Modern Wisdom - #262 - Chris Sparks - How To Properly Do An End Of Year Review

Episode Date: December 26, 2020

Chris Sparks is a Productivity Coach and a Former Top 20 Online Poker Player. Many people use the end of the year as a breakpoint to check in with how life is going and plan what they want to achieve in the following 12 months. Today Chris gives us the exact process he takes his high performance clients through to achieve maximum clarity and prepare for a year of success. Sponsors: Get a 21 Day Free Trial to a supercharged calendar at https://usewoven.com/wisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Access Chris' End Of Year Review Template - http://theforcingfunction.com/modernwisdom  Follow Chris on Twitter - https://twitter.com/SparksRemarks  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/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

Hello beautiful humans, welcome back. I hope you had a fantastic Christmas and I got very timely episodes today. I planned on this one for quite a while to just slot it in in the weird, kind of, nothing no man's land exists between Christmas and New Year. We're often thinking about how did this year go, what do I want to achieve in the coming year. And the end of your review is a process that very few of us have properly not formally written down, but almost everybody kind of gets this sense that they should be doing it. So today I got old buddy of the show Chris Sparks, former top 20 online poker player on the planet and a wonderful productivity and executive coach to CEOs, founders and many other high performers to come on and

give us the exact process that he gives his clients to ensure that they get the best clarity around what they want in the coming year and that they can close all of the doors to the open loops from the last year. So today you will get to see absolutely everything that he uses and also, you know, you've got the next, whenever you've got the next week, you can get this done before the new year. Follow it through. Chris gives a worksheet. He's created a worksheet for us for free and the URLs further on in the episode. So stay tuned for that. And just get it done. You know, it's going to take you a couple of days, but

it will give you so much clarity and purpose and perspective as we enter this new year. And, you you know 2020's been a year of challenges and difficulties for almost everyone this could be a fantastic way to utilize those to power you forward rather than finishing it with a little bit of a loss. I really enjoy doing these timely episodes that are tied in with a particular period that we're all at in the year and hopefully this will provide tons and tons of value to you. If that's the case then let me know how you get on at Chris Will X or have you follow me and if you enjoy it and think it would help other people then please give it a share.

The only way this show grows is by people like you sharing it with people like you and it really could help. So yeah, crack on, press the share button, just a little share, share, share away. But for now it's time to learn how to do an end of your review with Chris Sparks. Good to be back. So good to have you back on, man. How's 2020 been, you're in? You know, it's, there's been a lot of bright spots this year. I think everyone's aware of the craziness and all that's gone on.

But I would have been, it's been a pleasantly surprised how well I've thrived. I think the big news was I got engaged, realized that my partner who, some would say I was stuck with is like, wow, this is amazing. We get to spend all this time together and we're having a blast. And hey, if it's so good when things get up here so bad,

let's take this to the next level. So that was a super silver lining. This really made me refocus on priorities, which I think we'll get into, particularly being closer to family. So moving closer so we could spend a lot of time with our respective families. My just born niece, spend incredibly meaningful. And also just, I've been fortunate that, you know, the way that I earn a living, the way that I serve the world.

Both of those were already online based. So I've had lots of really meaningful and interesting opportunities to support entrepreneurs and executives through all of this turmoil. So, I mean, all external craziness aside, I think it's been a very cool year. You are one anti-fragile son, Ani. That is the goal. I mean, the world is going to get weirder. It is just going to get weird. It's not going back to normal.

What happened this year was not just like a glitch in the matrix. Weird stuff is going to continue to occur. And my goal personally and how I try to help clients is how can you put yourself in a position to thrive no matter what the world throws at you. And I think it's really encapsulated by that concept of anti-fragility is while many systems, people, organizations are threatened with, hey, if things change a little bit, if the tide rolls out and oh no I have my pants down. You know, there any change becomes bad and becomes a threat, but you can position yourself with your habits, with your relationships, with your learning to be

someone who not only is does okay when things get weird, you can actually thrive in those environments because you're well positioned. You're already surfing before the wave comes. So yeah, I think this will be a test and that's what I come back to is it's all practice. It's all an opportunity to put the things that we've learned and know into practice. So yeah, obviously your background professional online poker player, top in the world and executive coach to founders and CEOs and all of this stuff. I'm going to guess that the end of the year is probably a pretty intense time when it comes to reflecting and planning. Yeah, I try to practice what I preach. I think that's a really big factor or what I would call a forcing function to be able to walk the container on what happened in the previous year and do what I can to set myself up for success. Particularly as around the holidays, there's less inbound coming

in, things slow down and I like to go against traffic that I find that, hey, when everyone else is taking time off, that's the best time to do the deep work. And something that I've done the past couple of years is I then go and take the takeaways from my annual review and planning and share them online, which I'll get into later why the returns that I've seen from that. So that's essentially I'm blocking off about a week towards the end of the year solely for that process of capture and then turning that into a post.

