Modern Wisdom: The Mindset Rules Of A Poker Professional
Chris Sparks and Chris Williamson of Modern Wisdom discuss the mindset rules of a poker professional.
Having a high performance mindset is something everyone wants. Being able to achieve without stress or anxiety, maximizing output whilst minimizing suffering. As someone who coaches both himself and some of the world’s brightest on getting more out of their game, Chris has learned a lot about balancing growth, goals and internal peace.
Expect to learn what it feels like to play in an invite-only Bitcoin Poker Tournament, how Chris evens out his hard-charging nature to become more at ease, whether the outcomes you get in life are impacted by how neurotic you are, my theory around the Anxiety Cost of delayed actions, how to balance intuition with cognition and much more…
Video recording above; audio recording, resources mentioned, and conversation transcript below.
Chris Williamson (00:01): Hello friends. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Chris Sparks. He's the former number four online poker player on the planet, a productivity coach, and an investor. Having a high performance mindset is something everyone wants—being able to achieve without stress or anxiety, maximizing output whilst minimizing suffering. As someone who coaches both himself and some of the world's brightest on getting more out of their game, Chris has learned a lot about balancing growth, goals, and internal peace. I expect to learn what it feels like to play an invite-only Bitcoin poker tournament, how Chris evens out his hard-charging nature to become more at ease, whether the outcomes you get in life are impacted by how neurotic you are, my theory around the anxiety cost of delayed actions, how to balance intuition with cognition, and much more.
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But now please give it up for Chris Sparks.
First off, welcome to the show.
Chris Sparks (04:16): Honored to be here, Chris. Good to see you.
Chris Williamson (04:18): Good to see you too, man. So the last time that we spoke was in the car park of Cosmic Coffee across the street from where I was staying in Austin, and you were gearing up for a very big poker tournament that was happening quite soon.
Chris Sparks (04:33): That's right.
Chris Williamson (04:34): Tell me—Tell everybody what that was, and let me know how you got on.
Chris Sparks (04:40): Sure. So I went on a bit of a poker sabbatical in June of last year. I wanted to take some time to travel and focus on some other things, maybe have a normal schedule for a while. And I got alerted to a private tournament that was happening, and the tournament was denominated in Bitcoin, so it was attracting a lot of people who were—let's say—whales in the crypto-ecosystem. Not necessarily poker whales, but people who are, like, generally good to play with. And I was obviously intrigued. I don't consider myself a tournament player, but this was the possibility of playing a very large buy-in tournament with people who I think I would have a pretty big advantage on. So I took myself out of semi-retirement for the fifth or sixth time, and went on a training program, both in tournaments but also you know, physically, mentally, to develop the discipline, the stamina, the presence that I thought would allow me to maximize this opportunity.
Chris Williamson (05:54): And you got out there. Talk me through that.
Chris Sparks (06:00): Oh, I'm gonna get in trouble. I wish I knew this was coming. I think I played very well. As in many things in life, the cards fall where they may. There's many times in poker—You know, really success in poker is you have lots of these fifty-five/forty-five spots where you got fifty-five percent to win, and you just get enough of these and eventually you're stacking all the money in the world. Right?
It's like when I play cash games, I get enough hands that all these small edges compound and multiply. And the best possible situation that you can get into in Texas Hold 'em is that you are an eighty/twenty favorite, meaning that you are going to win eighty percent of the time. And in this case, I got all in pre-flop with pocket kings against pocket tens, it was a scenario that I had been setting up all day, and it went exactly how I had written it up, and if I win this hand which I'm going to win eighty percent of the time. I'm the chip leader in the tournament and based on who's left and the situation—So this was approaching the money bubble. Those of you guys who don't play tournaments, the bubble is right before the payouts begin. So usually people really tighten up, they start being more risk-averse, playing less hands, because no one wants to walk away empty-handed. So if you are in no danger of losing, as I would have been, having the most of the chips, you can really ramp up the aggression and put a lot of pressure on players and chip up very quickly.
So, I believe that had I won this hand, there were five players remaining at the time, I was a heavy favorite to win the tournament. Alas, a ten comes on the river, and I am out of the tournament. And it's always important, especially when you are playing a single hand for well over six figures in expectation, and you're mentally counting the chips and all of a sudden you are standing up and everyone's kind of feeling a little bit bad for you but also internally very grateful that the best player left is no longer in the tournament—You just kinda have to tell yourself, this is what twenty percent feels like. Twenty percent of the time I'm going to lose, and this is one of those times, and I did everything that was in my control. So, you know.
Chris Williamson (08:19): Bro. Man.
Chris Sparks (08:23): I mean, I really try not to tell, you know, bad beat stories because no one likes to hear them. But it's—you know, the life can be mentally grueling sometimes. Things aren't always going to work out the way that you planned it, and all I could do walking away from this, is I did everything that was in my power to set myself for victory for weeks ahead of time. You know, I really ramped up my physical training. I was working with a coach to teach me the detailed mathematics of tournament poker. Like, tournament poker is all just memorizing a ten-thousand-page book by reading it over and over again, and he was fast-tracking me on all the math, and I took a course on tells so I could read people's body language, I stayed at the Ritz-Carlton for multi-thousand dollars a night the times before and spent a lot of time at the spa to just walk in there feeling like I've already won, where I'm playing with literal crypto-billionaires and wanting to feel like a billionaire myself.
I put a lot of effort into preparing for this one day, and in one moment it was all over, and all I could say is, "Well, I regret nothing. I did what I could."
Chris Williamson (09:41): Dude. That's one of the things that really impresses me about you. You have this systems focus, but there's another side to you, and it really came out when we got to have our late-night alcohol-free beer at Cosmic Coffee. And you have a spiritual side to a lot of the things that you do, this sort of equanimity that I think you're able to find, which kind of helps to counter the ruthless side of productivity. So, you know, systems focus, really bothered about optimizing and so on and so forth, but then there's this other element to it, maybe like the yin to the yang or whatever that is a really nice counterweight, and you're able to find this equanimity and peace with you know, what is just—I mean there was, what? It was—It would have been millions, I'm gonna guess, on the line, had you ended up carrying through to the end, and instead you're sort of dusting your hands off and saying, "Good luck with the rest of the game, boys."
Chris Sparks (10:38): Yeah. I think as I have grown older and hopefully matured, I've become more philosophical and much more interested in my subjective experience of reality. I think in my younger years I was very hard-driving, and I think a lot of that was fueled by scarcity. Feeling like I wasn't enough, that I needed to accomplish certain things or else I would be a failure or I would be insignificant or that all of my perceived gifts, talents, potential would have been wasted. And why am I here? And I think that while I don't regret that, I think, you know, it's—it's what got me here, essentially. It's what allowed me to have lots of really powerful experiences and lessons and try many things that, although they terrified me, I thought were necessary in order to be this kind of pedestal version of a success.
