What Got You There: Poker is a Sandbox for Understanding Human Behavior
Sean DeLaney and Chris Sparks have a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation covering strategy, mindsets, and pursuing mastery and high performance.
Video recording above; audio recording below (1h26m). Time-stamped topics, resources mentioned, and full transcript following.
Topics
00:00:00: Intro
00:02:20: Chris’s Initial Interest in Games
00:06:28: Inflection Points
00:10:41: Learning By Teaching
00:14:42: The Concept of Centrality
0:17:55: Explore-exploit
00:21:33: Intentionality and Awareness
00:24:38: Reducing The Scope
00:29:56: Learn From Everyone and Everything
00:35:28: Self-sustaining Sources of Motivation
00:37:40: Post-mortems
00:41:57: Zooming Out
00:44:22: Architecture
00:47:35: You Win The First Hour, You Win The Day
00:52:00: Systems Thinking
00:58:36: Preparing for War in Peacetime
01:03:41: Murphyjitsu
01:07:04: Self-inquiry
01:13:13: Treat Everything As An Experiment
01:18:33: Mindset Shifters
01:22:41: Chris’s Favorite Place on The Planet
Resources mentioned:
Podcast Transcript
[Note: transcript edited slightly for clarity.]
[00:02:17] Sean: Chris, welcome to What Got You There. How are you doing?
[00:02:19] Chris: Fantastic. Sean, very excited to be here.
Chris’ Initial Interest in Games
[00:02:20] Sean: This is going to be one of those really fun conversations because you interact and do a lot of really interesting things. But what I love the most is you’ve uncovered a lot of these big principles. One of your focuses is around poker, but you came across this truth that the skills for winning in poker aren’t just about playing poker. And I want to uncover a lot of this, but I would love to know how you initially just get involved in, interested in playing different games?
[00:03:03] Chris: Well, my initial interest in games, I’m sure, is personality-driven. I’ve always been accused of being hyper-competitive and games are just a wonderful sandbox to learn about ourselves and to explore the boundaries of our capabilities. So I’ve been interested in games for as long as I can remember. My parents tell me stories when I was four or five sitting with all the adults playing Scattergories or Pictionary or Cranium. And that was all I wanted to do.
That was, to be seen on an even playing field even if I didn’t have the vocabulary or the depth, strategy necessary, I still wanted to be playing at that level. I just love to compete. As I got older that translated more into video games. I was most known for a couple of games online pre-poker. The first was the game called Microsoft Ants, which was a kid’s version of StarCraft. It is probably the most similar game. So, 13, 14 kinds of kids-friendly real-time strategy games.
And I got into card playing with a game called Gin, that was hosted on Yahoo. This is a one-on-one form of Rummy where you hold all the cards in your hand and achieve the perfect ELO rating in that game. And that was my introduction to poker initially with just playing freeroll tournaments, where you could compete against 10,000 strangers on the internet. And if you made it to the final table, the final 10, you would get a thousand dollars. So putting no money up, the possibility of winning a thousand dollars on my parents’ dial-up internet at the age of 16, that just seemed like the dream.
So I’ve been playing these games, competing, doing a very high level, but really only for status. You reach the top of the ant’s ladder or you reach the perfect rating and gain, and all you really get is a little bit of status within these small communities, but here was the opportunity to do something that I love: figure out the mechanics of a game and compete. Again, what I thought was a high level and actually get paid for doing it. That’s really what kicked things to the next gear.
[00:05:06] Sean: You mentioned the status there. I know you’re driven in the games inside of the games, but across all the games, if you could win one or hold one title, is there something like at the pinnacle of elite games that you would love to just hold the throne in?
[00:05:21] Chris: I can’t say I have. Unfortunately, I have in both of those games that I mentioned, I reached the top and I didn’t really change anything other than what’s the next mountain to climb. The coolest thing about poker and a lot of other things in life, is that they’re a little bit less closed. And like I say, I’m one of the least terrible poker players in the world. I’ve played on and off for 16 years, 2 million hands, and an absurd amount of time to obsess about one thing.
And the more that I learn just with anything, I realize how little I actually know and how there are just endless frontiers, endless dimensions for improvement. And poker, really, the only way of keeping score is who ends up with money at the end of the day. And a different sort of competing against the ghost of yourself is every decision is an opportunity to make the perfect decision. So I’m always analyzing what I did, always trying to uncover where my blind spots are, where my biases are, and continually try to calibrate and correct those.
Inflection Points
[00:06:28] Sean: I’m trying to think about those 2 million hands. I mean, that’s just an absurd number. I’m wondering for you, can you actually look back and see fundamental shifts in your overall ability? I don’t even know if this has to do with confidence at all across those 2 million hands where it was like, you know what, before I sat down at this tournament, I was fundamentally different per player than I left.
[00:06:46] Chris: Yeah. I like to think about inflection points a lot because I think a lot of things fall on an S curve. And inevitably we hit diminishing returns where we’re putting in more effort, but we’re not seeing the type of returns, the type of growth that we once were. And we’re looking for a change in convexity, which usually means the revelation of a new dimension of improvement that was previously unknown to us. And a lot of these inflection points that I’ve had in my life and my poker career were just that.
Things that were possible to do or dimensions to compete upon that I hadn’t even encountered before. And a lot of these were revealed to me with the benefit of working with some of the other best players in the world. Before I was a performance coach for executives and investors, I was the leading poker coach within a small niche of full-ring cash games, most known as an online cash gain specialist. And that gave me the benefit of having this wide sample size of here’s what all these other successful players are doing, and more important here’s how they’re thinking about it.
The difference between a strategy that you can see on the poker table and what is the thinking that generated that strategy and revealing, oh, that is a way of winning a hand that I hadn’t even recognized. So some of the epiphanies that just come to the top of my head, the idea that the absolute strength of my hand doesn’t matter. And that if you take that a level further, my cards don’t actually matter. What does my opponent think that I have?
And can I manipulate that perception and play in such a way that if he thinks I have this type of hand, how does my current hand interact with that? Other ones around, I can have a very good hand, but sometimes I need to turn it into a bluff. So looking for opportunities to bluff, to win the pot where I shouldn’t have to bluff, those are usually the best times to bluff because then the guy says, well, he has to have a good hand. It’s they’re looking for those spots where you’re trying to find bluffs.
And that creativity was something that I took away from other players, obviously understanding the mental side of it, I think is where I’ve always excelled. There have been other players who’ve spent more time studying models and have gone much deeper into the mathematical side of the game. But at the end of the day, a game like poker is played with other people. So, understanding both what is going on with myself in this moment, but also there’s a person on the other side of the screen even if I can’t see them.
They have feelings, they have motivations, and these are shifting from moment to moment. Can I develop a sensitivity to that? I think that was one of the real revelations for me. And I think a source of sustaining competitive advantage was being able to sense the person on the other side of the screen and even know that that was even a possibility. Previously I thought of online poker as just a robotic execution of strategies, but this added a whole level of dynamics to the game in that I had to be sensitive to. And thus, to develop sensitivity is to try to tighten a feedback loop around it.
This is what I thought this person was going to do, and they did something that was the opposite. What did I miss? Was there something there that could have tipped me off to that? These are the constant cycles, that constant iteration that I would go through, and eventually one of these paths would lead to diminishing returns. And I would say, what’s the next thing that I can do, which other people aren’t working on? Another dimension that perhaps has been neglected by others, that I can compete on, that others haven’t thought of yet.
Learning By Teaching
[00:10:41] Sean: I want to dive back into the mental side of things here in a second, but I don’t want to just gloss over a cheat code you tapped into here, to life. The best way to learn something is to teach it. But instead of just teaching it, you’re working with a handful of the smartest people within poker. And then, as you said, not only getting to watch them but actually understanding what’s truly going on in their head. I mean, what an unbelievable way to dissect, learn, and then synthesize that into your own style of play.