What's your stance on New Year New Me? I think in terms of continuous small improvements. So, you know, nothing changes when January 1st comes along versus December 31st, but these cultural milestones arbitrary as they are, the, you know, your birthday, the end of the year, these can serve as very valuable checkpoints. So I try to treat it as a checkpoint. On paper, nothing has changed from one day to the next, but it can be very useful to have these recurring check-ins to say what's going on, what's next. And so I don't think that I want to try to change everything,

but it's a good opportunity to check, hey, a lot of things change in a year, especially this year, what's changed based on that what makes sense to move towards next. Good, why do we need to do an end-of-year review? What are the advantages? So why do we need to do an end-of-year review? What are the advantages? So many. So I would say the biggest pitch that I would give to someone who's considering doing this

is life is better. So we perform better, we feel happier, more fulfilled, whether that's in our work or in the people that we love, when we spend more time in the present. And the issue is today, we spend most of our time rehashing the past, things that we regret, things that we wish we could have done, beating ourselves up for past failures, or in the future, things that are upcoming, stressing out about upcoming deadlines or rehearsing conversations that we're about to have. And my just overall stance is if we can increase the proportion of time that we spend in the present by just a tiny bit, we will get more done,

we will be happier, more fulfilled, or just subjective experience of reality will be enhanced. And so if I set aside time to reflect and plan to do that thinking about the past and the future during a designated time, that means more of my time I will be able to be present. That'll be in that present moment. So that's like the overarching idea of why reflection and planning is important. Anywhere of use in particular I think about every year as a chapter in my story. And so in my 80 to 120 chapter story, this 2021 chapter for me, chapter 34, is a good opportunity to think as the writer of that story, what's happening next to the character,

what would I like to happen, what tension is likely to emerge? What opportunities are likely to present themselves? And if I can position myself and generate some awareness about what's coming up, I can be ready. I can be prepared for that. I can seize those opportunities. And so I see it as I can architect this next chapter of my story if I do some outlining of it ahead of time. Maybe this is a good time to talk about the four parts of what I think of a good annual review and planning process are.

Before we do that, okay. Where do most people go wrong when they try and do review? They haven't seen you, they haven't done your worksheet, and they're just, I'm gonna have a crack at this myself. What are the mistakes that people make? I think I think first I would say that any is better than none So that's the biggest mistake is I'm just gonna keep doing what I was doing and you know that's insanity doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. So my approach is any time and intentionality that you bring to this exercise is going to have a 10x return on your time and attention.

So first, just take it seriously. I think the cultural notion of a New Year's resolution, or as you said, the new me, is a good encapsulation of how a lot of people go wrong with this, is they expect January 1st to come along, and all of a sudden they're going to become superhuman. Going from someone, let's say hypothetically, someone who hasn't been exercising recently. Okay, everyone knows those first two weeks at the gym are the worst two weeks to go to the gym because all of a sudden everyone thinks they're going to be exercising for an hour a day. So someone tries to go from zero to 60 with nothing to sustain them except for willpower and the temporary motivation of this year is different. And we all know what happens to

those people after the first couple weeks of the year that can't sustain that sprint forever. And so I think that's the second thing to consider is rather than everything is going to change. And I'm gonna put this huge, unsustainable goal in front of myself, thinking about what is that next step that I can take to create some forward momentum. I don't need to change everything at once, but generally where am I heading? So in my health and my relationships and my career,

where is that next North Star? I'd like to direct my attention to. And just what is that next step on the path? I think that that consistency and that continuous improvement, that's what I call a feedback loop, right? It feeds on itself. Every improvement becomes plants the seeds for the next improvement. And so I think that's the second thing to highlight or a lot of people go wrong, is they set the bar so high for themselves, it's unrealistic, it's unsustainable.

And I think the final thing that I would mention here is this is the opportunity to change everything. So I think when I see a lot of people's results of their goals, it was, oh, I made $50,000 this year. Next year, I want to make $60,000, or I had 50 clients this year. Next year, I want to have 60 clients, or I can bench press 300 pounds. Now I want to bench press 350 pounds. And everyone thinks just I want to do exactly

what I'm doing, but a little bit more. And this is your opportunity to completely sell everything, start from scratch, start from zero and say, I can do anything I want. What do I want to do? I don't have to keep doing anything that I was doing before. I can completely change. And so everyone is like, oh, I'm going to take, is it this path all the way over here or is it this path all the way over here? And no, there's always a middle path that someone is in considering. And so this is your opportunity, say, don't try to do more. It's not what I'm doing now, but just more of it is what do you want? What would you like to be doing and giving yourself permission to think outside the box to think about things maybe that haven't been considered?

