Modern Wisdom - #099 - Chris Sparks - Productivity Without Limits

Episode Date: September 2, 2019

Chris Sparks is a productivity coach, founder of The Forcing Function and a Former Top 20 Worldwide Online Poker Player. What happens when a world famous productivity coach compiles the most effective tasks he's discovered for developing personal productivity into an E-Book? Well today we're going to go through the best of what he's uncovered. Expect to learn how to set more effective goals and stick to them, how to build better habits, maximise time, attention & energy, avoid procrastination and accelerate your learning. Get your notepad out. This episode is brought to you by The Protein Works. Leave us a review wherever you are tuning in to be in with a chance of winning an entire year of free Loaded Nuts. Check out the full range here - https://bit.ly/TPWChrisWillx Extra Stuff: Get a free copy of Experiment Without Limits - https://www.theforcingfunction.com/blog/experiment-without-limits Take Chris's Performance Assessment Quiz - https://www.theforcingfunction.com/assessment Follow Chris on Twitter - https://twitter.com/sparksremarks Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

I genuinely can't believe that this e-book is free. It should be a 500 quid course. I'm also not getting any kickback from this, but you 100% need to go and download it. It is unbelievable. Link is in the show notes below and I'm actually going to be going through this ebook over the coming months, step by step. So if you want to do it with me, feel free to drop me a message at Chris Willx, wherever you tune in. And we can do like a productivity book club thing, action based productivity book club and be all accountable to each other. Also, this episode is brought to you by the protein works, huge fan of them and they continue to support the podcast. This time they are giving away one loaded nuts tub of amazing peanut butter every month for an entire year. So that's a year's supply of peanut butter and it comes

in all sorts of awesome flavors like white choc fudge and chocolate brownie. They're essentially peanut butter on, I don't want to say steroids. That's probably bad for the protein works, isn't it? It's peanut butter, upgraded peanut butter, but it's unreal. And you can get a year's supply of it for free, all that you need to do, wherever you are tuning in, leave us a review, that might be iTunes or Stitcher. Head to the app, it will take you literally five seconds to leave us a review, and you will be entered into the competition

to win an entire year of free peanut butter. Also, if you've already given us a rating, you will be automatically entered into the competition, so do not worry. If you haven't, I bet that you can go and do it in the time it takes for this intro music to finish, so crack on. And while you're doing that, please welcome Mr. Chris Sparks, founder of the Forcing Function, and former top 20 online poker players in the world. We are talking all things productivity.

Chris, welcome welcome the show. Hey Chris, hey guys, thank you so much for having me. Absolutely pleasure to have you on recently had one of your peers, Tiago forte talking about tools also had Nat Eliason host of the made you think podcast, saying that you and Tiago are the only two people in the world that he listens to about productivity. So no, no pressure, mate. No pressure. Thanks, I'll do my best. So why don't you give us a little bit of a background before we delve into the dark world of productivity? Why don't we, why don't we hear a little bit about you?

Yeah, certainly. So I kind of got into this through this side door. As you mentioned, I think a lot of people know me for my online poker career. I still play at a pretty high level, but I had my peak right before the event we call Black Friday. So you know, 2008-2011. And I learned quite a bit during that time about what it takes to perform at the highest level. And I realized that the people who were doing things that I saw as shaping the world were all becoming entrepreneurs, some of my poker players, friends included. And I wanted to find a way that I could take all of the things that I had learned about peak performance

and find a way to accelerate the growth of these people who I thought were putting things into the world that needed to exist. And so that's how I stumbled upon founding the forcing function where I take everything that I have learned about how to produce at a very high level. So become the sort of person who can accomplish anything that you want, whether that's installing habits or systems or just removing roadblocks to accomplishing one's goals.

And I've created a system which I've put together in my just released book, Experiment Without Limits, which I'm happy to talk about. I work on do workshops, I do one-on-one coaching, and it's something that allows me to have really interesting conversations just like this one. Get to learn something new every day.

Yeah, well don't speak too soon. Might not be interesting yet. I might boy you sleep, but yeah, I totally get it, man, the world of online poker seems to be like a bit of a breeding ground for people that are polymaths in other areas or people that are real extreme high performers, think a lot about Josh Waitskin as well, former chess prodigy, now turned executive CEO, coach and all that sort of stuff. It seems to, there must be some real, some real intellect in there. Absolutely.

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

on being able to make better decisions within perfect information. And so when you're playing poker at a high level, not only do you have to beat other players, but you have to conquer yourself, that we are the common denominator in all of our productivity struggles. And so understanding what our own triggers are, understanding how things can go off the

rails, or in the positive side, what are the conditions that allow us to have peak focus, to have it allows to have peak energy, and how can we recreate those conditions? Where if you understand what you're trying to accomplish, it's more or less understanding whether these conditions that I need to have in order to put myself in the position to accomplish that. I totally understand. So when you were going through online poker and you were looking at the potential for the forcing function,

who was some of the people you've mentioned Josh, who was some of the other people that you thought, wow, that's someone that I really need to learn from or someone who's particular stance, I really respect, or you had admiration for like that. Was there anyone who comes to mind that you thought is a role model in that? Oh, man, that's a really good question. I'll take a step backwards in how I approach all of this is I see my personal system as a collection of the best of other people's systems. So as a poker player, what you're doing is anytime someone makes a move against you that

puts you on your heels when you're not sure what the right response is, you realize, hey, if I don't know what I'm supposed to do here, this is probably a good thing to be doing to other people, right, that they probably stumbled upon a good strategy, even if I don't understand it yet. And so looking to emulate one part of that strategy until you can internalize the reasoning behind it.