I don't think that that is sustainable, and I realize only in hindsight that it caused me a lot of stress, anxiety, and unhappiness. And as I've zoomed out on my life, realizing that accomplishments in themselves don't really matter. I'm much more interested in feeling fulfilled and feeling happy and being, you know, a positive influence on the people who I'm fortunate enough to intersect with. And a lot of that scarcity can come at the expense of that. So if you're thinking about the flip side of it, I've tried to embody—Again, this is an intention, this is a practice that I come back to, I can't say that I'm here every day, but just this perspective of, "I've already won. I don't need to do anything else, I don't need to learn anything else, I have nothing else to prove. Like, I'm already here, I've already won." And operating from this position of, "I don't need to do anything, I can just enjoy, have fun, trust that the universe is going to present me with opportunities that I can choose to accept or not." It feels a lot more gentle. It feels like this weight has been lifted.
And especially when you operate in fields like poker or—I've gotten much more into investing in the last couple years, and consider myself at least a part-time investor. You need to have that separation between the results on your bottom line and who you identify with, because if you are too susceptible to these short-term fluctuations of chance, you'll be rekt. You'll just be completely r-e-k-t rekt, because you're gonna be punched in the face.
Chris Williamson (13:46): How do you—I'm fascinated by this, and it's something that I think I'm holding up your coattails about as well. How do you walk yourself from being the sort of person who is hard-charging, takes pride in their outcomes in life, takes pride in doing things properly and optimally and being as efficient as possible—How do you blend that desire to do well, to get the right outcomes, with an acceptance of perhaps not always getting the outcomes that you want? Of doing everything that you could have done and yet still not getting the outcome that you wanted? How do you marry those two things together?
Chris Sparks (14:28): Sure. As we've talked about before, it's a core belief of mine that there's no growth without goals. That whole, "Okay, I'm just going to keep improving on all these dimensions but not having clarity on why I'm doing things or if I'm making progress," is just a recipe for spinning wheels. To just keep running on this treadmill and sweating but not really getting anywhere. So I do think that it is very important to have a goal in mind, something that you are heading towards, that you are training for, that you can—Even if it's not quantitative, that you can track progress. "Is what I'm doing on a day-to-day basis leading me to where I want to be, this vision of who I want to be in the future or where I want to be in the future?" This internal coherence is the psychological principle. I think that is critical.
And it applies to everything. Even though, let's say you're in the gym for example. It doesn't matter how much you can deadlift. It really doesn't matter. That number doesn't matter. But if you aren't tracking it, it's hard to know if you're making progress, if those efforts are paying off. So I think it's really important for everything that you do to have some form of tracking, even if it's just in the journal, you're regularly saying, "How do you feel?" Like, how was today? Did it make you happy? Were there things that were cool, that you're grateful for, that you're celebrating, having this place to capture, "Is what I'm doing leading me to where I want to be?"
Chris Williamson (15:57): I just wanna jump in there—
Chris Sparks (15:58): Yes.
Chris Williamson (15:59): —Chris, 'cause this is a really important point that I never thought of before reading your article. And anyone can google, "There Is No Growth Without Goals" + Chris Sparks and it will come up on your Forcing Function website. Because of how popular Atomic Habits became, and because, "You do not rise to the level of your goals you fall to the level of your systems" became like a fucking epitaph, right? That people were just, "Oh, that's going to my gravestone, I'm just focused on the systems and the processes, bro, the results will take care of themselves," but there's a tension here between these two, right, that we need to—We know that enjoying the journey is what we should be aiming on, that presence is something that we should be fundamentally focused on. We also know that getting the process right is the only way to get the results that we want. But I genuinely believe that in that sentence, which is great from James, but I do believe that there is something that is missing from that. And if you read earlier in the paragraph, what he says is that goals are great for giving us direction, however they're not sufficient on their own.
And I think that that myopic focus that people have had, and I've had this myself as well, you know, to just forget the goals, right, "I'm totally not goal-driven at all." You do realize that you end up putting a lot of time in working incredibly hard to try and do a thing, and you're like, "Well, okay, what's this in service of? Like, what's this hard work actually getting me toward? Is it getting me toward anything? How do I know that the thing that I'm focusing on the process of is moving me in a direction that I want to?” It could be taking me in the completely wrong way.
Chris Sparks (17:28): I think that's right on the money, and it's—as you said, it's very nuanced and it's very tempting when you're looking at something like goals or systems to take a dichotomous approach in, "Goals are everything," or, "Systems are everything." I do believe this sort of "Score takes care of itself" is true, that if you are able to stay consistent with something—the phrase that I like to say is, "Ensuring continuous improvement." If you have systems that allow you to keep improving on things—at Forcing Function, we have something that we call the Improvement Loop. We talked about this a little bit last time when we were going over the Annual Review. But I think at any given time we're doing one of three things: we're planning, we're executing, we're reflecting.
So planning, let's think about this as the goals phase. Like, where do we want to be? Let's create a roadmap of how to get there. The execution, it's like experimenting. We're trying things, we're tracking. This is like the—we're just doing things, we're observing the feedback that we get from our environment, from the universe, and just kind of like, you know, bumping up against reality. And then this reflection, I think about this as the systems aspect. We're fine-tuning what we're doing, we're seeing what's working, doubling down on that. If we try something, and it's not having the progress toward the goals that we would like, we course correct, and that feeds back into the plan. So I don't see these as independent. I think they are both part of this continuous loop that we are iterating through.
The second part of your question—And I think this is, again, this is where I get a little bit more philosophical. But this mindset I think is really necessary for sustainability, of staying in the game for a long time and not burning out, is that you can have this direction, you can have these very specific goals but not be attached to them. When I say "being attached to them," like, identifying with their success. That you succeeding in this goal means that you have succeeded, and thus you are a success. And the inversion of that is, if you fail to achieve this goal you have failed and you are a failure. So, that's always the balance that I am trying to strive for, to try to instill in others, is that you can be trying really hard and going after really ambitious things, but not being attached to needing to achieve them. It's more the pursuit that is important.
Chris Williamson (20:13): A question that might have popped up in some people's minds is, "If my successes don't make me a success, then what does make me a success?"
Chris Sparks (20:25): I'm not sure that I'm qualified to answer. I'm not sure, because—I do think it really comes down to identity, and all I can think is to speak from personal experience. I try to operate from that perspective I shared earlier, of, "I've already won." In this frame, it's, "I'm already a success." Not because of anything that I've already done, but because I'm here, I'm in the arena, I'm working on things, I'm improving, I'm not attached to any results that come from that. And I think that really empowers me to be curious and to have fun with it, because no matter what happens I've already won. I'm already a success. I feel like just approaching things with this gentleness, this lightness really empowers us.
Chris Williamson (21:25): Well, dude, if you're able to do that, if you're able to attach a light touch to a hundred-thousand-dollar bet on a couple-million-dollar tournament—I think that pretty much everybody else can't, but this entire sort of area of—In the modern world, if we are what we do, then our successes define our worth to the world. I think that this entire area really fascinates me, and I think that when you don't have typical roles, especially when you're young and you don't have a family yet and maybe you haven't contributed to your local community, maybe you haven't had the sort of impact that you've wanted to on other people just yet—You think, "Well, okay, so what am I? What is a firm place for me to stand that gives me something that makes me feel enough aside from the ephemeral daily successes or losses, victories and failures that I go through?" You know?
