upon. Like, what are these critical beliefs that we believe this to be true thus I decide this?

So it's good to kind of uncover here, like, with this decision, like what's preventing you from moving forward? Like, what are you still unsure about, what are you uncertain about, what are you worried about? If you can uncover this, this creates an easy next action: what could you do to reduce your uncertainty? Like, let's say like you're thinking about moving to a new city, and you're uncertain because you don't know if you will like being there? Well, that's pretty easy to solve. Find a way to get more information about what it's like being there. The fastest way is just to talk to people who've lived there. The next step would be, okay, you go for a week and you live as if you're going to be there. If you're not sure if you want to make a career change, talk to people who've made that change. What would they have done differently? Why are they happy they did it? Try to see what a day in the life looks like. Right? Give some sort of experimental test so that you can validate this assumption that your decision is resting upon.

And the key here is that there is a crux. There is one critical assumption that if you change your mind about this assumption, the entire basis of your decision would change. So you might not know this now, but let's take a guess. Like, what is the one belief that is most important to your decision? What do you think is the crux of this decision? Let's type it into the chat.

These are really powerful, guys. These are really powerful. I hope this is illuminating for you. It's funny how just admitting these beliefs exist starts to defang them, start to kinda reduce their power over you, and perhaps illuminate some really easy, obvious, cheap steps in order to make this belief have less of a hold over you. The whole idea here is just to make it so that you feel really confident about it moving forward. So as you've uncovered this crux, this key assumption, right, this could be practical. Like, "Can I do this?" This could be psychological, "Is this what I want?" If you're able to uncover evidence, either through action or through past results, this will help to allow you to move forward, or to release this option if it's not an option you want to do. So like that crux that you identified, like that's the first place to start in order to—remember what we, from the beginning, how confident you were, how confident you need to be. This is the most direct path to start to bridge that gap.

So, think about what you could do today, this week, that could help to validate to make you more confident in this belief, and particularly if it's something that you're uncovering that is holding you back psychologically. Thinking about, well, what—how does this belief serve me right now? How is this belief protecting me? Where did it arise? And is there a way that I can disprove it, particularly if I think it's holding me back? I think fear as a compass is a really good, you know, baseline assumption. So, yeah. Thank you guys for your vulnerability, for sharing that. This is really good stuff.

Last and foremost is predictions. And the key to predictions is that a lot of what prevents us from moving forward with decisions is we're afraid of failure. We think of all the worst-case scenarios that could occur, and obviously, this leads us towards inaction. But I have a secret for you, it is that you have a superpower already, and this superpower is predicting the future. I really do believe that we have the power to predict the future. In psychological literature, they call this "prospective hindsight." That you generate explanations for an event as if it's already happened. There's a lot of proof that we can do that, and then as we go through this exercise, remember, the key to peak performance is being able to visualize. You are able to prevent those failure modes from occurring. This is really nuanced, so I wanna explain this again, is that you imagine that you made this decision and you think about what could happen. Well, if this goes really well, what does that look like? On the other hand, if this doesn't go so well, what does that look like?

So, on the not-so-well—I call this "Murphy-jitsu." So, some of you might be familiar with Murphy's Law: "What can go wrong, will go wrong." It can be really powerful to say, "All right, assume that I failed. I'm looking forward to three months, six months, twelve months down the line after I've made this decision, and I'm like, man, that didn't go so well." Okay. Assume that I failed. Why did I fail? Like, visualize it, think of all the reasons that it went wrong.

And the really powerful thing here is that it allows you to make mistakes in simulation rather than reality. Rather than having to live through this for three, six, twelve months, well it's like, "Well, I can already predict it. That means that I can change it." Right? We visualize a decision, it goes poorly, but why did it go poorly? Let's not fail that way. What can I do now to make sure that failure doesn't happen?

And this is really cool, because all of those things that you're afraid of, you realize that some of them you can prevent. You don't have to worry about them anymore. So, let's type into chat, this decision that you're making, what is one way you could fail? What's one thing that you're afraid of?

Great job, guys. I know this can be heavy stuff, but it's really important, this ability—think of it as being able to look at the void and not flinch. That if you think about how it can go badly, you won't have to experience it going badly.