The same way, when you're looking at who do I want to emulate, I always start from, do I want this person's life? This person giving advice, do I want to have a life that's similar to theirs, where none know one dimension can be taken away outside of the whole system, right? So people look at someone who's hyper-hyper productive, but the question is, do you want to be that person? The answer is no, right? Classical examples, everyone really admires

Warren Buffett. No one necessarily wants to be Warren Buffett, right? I mean, maybe Warren Buffett 50 years ago, but I digress. So where I'm looking for is who are people who are living in a way that is in alignment with the way that I'd like to live? And high level, I want to be learning every single day. I want to go to bed slightly better than when I woke up

as far as I know something else I've discovered want something new about how the world works. I understand myself a little bit better. And so when I'm looking for examples, I'm looking for people who embody that. Now that being said, it can be really interesting to look at true believers, people who have a fully fleshed out system. Let's see, a couple of people come to mind. I mean, as far as productivity goes, huge fan of David Allen, don't necessarily want to be David Allen, huge fan of Nassim Taleb,

don't necessarily want to be Nassim Taleb, but I can take off pieces of their system, people who are very, very opinionated about all things, what are the things that resonate with me, and how can I integrate pieces of what they're doing into my own system. I think a big error that many people make that they get onto this personal development treadmill is that they keep switching systems wholesale rather than taking off pieces of what other people

are doing, forming what I call small experiments. Like if I add this, if I make this small change, does it have effect on myself overall? If does, I can double down, if not, I stop it. And where a lot of people see is like, oh, this new tool, this new system, like this is going to change my life, this is going to solve anything. And the problem is that none of these things

are going to solve your own problems because we are always the common denominator. And the ironic thing is that this incremental approach in that I changed one small thing every day in a positive direction as it to compound returns. And that's the true way that progress is incredibly accelerated. Not these one-time heavy lifts of today's the day way that progress is incredibly accelerated, not these one time heavy lifts of today is the day that I change everything type of stuff. Yeah, I mean, I'm laughing for a number of reasons. Firstly, because Jordan, who is one of the guys that's a part of the Modern Wisdom project, often uses a quote from Naval, which is talking about, you can't just have a piece of someone's life, you have to have the whole.

And that, just for people that are listening, it's a really lovely tool to use. And especially I've done a little bit of reality TV, swimming waters of Instagram influencers and stuff like that. And a lot of people desire that, right? Like they look at that person, they think, oh, that's a cool life, or that person's got this and that going on. And it's like, I'm telling you, from first-hand experience that a lot of those people, you would not be able to be paid to have their lives. It looks good. Some of the bits are great, but some of the bits aren't. You're totally right as well. The person who's incredibly industrious, you know, you have no idea what Elon Musk's

relationship with his father's like. You have no idea what Elon Musk's bed routine in terms of his headspace is like on a night time. It's great to say that this guy's taken us to Mars and that he's making that testers this amazing cool company and he is. But you only see, especially now, with how curated social media feeds are, you only see what people want you to see.

And then when there's a scandal and something happens and it comes out that Jeff Bezos has been sending dick pics around or whatever it might be, like everyone's super shocked because we never get to see that side of people. And I think that a much more rounded view and seeing things in that way is a lot more interesting. Another one of the reasons why I'm laughing and I'm sure a lot of the listeners at home

will be, we have an entire series called Lifehacks. Now these are to be done in a very piecemeal fashion. Like we literally did one the other day, which is how to make the best toasty. Like how you make the best toasted sandwich. And we all gave our opinions on the best toasted sandwich. And then sometimes we'll do things, we'll use tools for such a short period of time

that in between recording the episode and releasing it, which is usually maybe two to three weeks, will have gone from the new relationship status, loving it to not so sure about it, to no longer using it, and then I'm about to publish the episode. And I'm like, oh, God, I might be talking about something I don't even use now. So yeah, the falling into the trap of this is going to fix all of my problems, is such a huge big deal. And you see this all the time, right? Like some of the guys that are in the office

that I work in will come in with something new that they believe is going to be the solution to what it is that they do. One of the lads got a hold of a shit ton of Medaphonil the other day, and they're all doing their resits from uni because they're big party boys. And they came in and he's like, man, like, let's get on this Medaphon, I'm gonna do this

and I'm like, guys, all of you are taking Medafe, and I'm gonna do this on your phone. Guys, all of you are taking Medafe and ill, and you've got your notifications on your phone next to your laptop. Like, am I not seeing, like, is no one else seeing what I'm seeing here? Like, don't focus on the quick fix, focus on the big problem.

But yeah, I think it's so much of the stuff that you've said, they're really took strikes according with my experience as well personally. And it's difficult not to get seduced, right? You see that click-baity title, like you're putting your hand up, yeah. It's like, for me, and perhaps for yourself as well,

it's the equivalent of like, I don't know, like a hot girl advert or something, and you're like, oh, it triggers something in me so primal like these 10 new productivity hacks for iMessage I'm like, I've got to see these new productivity hacks for iMessage, I gotta go and have a look and then I get in there and I'm like, you've done it again. You've got clickbaited, you thought it was gonna be really cool, but yeah, honestly, absolutely everything. Personal observation and personal experience, I totally agree. it, you thought it was going to be really cool. But yeah, honestly, absolutely everything. Personal observation and personal experience, I totally agree. Cool. A couple of things there. I'd love to have the touch on some of the interesting

threads here. First, you mentioned of all, and one of his favorite ideas that I really tried to internalize this idea of a single player game that the only thing that matters is our internal scorecard and how our own personal definition of success, and that it's impossible to look around and determine whether people around us are successful because we don't know what their goals are, right? We're continually projecting based on our own definitions. And as you alluded to, many times we don't take the costs into account. This is what I call differentiating goals from dreams. You know, as everyone wants to be a rock star,

no one wants to play 300 shows and live out of the back of a van for a year, right? It is like, everyone wants the results, but no one wants to put in the gym time. And the reason that, you know, we keep kicking ourselves is because we haven't reconciled, all right, well, if I want to achieve this goal, this is what it's going to take. And more importantly, due to opportunity cost,

here are all the things that I'm going to have to give up. That life is just one delicious buffet, but you can eat it all. You have to pick and choose to do some things at the expense of thumbs things you also want to do, but not quite as much. And it's this nefarious justification in the hindsight mirror that what we're doing is okay.

It's like, oh yeah, that's time I spent reading, you know, how to hack eye message productivity hacks. I'm really glad that I read that. But was that how you chose to spend your time in advance? Are you just backwards rationalizing? We're so much of our mental bandwidth is dedicated towards backwards rationalizing, oh yeah, that what I'm doing is great. And that's really, really the importance of planning that everything reduces down to what do you want. And once you understand that you can get yourself to want anything, it's what do I want to want?