I just think that’s such a genius way to uncover more skills within yourself by learning from others, and understanding more to their game. I just thought that was really, really cool. I would love to know, you’ve worked with so many people, if you could basically train with, or let’s just say under, I’ll just call you guys equals in this though, but this could be anyone this, that wouldn’t have to be a poker player. Is there someone that you’re like, man, if I could just spend a year with, I would love to do that?
[00:11:36] Chris: Yeah. First, I want to comment on the best way to learn is by teaching, and I wholeheartedly agree with that. Something Richard Feynman talks about a lot, is you don’t realize what you know until you need to explain it to someone else. And that’s a really good way to excavate gaps in your own thinking. So that’s something that’s been really key to accelerate my learning and everything, is needing to explain what I’m doing to others. To attempt, to try to turn what I’m doing into something that can be taught.
There’s a deconstruction and distillation there that is absolutely essential for creating a body of knowledge that can be built upon. Something that’s a strong foundation. And as you said, working with people in performance and in poker, realizing that there are so many different ways to the top of the mountain, that there’s no one perfect style that works. And thus the flexibility of being able to adopt whatever is most suited for the goal, what is most suited for your current context.
Flexibility And Adaptability
And so I realized in poker, there were lots of different ways to win, and if I could minimize my own identity, this is the way that I play. And this is the way that I do things and more, what is the right style for this moment? What is the right approach given the situation that I am in now? That flexibility, that malleability I think was absolutely essential because it creates a humbleness and it sort of is an antidote to getting stuck in this local maxima, something that works really well, but stops working after a time. It calcifies. Back to your original question—
[00:13:30] Sean: No, I want to dive back into that. The adaptability, the flexibility there, I mean, that’s a really hard thing to do just starting off. What was this just like an ingrained personality or was this something a skill you developed over time?
[00:13:42] Chris: I really think that poker forced me to learn this. I say it’s the equivalent of just getting punched in the face over and over, because when you lose a large amount of money and you have no one else to blame, you have two options. One is the one that I choose: to pick myself up, try to figure out what I could do better, differently. I have to try to look up objectively to not take it personally, that here, this is an opportunity for improvement.
I’m already not so terrible. Here’s a way to get a little bit less terrible. That was just something that I really had to learn. And I think it was not something that was ingrained. I think this mental aspect of the more infinite end game of improvement was not something that came naturally, but I realized that it was a prerequisite as a commonality amongst the people who did make it, who did sustain a place at the top. So, yeah, I absolutely think that it was something that was made, not born.
The Concept of Centrality
[00:14:42] Sean: How did you think through the process then? I’m thinking about just talking about someone having a specific skill, like a martial artist with an unbelievable kick. That’s all they work on. How do you think about bringing on these essential weaknesses and then developing them into these really strong traits of yours? I’m just wondering how you think that through. Should I attack my weaknesses here? Should I just double down on strengths? What’s that process like for you internally?
[00:15:24] Chris: Yeah, I think we’re getting into a bit of strategy here. I’ll use poker terms, but I think this translates to business and life. I don’t see any differentiation. I like this concept of centrality. So centrality is understanding where you have an absolute competitive advantage. Easy sports example, if you’re an NBA team who does really well on the break, well, then you want to be setting up as many fast break opportunities as you can. So in poker, recognizing the opportunities or the situations that I understood better than other players.
And the funny thing about statistics, is that statistics is looking at the past occurrence, but I have control over how often this situation occurs. Go back to our NBA example, say here’s how this team is doing against the fast break, but this is a universe of opportunities that’s already occurred. If I discover, Hey, this opponent has a really difficult time in this situation, I don’t think they’ve studied it enough. I can do things to create that situation over and over in a competitive sense.
So I really think about it more in terms of recognizing my strengths and amplifying that. I think a lot of productivity is understanding what we do best, where we have the most leverage, what comes easiest most naturally to us, and trying to amplify that and remove all the things that are getting in the way. I generally think it’s better to amplify strengths or make them stronger as well to maximize the occurrence of them, rather than trying to bring up weaknesses.
[00:16:54] Sean: Your NBA example, would that be something similar to like historic military strategy where not only are you gonna use your artillery that’s best, you’re actually going to draw them into a, let’s just call it like a space or a field that is going to be most conducive to you winning. Is that sort of a similar strategy with that?
[00:17:08] Chris: Yeah. Another game that I played a lot growing up was the Age of Empires and, a simpler one is Pokémon where you have fire types, you have grass types and you have water types. And just like rock, paper, scissors, water does really well against fire. Fire does really well against grass, and somehow grass does really well against water. And so thinking about what is your matchup advantage and say, okay, I have a fire type coming against me, can I have all of my water resources ready to go, but not being stuck in this is my type, this is the way that I do things. Here’s the situation that’s presented to me, do I have a counter that is best suited for this situation?
Explore-exploit
[00:17:55] Sean: It’s really intriguing. I actually love just the entire strategy of how you think about all of this. I’m intrigued. I mean, you clearly have gotten extremely good at a lot of different games. What is the main reason? Because you’re articulating this unbelievable strategy right now, I have to assume when you were growing up, this strategy was not that well thought out. So I’m wondering what innate skills you were using and tapping into, even at an earlier age.
[00:18:39] Chris: The metaphor that I always like to share, this comes from a book called Algorithms To Live By, is to explore-exploit. And I think a lot of gameplay and a lot of life falls into these two dichotomies. So real quick, to explore is, you’re exploring all these different options. Here are potential approaches. I’m trying things. Let’s say I’m looking to grow my business. There’s all these different marketing channels, I’m going to plant some seeds and see which ones take root. I just moved to a new city, and I don’t know which restaurants I like yet. I’m going to try a few different restaurants until I find the spot that I like.
And then once you find a strategy that works, it’s like, okay, here’s my investment mandate that I know that I have an edge here, I’ve proven alpha, or I’ve found that best restaurant. I’m going to keep on going back there because the chef knows me, and I know exactly what to order. This is when you shift more over to exploit: you find something that works—which, in a lot of video games, some people would call a cheap trick—and you just keep on exploiting that. So I think this commonality that I’ve found across games is that all games have their internal mechanics.
And trying to figure out which of these mechanics can be exploited and or which tendency that opponents have that can easily be countered. And you’re always just trying to, okay, I found something that works. I’m just going to hammer that home until other people figure it out. So is this almost willingness to do things that other people think, oh, well that’s not really a fair way of playing or, oh, that’s not very fun. I’m here to win. I’m not here to play and have a good time. Obviously, I enjoy winning, but the point of the game is to win. So I’m looking for what is that underlying thing that will maximize my chances of winning?
[00:20:15] Sean: Yeah. Warren Buffett’s partner, Charlie Munger, has got this great line: take a simple idea, take it seriously. It’s like “fight unfair fights.” And it’s so funny. I don’t know whether it’s ego or what, so many of us are so unwilling to do that. It’s just such a great principle and practice overall, the explore-exploit. The listeners, I probably mentioned this on like a few shows in a row now because this just came out. It was a research paper published by Nature. And it was basically, they studied like the best scientists, athletes, a few other creators and stuff like that.
Intentionality and Awareness
And they were basically saying they’re hot streaks. It was only hit after a long exploration period, and then they could exploit that, but it was only due to that exploration period earlier. I just think it’s like a great model to work off of. I want to dive back into mindset and mentality here for a minute because the game you’re playing, so much poker, I mean, it’s kind of that balance, like statistics and overall psychology. I’m wondering when you approach the table, what mentality do you need to be in to operate your best? I know it’s going to be specific to you. I’m just curious what that looks like.
[00:21:33] Chris: The mentality that I try to have every time that I sit down is treating every decision as an opportunity to make a perfect decision. So people talk a lot about presence, and it’s really hard to overstate that there are times that you are fully present in the room, and there are times that only a part of you is present in the room. And a lot of the edge that I find in poker is the sensitivity to dynamics, which means actually paying attention.