So I want you to just sit in this for a second, right? You've typed out this failure mode. Just close your eyes and imagine what that looks like. Where are you? Who are you with? What does it feel like? What happened? And then it allows you to kind of work backwards from that. This thing that's not going well, what could have caused that? Why did things go wrong? And as you start to work backwards, you identify things that are easily preventable. And by preventing these things you're afraid of, it allows you to move forward with confidence. It's like something we like to say at Forcing Function, is, "The greatest risk is the risk not taken." It allows you to take this calculated risk knowing that you've done what you can, you've tried your best to make sure that things go well. That's all you can do. There's no regret.

So, yeah. I really love this for uncovering these fears, these legitimate reasons to not move forward, but to illuminate that there are aspects of this that you can control now, that you can change this outcome by predicting the future.

We covered a lot of ground today. I just wanna bring it all together, put it in a little bit of a bow. There are five steps in my mind to making decisions. The first is hurdles. And if you have a hurdle in place, remember that confidence level that you need to hit, this allows you to both move quickly but also most directly at the goal. What are the things you could be doing right now to get your confidence to the point that you can make this decision? 'Cause that's the key, is to be more decisive, to make more decisions, to take more risks.

The second is options. Widen your vision, see all the possibilities. Don't get caught in these apples-to-oranges comparisons where it's one extreme or the other. You have lots of possibilities, so generate some. Be cool brainstorming having a bunch of bad ideas. Many good ideas start off as bad ideas. The more possibilities you generate, the more you're able to generate an option to allow you to get a lot of the upside with not as much of the downside.

Values, right? It's like these difficult things that we have to think about that make our lives much easier. So when you're going into a decision, be clear on your objective. What are you trying to accomplish with this decision? If you can get to terms with that, the best option will usually be very clear. A lot of people have a hard time making decisions because they don't know what they're trying to accomplish.

Fourth, assumptions. This is essentially being prepared, that you have these underlying beliefs behind your decision, and some of these beliefs are preventing you from moving forward. There are things you can do in the present: research. Talk to friends. Try something. Take a class, run an experiment, that will help you to make sure that these beliefs are beliefs that you can rely on, that you can trust yourself.

And then finally there are predictions, that most failures are preventable. So if you can de-risk your decision, this makes you a lot more confident that you can move forward.

So we're gonna go to Q&A in five minutes, but I think that you guys have had some sort of breakthrough. All of you. I can tell from the things that you're typing in. So I would like everyone to just type one thing that you are going to do to help you make this decision. What's one thing that you would like to do to help make this decision?

I love these, guys. I can't help myself: the more specific that you make this, the more likely it is you’ll do it. So I like to say, it's like, "How will you know if this has been completed?" Some sort of small action step that you can say, "Yes, this is done." And if you want to make sure that you do it, decide when you're going to do it. Don't have this be a loose intention. Block off some time in your calendar where you're going to sit down and do it. Some of these might only take you two minutes, but taking that very first step, getting the flywheel going, will illuminate more opportunities in the future.

So that's—I think that's what a lot of this is about, is people think of making decisions as going into a quiet room and thinking. Well, no. It's like, what can I do to get towards a decision? A lot of this is in your control to uncover information, beliefs, ideas that allow you to move forward with more certainty.

If you have any questions, now is the time to type them in. I just want to talk briefly about the infinite game of making decisions. It's like, if you get good at making decisions, you will have a good life. So what is the key is that you treat every single decision that you make as an opportunity to improve your decision-making process. This means making reflection your default habit. You try something, you see what happens, you reflect on what you could do differently next time. This is the idea, the score takes care of itself. If you're always improving your decision-making process, you will get great at making decisions. If you get great at making decisions, I'm very excited for what life has in store for you.

And realizing that the best decision-makers, myself—like, I'm wrong all the time. But the key is I'm constantly searching for these ways that I'm wrong, and I kind of enjoy that, right? It's this ability to be gentle and playful, inquiring on, "Wow, like, there's so many opportunities to be better at this. Like, what an opportunity, what a game to uncover these!" So I decided deliberately, right, this is a very systematic process that can happen very quickly. The quicker that I move, the more decisions that I make, the better I get at making decisions.

And that's the key question, is like after you make a decision, you see what happens. You have some more feedback, let's say, from your environment. So you say, "Knowing what I know now, what can I do differently next time?" That's that key habit, is every experience you have illuminates one opportunity to have an even better result next time. That's all this is, is just having a really long-term perspective, because when you approach your decision-making systematically, you'll see that these initial changes are kind of subtle. But that is the power of compounding. If you have an exercise habit or a meditation habit, you've observed this. In the beginning, it's kind of hard to tell anything that's changing, but if you look back months or years it's like, "How was I not doing this before?" That's really powerful, because if you become a better decision-maker, everything in your life will improve as a result.