How do I sculpt my environment so that my values automatically coalesce around what I'm doing? And it's this fear that I have being in this productivity game that so many people follow and listen to things like this as entertainment, as I am going to feel better listening to this because I have all these ideas that if I start hugging people for five seconds instead of three seconds, I'm going to have a little bit more empathy. And if I lower my voice one octave,

I'm gonna have 20% more trust when actually doing the hard work of looking down and understanding what do you want? And thinking about skill acquisition as a just in time process, what are the skills that are in the way of accomplishing your goals and worrying about those rather than having this giant collection of things

that you might actually use someday? The point about using it as entertainment is so right. Like you don't know the people that wrote that I do the show with, but it sounds like you do. That all of us are the same and, uh, Johnny and Yusef are both two sort of real and George as well. And other one of the guys, it's part of the project. Very, very focused on the results. I don't think I can get any of them to read a fiction book, but if Cal

Newport or Ryan Holiday or whoever brings a new book out, they'll be straight on it. And bizarrely, I think it applies a lot of pressure to them, and some listeners at home might be striking according with this too. Unless they can see a direct result from the investment of reading something, there are a lot of the time they're not going to read it. It's reading for this weird profit sort of sake. And I caught myself doing that and then have managed to backtrack quite a bit. The rule, if anyone who's listening to heuristic that I've used is that I will read

nonfiction by day but by night I'll only read fiction or story based stuff, just I don't want my brain sort of sparking away in that sort of a manner just before I'm about to go to bed. But yeah, like one of the problems with that is if the only time that you read is to read to One of the problems with that is if the only time that you read is to read to make a profit, there's an awful lot of pressure on what you're reading. Like you have to, unless you can do recall and unless you can do recall with high fidelity and then unless you can implement,

there's always this like, you're always gonna feel guilty or at least I found myself feeling that. I'm like, oh, you read the five chapters of Cal Newport's deep work, but only implemented one of them, like what a waste. Because there's this desire for profit on the back end. Yeah, and I think doing anything out of a sense of guilt is really poor fuel.

I try to identify anything that I'm doing out of a sense of obligation or fear and ruthlessly eliminate that because I want to enjoy everything that I do or it needs to be very clear towards my goals and putting this pressure on yourself that oh like I need to be extracting the maximum value out of everything is not only irrational, it's not healthy that we need to relax, we need to recharge, we need to unplug, and everything doesn't need to exactly tie to a goal. I mean, I'm really big on unreading fiction. I've actually cut way, way down on reading nonfiction because, I mean, any book,

especially around 200 pages, doesn't actually need to be 200 pages. It's a 20 page blog post with 180 pages of examples or stories around that. Does that sound a little bit like fiction to you? Right? It's a very blurred line. And when you're thinking about how do you actually maximize your time reading, sometimes reading the thing that takes four hours is actually going to be a lower hourly ROI than something that takes four hours is actually going to be a lower hourly ROI than something that takes 20 hours because the 20 hour thing is high quality enough and it transforms the

paradigms with which you view the world enough that everything you do changes after that. And that's why I really love fiction. Plus that, you know, I happen to enjoy it and I want to read things that I enjoy that the subset of books exist in the world that are both important and useful and enjoyable is far larger than the number of books that I love to read. I mean, my reading list is going to be thousands of books long before I die, and I'm perfectly okay with that. Yeah, totally. I read a, so it's sacrilege, I know, but I only read 1984 last year. And that book, some of the conclusions that I drew from that piss all over so many nonfiction, like productivity books, so much stuff that came out of that. And I was like, this is as useful if not more useful than

something which designs itself to be productivity. So. Yeah. And the whole notion of speed reading is that you can, you can extract information as faster. The point isn't to extract the information. The point is to is to prompt yourself on your thinking and to sit with it and think about ways to apply. And it's the more time that you spend with a book, the more you get out of it. And it actually has compounding returns rather than diminishing returns.

I mean, that whole notion of, you know, how do I take in information faster? How do I listen to this podcast at 3X instead of 2X? You said, you said, you've got this on at 2.5X. I know you do. I know you've got this on at 2.5X speed and Chris is telling you to slow it down right now. Yeah. And, I mean, man, I have so many rants today.

It seems like it's fine. We can, we can keep on doing it. A good rule of thumb is that people chronically underestimate intangible value, right? There's familiarity that I'm sure a lot of people have with Good Hearts Law that once we have a measure, it ceases to be a reliable measure, because we over optimize around that. Think about, you know, you're talking about Instagram, you know, think about, once you decide that followers is an important metric, you start to over optimize towards followers versus thinking about how do I increase engagement? How do I get these people to convert to something that I want

them to do, et cetera, that if we can understand what are these things that are bringing intangible value to us, things that we can't necessarily measure, but have an effect spread across our entire system, we can find ways to unlock hidden value because everyone is over tied to things that are very easy to reduce to a number. And I think this is probably a good transition to talk about experiment with how limits

of it is the huge reason why I decided to start it is because I felt myself falling into this trap over and over and over again is I can't do anything to help people. I don't know enough. I'm not enough of an expert. I don't, what do I have to offer? Thinking that knowledge is the limiting resource for people. If knowledge was the limiting resource, man, these people who are reading 100 books a day, why aren't they going to space?

Clearly, there's something else that's missing in that equation and that it's action. The knowledge is only useful to the point that is getting in the way of acting that we don't know what to do. I realize that from poker, all we do is forward information. That's how we win against our opponents is information asymmetry. That I was carrying this over to my personal life that I was hoarding my information and thinking that I had the secret. And I decided it's like I want to burn these bridges by outsourcing, I'm sorry, by open sourcing everything that I know. And so I took what it, if I could only, you know, the old, like if we lost all information about

science, Feynman is, okay, well, we know the universe is made from atoms, we can build everything up from that. I was like, if everything we had learned about performance was forgotten, what could I share with people and so that they could build up from that and find a way to build upon these principles, install them in their own lives. And that was the birth of experiment without limits. Is here is everything that I know, like take it for free. And my hope is that this will illuminate the opportunities

that people have and actually spur in them to take the action, where the knowledge itself has no value until they actually act upon it. Yeah, so having gone through experiment without limits, one of the things that I have to say first off is it is very action focused. Every page is a task, every task has a time predictor of how long you think it's going to take you. There's like a augmented and silly real information, which is like this is something that you might want to do when you're doing this and all this sort of stuff. A really cool point. I mean the middle of writing my first ever online

course and a really cool point that I came across was from LinkedIn and it said that the word strategy or strategist is in the top 10 bio descriptors on all of LinkedIn top 10 words strategy or strategist, but executor or execution doesn't even feature in the top 1000. And I think that that asymmetry of people who like to plan versus people who like to do, people of talking versus people of action. I think that you've hit upon a real gem there, which is just by doing stuff and learning by doing and just trying things out, you get a lot further than kind of this circle jerk of information slash read in slash whatever it might be.