And so am I in a position that I am fully curious that I am aware of any changes to the landscape? And what is my game plan? Before, a lot of people will fall into this habit of just sitting down and hopping in and let’s see what happens. Who’s playing, what history do I have against these players? What do I know about them? What’s my general game plan against them? What are the types of situations that’re going to be advantageous to me? How can I create those?
Even if this is just a two-minute thought process, coming in with this intentionality, I think is really the difference. And something that I talk a lot about is, I only play when I have an advantage. So then when I sit down, I know I am there. And when that reason is no longer true, I leave. So a lot of people, you know, ego-hubris-overconfident, will continue to play even when that reason for playing is no longer there. And that’s the thing—there’s always another game.
Life is just a universe of opportunities. And you can just, as you’ve mentioned, you know, Munger before you can wait for that big fat pitch. So there’s this discipline in not only game selection—am I playing the right game? A lot of people don’t even know what game they’re playing. But once I’m playing, am I comfortable just folding, folding, folding, waiting for that right opportunity to get involved? There’s a lot of really good players, but what really separates is this discipline.
Simply, I am going to wait until the odds are in my favor and only then will I act. I like this metaphor of surfing. I just surfed for the first couple of times in Panama. So I’m thinking a lot in terms of surfing metaphors. You watch surfers, a lot of times they’re just hanging out in the water. They’re swimming, they’ll kind of reposition, they’re waiting for that right wave to come. If you pick the wrong wave, you’re going to waste a whole lot of energy. It’s really just being in position. Poker is very much a positional game.
So what position is most advantageous? I’m always auditing my current state of mind. There are things I do. We can talk about routine preparation to get myself into this current state of mind. But I also know that this is going to change that I could be thrown off by something. I could lose my focus. I could forget why I’m there in the first place. So I try to have these objective signals for me to like, okay, get back into it or clearly my mind is not where it needs to be, okay. Now is the time to quit. And for me, it comes down to intentionality and awareness.
Reducing The Scope
[00:24:38] Sean: We need to dive deeper on this because I’m thinking about those moments where you lose presence. And I’m wondering what, say in a tournament where you essentially just can’t leave for the entire day. What are you doing in those moments? Like we can just think about this. Say, we’re a business person and we’re in a meeting and that presence is lost, so, we can apply what we’re going to teach us here. I’m just really intrigued how you recenter yourself in those moments.
[00:24:58] Chris: Sure. So one ritual that I’ll do, if I cannot leave, say, that I’m sitting in a chair and I’m like, Hey, I’m going to be here for the next five hours. One thing I’ll do is I’ll go check my posture. I’m going to sit up straight, shoulders back and I’m gonna open my eyes a little bit and I want to pick one particular thing to focus on. One single thing in live poker is hands. Hands are actually a decent place to notice live tells. I’m just gonna watch people’s hands for a while and see what I see. It’s like sometimes just like this Robert Pirsig, instead of looking at the entire building, just pick one brick and pick one particular thing to concentrate my focus on.
And then once I get done with hands and be like, okay, I’m going to just try to listen to people’s tonality of voice and try to sense, okay, is this a confident voice? Is this a pretending to be confident voice? That type of thing. So, having one particular thing to focus on. Obviously, I think that body posture has a lot of signals. So if I notice I’m starting to slouch, okay. That’s a good signal that I’m starting to lose focus, focus on posture a little bit more and maybe do some stretches. Maybe I’m going to just completely shift in my chair.
I’ll also move to sit sideways or backwards. Just anything, it’s like motion creates an emotion type of thing. I’ll also really try to put myself in someone else’s seat. If I’m trying to get inside their head, what are they thinking right now? I’m going to pretend like I’m playing their hands if I’ve already folded. Okay. Like, based on what I’m doing. All right. I have a strong hand. How would this person like to play a strong hand? Try to like to play alongside them, get in their head. I think as I speak out loud, a lot of commonality is to try to reduce this scope by having something very specific to focus on. It’s something to bring myself back into the room.
[00:26:48] Sean: Well, one of the great things about all these things that you mentioned, reducing the scope is, these aren’t huge monumental changes. They’re small changes. And I mean, what you’re saying besides the posture kind of seems like all of this is internal where other people at the table will have no idea. I also want to just hit on, you mentioned a person dialing in—that’s from Robert Pirsig, Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and please fill in any gaps here.
Essentially, he was teaching a writing course and a young student had to write about the entire town. And he said, no, no, no. Like she couldn’t, she was just getting too blocked in her own head. So, he said focus on a single brick at a single building in town. And all of a sudden that unleashed her creativity. When we focus on these small things, we understand the games inside the games. We can go so much deeper on a particular thing. That’s what you meant by Pirsig, right?
[00:27:35] Chris: That’s exactly right. I’m a very visual thinker and I like to think I have all of these different levers for which I can change my internal state. So say one is the level of arousal where it’s on a continuum from full fight-or-flight to full alpha meditating in my cave. And the first step to putting myself at this right level of arousal is, where am I in this moment to just have that audit, have that proxy of where am I?
And then, once I can decide, oh, I’m a little bit fight-or-flight. Well, perhaps I want to be a little bit more towards the middle. Actually, sometimes it happens like, I’m a little bit too chill, I need to lead for it a little bit. I need to get more involved. Okay. Well, I’ll raise the BPM on the music that I’m listening to. Maybe I’ll raise the lighting in the room. Anything just to signal to myself, all right, I’ve deviated a little bit from course, this is a way to redirect.
So I said a lot of this for me always comes back to awareness. And what can I do to be aware of what is happening in this moment and this visual for me that this is something that I can change, right? It’s a design affordance that by changing this part of my environment, I will change my internal state. That seems to work for me because it brings something back into my own control. I become the author of the experience once again.
[00:28:58] Sean: Well right level of arousal, this was a total game-changer for me when I was playing sports. Like I’d be too amped up and all of a sudden, I’d make too many errors. And then all of a sudden I realized I had to tone that down, listen to some more calm music prior to a game or something like that. And all of a sudden, when you understand that game, your actual game, your performance, your play, and this could be the same thing that we were talking about a minute ago, in a business meeting.
Learn From Everyone and Everything
And when you understand your level of arousal and what impacts that just changes things dramatically. I’m so intrigued, because you mentioned the surfing analogy, which I thought was great. And it seems like you’re pulling from things that have nothing to do with poker, but then you incorporate them really well. Are there other things that you’ve just pulled out of, let’s just call it like thin air, from other domains that just really impact your life? I even know you mentioned James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games. That was like a fundamental breakthrough for me as well. I’m wondering what are some of these other big, let’s just call them levers, that you’d like to pull that you didn’t pick up from poker?
[00:29:56] Chris: It was wonderful. I think just a fun posture to take through life is that every person that I meet, every article that I read has something to teach me. And it’s my job to uncover, what is this person’s superpower, or what experience has this person had that I’m never going to have, but perhaps I can glean something through it. If I can maintain the sense of curiosity that life has infinite depth, well, I will infinitely learn and grow and be able to continually expand my capabilities.
So when you’re asking for who I would want to work under, I would want to work under anyone who is the best at their craft. So I look at anything from a meeting at a really nice restaurant, how do the chefs coordinate so that they minimize movement so that they can create an experience that’s excellent, but also quick? It’s this perfection of process. And what are the types of things that they do to communicate, or how do they prepare ahead of time? So that when things got busy, they didn’t get overwhelmed.
Bottlenecks
I look at things like manufacturing. A really key mental model for me is bottlenecks, which you think about a factory line—let’s say like, Ford building cars, you had all these discrete steps and how quickly the car can make it through the assembly line. That speed is limited by the slowest step. And if you extrapolate that out to life, that we have these things we’re trying to achieve, we’re progressing through these linear steps, but whichever step is most limiting us, that is literally the only thing that we should be paying attention to.
If we improve any other aspect of our lives, that’s a waste because we’re speeding up the other steps that aren’t the bottleneck. What was just such an epiphany for me, is that the vast majority of things that we do are a complete waste of time because they don’t actually attack the bottleneck. And something that’s boring—how does a factory work? How do you streamline operations?—all these types of things have implications for the way that we live.