Before I go to Q&A, I just wanted to mention a little bit about Team Performance Training. I can't help myself, I'm just too excited about it. So, if you liked today, I think you'd really like Team Performance Training. Our goal with Team Performance Training is to help you optimize your productivity, scale your mission, and perform at your peak. I'm fortunate enough that I've been able to work with hundreds of really, really successful investors, executives, founders, and this is me teaching the essentials—what I have found works best. The commonalities of elite performance. And if this is something that interests you, I would really encourage you to apply. We're putting together a really great team for this third cohort. I like to think of it as an executive MBA, where I myself am a little bit intimidated to be in a position of teaching such talented people, but realizing that everyone else in the room feels the same way, that if you surround yourself with people who are doing really interesting, impactful things, that will raise the bar for yourself. And that's what it's all about, is raising the bar, that if you are in the right rooms you will raise the bar for yourself. You will illuminate opportunities, blind spots, and find ways to do what you're doing even better.

So if this sounds interesting to you, we'd love for you to consider applying for our third cohort. You can learn more about Team Performance Training at teamperformancetraining.com. Those applications are open for the next two weeks.

I'm gonna answer some of these questions. In case you have to jump or I don't get to your question, please email me directly. I love thinking about decisions, I love thinking about performance, I do this stuff because I enjoy it. Like, this is my mission. It's so much fun for me. So, if you have any questions, if there's anything I can do to support you, if you, I give you feedback on how you can make this big decision in your life, please let me know.

All right. Let's see what we got in the Q&A.

Okay. Anonymous Attendee, in the back row, would like to know what happens if the way you could fail is completely outside of your control? This is a really good question. I think there are two aspects to this. First is, perhaps there is an option that you could take where you have a little bit more control. I don't know, maybe I enjoy control, but I try to do things in life that I have a lot, I think I have some influence on the outcome. I don't wanna leave it completely up to chance. Now, that being said, there is a lot of luck in life. Timing, being in the right place, other people being involved who you might not have direct influence over, and this is just where I think the stoic perspective can't be beat. So, one of the key stoic lessons is, "Wisdom is knowing what's in your control and what's out of your control, and just not worrying about those things that are out of your control." I think this is kind of a recipe for just feeling more fulfilled and not getting caught up in the vicissitudes of the market, or the unpredictability that is other human beings. That we just worry about what we can control directly, and let the chips fall where they may.

Now, I will say that a lot of times we are going to miss something. So after this thing happens that you think is outside of your control, look back and see, was this actually the case? Was there anything that you could have done in the beginning to influence this outcome, have placed the odds more in your favor? So it's kind of a dual advice here—the first is, I would kind of pick apart that assumption a little bit. That just seems a little bit too convenient to me that it's all out of your hands, and like is that really the field you want to be playing in, is something you don't have any control over? On the other hand, there are clearly going to be things in your life that you cannot control. So like, don't stress about those things and you'll be happier.

All right. This next question comes from Dan Pedrero. How do you document your decision-making retrospectives? How do you make it easy and go back to review what you were thinking three months, six months, one year ago? Awesome question. So, I can't help but plug the Decision-Making Canvas. I use this anytime that I have a big decision. So, with recent decisions: do I go deeper into investing? Do I start making angel investments? Do I move cities? Do I sign up for a, like essentially a triathlon? Some of these decisions are bigger than others, but I find it really cool to put all of the thinking on my behavior, because I'm really big on improving this process. So I have a file folder—It's funny to say these things out loud—it's labeled "Decisions" and every time I have one of these canvases I put it in the folder. And I can't help, every time that I put a new one into the folder, to just peek at the other ones that I've made in the past.

I also have a habit that I find really useful, is my quarterly and most recently my annual review, where part of that process is to go back over the major decisions that I had and see, hey, can I improve these decisions? Am I happy with the way that I made the process? A lot of times things won't work out the way that I want them to. Right? It's not looking at, were the results from this decision good? It was, was my process of making the decision good? I think this is a really important distinction. And I'm always assuming that I missed something, that I was wrong in some way. So by going back and saying, "Hey, if I could do this differently given what I know now, what could I have done differently?" So I think that habit of looking back at a regular frequency—For me, it's every three months, at least every year. Like, what are these major decisions that you made, and how do you feel about the way that you made those decisions?

I said, it all comes back to the assumption that you are going to be making a lot of decisions. So, by putting just a little bit more intention into the way that you do them will allow you to improve this skill of making decisions, over time.