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

Yeah, I get it. So let's take us through. What do you think people need to know first from experiment without limits? Or if you were doing a productivity, MOT for someone, if you're having a little bit of a breakdown, having a take in the minute of the garage looking under the hood, where would you start? Yeah. So I would say it breaks into two parts.

So the first part is the fundamentals. Right. So you need to have the fundamentals down before you start optimizing, right? Thinking about your co-producer who's taking Modaphanil before he hasn't turned off his notifications, right? There's these last mile solutions that everyone wants to jump to before they have the strong foundation. And for me, the foundations are goals, systems, and habits and routines. So first goals, I structure out how you can figure out what you want and how you can frame it in such a way that it's achievable, it's actionable, that

you know when you will achieve it. Once you know what you want, you have a very easy litmus test for things that are on the path path that are not on the path. Systems is more or less my way of thinking about how do I accelerate progress around that path? How do I make it easier to make progress? And it really focuses on these three key principles of leverage bottlenecks and feedback loops. So leverage, how do I get more or less bottlenecks? How do I identify what is most hold of me back? And then feedback loops, how do I know if I'm making progress? How do I know if my efforts are tracking towards my goal?

Habits and routines, everyone knows how to create habits, how knows how to create routines. But it's something that's very easy but not simple. And so I'm really trying to break down if you follow this system, you'll be able to install a new habit every month. That's 12 new habits a year. How many people start 12-year habits a year?

Thousands, millions. How many people actually add 12 habits a year? I would say, you know, one in 100 people. And all it comes down to is just adding one at a time and making everyone knows kind of the power of habit, but people actually don't think through and practice and plan out when they create a habit. What the trigger is, how do I make it ridiculously easy to do, and why am I doing it? And it kind of outlined those in the step-by-step portion.

And then the second half, the assumption is, once you have all these places, the system is, you know, humming, running well, how do you optimize? So you have your key resources of time, attention, energy. How do you maximize those? So time is really getting your planning and reflection down. So I call this the the cycle of I plan what I'm going to do. I have that experiment. I collect data. I reflect how did that go. And based on that, everything

is a double downer stop. And so I'm constantly having a bunch of these experiments going one in each dimension so that I ensure progress and all the things that are important to me. Attention, you're talking about notifications. Attention is primarily about understanding that everything that is not your top priority at this given moment is a distraction. So how do you create a default so that the thing that is the most important thing right now is the only thing you're going to do and that everything else, you make it harder, you add friction to it. Energy, we talked about last mile, how do you get your sleep, your exercise, your diet, nailed in, automatic, solved, so that you don't even have to think about it.

And then we can talk about what you next as far as, you know, caffeine supplements, et cetera, but 99% of the value in locked there is sleep, nutrition, exercise. And then I go into what I call more mental games. This is a lot of crossover from poker and your motivation. So how do you get yourself to do hard things? How do you show up? When things aren't going well, how do you get yourself back on track? How do you debug up? When things aren't going well, how do you get yourself back on track?

How do you debug yourself? So getting into procrastination, getting into ensuring accountability and consistency. And then my final is probably the my favorite chapter in that Accord belief for me is that we can become and achieve anything that we want, and the meta skill there is learning how to learn that the only thing that's in the way of our goals is the skills necessary to achieve them. So the final chapter accelerating learning, I break down my process for self-transformation in how do you acquire any skill in an extremely efficient manner. Recently we had Scott Young author of Ultra Learning On. Last year I had Pete, a C Brown author of Make It Stick.

Tiago Forte has been on earlier this year. James Clear, author of Atomic Habits has been on earlier this year. It does seem to me like everyone is kind of circling around a lot of the things that we're talking about today. Why do you think it is that so many people have this, around a lot of the things that we're talking about today. Why do you think it is that so many people have this, I'm going to say obsession, but I'm going to use the word, this obsession with optimizing and productivity. Obviously, we all want

to get more done in less time. But is it just that no one or a lot of people aren't finding the solution or sticking to the program, and therefore there's constantly a gap in the market for someone to come up with something new. Is that why or is it something else? I wonder what you've thought of that. I'm happy to guess. I would say that there are a couple different schools

of thought, right? So why now, why are people so interested in optimization? I think it's this, you know, transparency due to we can see what everyone else is doing and it's never been easier to compare ourselves with our peers and particularly to compare ourselves with the best possible version of our peers, what they want us to see. And so I think a lot of it really is driven by competitiveness in that we are, we are relativistic creatures, right? We're concerned about our position in the pecking order and we want to improve relative to our peers. Now the positive spin on that, you know, why, why habits, why now? A lot of the research on behavioral change is so well established in the

psychological literature and really has not changed since the 70s. Are the best practices today haven't really changed all that much in the last few decades. Now this will put in it, not counter to what a lot of magazines and articles will tell you, Not counter to what a lot of magazines and articles will tell you, right? Men's health needs to put out a new workout every year. Sorry, every episode. There needs to be a new diet for people to try. People are going to go through phases. But the core habits underlying these behaviors, the science there has not changed at all.

Why I think people are so interested is because we feel like we are powerless that more and more of what we do every day feels outside of our own control. Right? We're drowning in messages, we're drowning in emails. There are so many things that we could be doing. And we've never been more aware of all the things that we, quote, unquote, should be doing, but don't have the time to do, we don't have the energy to do. And so we look for solutions outside ourselves, right? Everyone, that become the true believer of a system. And I think a lot of people finally settle on, you know, what my consensus belief is that

the solution lies within ourselves and that if we can become the sort of person who can change our behavior as needed, who can learn any skill that we increase our own capability, we feel more confident moving about the world, we feel less self-conscious and exposed on the internet. I'm very, very supportive of this movement, but as always, my concern is that people treated as entertainment as they read about the solution and think they've accomplished it. The knowledge is not the action. And that's my hope is, you know, you talked about James Clear.