If we are open to the idea that people figuring something out in one specific domain can also generalize across other domains—you mentioned military strategy. Now, even though I’m not looking to go to war anytime soon, there’s been a lot of investment and a lot of thought that’s gone into what is the correct way to prepare and to generate a strategy that can work, that can survive the uncertainty and chaos that is a battle. So I love going back through history because I assume that everything that’s happened is going to recur in some form.
I’d rather learn from someone else’s experience and my own. And a big one for me that keeps popping up, and I keep heading back towards, is ancient wisdom. But for me particularly, Eastern philosophy is something that I’m finding that I’m starting to weave in more and more as I kind of climb this ladder from the early part of my career. And all of this, obviously with the benefit of hindsight, I realized that a lot of the drivers for me were linked to fear and insecurity.
We talked about status before—it could be financial, it could be freedom, but moving away from something rather than towards. And this question for me is like, is it possible to be ambitious without being attached to anything? Can I remove the stress and anxiety from the equation, but also go forth and do big things in this world. And this is a question that philosophers, scholars have struggled with for thousands of years. I might as well look at what they’ve come up with, rather than trying to just start by generating it from first principles. Those are just a few that come to mind.
[00:33:58] Sean: There’s fifty different things that my inside is just lighting up with that I would love to go down. First, you dropped so much amazing knowledge right there. One of the things I love and think about is like just full on Sherlock Holmes approach. You mentioned, you can learn anything from anyone, any article that is such a profound insight. I’m always looking for little nuggets and two that really come to mind.
We were talking earlier about Robert Pirsig, Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and he just hits on quality again and again. And you were talking about restaurants—there are two people in the restaurant industry I think about a lot. Nick Kokonas, one of the things he did within his restaurant is whenever you get those glasses of water at a restaurant they’re just dripping water, the condensation. So he realized there’s a specific temperature to serve the water at where no condensation occurs.
So I’m just like, holy shit, Nick, like quality, quality! And then I also think a lot about Danny Meyer, the other famous restaurateur of Shake Shack and Union Square Hospitality. And one of the things they did is they doubled up the seat backing and the drapes. And I wasn’t really sure why they did that first. It was for sound control. So basically each little table is basically its own soundproof structure.
Self-sustaining Sources of Motivation
So other conversations are interacting and it’s just like you can understand what you were talking about, studying the best in the world at what they do. They have this level of quality and these little insights that they pull out. That thread, I just thought it was so exceptional. You just brought up the Eastern philosophy there and some of the big questions they’re wrestling with. What’s your answer to that question? Can you kind of be non-attached from all these things we’re going after?
[00:35:28] Chris: Very much a work in progress. I think that’s something that I’m, for lack of a better way, struggling with right now. But you know, it’s a good struggle to have. I think it requires a shift in motivation, and I think the biggest bottleneck that an entrepreneur has is having a good reason to get out of bed in the morning. So if you don’t have something that’s pushing you like, oh, we’re gonna run out of money or everyone’s going to think that I’m a fraud and a failure—these types of things that can work for a while, but honestly, don’t seem to me like a fun way to spend our time on this earth. Is there something that we desire, something that’s worth going after, even if we fail? That’s so important that of course we would throw ourselves into that? I think it has something to do with finding sources of motivation, which are more self-sustaining, which are less results-oriented, which are more approach-oriented.
I love the summary that you’ve put on The Fifth Discipline. He references the path of least resistance, which is an idea I come back to often. It says the difference between having something that you’re moving away from and having a vision that you’re trying to create. And so I think that this has something to do with there’s a vision that’s just so exciting, of course, I want to move towards that. Work in progress.
[00:37:00] Sean: Yeah. Yeah. Peter Senge, the book, The Fifth Discipline, obviously that recap is so long because it’s had such a profound impact. And in the model you just talked about, they’re moving to the path of least resistance. Robert Fritz writes about that a lot within creativity. It is such a good model to work on.
Post-mortem
So, I know we’re talking about striving for certain things here and not trying to get attached, but I would love to know after a poker game or a tournament, what does it look like for you? We were talking about the mindset before and kind of the conditions are there—what things are you doing afterwards? Because I see so many elite performers, the second the event ends, it just ends, and there’s so much missed opportunity there. So I’m just wondering what that looks like for you after a game or after a poker tournament.
[00:37:40] Chris: Yeah, fantastic question. It comes back to treating everything as a learning opportunity. I work with a lot of people who make very high-stakes decisions. I think a lot of what holds us back in our life, in our trajectory, is our ability to make good decisions. And, the same thing is true in poker, right? If we’re treating every decision as an opportunity to make a perfect decision, every decision can be an opportunity to improve our decision-making process.
So it’s critical that while things are still fresh for me after a session to perform a post-mortem: what were the things that went well? What were the things I would like to have done differently? What am I learning for next time? That’s the basic format of any retrospective. What went well? What didn’t go so well, what did I learn? So I’m going to look at, well, these are the things that I did that I want to do more of, things that seem to work, strategies that are capitalizing on things that seem like I have a good handle of what’s going on and understand the situation.
I want to look at any mistakes that I made. These may not necessarily be the biggest hands that I’ve played, it could be missed opportunities to get involved. This could be, I didn’t need to put so much in there. It’s going to be, I didn’t really understand what I was doing. I don’t think my thought process is right there. It worked out well for me, but I don’t think I understood the situation on a high level. These are all just potential opportunities for me to improve.
These are different dimensions to explore. And as I said, the most important thing is, I want to come out of every session with something that’s actionable, something that I’m going to do differently next time. Even if it’s just, I want to be extra aware of this—like, okay, when I played against this one guy and he was playing really aggressively, I noticed it threw me off my game and I started over-focusing on him. That’s something that I don’t want to encourage.
So I want to be extra aware next time that someone feels like they’re playing more aggressively against me, so that I don’t fall into that trap of over-focusing on them. Every session that I have, I’m getting a little bit better. I think something to note is that this is happening sometimes at like three, four or five, six in the morning, right? The best time to play poker, I like to say industry hours, is generally like 10:00 PM to 2:00 AM.
Now I can play anytime, I’m fortunate that I have the luxury of total freedom, but there’s a power law here. It’s like—I might be making five times as much, ten times as much an hour playing at these peak times. Well, this presents a problem: it’s 4:00 AM, I’m done playing poker, I would love to go to sleep, but it’d be very easy for adrenaline to be going hot, high. It could be just like running these hands over my head over and over. So the post-mortem process allows me to, let’s call it—closing the container on this session is like I’m able to put it in the past and not rehash it.
I think a lot of this is just externalizing my thinking. It’s like, I have all these mental bookmarks that I can come back to later. It’s like, okay, I wrote this note last night of three-bed pots and in position, I don’t understand “why ranges.” That’s a lot of jargon, but that’s just like one of these specific examples. So like, okay. Based on that mental bookmark, now I have a study plan when I have some extra time. I know what I’m going to look at and how I’m going to be more prepared for next time.
And so when I’m able to externalize this, all right, bring my breath back down, do some things that are kind of a bedtime routine, start to try to compress this time from, I’ve gotten to the point where after a really crazy session, I can fall asleep within fifteen minutes. This is something I’ve worked on over time is just, how do I bring myself back to earth? All right, I need to relax. I need to recover. I think that’s also something that is really critical that you see a lot of these peak performers do.
Something that Josh Waitzkin, who we both have a high respect for, talks about a lot. Can you avoid being at this level six arousal all the time? This is just like low-level stress anxiety. Be able to ramp up to a ten and back down to a one when a situation calls for that. That’s something that I’ve really had to work on over the years.
Zooming Out
[00:41:57] Sean: You’ve clearly put a lot of thought into it. I’m thinking about the adrenaline that you mentioned, like you’re hot off a game and as great decision-makers, usually we can rationalize things really well to ourselves. So I’m wondering if the adrenaline’s a bit high, how are you not just getting more infuriated at different times? Both with your own mistakes, and then say like, you’re playing a hand perfectly, but other people at the table, I’m just wondering, like the balance, how you’re thinking about that internally?