And so I said, it's nice to have this space for possibility because most of the year we want to be spending our time in the present focused, sprinting forward. And now is your time to just question everything. And that is so refreshing. Yeah, the opportunity to assess our fundamentals, as you say there, the explore before you exploit kind of paradigm is so rare. And everyone this year, even though probably the amount of stuff that we've

been able to do has gone down, the urgent has still beaten the important for the most part, tasks that are in front of you, the email that needs sorting, that load of washing that's got to be taken out before it gets musky, you know, all that sort of stuff. People often can spend their entire lives, and I'm realizing this now, I now, I could literally spend the rest of my life from 32 years old until the day I die, just dealing with urgent and never doing important. And I'd always feel busy, and it would give me the sensation

of being busy and being productive, but at the end, the actual amount of movement ground that I'd covered would be very little. Also, I was away in Dubai recently for about three and a half weeks and while I was out there I met millionaires, billionaires, founders, CEOs, endurance athletes, YouTubers, podcasters, Steven Bartlett, the CEO that founded social chain from diary of a CEO, like literally, guys that have such huge broad scope vision and it just blew my world view apart.

I thought that I had a good idea of the sort of progression that I was able to predict. Oh, well, I can do, you know, I grow the show by this and I start this business and, oh, I get a membership site and this and the other. And then I went and spoke to Steve over dinner and he said, I was talking about how's podcasting going. He got, oh, I've got Eddie Hearn, the boxing promoter coming on. Who you've got? Oh, I've got Eddie her and the boxing promoter coming. I said, Oh, cool. I've got Eddie her and coming on soon. That'll be sweet. This is not.

I'm thinking we're on the same path. He's just a little bit sort of further along with the bigger pair of shoes on than I am. And then I started talking about how he's monetizing. And he was like, Oh, yeah. Well, he'll approached me because the CEO loves my podcast. And originally, I think they me because the CEO loves my podcast. And originally, I think they might have just wanted to sponsor it. But then we turned the deal around and now I'm on the board. I'm going to take them to IPO.

I've been given equity in the business. I'm going to get them to IPO and then I'm going to exit. And I was like, okay, yeah, no, I'm playing checkers and you're playing chess. Like this is a total fundamental, different world view that we have over what is achievable. And I think what you're talking about there, that step back reconsider, what are the possibilities that I can do?

Like full, nothing, uncover what's underneath the rug, what's in that cupboard over there, that absolutely everything. So yeah, it resonates a lot with what I've learned, especially recently. So the framework, take us through the framework. Yeah, I like what you said there around this is an opportunity to expand your sense of the possible. And so if you're thinking about how do I increase my conversion rate to for my email signups? You're probably doing it

wrong. You can think a little bit bigger than that, give yourself some temporary permission. So I'm adapting my format a little bit this year. I will say the format that I've used the past few years is available online. I'm gonna post that in the show notes. So we'll put that link in there. This year, the way that I'm going about it, it's going to have four parts. And so the four parts are reflection, vision, planning, implementation.

And so I'm gonna do just a quick walkthrough of each of those parts. So first reflection, this is looking backwards at the previous year, and the classic two questions, what went well, what didn't go so well. Obviously, the follow-up to those, what can I take away from that? What did I learn?

So this is where I'm looking at each area of my life. So I think the three basic pillars that everyone has, career, health, relationships, and you can break those down for yourself depending upon, you know, need, desire motivation. So for example, for career, I'd be looking at forcing function, I'd be looking at poker, I'm doing some investing, so I'm looking at my investing. Maybe with health, if you play a sport, you want to break out diet or exercise or sleep.

Relationships, for me, I'm looking at my relationship with my partner, relationship with my family, relationship with my friends. So this is fractal. You can go down to any level. And so with reflection, I'm trying to pull up anything that happened, something that was something that I learned, something that was unexpected, something that changed along the year that I didn't expect from the beginning. All of these things are helping me to identify what's going on, what conditions work for me, what efforts that I did this year led me towards

my goals, just anything that I can use as fuel for this next year. Things that I can draw upon, whether that's celebrating wins, oh, that was awesome. I want to do more of that. Or, ooh, I thought I was going to do that, but I didn't even start. Or, oh, I tried that and it went horribly. Let's uncover everything that happened with that. And how can we avoid paying tuition for those same mistakes twice? Because if we really bring up those lessons, hey, that's incredibly efficient that we're not going to do it that way again again or that worked. Let's remember that next time when we're in that same spot

And so I said about 90 minutes a side 45 for things that went well 45 for the things that didn't go so well The second part good I just wanted there how are you Defining or how are you finding the things that you want to focus on? Is it like an objective metric? Like I had this much sex this year, I had this much revenue this year. You know, like people could drown themselves in just high accolades. Are there any ways that you try and pinpoint? Is it just anything that kind of arises into consciousness? The good shit sticks sort of.