Like I read James Clear's book, and for me, someone has been immersed in this world. I think, well, there's not really much new that's here, but he has put it more directly and concisely than just about anyone else. And it has reached a very wide audience to people who can actually implement these into focus. And, you know, that's my hope is that people don't treat this as a beach read, but they

actually go and take the next step, say, all right, given this information, how do I apply it? What is the next step? What's the action that I take? Yeah. I think it would be difficult for someone to go through this and treat it as a beach read. It's so action focused. There is a lot in there. You know, even just the use of some of the the highlight tabs for particular tasks and stuff like that, it's like if you've

been to a restaurant and they've got like a featured meal, like a featured meal of the month, it's like your eyes immediately get drawn to that. If you're on a beach and they've got like a featured meal, like a featured meal of the month. It's like your eyes immediately get drawn to that. If you're on a beach and you use this as a beach treat, I will be impressed and surprised. Also, what you said about James' book is exactly the first thing I said to him. As that being honest, James wasn't a massive amount that was new in atomic habits to me,

but I've never seen it all put together in the same place and displayed with such wonderful examples. And hopefully with this, this will be something similar. So why don't we, why don't we go through and why don't you pick, we can either go through each chapter or why don't we go through a couple of chapters and why don't you give us your favorite, this is going to be like making you choose your favorite child here. Why don't you choose your favorite task from within either all or a couple of sections or something like that?

All right. Okay, so maybe we'll do, we've been talking about habits. So maybe we'll kind of start with habits routines and then I can switch to one of the more more prescriptive kind of optimization chapters after that. Amazing. So my key takeaway from habits is that our future behavior is deterministic, right?

That it's not only true, it's also useful to think about your future self as not having free will, right, that you do not choose what you're going to do in the future, but that your actions are determined by the context that you find yourself in. And, right, so to unpack that, we take actions now that change what we do in the future. One aspect of that is everything that we do makes it more likely that action is repeated in the future. So thinking about habits, I use this metaphor of a river digging a path through rock. You think about the river that created the Grand Canyon over millions of years.

And so on the good end, everything that we do reinforces that we do that again, right? Every time we complete a habit that is positive, we reinforce our identity as someone who does that. On the other side, when we have something that we call a quote-unquote bad habit that we don't want to be repeating, realizing that we have carved a path through the rock and that it takes time to refill that river with sand, but that every time we have this impulse and we say no, the level rises a little bit, right? So I think of this as an upstream effect in that in order to change our behavior, I don't try to do anything in the present. I don't do things.

I make things easier to do in the future, or if I don't want to do them, I make them harder to do in the future by adding friction. So if you understand and internalize that, you can change your behavior in any direction that you want. And so the how-to of that, right? The everyone knows this trigger behavior reward, but I'll just take 60 seconds to break this down into how do you actually implement that. So think about it, like, with the trigger,

trigger sets it in motion. So we'll use Good Habits as an example, but use the inverse for bad habits. Like, if you want a habit to happen, understand what triggers it and make sure that trigger happens. Make sure that you notice it. Make sure that you do next is very clear.

Make sure that you can't avoid it. And I have a checklist that you can follow, specific consistent, automatic, unavoidable. And if you look at all of the things that you want to do and identify that trigger and make sure that trigger does all four of those things, the habit takes care of itself. You don't have to do anything else.

Where people forget to do things is that they forget about their trigger and they don't have a system to ensure that that trigger occurs and that they notice it. Behavior at a high level, how do you make it as easy as possible? When you're first starting off a habit, I always recommend something that takes two minutes or less.

You have no excuses and it is auto-opted. It just happens, not worrying about the results. Everyone has this heavy left and you haven't worked out. It's January 1st and now all of a sudden, you're going to go to the gym every day for two hours. Well, that's not gonna work out too well, but if it's all right, you know, at 9 a.m. after brushing my teeth,

I'm going to do five pushups every single day, right? How can you say no to doing five pushups? But before you know, you have a chain that you can start to build off of where five can become 10, can become I go outside and do pushups, can we go? I run around the block for 10 minutes, etc. And before you know it, you know, your Olympic weightlifter. The final is like reward.

It's very important to understand why you are doing a habit. First, you know, connecting it to a long-term goal. You know, why are you doing this in the first place? How's it tied to your goals? But also having an immediate reinforcement. connecting it to a long-term goal, why are you doing this in the first place? How's it tied to your goals? But also having an immediate reinforcement. So the intrinsic reward is, why is this important? Extrinsic reward is, why does this immediately reward me?

So we've been using Jim as example. All right, so I want to work out why? Because I want to look good, why? Because I want to feel confident when I'm out, right? Or I want to feel better. I want to have more energy. Why? So I can make more progress towards my goals. I can build my business, etc. The exchange reward is you walking outside of the gym. Man, I feel really accomplished. Oh, this like sword feeling feels really good. I can post on my Instagram a photo of like how I look at my shirt, shirt off, you know, not pointing, not pointing anything. I can,

you know, I can talk to a friend, right? A friend meets me at the gym and I have that that social aspect that feels good, right? If you have these three elements in place, trigger easy behavior reward, elements in place, trigger, easy behavior reward, you create a strong foundation for a habit that automatically expands with time. And the smaller and stronger that foundation, the easier it is to expand. But where people mess up when it comes to habits is that they take on too much too soon, and then anything happens, right? They go on a trip, their schedule is too busy for the day, they much too soon, and then anything happens, right? They go on a trip, their schedule is too busy for the day, they miss a day, and all of a sudden they're starting

back at zero. As William James puts it, like they've let the ball of yarn unroll and they have to spend all the effort unrolling that ball again. So one experiment that I really love here, this is in the chapter four routines, right? Where routine is just a collection of habits that you that's something that reinforce each other is that you actually walk through your routine and practice it. And so the example that I give that's a really common one for people is getting out of bed right away. And so I recommend people simulate waking up in the morning with their alarm and just getting out of bed,

turning off their alarm and going about their day over and over and over again before it's automatic, practicing it, identifying any ways that they could get off track and adding friction to those ways. So making it really hard to hit snooze and the more automatic it is, the easier it is. And people are like, well, I don't want to spend

a half hour practicing a routine. Think about this half an hour could save you months in how long it takes for this to actually become solidified. So that's a really powerful one. I call that offline training highly, highly recommend. That's cool. I've got so much, so many little threads open here. I'm left to go through here.

So I'll work backwards. First off, my solution for getting out of bed has actually been to get a Sunrise alarm clock, which I absolutely love. Everyone who's listening will know that I'm a big fan of that, but it's on the other side of the bedroom. So to get up and turn it off, I've got to walk over. It is also next to my window, which is next to the curtains. Open the curtains, I've got to turn the alarm off, might as well open the curtains.

I'm not getting back to bed. Like, there's this huge window in front of my bedroom, like I'm not going to go back to bed after that. Also, please, I know that when we're too agnostic today, I'm part of the Chris Sparks ideology today and we have too agnostic, however, for the love of God, please do not sleep with your phone in your bedroom, just put it in the

kitchen, put it somewhere else, like the, probably the single best thing that I've done in the last three years of improving myself has been not having my phone in my bedroom. And every time that I go away and I stay in a hotel or I'm on holiday, I'm reminded of why I do it because I forget. I just put it next to the thing and I set my alarm. I'm going to alarm and I'm like, I'll have watched five YouTube videos and done.