[00:42:23] Chris: I think it’s always about zooming out—the results of any given day, in life or in poker, don’t really matter all that much. So if I keep my focus on the long run and just trust this process, that if I continue to improve, the amount of money that I have in my poker count is going to take care of itself. Obviously that’s easier said than done, but that’s something that I always come back to: can I take the long run, the long view, and just continue to trust that process.
I think the other two, is just to recognize that this is going to happen—and poker, we call it tilt—but in life, everyone has bad days. I work with incredibly successful people and they all have days where they’re full of self doubt, where they consider, Hey, is this actually what I want to do with my life, this type of thing. And rather than to let yourself spiral—I call this feeling feelings about feeling feelings—don’t let being frustrated cause you to be angry, cause you to feel sad, et cetera, et cetera.
So just sit in it, recognize that it’s happening, and try to move past it. And if you can’t right, there’s always tomorrow. So like, all right, well, clearly today is not my day. Great. I quit. I zoom out. Okay. Over the very long period of time I’ve done very well. Some days are not going to be that day, it’s all right. Maybe tomorrow will be that day. So it’s like allowing myself to zoom out. It’s like, I don’t need to win today. There’s always tomorrow.
[00:43:53] Sean: Well, I think we forget about the power in just being able to walk away. We see so many of those people that aren’t, and unfortunately, they’re there for ten more hours, all complete losses. This is something we were talking about a few minutes ago. We just kind of like what you’re doing prior.
Architecture
I know you mentioned you work with a lot of great decision-makers, both in poker and in the financial world, in terms of investors, and you really talk about architecting their own life. I would love to just hear you talk about this a little bit more, because I think there’s so many amazing takeaways that we can all learn from this.
[00:44:22] Chris: I think there’s so much value in that term of architecture, so I want to expand on that a little bit. Architecture is creating a space that encourages people to do things in that space that you want them to do. I like to adopt this belief—let’s put aside whether it’s true or false. I liked it, it was a very helpful belief for me—that the universe is deterministic. And what I mean by this is that our behavior is determined by the context that we put ourselves in.
So context being mental state, our environment, things like who’s around us, what’s on our desk, what’s on our desktop. What did we read today? What is the algorithm serving us? All of these things that are in varying levels of our control are determining what we’re going to do next. That we have very limited control of what we’re doing in the present moment and how this belief helps me is that if I can zoom out and think about what is the architecture of my life, what are the structures that I am creating?
And what are the natural results of those structures that can allow me to put myself in situations where I’m going to succeed? This is just coming back to the meta-game of being objective with how you view your life. You don’t fail, you fail to create conditions for success. There are patterns that are good for me, and I want to repeat those patterns. I want to amplify those patterns. There’s patterns, there’s habits of things that I don’t want to repeat as much.
And what can I do to add friction to those, to remove those triggers from my environment so that I don’t fall into those patterns? Thinking about my life as an architect and how I can design it in such a way that my future self does what I would like that future self to do. And that when I work with people, a lot of it is helping them to gain an awareness of these invisible structures in their lives that are creating behavior that they want to change.
And then once they become aware of those structures, that becomes an interface or a design in terms of affordance, in order to be able to change that behavior. The context that they’re in, leads the behavior. So rather than trying to attack the behavior directly, changing those contexts under which the behavior occurs.
[00:47:00] Sean: Talk about taking a simple idea, take it seriously. I mean, we could literally just go on for hours, that concept alone. I just love that. I hope people are rewinding that, listening to that again, and really writing down the importance and then thinking about this in terms of their own life.
You Win The First Hour, You Win The Day
I know we don’t need to hit on like specifics here. I am just wondering though, are there some commonalities that you see amongst these high performers that are now like you’ve got pattern recognition that are just so obvious and are popping up again and again? So I’m hoping that people listening can kind of like the light bulb can click and find the fault in some of the things that they’re doing.
[00:47:35] Chris: I think that there’s two things. First, what are the things that work for us specifically? And how can we make these conditions occur more often? All this is coming back to awareness. We recognize something that works or at least something that we do that correlates with success. Well, the first thing is like, can we make this thing happen more often and see if it has an effect? But I also think—and this is just the benefit of working with so many talented people and being able to have a wide sample size—I do think there are things that really tend to generalize.
So the first thing, when I start working with anyone, is how did they start their day? A one-liner dialogue is, you win the first hour, you win the day. Something that I see a lot of high-performing people, the trap that I see them falling into, is immediately starting reactively. Checking messages, checking things like Twitter, checking their email, looking for environmental cues on what they should be doing. It’s something that I see often is that moving to reactivity is a one-way street. It’s very difficult to step back and think about your long-term goals, the classic important-but-not-urgent things.
Once you’ve gotten stuck in your inbox, once you’re putting out fires. So I’m really big on having some form of morning routine. We can talk about the importance of things like one, some activities, but I think it’s just something that you do that sets you up to have a really good day. And what is that for you that when you do it, you find those days go a little bit better. Start the day with that, and then think about what is the most important thing that you could do today. Coming back to power law, this is likely more important than all that other stuff you have on your list combined.
You do an hour of that before you let in the world. That first two hours, when our morning routine opens to whatever activities, our one hour on the most important thing chosen in advance, you had that in mind before you went to bed, you know how you’re going to get started. You do that, and then you let in the world. That’s something that I’ve seen that works for literally everyone. So I always start there. Obviously, I look into, when I work with investors, trying to create their decision-making process in a way that it’s systematic, but also something they can actually execute on.
When I work with founders, trying to think about what are the things that only they can do that have the most leverage? And then conversely, what are the things that get in the way of that? Are those things that they can delegate? Are they things that they can hand off? There are things that they don’t even need to be doing. That creates a path to improvement and with all time management, I really think the goal is to move from this position of scarcity to a position of abundance. This dichotomy is way overplayed, but I think in this context, it’s really important.
If you have something like time scarcity, you feel like you’re always getting buried. The backlog is always getting longer. You never have enough time. The list never gets shorter. But the difference is moving to abundance. And I have as much time as I need, everything will get done. Trusting that is just being realistic about how much time that you have. So the people who I see who are stressed, who don’t feel like things are moving at the speed they want, they are unrealistic about how much time that they have.
So that’s something that I have everyone do first: track where your time is going, ideally for a week. But even for a day, it’ll really surprise you, that you have a lot more time than you think you do. And then the second is, prioritize. The busier you are, the higher ROI that you get from planning and prioritization, and all of this is just reconciling that your time is limited. Your time on this day is limited. Your time on this earth is limited.
So it’s important to think about what is the best use of that time. And if you know that you’re doing the best you can, in the limited time that you have, you’ve decided in advance what the best thing is to do. And you have no regrets. You feel like I have as much time as you need. So something that I’m always trying to get people to work towards is having a way to recognize what are the constraints that I’m dealing with. What’s the best that I can do under these conditions?
Systems Thinking
[00:52:00] Sean: Chris, this is unbelievable. This is a great place to start for a lot of people. One of the things that just seems to keep popping up that you seem to do exceptionally well is, you can get to the crux of it. Like you understand the leverage, the constraints, you’re really detecting the signal from the noise there. I’m wondering, is there something that you’ve uncovered within yourself that allows you to essentially look at less and see more? Because it seems like you’re very good at doing this across a lot of different things.
[00:52:28] Chris: I wish I knew. I do think hopefully this is a good example of finding the thing that you do well and trying to amplify that. This is how I got into coaching in the first place. People told me that I should, it’s not something that I ever saw myself doing. But people tell me that it’s useful, that it helps them. I see the results even if I don’t know exactly what causes them and I really enjoy it. So I try to keep on leading into it. I think we touched on a little bit, around curiosity.