And this is what you were saying earlier on, that if your sense of self-worth is predicated on such a fine margin that the last thing you did being good or bad determines your self-worth up until you get the opportunity to like, shake the Etch-a-Sketch eraser and then draw something new, that's far too turbulent of a situation to be in. Like, you need to be able to find firmer ground to stand on.
There's a quote I put in my newsletter the other week that was from Nathan Jones, and he says that, "There is no scarcity. Only opportunities all around us that we cannot yet perceive. Scarcity is a spiritual condition. It is projected from out of us into our world." And that's so true. There is no scarcity. There is only opportunity out there. There is an infinite number of things that you could do, an infinite number of ways that you can find joy and presence and happiness in the current moment. And yet because of the way that we choose to frame the situation that we're in, we see it as scarcity.
Chris Sparks (23:22): Yeah. I think we operate in a culture that really rewards delayed gratification, that pushes satisfaction and happiness out into the ever-receding future. And if we're operating out of this place of lack, I have a spoiler for you. Like, there's always going to be lack. Like if you—"Okay, when I hit this number in my bank account," or, "When my audience hits this size," or, "When I get this strong," or, "I have this type of network," whatever it is, that goal post is always going to keep moving if you're operating from the, like, "When I have, then I will be," or like, "When I've accomplished this, then I can take a vacation, then I can take a step back, then I can feel good about myself." And I've been there before for most of my life, and on some days, unfortunately, I lapse back into that. And operating from this place of lack—In Buddhism, they call this a "samskara." It's a hungry ghost that you can never feed enough. That if you have lack, no amount of satisfaction will ever satisfy you.
Chris Williamson (24:39): Dude. It's like running toward the horizon. That was what Ben Hardy said. You know, if every time that you take a step toward your goals you decide to move them further away—Or Morgan Housel in The Psychology of Money says the number way to be financially free in the game of finances is to stop moving the fucking goalposts. Like, keep the goalposts still and you might be able to score, but if every time that you kick the ball toward them you decide to move it further away, you're never ever going to reach it.
And again, I think that it's such a rare thing to hear "enoughness" used as a term, because what everybody celebrates at the moment is—You know, unless you're part of the whatever it is, FIRE movement that—retire early. Financial Independence Retire Early movement, everybody is saying, "Well yeah, you've made a mil, so now it's time to leverage that and make ten, and now that you've made ten it's time to leverage that and make a hundred." You go, "Well, why?" Genuinely, why? What is it that you can get with a hundred million that you can't get with ten? Do you want dynasty wealth? Are you trying to sort the next twenty generations of your children out? Like, what is it that you're trying to do with this? Or is it just that you have become caught, you've become captured by this game of feeling like the solution to your feeling of insufficiency is going to be sorted on the other side of the next zero that gets added to the bank account?
Chris Sparks (26:00): It's hard for me to emphasize enough that I've realized that acceleration comes from slowing down. That the more—
Chris Williamson (26:07): What's that mean?
Chris Sparks (26:09): —the more that we can sit and be quiet and think and listen, especially to what do we really want, rather than listening to this memetic what everyone else thinks that we should want or tells us that we should want, the more that we will be able to take the most direct path towards what we really want. And I think it's really dangerous and pernicious even to look at what everyone else is doing as the example of what we should strive for, and yet that's how we all live our lives. So it comes back to this old annoying but very true idea of the inner scorecard, of actually thinking about why are we here and what that would look like and trying to put the blinders on what everyone else is doing. That, hey, these are all opportunities, as you said, but they're not the opportunities for me. I don't need to succeed in the way that everyone else thinks that I should.
Chris Williamson (27:17): Digging into the concept of what do you want to want is a pet obsession of mine, and yours as well I think. As a talented person that might be listening to this, or as yourself, you know, you could have done the poker route, the investing route, the coaching people route, and then probably a million other things that you didn't even decide to start—How have you decided to focus on the things you do in life without being tempted by the other things that you could be doing? It seems to me that there's almost a little bit of a curse of talent, that if you have abilities that you could deploy in different directions that the paradox of choice comes up, and a lot of the time that means that people get a little bit done everywhere and don't actually make any meaningful progress anywhere.
Chris Sparks (28:02): There's two approaches that I come to with this. The first is knowing what value that I'm optimizing for. There's a really powerful exercise that we have adopted from a book called, The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, that's called the Top Values Exercise. We can drop it in the show notes, we have it in a Notion doc that anyone can use. Essentially, it starts with, "What are all the things that you value?" Take this long list of a hundred things. And maybe you're like, "Hey, forty or fifty of these things, yeah, I value that. That sounds like a good thing." Well, then you have to start limiting down the list. So what are your top ten values? What are your top five values? This is where people start to get really, really uncomfortable. "What are your top three? What are your top two? What is your top value?" And this is where, like—you start to have to make these trade-offs, is like, "Okay, is family most important to me? Is financial freedom most important to me? Is my personal development most important to me? Is my health the most important to me?"
It doesn't matter what the answer is, 'cause there is no right answer except what you think the right answer could be. But once you decide that, "Hey, X is most important to me," X comes first. You decide that health comes first, and you're only sleeping five hours a night because you're hard-driving on your startup. Well, that should cause a little bit of dissonance.
I mean, you said that health is the most important to you, but clearly, you're acting as if it's not the most important to you. I work with clients who say that family is their top value but don't get to see their kids as much as they would like. Well, that should cause a little bit of dissonance. You said family's your most important, but the actions that you're taking aren't in alignment with that. Right? It's a kind of a cognitive canary, if you will. Right? The idea, you have canaries in the coal mine, if the canary dies there's something wrong. It's like, "Hey, I say this is most important to me, but if you look at my calendar, you look at what I'm doing, there's a disconnect here." Either I want to believe this is most important to me and it really isn't—and that often is true, right? Like, your actions are your best indication of what you're doing—or, "I need to change the way that I'm investing my time, my energy, my attention into the things that are actually most important.” So this is a really good call-out exercise that I recommend.
The second is a little bit more intuitively driven, and this is coming back to slowing down, is just to listen to what resonates. What gives you energy? What makes you feel most alive? The days that you're most excited to get out of bed in the morning? Like, what else is going on? And really tapping into that. For me, if something is feeling draining or I'm procrastinating on it or it feels like an obligation, that's a signal from my subconscious that something is going wrong, that I'm not acting in alignment and maybe I need to change. Or—
Chris Williamson (31:05): Well, what would you say to someone that was like, "Well, Chris, not everything that I do is going to be fucking sunshine and rainbows. It's great for you as the poker pro that owns his own business, but some of us need to grind our work out. I can't just decide to put tools down at Grath because I don't like this job anymore. There are certain necessities that I need to do as well."