Mike Mantell wants to know, what makes a decision good or bad? We have a philosopher in the room. I wouldn't be as black or white about this. If I had to be, I would say what makes a bad decision is not necessarily being impulsive, but not taking the time necessary to get a full picture of what is going on with the decision. And that's like the real power of having this process, is that it just forces me to stop and to look at things from different angles. Because I'm always going to be missing something. And if I go through the process and I have a bad result, right, bad, like, undesired, something I don't want to happen happens, that doesn't necessarily mean that I made a bad decision. That means that there might be something about my process or the way that I executed this process in this decision that could have been improved. Right?

That's really the only thing that could go wrong with this, is—I think this is actually an important thing to note, is I—especially this step number five, where I'm predicting outcomes, if something happens that I didn't think was a possibility of happening, right? All of this is just excavating my brain. What could happen? What are the good things that could happen? How can I make those more likely? What are the not-so-good things that could happen? How can I make those less likely? If something happens that I didn't even see as a possibility, this should be a trigger. A cognitive canary that, hey, I clearly missed something here. Was there a way I could have seen this in advance?

And so, yeah. Like, I don't really think there's good or bad results. There's just like improvements to the process. So yeah, I would encourage you—I know this is just kind of like a normative view, but like getting away from this black or white thinking of, like, "I made a good decision," "I made a bad decision." It's more like, "How could this decision have been improved?" And, like, I have decisions that go amazing. I sit down at the poker table and I win lots of money, and immediately I'm like, "Okay, well, how could that have gone better?" Right? I think that's the most dangerous thing is to assume that 'cause something went well that you made a good decision. It's really just important to view the process.

All right. Ah, man. I wish I was better at pronunciation. Sriram Manogar would like to know how to make a decision when two choices are really close. Well, if you think that a decision is fifty/fifty, this is a good sign that you need to think more about this decision. Like, just, what are the chances that it is actually fifty/fifty? Like, it could be fifty-one/forty-nine, and maybe that's too close to make the decision, and you want to see if it's fifty-two/forty-eight. But for me, if I really thought it was so close that it was fifty/fifty, I think for me this would be kind of an alert that maybe my thinking on this is a little bit lazy.

And this goes back to the first part of the five-step process, the hurdles. Most decisions don't matter all that much. Right? If I'm trying to decide what I want to eat for dinner tonight, and it's like chicken or steak, and it's fifty/fifty, who cares? Flip a coin. Right? Most decisions are just making a decision and moving on. But if you're fifty/fifty on what I should do with my life, well, man. Like, that should kind of be a signal that you're not really thinking about this deeply enough, because, yeah. Like, there's a lot to unpack there if you really think those two options are so close. So, you know, do what you can to test some of those assumptions. Talk to other people. Run an experiment. See, okay, well if this was sixty/forty, what would illuminate that? I really don't think there are any fifty/fifty decisions, just fifty/fifty thinking.

Natalie van Rooyen would love to know, "I struggle making quick day-to-day decisions which often result in procrastination and inaction. Any advice on just making these menial task-related decisions?" Yes. I think that just recognizing that everyone has trouble with procrastination. I have a post that I really like which talks about the procrastination equation, and essentially the key to avoiding procrastination, or at least preventing it, is to recognize that there are legitimate reasons to delay making the decision. Right? This is what we were talking about when we look at assumptions. Like, hey, there are actual risks here, and there's actual uncertainty, and if we can do things to reduce that uncertainty, that will make us more likely more able to move forward.

And I think it's partially recognizing, like, Natalie, how certain do you need to be to move forward, and what could take you to that point of certainty? A lot of things that don't matter, just pick one and move on. Right? You're gonna have this come up more and more often, so like, I literally flip a coin. And I set a timer, say, "Okay, I'm gonna work on this for twenty minutes, and see if I still think that this is the best thing to do." That you can switch afterwards. That's the key: you decide, "Hey, this wasn't the right thing to do, I can completely switch later."

Another thing that I find to work really well for this is what I call separating planning and execution. There's an activation energy that can be really expensive if you sit down at your desk and are saying, like, "Well, what should I do today?" Well, man. There's just millions of things that you could potentially do. How does one choose? And that's what leads to us hopping on Twitter or going to our email box and saying, "Let someone else make that decision for me, let someone tell me what's urgent, what I should be doing." And that's why I try to do as much of my planning off the table as possible, away from the desk, where when I sit down to start the day, I've at least chosen, what is that very first thing that I'm going to do? GTD calls this the "next action." If I've already chosen this, then I can immediately get started. I'm not expending all that energy trying to decide. And that makes it much more likely that I'm gonna choose something that's important, that's high-leverage.