Just that internal drive to find this intrinsic thread that ties things together. And for me, I really try to compress ideas as much as I can ideally into some form of principle, something that I can just apply to everything. So maybe it’s this drive that allows me to get to the core of things. Certainly, this lens of systems thinking that I try to apply to everything, never fails to pay off. Just understanding that everything is a system, and that most of the things that we are doing are just shifting around deck chairs on the Titanic.
We need to go deeper. We need to figure out what is actually the core cause that’s driving this visible behavior that we’re seeing. I don’t know. It’s an obsession, it’s a compulsion. It’s a mission. But you know, it’s my “why”. It’s what keeps me going. It’s what keeps me curious. And you know, hopefully, it continues to pay off.
[00:54:11] Sean: You mentioned systems thinking. I just wanna make sure for anyone, who’s not that familiar with systems thinking overall, maybe a high-level overview. And then I’m wondering within that, what are you looking at specifically within specific systems that allows you just to understand them better and then deconstruct the best path forward for them?
[00:54:31] Chris: Yeah. Someone who is interested in the subject, I highly recommend the work of Donella H. Meadows. She has a book called Thinking in Systems. And one of my all-time favorite articles is called “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System.” High level, everything is a system, you think about economic systems, we think about within our body, the human system, we think about things at the atomic level, our behavior and all that this means is that a system is composed of parts and that systems display emergence.
And that the output of a system can not be predicted by the parts. That the output is greater than the sum, is what’s said. And so it’s inherently—it can be a black box. It could be unpredictable. You put one thing on one side, you get something out, completely different on the other side. And that’s because all of the fun stuff in life is these interactions, right? Not the things themselves, but how things interact and looking at how these interactions, which seem very simple through emergence, can lead to very complex behavior.
And when you’re thinking about how to change the output of a system, trying to think and look at what Donella calls these leverage points, what you’re talking about is that most things that people do to try to shift things around, it’s moving a decimal point. It doesn’t really have any effect because it’s not attacking at the point of greatest leverage. When I’m thinking about how to change someone as a system, I always start with paradigms.
This is the spoiler alert, end of the article, the ultimate leverage point is: what are the beliefs by which people form the goal of this, and change what they’re going after and then change how they measure success. So that changes what they do on a day-to-day basis, et cetera. If you can get someone to change the way that they see the world, everything else will change in its path. That’s why I think that art has the power to change the world.
For example, writing books, creating paintings, these things can shift the way that we see things and thus create the structures under which create the incentives that everyone acts upon. So when I try to look at everything systematically, thinking about, well, what change would create a difference? Is this something that is a core cause, or is it just a symptom? Is it something that goes after the bottleneck? The thing that’s constraining output? Or is it changing something that’s not constraining output? I find that this lens, because everything is a system, applies to everything.
[00:57:30] Sean: No, no. That was a fantastic encapsulation. The theme of paradigms, assumptions, mental models, they keep coming up again and again. I think about recent conversations with Gary Klein and Lia DiBello. Lia is a cognitive scientist and she basically uncovered it in her work. They create essentially virtual worlds for businesses to go into and test and fail, test and fail. And she said, no, no, no. It completely gets down to paradigm shifts. If you think about a storage cabinet and you have a great storage cabinet and keep adding new and new information. But once that old mental model, that storage cabinet isn’t working correctly, adding on new information is useless until you have that paradigm shift.
Preparing for War in Peacetime
So I just love that you highlight that. I’ll make sure that article is linked up. I know we’ve shared that in the past. I just love how you think through strategy decision-making and one of the concepts you have, that I just want to expand on with you is preparing for wartime in peacetime. I just want you to hit on this and because we have a lot of things I want to dive into within that. So if you could just set the context, essentially what preparing for wartime in peacetime is, then I’d love diving into some of this.
[00:58:36] Chris: Yes. So this is, can you turn it on in the moment that you need it? So, classic Allen Iverson meme, right? We’re talking about practice is like, you got to practice how you play. Something that I got from Josh Waitzkin is this idea of training at altitude when I would play. I realized when I played baseball—I would hit in the 90 mile per hour cage. Mostly it’s like swinging and missing all of them. But then when I went and faced the 70 mile per hour pitchers, it didn’t feel like they were quite as fast.
And so I’m always looking for ways to train in conditions that are suboptimal so that when I actually need to perform, it feels easier. I think there’s this misconceived notion of you are going to be able to turn it on when you need it. But for me, my ability to perform comes from the confidence that I’ve seen this before. Like there’s nothing that could come at me that I’m not ready for. That nervousness is just a symptom of lack of preparation. So I’m always predicting, always trying to think about what the future is going to bring.
And I think that we have this dormant ability within us to predict the future, to know what’s coming. And I’m trying to simulate, okay, if I send this email and the person writes back in an angry note saying, how could you say that, that sort of absurd, right? This is a random example. Before I send this, is there anything that I should change to prevent this failure mode from happening? Okay. I see this person over the other side of the room. I’ve been wanting to talk for years. Maybe it’s like Gary Klein, and I’ve been building on the shoulders of giants and like, oh, what’s the question that I would love to ask Gary Klein.
Okay. Well, I don’t want to be a fanboy. Let’s take a breath. Think about it. All right. Well, how could this interaction go poorly? All right. How do I make sure that this interaction doesn’t go poorly? It’s about simulating how it goes well. All this is happening at this sub-second level. For me, I’m just always simulating and trying to steer myself into future dimensions. You know, the saying is like in a parallel dimension sense that is favorable to me by thinking about what could be happening.
And that’s when I say prepare, treating peacetime as wartime. When shits the fan and things are going crazy, you’re not going to be in a perfect place to strategize. All of your perceptions are going to be distorted. There’s going to be too much noise happening. You need to have done the preparation ahead of time so that you can be relaxed in this moment knowing that, Hey, this is what I trained for, but also, what am I looking for? Of all the things that are happening, what is going to be relevant to me that will cause me to change course?
I’m going in here with this default strategy, but life is coming at me and there’s going to be things that cause me to want to change the strategy. So knowing ahead of time what I am looking for allows me to pivot faster. Another one from decision-making that I reference all the time that comes from warfare, which we were talking about before, is the OODA loop that comes from John Boyd. He’s looking at why, when you have two fighter pilots fighting it out in the air, why do some fighter pilots win an inordinate amount of the time, despite all variables being equal?
And he describes that it’s this ability to reorient to changing conditions that allows someone to succeed in a very noisy, quickly changing environment. So my ability to reorient to these dynamics, whether I’m in a high stakes poker game, whether I’m in a conversation such as this one, or whether I’m making a difficult decision for investing or otherwise, is what are the things that could occur that eliminate, Hey, I’m missing something or I have a blind spot or these assumptions that I was using to create this consent this decision are no longer correct.
I’m now basing this whole decision on a castle of sand. What should I do next? So it’s like, I’m trying to do all this preparation ahead of time. You could say that a lot of life is preparation for these big moments, because I think that these opportunities are so finite. They come at you and if you’re not ready for them, but they’ll just pass you by. So it’s like, we come back to our metaphor of where we’re surfing, we’re swimming. If I’m paddling, if I know the wave that I’m looking for, I can position and I can recognize it and I can surf it. But if I don’t know what waves are going to be good waves, like I could just hop on any random wave.
Murphyjitsu
[01:03:41] Sean: It’s so unbelievable. The number of opportunities that’ll pass people by because they haven’t prepared properly, as opposed to when you’ve done all that preparation. When that moment comes, you are completely ready and you can make the call, whether that be an investment decision or something else. I have seen this with plenty of people, with real estate investors. They know exactly when the house comes available, that meets all their criteria. So yeah, it just is a great point. These frameworks that you have, I think are just exceptional. Another one that is just really cool is Murphyjitsu. And I would love just to hear you talk about this, I have some things I want to ask within that.
[01:04:16] Chris: Yeah, I hinted at it a little bit before and then talked about how I’m always simulating things. Murphyjitsu is based on Murphy’s law. The assumption that, if it can go wrong, it will go wrong. So it’s assuming future failure. I’m in the present visualizing that I’ve taken action and, or made some sort of decision and what are some ways that it could have gone horribly wrong and really visualizing it as a way to try to get like, what are some things that could cause failure.