Chris Sparks (31:25): Absolutely. I'm thinking about moments, and I'm thinking about trajectory. I don't think there is a need to quit your job today and go to the ashram and meditate, or like, "All right, well, yeah, it doesn't matter that you don't have as much money in the bank as you need to support yourself. Like, burn the boats and go create the Chris Williamson coin and just YOLO." There's clearly constraints that need to be met. We always come back to those pillars, like, "Are you doing what you need to be healthy? Are you giving time to your important relationships? Your family? Your significant other? Your closest friends? Are you putting yourself in a position in terms of your career that you are building skills, that you are building network, social capital, that you are setting yourself for a positive trajectory?" Like, all that foundation needs to be there and to build with, and I would never tell someone to just drop everything because you don't like what you do or the city that you're in.
But it's important to have this North Star, and I think in terms of setting direction this is a very cool place to start from, is, "What are those moments that make you feel most alive?" And perhaps you can find ways to make those happen more often, even if it's just internal, even if it doesn't mean making any large-scale changes in your life, but to find more of those moments and to amplify them.
Chris Williamson (33:09): There's a story that I heard about both Elon Musk and about Jeff Bezos, that they had single objectives, like a unifying goal that both of their companies were working toward. Elon's was, "Does this get us closer to Mars?" And Bezos's was, "Does this improve the customer experience?" And one of the things, for the first time ever at the start of last year, I did a proper formatted annual review, which is your process, and in that because you have a single North Star for each of your four areas, for health, careers, relationships, and like a personal development thing, inherent in one North Star is not the "yes" that you say "yes" to, it's the "no" that everything else has the "no" said to. And that really, really did make such a profound difference last year, because I knew all of the things that kept on coming up to tempt me, "Is it in service of that thing?" The one thing—This is what you said it was going to be. And it's only a year.
And this is the other thing. You know, a lot of people might feel a bit of existential crisis around, "Well, like, Sparks Poker Guy said that I've got to choose the thing that my life is about."
It's like, yeah. The thing that your life is about for now.
Chris Sparks (34:25): Yes.
Chris Williamson (34:26): Not the thing that your life is about for the rest of time. This isn't you setting yourself on the next sixty years, it's you—For how long? For three months, for six months, for twelve months, or something?
Chris Sparks (34:36): It's so powerful. I just—So many things I want to expand on there. So first, yeah. You're not choosing what you want to do with your life. You know, this is not talking to your high school guidance counselor. Like, what a scary question, and like how boring would that be, if you knew exactly what you were going to be doing for the rest of your life. All you are doing is picking a direction to head.
And this is why I always come back to this experimental framework, if you pick a direction and constantly the world, the universe, your friends, your followers, the environment are giving you feedback on whether you are on the right track or not. So commit to a time period. I say a month is a great default. Maybe if it's something that requires a little bit more commitment, like starting a business, moving into a new city, maybe you want to make it around three months. But commit to that, and the power is for that time period you are giving it all that you have. You are giving the experiment full room to run, and you're not worrying every day, like, "Did I make the right choice? Maybe I should have done this other thing instead." Because at the end of that period you have the full opportunity to double down or stop. "Do I want to take the next step with this or do I want to try option number two?"
And I think that's a really key lesson with this choosing one North Star. This is so hard for people, and it's so hard for myself. I do this exercise myself, and it's painful, because I sit there, I created the damn thing, and I'm like, "I want to write down five goals, because I can't choose just one." And I have to literally cross them out.
Chris Williamson (36:22): Like killing your children.
Chris Sparks (36:23): Because, like, yes. Everyone that hears the word "distractions" is like, "Oh, I'm sitting on YouTube or maybe I'm playing Settlers of Catan or I'm Netflix or I'm Twitter scrolling." No. The most dangerous distractions are the ones that feel productive to you, because it's you working on that number three, number four, number five goal to procrastinate on moving forward your number one goal. That our speed is fastest, right, when we slow down, we understand what is most important to us, and we put the blinders on everything else. And that's why that pain of making that first decision allows you to move quickly and with full conviction on that number one North Star. And that's why I'm such a big believer in it.
So it's not necessarily like waiting until you are sure that this is the right thing. Don't wait. Like, take your best guess—
Chris Williamson (37:25): Just pick a thing. Yeah.
Chris Sparks (37:26): But like, pick something. Just pick a thing. It does not matter. But you have something to shoot for that you are focused on, and as you move towards it you will learn so much more than on the sidelines trying to plan.
Chris Williamson (37:39): The maddest thing is how liberating that feels. It's so liberating to know that there is one thing that you're moving toward, and you don't realize—Until you've done this, you don't realize how much of your day is spent measuring the relative benefit and cost of a bunch of different decisions that you could make. "Okay, so I didn't really sleep very well last night and I've got this thing to do at work tomorrow but I'm supposed to go to the gym tonight. If I go to the gym tonight I'm going to be tired for work tomorrow." If health was your number one priority, you wouldn't care about how you were gonna perform at work tomorrow. And if work was your number one priority, then you wouldn't care about the fact that you're leaving the gym. I know that's a really obvious, like, simple example, but then imagine that across every decision that you need to make. And it's just this snowplow, like that Snowpiercer train just—
Chris Sparks (38:28): Yes.
Chris Williamson (38:29): —plowing the fuck out of everything, and it's just on a set of tracks, and it's going in a direction, and a decision and opportunity pops up and you just forget about it, because it doesn't contribute. And a decision pops up, and you forget about it.
You said about how the most dangerous procrastination tools aren't the things that are obvious procrastination, they're like the shadow projects that we do which are mere reflections of the main project we're supposed to do.
Chris Sparks (38:50): Mm-hmm.
Chris Williamson (38:51): And in The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield, he talks a lot about shadow careers. So he spent a lot of time in LA and Hollywood around actors and film business, and he said that he found a lot of lawyers and agents for actors were failed actors. So what they'd done is they wanted to go and pursue this career, but they hadn't quite decided to commit fully because it was so risky, so they'd gone into this sort of proximal analogy career, this thing that was close enough to it, this ancillary part—It's a bit of it, but it's not really it, but it satisfies the part of us—and that's the worst thing. Like you could have just—If you're going to be a fucking agent for an actor with the dreams of being an actor, you might as well just go and be an actor. Like, you're already doing fifty percent of the stuff. Like, just go and commit the full hog. Alternatively, go and do something else.
So yeah, I think one of the ways in which you convince yourself that you're doing the work but it isn't the actual work you're supposed to be doing, those are the dangers. And I've seen that so many times. "Oh, I've got this website copy to finish," for like to finish the main thing that is important, "But ooh, I could write a new script for a YouTube video, ooh I could do some guest research, or do whatever." It's like, no. What's the main thing you're supposed to do? Focus on that.
Chris Sparks (40:09): In venture capital, they have this model of power-law. Right? I think in the pandemic we learn a lot about exponential returns, and in venture capital you raise a fund, you go out, and you invest in like thirty startups, and one of those startups is going to have a better return on investment than the other twenty-nine combined. That's what the power-law means, is that one of these things is going to be worth more than everything else combined. And I think this applies to the way that we spend our time. That your best hour today, what you do in that hour, is going to be worth more than the rest of the day combined. That long to-do list you have, that ten things you say you're going to do today, one of those things (which, by the way, is probably not on that list, because no one's asking you for it), one of the things on your list if you did that will be worth more than doing everything else on the list combined.