So it seems like you might need a little bit more of a planning habit. And I just encourage you to take that planning, like, away from your desk, do it on a notebook, make it super offline, and that'll make it a lot easier, if you have that first action. Right? Once you're moving—that's the key thing about procrastination is just like, the way to beat procrastination is just to do something. Do anything. So whether that's like opening up the document and typing your name, or like texting the friend "hi," right, the super-imperfect action, once you're moving, the next action becomes a lot clearer.

Skar wants to know, "How can your poker game improve your decision-making capacity?" This could be an entire lecture in itself. I wrote a post on this that I'm pretty proud of called, "Play To Win: Meta-Skills in High-Stakes Poker." So, I highly recommend that you check that out. In—I really think of poker as this like decision-making sandbox, and the cool thing about poker is that it has very tight feedback loops. Right? I make a bet or I call a bet and I see their cards. I see where my assumptions are correct or incorrect. And this creates an iteration, this is what in systems thinking they call a feedback loop. I take action, I receive feedback from my environment. And because I'm able to make these feedback loops really tight, I receive feedback and I immediately adjust my assumptions to make my decision-making process faster. And that, I like to say, the tightness of your feedback loop is proportional to your speed of progress of improvement in your life. Put another way, the faster that you are receiving results and then using those results to change the way that you act in the world, the way that you make decisions, the faster that you will improve.

So, I'm constantly looking for ways to get feedback. Right? I'm writing a giant post. As soon as I get past the point of being ridiculously embarrassed, I send it to a friend and say, "Hey, what do you think about this? Is there anything that you see here that needs improvement?" I think a lot of things are just a race to feedback, and if you're finding that you are really uncertain about the way that you are making decisions, this is probably a good signal that you need more feedback loops in your life, whether these are your trusted friends or family members who can help to illuminate what you might be missing or just ways to have like really crappy rough drafts that can see if whether you're on the right track.

Okay, I think this is the last question that we have time for today. This question comes from Martin Dyhouse. "Chris, do you have a different process or thoughts on when the decision leads to an action which is recurring, including a habit into the daily routine?" Yes. I think that every decision leads to an action that's recurring, because when I was talking about values, it's like, if you make this one decision about what's important to you, that leads to lots of cascading decisions about doing things that make that important thing to you happen. So, making that decision up front, that hard decision, makes a lot of future decisions really easy. So for example, you're talking about adding a habit into the daily routine. I always talk about my key habits, journaling, movement, you know, exercise, meditation, planning, these are all kinds of elements of my morning routine. Once I decided to make those parts of my routine, now those things somewhat take care of themselves, and I get all the cascading benefits of those.

But I think there's a lot of hesitation to take on a new habit, 'cause it's like, "Well, maybe I won't want to do this. Maybe meditation won't work for me, and I'll be stuck doing it." And this is where I always come back to the experimental period, which I think is really, really important for habits. 'Cause in the beginning, like, habits are really fragile. They say in Dune that beginnings are delicate times. So what I like to do with a habit when I'm thinking about this is something I want to add to my life, is that I commit for an experimental period. I'm like, "All right, maybe I want to be a runner. I'm not sure. Running could be cool, but it also could be something that I don't like. Well, for the next thirty days, I'm going to run every day. I'm going to act as if, like, I am a runner, hundred-percent certain that running is the thing for me to do." And after thirty days, I can say, "Great, running is awesome. I want this. I want to double-down on this. I want to run more often, I want to run longer distances." Or it can be like, "Hey, I'm glad I tried that, but I don't think I want to run."

And, okay, what's another habit that might allow me to satisfy this value, whatever that is, getting outside, being in a runner's community, starting your day with movement, seeing your neighborhood, whatever it is. Is there something else that you could try and turn that into a habit and see if it satisfies as value. So I like to think of these things in terms of experiments: I commit, I collect data, I see how it works, and if it's working, I double-down on it.

Thank you guys for your wonderful questions. I really appreciate you being here, for participating, for putting in the work. I hope you found it productive. Like I said, if you think of any questions, I would love to be helpful to you. Please send me an email. And, yeah, if you found today valuable, you want more of this, check out Team Performance Training. I think you guys will really enjoy it.

Thanks for being here. Really appreciate you guys. It's an honor to be with you, and see you all next time. Take care.

 
Chris Sparks