I've just fallen back into that old habit, right? But yeah, please keep it outside your bedroom. Moving back up, you mentioned about allowing yourself to sit with the good feeling and to give yourself a reward. Rick Hanson in hardwiring happiness, episode 80 something, sorry, Rick, uh, did an episode with him on resilience, his new book, totally stopped talking about resilience and just went deep on hardwiring happiness, but hardwiring happiness allow yourself to sit with good emotions he suggests for between five and ten seconds when you do something good let it fludgy day and I really love that another element of that which it forces you to do is to take time away from your phone or any other sort of stimulus because you're quite engaged with the stimulus that is just you. And I think that's quite a lovely thing to happen. And then with regards to what you mentioned in the beginning, which is the upstream effort,

a lot of people say to myself and some of the other guys that I work with, I am honestly, I'm such a bad procrastinator at university. All I did was hand my assignments in like on the day. I did a master's dissertation in 36 hours. And I did 80% of the word counting the last 36 hours. I'm terrible. And the fact that I'm even slightly competent and able to do the fact I'm able to get myself out of bed and get dressed in the mornings like fairly miracle. But I do a couple of businesses and I do this podcast and I do a couple of other little bits and pieces. And to some people, that might seem like I'm doing a lot.

And yeah, in the first place, it was hard. Like when I started trying to publish one podcast a week, I was like, oh my God, like this is taking a long time, the systems, I haven't got my systems in place, it takes me longer, it's effortful. Fuck, I keep making mistakes. And then I stepped it up at the beginning of this year, I made a promise to the listeners, that as long as I'm in the country,

they'll get two episodes a week. And then after a month, I was like, you fucking idiot. Like, why did you just have to do that? You've just like totally linchpin' yourself to this ridiculous workload. And now, if I don't record to a week, I feel like lonely. I'm like, oh, hang on, I'm not smoking anyone this week. I better do four next week. And I find myself like on Saturday morning,

I had the guy that created titanium agraft, Andrew Doyle, had him in. And I'd only had four hours of sleep, but I was like, I wanna get up, I wanna talk to Andrew, and I do that. And now the editing process is refined and all the rest of it. So yes, getting more things and fitting more things

into your life is difficult in the first place. And that's why starting small is effective. But over time, as you become more and more proficient at those things and your your processes either become more refined or your capability goes up or you know, going to embarrassed perhaps you might start outsourcing some of this sort of stuff. Like all of that, all of that allows you over time to do an Elon Musk. That Elon Musk might not actually work 80 hours a week. He might just work 40 hours a week, but be able to do the work of 80 hours because he's incredibly efficient with his time or he might be whatever. So, yeah, those are my thoughts there, Chris. I've run back up the line, then, mate. Yeah, maybe we should talk about procrastination. Let's do it. Let's do it.

I really need some help with that. Yeah. I think you touched on a very important concept, which is, you know, when the first hour you win the day, that how you start the day really matters as far as setting the tone and that having something that's important to you that gets you excited and out of bed is maybe the first important thing that you have, right? The no amount of productivity techniques are going to get you to want to do something that you don't want to do, right? So start with a goal that feels good, that's important to you. And that everything that you pick up, you need to put something else down, right? That productivity usually comes from doing less things rather than more, but you do things

of higher average importance, right? And so you accomplish more by saying, all right, I'd like to do both of these, but this is more important. So I'm going to put my focus here first, and then I switch. I talk about this as serial rather than parallel. So the key to procrastination is getting started. Right. Once you're moving, right, a body at rest tends to stay at rest, a body in motion tends to stay in motion. It's like, do whatever you can to get moving. Think about this as a verb change. Like I am going to publish a podcast to I am publishing a podcast. I am going to write a blog article to I am writing. There's a very subtle difference and all you do is you write the first word, you open the document, right? Take the very first step. And so conquering procrastination is finding the reason that you are not starting and

reconciling that argument with yourself so that you start and before you know it your underway. One of the things to interject there, one of the things that Laura van der Kam talked about, I don't know whether you're familiar with Laura's work off the clock. So she's a time management expert, highly recommend. I'll send you the, that's it, I'm going to get another play here. I'll send you the podcast on some done. And on that she has this really cool little way that she reframes thing That's things that she doesn't do and a lot of the time people say I don't have time to do X I don't have time to do Y Whereas she reframes that whenever she catches herself doing that. She says it's not a priority

It's not a priority because that changes it from being outside of your control to being in your control. And it forces you to question, actually, how much do I want this thing? And if I do want this thing and I'm not doing it, why? I really like that reframing. It's straight-accorded what you just mentioned. Yeah, I think that's a very good thread that we've been coming back to that time, how we spend it

is a reflection of our priorities and that if we're not doing something, there's a reason, right? And getting in touch with that reason, understanding why is a much more effective way of discovering why we are doing it or if it's even worth doing in the first place, so you can eliminate that guilt we're feeling about it and sleep better at night,

be happier, etc. I love what you're talking about as far as Rick Hanson where focusing on our subjective experience in how can we make the things we're going to do anyway, more enjoyable, and the habit that he recommends is take literally one minute after you do something and just say, wow, like, wasn't that great, wasn't that fun? Aren't I glad I accomplished that? And the transformation that makes me go throughout life saying, wow, like, this is so much fun. Like, I can't believe I get to do this. I can't believe people pay me for that versus like, oh my God, like Monday again, I got to show up and do this and do that, right? It's, if we enjoy things, we eliminate a lot of this

perceived activation energy to get started. I mean, you touched on something that's very core to me, which I call as a forcing function, where you put something in place that changes your default behavior, right? Or before your default behavior would have been, all right, well, I'll put a podcast out when I feel like it, right, when I have time. But you've made this commitment to your audience that says, I'm going to put two episodes out a week. And then you have to reorganize your personal system

to follow through with that progress, right? You've created a new default is like, well, I'm going to find a way to put two episodes out a week. I've now created that as a top priority, and now my time will have to reflect that. And all this is, I talked about like the reflection planning cycle is just regularly reflecting, you know, where is my time going, and is it in line with my priorities?