But the danger is that we measure our productivity in the number of boxes that we check, the number of things that we get done, rather than the progress that we make towards our goal. And right, coming back to the importance of really slowing down to decide what's most important, because progress towards that is better than progress on everything else combined. So it's this one decision that's hard, but makes all of the other decisions super easy. Like you said, you're a freight train just plowing through. So that's why I always come back to like what is most important, how can I prioritize that, how can I make sure that it comes first at the expense of all these other things that I can just justify later.
So if you're thinking about this, this could be whether you're a manager or whether you're just trying to manage yourself, right, you're thinking about, "Oh, did I have a good week this week?" Well, it would be very easy to say, "Oh, like, I did this thing, I did this thing," you list out all the things that you did. Well, let's imagine that you'd had just one goal for the week. And you're like, "Well, is this a good week? Well, I did all these other things." Well, that doesn't matter. Did you make any progress towards that one goal?
Chris Williamson (42:19): Did it move you toward the goal? Yes.
Chris Sparks (42:23): I see this all the time when I work with my performance coaching clients. We have a session, and for me, the whole goal of the session is to give them three things at the end. These are the three things that I recommend that you do for next time. I don't come up with them. They come up with them. They say, "Hey, I should be really doing this." It's like, "Hey, that sounds like a really good idea. Maybe you should be doing that. Let's define it. Let's be very clear on what you're going to do, what are those steps, what does it look like when you're gonna be done, where are you going to accomplish it, why is it important to you." And then like, "Hey, are you committed to that?" They're like, "Yeah, I'm going to do that." Like, "Cool, I'm writing down that you're going to be doing this. Great." Write down these three things, I send 'em in an email afterwards, do one, do two, do three, and then the next time that I see them I'm like, "Hey, how are things going?" And they tell me about things that they've done. It's like, "No, no, no. I don't care about any of those. Those three things that we decided last time are by far the most important things for you to be doing. How are those going?”
It's so funny how we want to pat ourselves on the back for doing all of these other things that are just a mechanism for avoiding what's most important.
Chris Williamson (43:28): One of the things that I've heard you talk about to do with your poker game is confidence from evidence that you know what you're doing. Right? The fact that if you've done something repeatedly over and over—but there is an element here of intuition versus cognition, and because a lot of people are—Pretty much everybody is some form of knowledge worker now, right? There's an executive function that you need, you've gotta make a decision, everyone's like doing a little bit of operations. "Gotta do this before this, and that's more urgent, and this is important, but this I can push off until tomorrow." How do you balance, or how do you play with the tension between cognition and intuition when you're making decisions?
Chris Sparks (44:12): A key takeaway that I had from my annual review this year, which by the way I put out publicly—I'm pretty proud of it, maybe there's some good stuff in there. One of the key takeaways is that I'm too smart. Like, I'm trying too hard to be rational and to approach things from a very, "Let's figure this out," lens. And I'm acting—Like, this is a little bit tongue in cheek, but this year I'm trying to be less smart. I don't need to know what's going on, it's more about that I can trust myself to do the right thing. And this is much more of a reliance on intuition and feeling. We talk about listening to the signals our bodies are telling us, listening to our emotions, trusting our gut, and I think it's important to recognize that for me, when I say "intuition," I mean internalized experience. That the more that I have done something, the more that I have internalized the right way of doing it. That so much of it is subconscious, and that if I'm trying to think about the reasons for doing it, or my strategy for doing it, or optimizing it, I'm getting in the way of my natural brilliance, and that this intuition (because it comes from internalized experience), if I have no experience it's not going to come overnight. I'm not going to be well-calibrated.
So this is important, because if I'm taking a long-term perspective, I need to be getting more experience so that my intuition becomes something that I can rely upon.
Chris Williamson (45:56): So does this look like at the beginning of a pursuit you're more deliberate, you're more cerebral, and then as you continue and you accumulate more experience then you allow that intuition to take over? Is that the way to look at this?
Chris Sparks (46:09): Yes. And I would take it even farther, is I want to be very tolerant of making big mistakes in the beginning by trusting my gut knowing that my intuition is not going to be well-calibrated yet, but because it's going to get me more reps and more feedback and more evidence of where I am calibrated. Right? It's like I want to be optimizing for speed, and this process of needing to be very deliberate slows things down. Just so many opportunities for life, especially in the physical world, are very temporal. Like, you see the person across the room, you're like, "Oh, I should go talk to that person." You can't be thinking about the perfect opener or like checking their Twitter feed looking for the right thing to ask them about. Just go up and say, “what's up,” right? Trust your intuition on that. And I'm trying to just say, "Oh, I think I should do this," just doing it. Just trusting it. And if I'm wrong, I can go back and calibrate that later. It's like, "Okay, here are the things that I might have missed, or here's what I might have done differently next time." Right? The time for that deliberation can be there, but not in the moment. In the moment, you just go for it. And I talk about this in—
Chris Williamson (47:21): Bro, I, I, finish your—I gotta tell you about this fucking concept once you're done. Finish up. I'm so excited to tell you about this thing I came up with.
Chris Sparks (47:28): Yeah. Yeah. So in poker, I think about this as confident versus critical. So—I like to give poker examples. So imagine that I'm playing in this very, very high-stakes tournament, and I'm in there with people who like, this is just a rounding error for them. This is no big deal. So if I look like I'm really try-hard, they're going to try harder. I want them to relax, I want them to—And I also want them to be a little bit intimidated by me. Right? The easier that I make it look, the more that they're going to say, "Hey, like, he's too good. Maybe I wanna just let him have it." So I, at the table I want to be embodying like, "I'm going to win this tournament, guys, it's just a matter of time." Like I know it, I am fully confident. And so every bluff that I make, every raise, every call, I'm like, "Man, I'm just like the greatest poker player in the universe. This is amazing." Like everything I do, everything I touch turns to gold.
Now obviously I can't believe that, and I don't believe that. The second that the tournament ends, I move into fully critical mode, and be like, "Wow, I just played like garbage." Like, it doesn't matter that I won a million dollars, I made a bunch of mistakes, so I'm going to go back to all of those places that I could have done things differently and deconstruct it and figure it out so that when I come back to that next situation, not only do I have the evidence and the confidence, like, "Yeah, I studied this spot. I'm prepared. Like, I know exactly what I'm doing, I'm just going to trust it." But that I'm likely to do better in that time, or I'm likely to move faster, I'm likely to not hesitate. So it's this dichotomy that's so supportive, is just trusting intuition. But then, you know, when the curtain's closed, I have the time to sit back and reflect. I can say, "All right, well, I messed up a bunch there. Let's figure out how I messed up so I don't make that same mistake again."
Chris Williamson (49:25): Didn't you work on how you were going to put the money down on the table? Like the body language and the sense of—What was that?