And before I act, before I decide, is there anything that I could do now to mitigate that failure, to make it less likely to happen or less bad if it does occur? The recognition that before I act, I have the ability to stack the odds in my favor and that I should not act until I have at least done the mental work of deciding. Yes, I have thought this through in such a way that given what I know now, I don’t think I’m going to fail at least in any obvious ways.
If I fail, at least it will be creative. At least it will be novel, but there’s nothing easily preventable that I’ve failed to do. I illustrate this in an article that I’ve put out, standing on the shoulders of Gary Klein and many others, trying to think about how we take all that we have learned about making decisions from an academic psychology economic point of view and apply those in daily life. What’s a checklist that we could follow?
And the final step in the checklist for me is, all right, I’ve looked at what I’m trying to optimize for, I’ve thought about my assumptions, I know what my confidence level is. Okay, well let’s invert and evert that. How am I going to fail? Let’s avoid that. Let’s make sure that that doesn’t happen. At least that I’ve checked this box, well, I can’t think of any possible way this could go wrong. Okay. That in itself is a license to move forward. And something that I see a lot with decision-makers when you are talking about the finite nature of opportunities is that if you know what you’re looking for, you can move quickly.
That speed is a huge advantage. All things being equal, whoever shows up first, the most enthusiastically is going to get the opportunity. And so if I can hit that hurdle of all right, I can’t see any obvious way that I’m going to fail, why not go for it? That’s going to allow me to maximize my ability to capitalize on those opportunities because I have high conviction. But creating conviction requires work. It requires preparation ahead of time.
Self-inquiry
[01:07:04] Sean: Yeah, that’s actually—one of the things I’m thinking about is someone who might be earlier in their career. Just being able to think that through that, that requires a certain amount of creativity. I feel like it’s creativity mixed with overall, just like doing the reps, right? Like you need that pattern recognition. Are there things people can do to even be able to better brainstorm potential failures if they’re more inexperienced?
[01:07:30] Chris: Pencil and paper. Thinking about that from a third-person view, I think this is really one of the biggest benefits of having a coach, any coach. You see anyone who’s a high performer at any level, they have someone who is trying to take them from a first-person view to a third-person view. So they can view themselves from the outside as an objective observer. A couple of techniques that I’ve used are, let’s say literary, I think about myself as the protagonist in a novel that I’m reading.
So like, my life is occurring, and the book is filling in with things that are happening, and I pause and like, yeah, I’m reading what I’m doing. I was like, okay. What should the character do next, given where they are now? What is the obvious thing that we, as the reader know that this person obviously is missing? Can I think about myself as a character? What is this obvious advice? Obviously talking to a friend is really huge and in programming, they have this concept of the rubber duck.
Before you go and you bother another programmer with the bug that you’re facing, explain the problem to a rubber duck, like we’re going back to Feynman. But elevating these caps in your own thinking, the process of explaining it to a literal duck sitting on your desk, you might, oh, I can’t believe, I didn’t think of that. But just having to explain the nature of the problem usually will at least reveal a path towards a solution.
Another fun exercise that I like to do, I call amnesia: imagine that you have just teleported into your own body, right? You got abducted by aliens, you landed, you landed back from outer space into your body. No idea how I got here. Who’s this person in the zoom room who I’m talking to? How did he even get here? All right, well, we’ll give it, and then I got here. I’ve no idea what I did. What does it make sense to do next? All right. This is allowing me to get past the things that I’ve tried.
Here’s the thing that didn’t work: it’s all getting back to like, what is the obvious advice that if someone had an objective outside view on our current situation, we would give? And all of this is just ways of having self-inquiry of asking ourselves questions that are helpful. And I like to think that if we keep coming back to the same questions, as my improv teacher says, “repetition is not redundancy.” If we keep asking the questions and then just waiting.
Having the pen and paper and being like, okay, I’m just going to keep the pen moving. A lot of these are going to be bad ideas, but if I run out of bad ideas, maybe I’ll hit on a good idea. Just being open to what occurs and just exploring the question eventually you’re going to hit on something. And I said, a lot of these are just ways to get our own head and look at things from the outside and say, well, I don’t know. Let’s go about figuring it out. What are some possibilities?
This is another aspect of decision-making that I find that is really helpful is just approaching it as generating possibilities. People particularly, this is a cognitive distortion that’s really common among successful startup founders. We see some things that work really well for someone in one aspect of their lives, but don’t always work well in every other aspect of life. Super decisiveness also can lead to this very black and white thinking. So rather than thinking in these dichotomies—all right, I give this example of a client I work with, sorry—who is like, okay, I’m really stuck on this decision. Should I go and build this billion-dollar business? Or I’m going to go to Myanmar and settle my possessions to live on a beach. What do you think I should do, Chris? I don’t think I’m qualified to make this decision, but first, don’t you think that there’s some sort of middle path between these two extremes? It’s not A or B. there’s usually C, D, F, G, H, I, J, K, that are somewhere in the middle there, where possibly we can get a lot of the upside, but without all the downside.
One of the classic decision-making studies, they found that forcing someone to just generate other possibilities, they ended up choosing one of those other possibilities that they weren’t even considering. So yeah, at first, like externalize, get the thoughts outside of your head, keep writing. If something is interesting, pull on that thread, expand upon it. Right. And make that 20%, a hundred percent. And just trust that if you keep asking the questions, the answers will appear eventually.
[01:12:26] Sean: Chris, those past few minutes were just an absolute masterclass. I love that. It’s funny, actually, when I was preparing for our talk I screenshotted your amnesia technique and I sent it to a friend and I said, there’s so much genius in this. We need to do this more and more often, this is exceptional. So, I hope that listeners really took note of that. Wow. You are filled with so many incredible insights, wisdom, it’s clear you’ve learned so much from yourself.
Treat Everything As An Experiment
I just love that “know thyself element,” but then also from other people. So, we’re going to round this conversation out here in a minute, but I’m just curious, what is this learning process like for you? I mean, because it’s one thing to get back to Feynman, right? Like being able to say a term of something, but like you’ve ingrained them into yourself. You don’t just know what these are, you live them. And I’m wondering, for people who are trying to learn things better, so they become part of their life, what do you do really well?
[01:13:13] Chris: I think something that I am doing much better these days is treating everything as an experiment. I wrote a workbook which is free to download for anyone on our site.
[01:13:30] Sean: It’s freaking awesome. I’ll make sure it’s linked up. It’s exceptional.
[01:13:36] Chris: Experiment Without Limits. You can download it for free. And this concept of experimentation is really near and dear to me because if I give the inverse, when I feel like I was early on in my journey, I was just consuming very promiscuously just like inordinately, consuming things and never really applying them. And this is something that I’ve really discovered in my work of coaching is, you can’t tell anyone to do anything.
You’re not going to just read something in an article and then instantly change the way that you see things. You have to apply it. By slowing down the process of taking things in and over-training on them, looking for opportunities to apply it in everything that I do—you noticed before that I take something from poker and apply it to my life. Or I take something that works in one aspect of my life and say, Hey, this could apply to improving my nutrition, the supply to improve in my romantic relationships, right?
Can this thing that works over here, be taken somewhere else? Can this principle be generalized and universal? Something that I’m always looking to do is find something that’s really interesting and then find as many opportunities as I can to apply it, to get as much as I can out of it. By understanding what seems to work, I can make that happen more often. I think a theme of this conversation ongoing that I continue to hammer home is being curious and being aware.
If we can have these be our defaults, I think a lot of things end up taking care of themselves. And an end game that I’ve managed to get through a decade-plus of working on myself and working with very, very smart people who challenge me to be better and to make the things that worked for me, something that they can take on and apply for themselves, is trying to approach it in such a way that it’s applicable.