And if it's not, you rebalance your time portfolio. You say, all right, well, I've been spending a lot of time on this thing that's not really important to me. Maybe I should spend something up my time on something else as important as that, right? It's like, I say that relationships are really important to me, but I haven't been keeping in touch with my friends. I haven't been spending time with my significant other. I say my health is really important to me, but I haven't been keeping in touch with my friends. I haven't been spending time with my significant other. I say my health is really important to me, but I haven't been setting a time aside to go to the gym. I haven't been setting a time aside to cook healthy food, right? And all you do is you just bring yourself back into balance as far as putting more time into what you say is a higher priority. At a high level, this procrastination chapter is identify why you are procrastinating

and then get rid of that reason. So the four categories are expectancy, value, and pulsiveness and delay. So expectancy, that if I do this, I will get a reward. that if I do this, I will get a reward, right? And so making sure that you can increase your perceived chances of success, or that if you do succeed, there will be a reward at the other end, value that you enjoy, like you're going to do, and that the reward you will see

is something that you place a value on, right? So how can you do what you're doing, make what you're doing more enjoyable? Well, we'll come back to the, I guess we'll use you as an example if you don't mind Chris Farz producing a podcast episode, right? So it's like, how do I increase my chances that putting effort into producing a podcast will have the results that I want? How do I make the process of editing a podcast, which I know is a pain in the butt, more enjoyable, right? How can I, you know, can I put on good music? Can I have a friend who has a podcast over come and do it with me, etc.

Impulsiveness. This is the attention chapter at Nut Shell. It's like our ability to focus in the face of distractions. So we make these distractions harder to access. Everyone knows that as soon as we have something we're procrastinating on, that's the time that we want to clean our room, right? That's the time we want to organize our file structure. Like, how do we remove these options from our menu?

And then finally, delay, a huge part of procrastination is like, we have to do all the work, but this asshole in the future gets all the benefits. So how can we receive some of the benefits that we get from putting in this effort sooner? And if you discover which one of these four is most holding you back, you can immediately put something in place that's like, oh, this is more enjoyable. This is more valuable. And all it does is it allows you to get started.

And once you're moving, you keep moving. So I call this the procrastination algorithm. Notice why you're procrastinating. Try something if it works. Start working if not try something else. And it's funny is that like you just go through this process for like five or 10 minutes and you immediately start moving because you discover, oh, well, this is why I'm not doing it. If I change this, then I guess I will start moving versus like, you start in hours or days

or in my case sometimes and, oh, I'll start this book and months down the line, right? It's just like, take that few minutes to look at yourself and say, why am I not doing this? Recognize this is actually a good reason, but I can reason with this reason. I can strike a compromise and that allows you to get moving. I totally get it. I love the idea as well. What we're focusing on here with regards to procrastination is the next step. One of the things that I use for me is what is the

smallest next step that I can take that kind of puts me on the way. So many of the guys that I'll speak to, so my company we run club nights, we deal with a lot of 18 to 21 year old students, we would call it uni, you call it college. And so many of those guys are like, oh man, like I've got this huge assignment to do, I've got this down here that I'm like, first question, if you're struggling with it, have you made the file? Like have you created the Evernote or have you made the word document? Oh, I haven't done that yet. It's like man, just do that. Do it because that is that is the first thing that before the reading before the that and it's so if you're listening and you need to do an assignment, just make the file. That is the next step that you can do and you totally are. I love the body emotion stays at motion, motion, body at rest stays at rest. It's the third law of thermodynamics for procrastination.

It's perfect. So what do you next, what's the next chapter that you want to have a little look at? Oh, man. I mean, if you don't cut me off, I'll give you a good river. I mean, I would probably, because of the way that we started, I would probably end with learning, right? So we talked about at the high level,

if we understand what we want to accomplish, we then identify what are the skills we need to acquire to accomplish this goal, where it's very easy to fall into the trap of, here are all the things that would be fun to learn today. It's like, I would love to speak five languages. I want to be able to throw ninja stars. I want to be able to do a handstand.

I'd like to be able to, you know, to talk to 50 women a day, right? It's like, all of the, like, I have this long list of things that I'd like to do, but the question is, which one of these is actually in the way of achieving what you want? So I call this identifying or highest leverage skill. First, what is your most important goal? What's the biggest goal that you have right now? And then create a picture, what is the version of yourself who is accomplishing this goal?

Right? So like, what does a day look like for them? What are they doing? What are they capable of that you are not yet capable of? Right? Whether you it's not something you do or it's something that you'd like to do at higher level. And then decide which one of these is most on the path. Right?

If you only pick to do one of these, which most puts you on the path towards it being this person who can achieve this goal. And that takes you down from here's the long list of things I'd like to do to here's what I'm going to learn next. And each one of these skills that you acquire raises the floor for yourself, right? They compound in that you be every skill you acquire raises the floor for yourself, right? They compound in that you be every skill you acquire makes it easier to acquire complimentary skills and that by adding one at a time instead of

dabbling in a bunch of things at once, right? Your speed of acquisition accelerates. And so starting with like, if I can only learn one thing right now, what would it be? And then you create a plan and you say, all right, well, how good do I need to get at this? Right, we don't need to become experts in anything. Sometimes you think about 80-20 rule that acquiring competence is enough for us to move on. And we frame this as a hypothesis. Like, I think that I can accomplish X, then I will be able to move on. And we frame this as a hypothesis. I think that I can accomplish

X, and I will be able to move on to the next thing. For me, I'm trying to relearn Spanish, to say relearn because I've forgotten quite a bit. And so my test is I'd like to be able to have a half hour conversation in Spanish with a local without them knowing that I'm learning Spanish. And if I think if I can accomplish that, anything beyond that is extra. But if I can accomplish that, like, I get most of the value. And so how do I get towards that? It's like that plan is what is the what is the most direct path towards having 30 minute conversation with a native speaker? It's probably having very short conversation with a native speaker. It's probably having very short conversation with non-native speaker

and then working my way up to longer conversations with more accent. But you see, once you know where you're heading, it's very easy to create a clear path to get there and it's much more effective way of learning. So that's really what I recommend is, you know, for me, my dream was I just wanted to spend all day learning things, but I realized like the only point of acquiring skills is using them. And so let's start from what skills do I need and how can I effectively acquire them so that I can accomplish the things I actually want to do. Yeah, there's an analogy that Yusuf, one of the co-hosts, uses where he talks about his ruthless indexing of information.