Chris Sparks (49:34): Yeah. I practiced over and over again looking at my cards, grabbing chips, and putting them into the middle so that I could have—not only so I wouldn't be giving anything away, so that no matter what I had, that would feel like second nature to me, but also to just kinda reclaim some of that mental bandwidth. So while I'm doing that, rather than focusing on the movement itself, I could be thinking about what the right play is to make. It's just trying to make something second nature, so that I don't have to even think about it.
Chris Williamson (50:06): Dude. So, this thing that I came up with, it's opportunity anxiety. So, opportunity cost is that by doing a thing you are not able to do another thing. Right? You have the choice between the theme park and the gym. By going to the theme park you can't go to the gym. The opportunity cost of going to the theme park is not being able to go to the gym. Right? I'm adamant that there's an equivalent around opportunity anxiety, and it shows itself in daily routines best of all. So the daily habits or practices that you need to do, they reset every morning when you wake up. So as you wake up in the morning, you now have this "brrring." Like this list of, "I've gotta meditate, and I've gotta go to the gym, and I've gotta walk the dog, and I've gotta check my emails, and I've gotta do blah blah blah blah blah." The longer that you leave those things without them being done, the more time is spent thinking about the fact that you still need to do them. So this is an argument for front-loading tasks and—Especially personal productivity tasks—Earlier in the day.
If you have committed to yourself that you're going to read ten pages and meditate and do some breath work, you can either do them upon waking and then spend the rest of the day basking in the glow of having been such a smart arse that you already did it, or you can spend most of the day thinking, "Oh, god, I've still got to meditate later on, and oh fuck, I've still got—I gotta read the ten pages of that book later on." Every single one of those thoughts that you had, that is your anxiety cost. Right? That's the opportunity anxiety cost. The anxiety cost is you could have spent this time thinking about something else by doing the task earlier, and that's the same as if there's a cute girl or guy or an interesting person on the other side of the room at the party. Go and speak to them. Because the alternative is thinking about going and speaking to them for the next five minutes, and that is—That's not achieving anything. That's the cost that you are paying, right? The anxiety cost is the cost that you pay for not doing a thing sooner rather than later.
Chris Sparks (52:02): That's so brilliant. And I think it's so well said as well, as—You know, the way to enjoy your life is just to have no regrets. I think that's one of the real costs of putting things off, is that they're still hanging above you, you're still coming back to them, maybe feeling bad that, "Oh, I should have done that already," or, "Man, like, I would be enjoying this time with my friends or family a lot more if I knew that as soon as they went to bed or as soon as they left I'm gonna have to do this thing that I've been putting off." And, yeah. I always come back to just wanting to do my best, and if I've done my best I have nothing to regret, and I just enjoy things a lot more.
One thing that I would add to that when it comes to things like habits and routines is to just think about trying to find the magic in the mundane. I think it's very easy to fall into the trap of thinking like something like meditation or exercise or writing in the morning or whatever your daily habit is as something to get through in order to get on with your day, and that there's infinite depth to any of these activities that you keep on doing, and infinite magic if only you can pay attention to it.
A breakthrough for me was, you know, we talked about the fantasy of running off to the ashram. Well, I had this fantasy one time. I went and stayed at an ashram for a week when I was traveling. I was in my, you know, thirty-dollars-a-day backpack super-grizzly phase, and I was like, "I wanna see what it would be like to be a monk, so I'm gonna try to be a monk for a week." And on the surface level, these guys' lives are so mundane. They wake up, they sit, they're sweeping the floor, they're doing dishes, they're eating the same meals every day. It's like, "Man, this looks pretty mundane and boring." But then you realize that their experience of the mundane is so rich that a simple activity like washing a dish or sweeping the floor could have infinite insight or just be so rich that they didn't need anything else. That the opportunity lies within to find the gold in these.
So I've been doing the same routine more or less for over a decade. Like, that first hour of the day is pretty much the same. And I've had periods where I'm like, "Man, like, maybe I just don't need to do this anymore," and about a couple weeks after that I was like, "Yep, that's probably why I've been doing that for a decade." Like, the day goes way better when I do those things. But it's that I forget, not only I do these things so that I can perform better, so that I could show up more for the people that I love, but I do these activities because they're worth doing for their own sake, and every time I do them I discover something new, if I go in with that attitude.
Chris Williamson (55:09): What does the first hour of the day look like for you?
Chris Sparks (55:13): When I wake up, I write three pages in my journal. These are the morning pages that come from Artist's Way, of which I'm a huge proponent of. I meditate for ten minutes. I would love to get it up more, but like ten minutes is the most that I can get on a daily basis. I look at my plan for the day, say, "Hey," I decide the night before, "Here are my top three priorities. What am I gonna do? Let's make sure that I have the time for those." I'll slot those into my schedule. And then I try to get some sunshine on my face. I go outside, I go for a walk, I do some stretches, pretty basic like yoga-type stuff, but you know, motion creates emotion, so that when I sit or stand at my desk I've already kind of got some momentum going, I already have some ideas that have popped up, and hopefully those can start to spill onto the screen or onto the page. So it's, yeah, like capturing, getting all the kinda mental detritus out of my head and then like never looking at it again. Meditation, like getting centered, slowing down, movement, like, let's kinda get my body in gear.
And then yeah, that's it. Sometimes I'll read a chapter of a book that I'm interested in, sometimes I'll hop right in, but yeah. The first hour's kind of the same, but the experience is quite different from day to day.
Chris Williamson (56:42): It's not far off from mine. Going back to what you just said about visiting the ashram there, that is you minimizing your anxiety cost, right? You had this thing, it was a potential that was going to take up time, you'd thought about it a lot. "Okay, I'm gonna stress-test it." You know, "I'm gonna go and see what it's like. And maybe I'll fucking hate it. Maybe it will be shit." But by doing that, the girl that you obsessed over in school for months and months and months, you could have got rid of that within two minutes by just going up and speaking to her. She might have been an arsehole. You might have hated her. She had bad breath or something, and then you would have been like, "Oh, god, I'm so glad I got that out of the way." Or it might have gone well, or it might have done something indifferent. Right? But you've done it. That minimizes anxiety cost.
The other thing that I thought was what people do in life when they seek new experiences for the most part is they're trying to create an external stimulus that causes them to be present, and our goal in mindfulness and in our daily lives is to lower the threshold of external stimuli that causes us to be present. If you can be present when you're sweeping the floor, then going on a roller-coaster is fantastic, but you don't need any more of it. You don't need to base jump off the side of a mountain, you don't need to have sex on MDMA, you don't need to—You know, pick whatever it is that you do that causes you to not be able to be anywhere but in the present moment. The goal is to take it from being at the peak of the roller-coaster to going on holiday to taking the dog for a walk to just washing the dishes. Right? Lower the threshold down to the point where you can simply be present because you want to be present doing whatever it is that you want to do.