I don’t tell anyone to do something in a session. I try to create an experience for them that will allow that belief to shift. So in the same way, like some of the things that I’ve talked about that are worth trying, think about them as an experiment where okay. If I try this, let’s be curious and see what happens. There’s no failed experiments, only unexpected outcomes. So I’m always, in every area of my life, experimenting and building upon the results of previous experiments, seeing what happens and can those results be replicated.
Can I reduce this to some sort of principle or habit or a routine that I’m in control of, so that I can make this context happen more often? And I’ve found that rather than telling someone—we go back to like, a very low-hanging fruit for a lot of people. Don’t check your email first thing in the day. Certainly don’t pick up your phone when you’re in the bed, check the email—be like, Hey, don’t take my word for it. Why don’t you just put your phone in the other room? You can give it to your wife. You can give it to a friend and tell him not to give it back to you till noon and just see what happens. Be curious about it and see how the day goes. Oh, well, I’m going to prove you wrong. That’s silly. That’s not going to make a difference, but having that experience. Oh, that’s interesting. I actually did a lot more deep work today. I didn’t feel as frazzled, the world didn’t catch on fire because I didn’t check my phone for a couple hours.
All of these invalidated assumptions come to light through this experience and this aspect of cognitive dissonance comes into play. All right. Well, I’ve had this new experience that can’t be explained by my previous beliefs, perhaps my beliefs need questioning, right? And it’s like these oldest, most deeply held long beliefs that most need revisiting. So I encourage everyone to just take this experimental framework to try things, see what happens, based on that, is this something that you can reapply to others in your life?
[01:17:56] Sean: Yeah. It’s such an incredible approach and way to go through life. It’s one, I do try to implement as much as possible. Always just being aware of that. I know this is one of those annoying, tough questions, obviously, because you’re constantly thinking, consuming. And when we meet someone or we’re reading something like it has to meet us in that moment, the one that we’re prepared for.
Mindset Shifters
But I’m just thinking, you’ve mentioned a lot of great thinkers that you’ve learned from, is there anyone else that you are like, they’ve probably fundamentally shifted how I approach things. How I think about things. I know we’re always just curious about who are those mindset shifters? For certain people that are on the show.
[01:18:33] Chris: One really big red pill for me was the work by Roy Baumeister. And he has done a lot of work on meaning. As I move to what I call post-productivity, where I care less about getting things done and more thinking holistically about how what I’m doing is leading to a more meaningful life, he’s really put into focus for me what that means. You can actually deconstruct people who have meaningful lives. What are the aspects of that?
And he really differentiates the difference between happiness and meaning—where a lot of times, when we’re talking about becoming happy or feeling fulfilled, those ideas are becoming commingled where we think we’re becoming more fulfilled or we’re actually becoming more happy, or we think we’re becoming happier, but we’re actually trying to become more fulfilled. And the recognition that there’s a little bit of overlap, but for the most part, these are very separate ideas.
Things that can make us feel happier usually mean being less stressed, feeling like life is easier, having more time with friends who are supportive and warm, all these things that lead to a happy life. Things that lead to a meaningful life, usually come with some form of struggle. Things like having a kid, trying to build a business, trying to attack one of the many problems in our world and make it, you know, move the human race forward a few inches.
These things that make life really meaningful can lead, especially in the short term, to detract from our happiness, because they can cause stress. They call our self-identity into question. And so we were talking about continuum before—it caused me to think about happiness and meaning on a continuum, where at certain points in my life, I’m going to be way over index towards meaning, and that’s going to put me at the risk of burning out. And so I did. Okay. I recognize all right, I’m going after it a little bit too hard. Say like, I’m red lining, I need to find some way to recover and to prioritize my health. I’m going to rest. I’m going to take a step back, make sure that what I’m doing is the right approach and move a little bit more towards happiness. And other periods of my life, I’ve traveled around the world with no income for a couple of years. I’ve done a lot of courses like child MBA, where I’ll take a few months and just take a bunch of random classes, full explorer mode, and see what I like doing. See what I learned and I’ll catch up.
I’ll wake up on the beach in Thailand and be like, maybe I’ve gone a little bit more towards happiness. And the reason that I’m feeling a little bit lost is I don’t have a big goal to go after. Maybe I need to do some visioning and think about what’s worth going after, what’s worth failing at. And so we’re just recognizing that life is kind of an oscillation between these two extremes, and that I’m not going to be able to go after happiness and meaning simultaneously, but I can understand where I am at and where I need to move towards.
That’s been incredibly influential on me and not only understanding all right, if I want to do big things, that means sacrificing happiness and being okay with paying that cost, but also recognizing that sometimes I can do things that aren’t productive, that are just designed to improve my subjective experience of reality. And that’s okay because that allows me to stay on the path.
Chris’s Favorite Place on The Planet
[01:22:41] Sean: I think a lot of people are gonna be interested in diving further into that. I have to know that you travel all over the world. What’s your favorite place on this planet?
[01:22:48] Chris: I’m a huge Japanophile, I’m obsessed with Japan. I try to visit every year. I actually was currently planning to be in Japan. I wanted to do Japanese immersion and just eat, bike my way through the country. Unfortunately, they are still currently closed, but hoping to return there at some point in the near future. But yeah, that’s another whole rabbit hole in itself.
I find that just Japanese culture, because it’s been maintained throughout the years, is a little bit of a Galápagos in that, because it was closed off to outsiders, it evolved independently. There’s just so much there that I find incredibly fascinating and not to mention being a huge sushi connoisseur, kind of just watching another master at work. Let’s say someone who lives quality to experience the creation of that, the dedication to excellence of a craft, for me, I just find it intoxicating and very inspirational.
[01:23:54] Sean: I’m right there with you. What about if you could do this with anyone dead or alive, just like spend an evening having just a conversation about anything, who would you love to sit down with?
[01:24:05] Chris: I think Feynman always comes back to mind. I’m a huge fanboy of his. We’re talking about, perhaps after Einstein, the most influential physicist of this century. We’re talking about uncovering the fundamental nature of reality. This is no joke they’re talking about, but at the same time, someone who had a lot of fun. You read his autobiographies, you talk to people who knew him, you read his letters, and this is one who really loved life.
And this idea that you could go after these really big intractable hard problems by just being curious and having fun . . . he seems just like an amazing dinner guest, but I would love to have him infect me with some of that enthusiasm and confidence—that if I continue to just go through, you know, optimize for interestingness and just continue to go into the rabbit holes, just because they interest me, to trust that will lead to doing useful things.
[01:25:18] Sean: Feynman is just one of those people I would love to sit down with as well. Chris Sparks, this has just been too much fun. I really do think your work is exceptional. Your writing, the ideas you bring to light, and how we can implement them into our own lives. I want to make sure everyone gets linked up with you. Where can we direct the listeners?
[01:25:36] Chris: So my company is called Forcing Function. That’s forcingfunction.com. The workbook that I mentioned you can download for free. This is my best compression of all the principles that I have found that work for executives, high-performing founders, investors—that can be found at experimentwithoutlimits.com. I lead a group class twice a year currently called Team Performance Training. You can find that at teamperformancetraining.com. I’ll be leading that again in February. And you can also find me on Twitter. I’m working on just shooting out some of these one-liners, some of these things that I’ve found to work. That’s @SparksRemarks. Many of the things that I talked about today, I put in articles, you can find all those for free on forcingfunction.com.
[01:26:24] Sean: Fantastic. All that will be linked up along with the transcript here, but Chris Sparks, I can’t thank you enough for joining us on What Got You There.
[01:26:31] Chris: It’s a complete honor. And thank you, Sean. I think you curate a wonderful line of guests. You asked great questions that for me really got me thinking and trying to deconstruct what makes me tick and what makes people tick. So thank you for your work and bringing these ideas to light.
[01:26:48] Sean: You guys made it to the end of another episode of What Got You There. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I really do appreciate you taking the time to listen all the way through. If you found value in this, the best way you can support the show is by giving us a review, rating it, sharing it with your friends and also sharing on social media. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. Looking forward to you guys, listening to another episode.