And he says, he's going to kill me if I get this wrong. I think he's ever known as like over a thousand summaries of one kind or another in. And he's done two degrees, one of which was medicine. He runs an online business, but he also coaches people for online business. And then also is into highly into meditation, all this sort of stuff. And you just think like there is just this ruthless indexing of all this sort of thing, but it will be much more useful

to have had 10 bucks and implemented all of it than it would have been to have had a thousand and you can just reference it. And then maybe remember some of the bits that we've gone through on that. So Chris, I absolutely love today. One question and this is, it might be a difficult one. A lot of people might be thinking that, Arbina, I'm going to breathe, I don't worry, I'll breathe on. A lot of people might be thinking. This all sounds great. Chris barks, productivity guru, but I don't know where to start. I don't know what I'm

supposed to do. Maybe they've got experiment without limits in front of them. And I think you say in that, that it's not necessarily a chronological book, it's not necessarily done in order. And I know that if I was to say this, you would say, well, that's a discussion about the bottlenecks that you are facing and we will tell you to go on a chapter like that in that particular way. But I'm going to ask you more difficult question. And it is, if you were to pick one of the chapters that you've got, so we have goals, systems, habits, routines, time, attention, energy, procrastination, mental game, and learning, if you were to pick one of those to give to the broadest cross section of people,

which one do you think brings the most results on the back end? If you could give most people one chapter, what, it's a good, it's a very good question. I think I would have to go with goals. I really come down to that having everything progresses naturally from a strong foundation and that a lot of wasted effort comes from not knowing what we want so having a structured process in place for determining what do we want to accomplish and how do we get there. I think a lot of other advice becomes obvious where if we if we have a clear idea of where we going we automatically we automatically identify opportunities to take action in that direction. And so while I mean setting goals is primarily a series of prompts, which is just attacking this question from different angles of what do I want, I think that everything reduces

down to having a good answer of that question, that we cannot move until we determine where we're moving. So I think that's the chapter that's most broadly applicable to anyone. And then I think we can all, myself, included have more clarity on what we're trying to accomplish. I believe that a minute spent thinking about what we want to accomplish returns 10x and probably

more, because we don't go after things that aren't that important to us and we go after the things that we want in a very effective way. Now that being said, my idea with putting this out there is that it's useful to anyone no matter what stage in their own journey they are. And I have what I call the performance assessment, which is a short quiz, which is free and available to anyone on my website. That's theforesyncfunction.com slash assessment,

where I ask some questions which will help you identify where is your current personal bottleneck? Where is your best opportunity for growth? And anyone who takes a few minutes to complete that, I reply to what I think is the best experiment within the best chapter in the workbook for them. No way. That's all so. Yeah, I realize, my estimate is that it would take

someone 20 to 30 hours to work their way through this. There's a lot here. And I think of experiment without limits as a reference guide that people can come back to as needed. And that the most important thing is determining, oh man, this is a lot. Where should I start? And so I'd like to you eliminate that sort of friction for people said, hey, based on what you need right now, I'd recommend starting here. So yeah, that's something that I offer to anyone. That's the forcing function.com slash assessment.

Any other experiment without limits which we've been talking about a lot today, I hope if it's something that interests you, you can download it for free at the forcing function.com slash workbook. Amazing. Everything which we have gone through today will be linked in the show notes below. I'll tell you what I'm going to finish on this note. And talking about the checklist that you have and then the review on the backend

and then the subsequent book experiment without limits, you know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of Jordan Peterson's online courses. Have you done those? Yeah, so understand myself.com and future authoring or self-authoring.com is so similar. It's like, this is what you are and these are some of the things you need to know about you and this is tasks which you go through. Did you ever think about that when you were doing this? It's just it's

just I have it. It's such a similarity and it's also way No, I'm honored for the comparison. I'm a big fan of Peterson I see this as Many of the things that I talk about aren't my own invention that this is a collection of what I have found To generalize the most from a variety of sources whether things that I've read that I've tried, things that clients do that works for them. And so I'm happy to hear that what I have to say is said elsewhere because it's validation that what I have to say works, right? It's like the value here is not in the information, the value here is in the application.

And so I say, is like, do any course that you're actually going to finish, right? That there's nothing out there that you can read that's going to change your life, but until you apply it. And then who knows? Amazing. A good analogy that I remember there from one of the guys was that you don't go to an art gallery because the artists that made the work are in there, you went because they display a well curated list of art. And this is the same thing. James Clea, Tomi Cabot, it's probably the best book that I've read this year in terms of non-fiction. Again, nothing, all that stuff's available online, but it's curated together and it's delivered in context and all that

sort of stuff. Chris, man, today has been amazing. I know that I'm going to get hassled to get you back on. So I hope that you're ready and willing for a second episode because you will, you will be getting an invite for it. Everything that we have linked will be in the show notes below. If we go to the forcing function.com slash assessment and see if we can run Chris into the ground and totally ruin his day by making him do absolutely loads of these reviews back to us. That would be great.

Links to experiment without limits. It's only 90 pages, something like that, quite a short book, 91 pages. Like it's 90 pages long, it's an ebook and it's free, read it on a Kindle, get it on your computer. I will be going through this. I'm actually going to be going through it with a couple of my clients as well. So if you are listening and you want to go through it with me, feel free to drop me a message at Chris WillX wherever you follow me. And I'll tell you where I'm

up to. We can kind of do like a Chris Sparks productivity book club thing and see if we can make ourselves a little bit more productive and performance a little bit more peak. If people want to get in touch Chris other than the forcing function, why can't they find you? Thanks for having me on Chris. It's been an honor and a privilege. If you're doing a part two, we'd love to keep talking about this stuff, kind of checking how things are going. And yeah, this doesn't need to be a solo journey. The science is really clear that if you have someone you care about, a friend, a family member who's interested in these things, podcast toast.

A podcast toast. A podcast toast. Yeah. If you do it together, you greatly increase your chances of following through and taking action. So yeah, highly encourage that. If it's something I said today, you know, resonated, you know, please get in touch as I said, my company is the forcing function. So that's the forcing function.com. I'm on all the usual social media channels at at

sparks remarks. And, you know, I'd be happy to hear from you. Yeah, I'd be happy to hear from you. It's like, I put this out there to help people. And so if people are using this, tell me what's useful, anything you've got out of it, that's very useful feedback for me. And it would really be validating to hear that something I said today was valuable, something you found, an experiment limits without valuable. So yeah, send me a message. We'd love to continue this offline Chris. Thank you so much. Amazing Chris. Until next time. Thank you, man. you