And I think if you view kinda through that frame, it becomes much more of a game. You realize that what most people are doing and the people a lot of the time that chase the grandest experiences are the ones that are enabled to be present without them, and that makes you see the people that constant—You know, Dan Bilzerian might be an example of this, I don't know how present he is or isn't, but that sort of a lifestyle would indicate to me that somebody—If you need so much opulence and extravagance in order to enjoy life, that's kind of a sad situation to be in. If you can't simply be happy being—it's the Naval quote. "If you can't be happy with a coffee you won't be happy with a yacht." Like, if you can't be present washing the dishes, what makes you think that you're going to be present on MDMA? Like, you know, it's—that's one of the things that came to mind.
Chris Sparks (59:11): I'm not sure I verbalized this before, but this something I'm confronting with myself and then thinking a lot about, is the prison of expectations. And one way that this I think has been manifesting for myself is setting a really high bar for social interaction. Realizing that hanging out with friends was really a vehicle for me to pursue peak experiences or to kind of engage the you know, self-involved or controlling part of me that wanted to create these amazing experiences, that everyone thought so well of me, or that, wow, I can't believe that I pulled that off and accomplished that, or that was so amazing, now I have all these awesome stories that'll make me sound cool on a podcast, and realizing how this—what I was telling myself is like prioritizing relationships and spending time with friends was really just an excuse to satisfy these urges that as we said, like, could never really be satisfied. Right? They're just—when you've skydived enough times, all of—You need to skydive without a parachute or you need to do formations or you need to get a wing suit or whatever it is. You're always gonna find another way to keep pushing that edge that always recedes.
And just coming back to, no, is like—I spend time with people because I value spending time with people, and being comfortable releasing these expectations of, "I need to be doing these amazing things," and, "I need to be hanging out with like this caliber of people or like I'm just not going to do it," or it's like a waste of time. Whatever story that I told myself to justify just not sending a text to my friends. Realizing, like, no, like we can just sit and hang out and do nothing and if you're with people who you love and you care about, that's enough.
So, yeah. I think that for me, I said, I'm still trying to figure this out, but it came back to these expectations of—these expectations, not only were they never going to be met because I would keep raising the bar, but they were getting in the way of doing the thing that I value. So I think these examples come up all the time, of needing to hit this bar, but these expectations prevent the action that allows you to move towards it.
Chris Williamson (01:01:50): Talk to me about dealing with emotions when you need to be rational, effective, performing well, or just equanimous. You know, what did you learn during this intense period of preparing for your poker game, where you knew that there was a chance that you would win, but also a good chance that you would lose as well, and you're there trying to make decisions under super, super high pressure, and then the card's gonna turn over and it's a ten rather than a king. Talk me through what you learned about processing emotions and dealing with them.
Chris Sparks (01:02:27): Emotions are our friend rather than the enemy. I think for a lot of my life, you know, I would post on rationalist forums and all of the books that I would read would be on cognitive biases, and I thought that I could just reprogram my code to be robotic, to just become this you know, robotic executor who just shows up and does the work every day, or to make these perfect decisions for large amounts of money and just not care about what happened. That, you know, not let emotion creep into it. And the truth is that there is no separation of emotion from action, or decision. That the emotion is the catalyst, is the core component of these things, and so by trying to suppress or repress emotion, we are—It's like we're sweeping it under the rug, and it's just gonna pop out somewhere else. Right? We're sticking our finger in one hole and it's gonna pop out of another hole. It's going to come out in some form, and the more that we try to deny what we're feeling, the more that it's gonna show up in strange ways.
My meditation teacher calls this "instant karma," where we deny that we are angry or frustrated about something and we immediately slam the door on our finger or we trip or fall. It's sort of like, the universe is kind of like giving these signs of like, "Hey, like, maybe you aren't as egg-nam—I can never pronounce this word—"equanimous" in this moment as you would like to believe. This, like, this is probably a signal that maybe you should just like take it down a notch.
And the saying that I always love is, "The key is to not feel feelings about feeling feelings." Right? Feel sad, you feel angry, you feel guilty, you feel frustrated, like, don't feel angry or disappointed that you feel sad. Just feel sad. Sit with that, and this will allow you to try to deconstruct like, "Why am I feeling what I'm feeling right now? Where is that coming from?" And it allows you to have a little bit more of a friendly relationship with that emotion, rather than an antagonistic relationship, because these emotions, these are signals from your subconscious. These are things that you are experiencing, they have valuable things to tell you. So when I'm in a big poker hand, or when I'm making a big investment decision, or when I'm talking with a client, I'm trying to pay attention to what I feel and trust that this is valuable information that I should listen to.
Chris Williamson (01:05:13): Dude. I love it. Increasingly I think that the stoicism movement that we've seen over the last five years or so—people wanted a secular version of yoga for the mind. That was what they wanted. They wanted to find something that was going to make them a bit more agile and make them not at the mercy of the tidal wave, the vicissitudes of life, right? That they weren't gonna get ragged around by it so much. But I think that you end up losing a lot of the beauty. Like, what would life be if it wasn't for the fact that you actually did care about things and got sad about stuff?
There is beauty in that. There's beauty in the fact that you get to feel the richness of emotions, because there's a lot of criticism around the moment around life being far too comfortable. You know, we have heating when it's cold and air conditioning when it's hot and we can Amazon Prime a TV with Netflix on to Postmates ourselves some food to our door while we sit on the couch and blah. Like, one of the concerns that I have especially around the rationalist community is that trying to rely on wrangling your emotions using a list of cognitive biases and some CBT ends up being a mental/emotional equivalent of that very, very comfortable life. "I don't ever want to feel basically any emotion that I don't want, so what I'm going to do is I'm gonna use raw cognitive horsepower to just try and clamp it down." You know how you see those packages on the back of trucks, and they've got those ratchets, and it's like, "Right, I'm gonna ratchet this down so tight that it can't ever move, and it's just never ever gonna be able to get away." And you go, "Well, okay, but what if you just sat with the emotion, or what if you used the emotion as a signal?"
You know, you're nervous before you go into a poker game. Well, good. Maybe the nerves can focus your attention. Maybe you're not nervous, you're excited. Maybe the framing of the emotion is all of the problem, and the emotion itself is barely any problem at all.
Chris Sparks (01:07:09): So good. I'll start with the practical, and then I'll lead into the existential. The example that you gave of being nervous, accept that. Work with it. Understand, "Is there a good reason why I'm nervous? Is there something that I can do to feel more prepared?" Knowing that I'm nervous, how is this going to affect my decision-making? How can I work with that, how can I account for it, how can I adjust for it. Right? If I'm—If I am nervous but I pretend like I'm not nervous, it's gonna cause me to overcompensate, it's gonna cause me to deny, it's gonna cause me to go astray. So like, acceptance is always the first step. Right? Awareness, acceptance. Given where I am, what does it make sense to do next?
Zooming out a little bit, this let's say "mission" of, "I want to conquer my emotions, I want to become fully rational," it doesn't work. It comes back to these expectations, right? It's a recipe for suffering. And I think this applies to anything where we are trying to look for solutions where, "When I reach this point then I will have it all figured out. Then I will have everything that I need." It's hopeless. Like, this hope of achieving this skill, receiving this knowledge, becoming this type of person, and then all of your magical problems go away, it's hopeless. It's just a recipe for more suffering, because if and when you reach this hypothetical place, which, sorry, you're not gonna get there. Like, you're never gonna remove all of your biases, you're always going to have some things about yourself that maybe you'd like to change, but like sorry, they're not going anywhere. Even if you were able to change everything, it's like Whac-A-Mole. New things would pop up in its place. Like life is just this never-ending set of details and challenges, and if you can accept that then it's a lot of reduction of suffering. Right?
It doesn't mean that you don't try to think better or to make better decisions, but you don't treat that as a project that's going to solve all of your problems. It's like, you mentioned how we take things like stoicism and turn them into a religion where it's like, "Well, we want to reduce our experience of negative emotion so that our companies can sell more products or so that we can make more friends." Like, we turn all of our spirituality into a project, and it's just imposing this material frame onto, no. Like, the point is to try to ask these difficult but important questions. Not necessarily needing an answer or expecting this answer is going to change us, but like, we just—It's just—you mentioned meditation, right? Why do people start meditating? It's like, "Well, it's gonna give me some sort of competitive edge." It's like, "No, man. Like, you meditate because it's just a good thing to do." But the more that you like thrust all of these expectations onto it, the less likely you are to stick with it, because you're going to end up just being disappointed.
Chris Williamson (01:10:28): Well, let me give you two different types of humans, right? And you can look at them both in terms of effectiveness—That could be, you know, in the ruthless, capitalist, want-to-make-sales world, and in terms of happiness. The first one spends a lot of time thinking about cognitive biases and they've spent tons of time on lesswrong.com, they know everything that Scott Alexander's ever written, and when a decision pops up to them they'll go through their list of biases, "Okay, so I've got self-serving attribution, and I've got the fundamental attribution error, and I've got availability bias, and there's a little bit of don't multiply by zero in here, okay, that that that that, right." And then stoicism and CBT will clamp down on the emotions, and then "ptt," they spit out some sort of solution. Compare that with a person who has the same decision come to them, and just intuitively allows themselves to feel what it is that they're supposed to do, it's an aggregation, this big macro-aggregation of all of their experiences, they think through things, and then they just make a decision, right, based on how they feel plus the surface-level amount of thinking that they need to do.
Person number one I don't think is any more effective, I think it's much more laborious, I think that they're more likely to make decisions that they overthink, which actually end up being the wrong sort of answer, and on top of that, I don't think that they're any happier, because they never actually get to feel emotions. You don't ever get to feel the beauty of nerves or excitement or sadness, or joy or anger or happiness, or any of these things, whereas the other person has a richer and quicker life. You were saying that iterating on decisions and getting those out quicker is one of the most important things. "How quickly and effectively can I make decisions?" The person that does it intuitively with a requisite amount of thinking without overthinking, without going through this big process of cognitive biases before they can do something, I think that's the person that's quicker and more effective and has a richer life. That's the one that I want to be.
Chris Sparks (01:12:20): My intuition is telling me that as well. The dimension that I'm thinking about it is in terms of fragility versus robustness. I think the challenge, or let's say, a detriment to over-focusing on one aspect of yourself is that aspect becomes a crutch. Right? You see this in the guy who only does bi's and tri's but never has leg day. It's like, man, well, he can put up a lot of weight if he's within his wheelhouse, but you know, you put him on a soccer field or you put him in a race or something that requires him getting outside of his comfort zone and all of a sudden he's not quite the horse that you want to bet on, right?
Chris Williamson (01:12:59): Well I'm gonna guess that the same would be in poker. Like, if you had a guy that's just a quant monster, like an absolute percentages beast, but then hasn't spent time working on emotions or hasn't spent time working on tells or body language.
Chris Sparks (01:13:13): Yeah. When—In poker, there are—A large class of players is completely model-driven, where the way that they study poker is to ask the computer what it would do and try to memorize those solutions, and that works great as long as they're in a situation that they have studied. But all of a sudden—and I'm in control of this because I can control the field of play—I take them to a situation that maybe they haven't studied, and now they have to rely on what their intuition is telling them, and every time they query their intuition, nothing comes back because they've never had to rely upon it. Right?
And that's what I mean about fragility, is like, yes. If you have this thing that you go super deep on, it works great as long as you're within this very narrow band of situations, but as soon as you get outside of that, it becomes very uncomfortable. And that's what life is going to do. It's going to put you in situations that are outside of your comfort zone.
Chris Williamson (01:14:14): Chris Sparks, ladies and gentlemen. Experiment Without Limits is the best workbook that I've ever found for productivity, and you are an idiot for not charging like three hundred bucks for it, because I would have happily paid three hundred bucks for it, but you can get it for free if you got to forcingfunction.com, and you can get a paper version on Amazon for like, what, like five bucks or something, or like ten bucks.
Chris Sparks (01:14:36): Fifteen. It's at cost. But—
Chris Williamson (01:14:36): Ah, so. Whatever.
Chris Sparks (01:14:38): Yeah. Printing costs more these days. But yeah, highly recommended.
Chris Williamson (01:14:41): Dude. It's fucking dope. It is a systematic process for every single different thing that you need to optimize your productivity system. I, it's—I send that to absolutely everybody that wants to get on with their productivity. And what else are you doing? What can we expect from you this year?
Chris Sparks (01:14:57): Thanks. Right now we're really excited about the third cohort of Team Performance Training. This is our flagship program. I work with fourteen executives to teach them my full system for performance, so centering around vision, getting clarity on what they want out of life, prioritization, how do we make sure this North Star, this most important thing, comes first, and then systems, how do they make sure that these important things, they experience continuous improvement. So I show them how to do it, and then we sit down and I force them to do it, and we do it together, and we immediately give each other feedback. It's amazing. You want to check it out, learn more, teamperformancetraining.com. Current cohort starts mid-February, we're gonna offer it again in September. So check that out. I open source everything that I do, everything that I learn. We've got some great articles at forcingfunction.com, some cool templates if you wanna plan your day, reflect on your life, uncover your top values, all of that can be found there at forcingfunction.com.
I'm also getting into the Twittersphere a little bit more, so if you want to see some kind of concise things that are coming to mind, you can follow me there at @SparksRemarks.
Chris Williamson (01:16:05): Dope. Thanks, Chris.
Chris Sparks (01:16:06): It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much, Chris.
Chris Williamson (01:16:15): Thank you very much for tuning in. Don't forget, if you want a list of one hundred books that you should read before you die including Chris's Experiment Without Limits, head to chriswillx.com/books. You can get it for free right now and download it immediately and begin your journey on a beautiful, literary quest: chriswillx.com/books. Also, don't forget that you can receive eighty-three percent off, three months free, and a thirty-day money-back guarantee from Surfshark by going to surfshark.deals/modernwisdom, and you can get the perfect straight smile that you have always wanted seventy percent cheaper than other invisible aligners by going to dwaligners.co.uk/modernwisdom.
I'll see you next time.