Is it just anything that kind of arises in a consciousness? The good shit sticks sort of. Yeah, I think it's very possible to drown in details and to turn this into a accounting exercise. Retrospective diary. Yeah, so I mean, the first way is within the each area, I'm setting a timer and my goal is to just keep my pencil moving until the timer goes off. And so anything and everything, no editing myself,

I'm not trying to create some sort of narrative, I'm not patting myself on the back, anything that comes up. And so if I have numbers handy, that's awesome. I don't do any of this near computer, so if it requires me looking something up, I'll just make a guess, or I'll say, hey, how that felt. Or, hey, here's some wins that came from it.

It's super for me, it's super subjective. Early in the year, I have some objective metrics to grounded pawn. After I've done the brain dump, I might check some of my monthly reviews to see, hey, is there anything that I forgot about because a year is a long time? But yeah, essentially, whatever it comes to consciousness, trying to swim as deep in the water as I can.

What's the reason for doing it analog rather than digital? Because I'm a total let out and I think that computers are a gateway to distraction. That is a very good argument. Half-joking, half-serious. I think that our tools shape us in a number of ways. And for me, I like this process to be a little bit messy, and I'm really big on trying to unplug and get away from my current context. So this is probably a good time to note as far as logistical stuff.

Don't do this at your desk. Don't do this in the place that you spend a lot of your time. There are your context in a lot of ways shapes your thinking. And so I try to get as far from my desk as possible. If you're likely enough to live in the southern hemisphere, hey, like go put a blanket down on the beach or in the woods. If you're like us, you're stuck and it's super cold. And you have the ability.

I like to run an Airbnb for a couple days, you know, get a cabin in the woods and, you know, ideally there's no internet there or I unplug the internet and just try to get away from my normal way of thinking and doing things as possible. If it's not possible for you to leave your home, your apartment, pick a new space, create a special space like a new chair in a new area that you don't work, make it inspiring, make it a place that's reflective of the intentionality you're bringing to the exercise. But yeah, I think that's a really big part of getting the maximum out of this exercise is to get away from your normal way of being.

That pattern interrupts interesting, really interesting. I'm a big fan. We could go down this rabbit hole forever, but my newsletter that's going out this week is all about the pattern interrupt that I had while I was in Dubai. Okay, so we've got, what went well and what went badly from the last year? Family, relationships, career, and what was the final one? Health. Health.

Cool. What next? So we've generated all of this fuel, all these things that learn. So we're a little bit inspired and we're a little bit disgusted. And we're going to take that and we're going to convert it into this next step, which is vision. And at a high level, vision is what do we want? And what another overall question is what does next year look like? And so this is a visualization

in the present. We're not saying here's what I'm going to do. It's like, here's what next year looks like and trying to paint a picture of what we want. And so revisiting all of these areas, what do I want my health to be like? What do I want my career to look like? What's a typical day of work? What's a typical day with my partner? And creating a picture of that. And the end game of this is generating creative tension.

And so with the reflection, we have this picture of current reality. And now we have this vision of here's what reality could be. And so like a rubber band, there's this tension. And well, now I know where I am and now I know where I want to be. And it's very obvious the differences between these two pictures. And so one of two things needs to change, right? Nature of course of vacuum.

Either I need to bring this vision closer into reality, lower the bar for myself, maybe something that's a little bit more realistic based on what's going on now. And or I take my current, where I currently am and I push it into alignment with where I want things to be. And so I find this is a really valuable second part of this that's often skipped. And the past I would skip is, what do I want?

What are things going to look like? Because this is what allows me to determine what goals do I need to have in order to bring this vision into reality. That's cool, man. The differential, I think, Jordan Peterson's got his future authoring and past authoring and present authoring program. And he uses precisely the same thing that you create the tension between the two. So we've got a reflection. We've got vision. I've got the next one. What's the next one. So halfway home vision. I set aside 60 minutes. And again, this is lots of writing, no judgment, keep the pen moving, anything is possible type thinking.

And so I generally recommend, hey, that's a lot of brain work. We're talking only two and a half hours. So obviously, someone has the time, but you're going to feel pretty drained afterwards. And so this is where I recommend if you can end for the day and just like F off for the rest of the day. Go run around and play with flowers, go for ride your bike, hang out with your family, read some books,

just like do something that is completely non-work, completely unrelated, just recharge yourself. And it's like letting all of this sit. You want to sleep on it because things are going to come up in the interim. Now that you've opened these loops, you'll start to identify connections. And so this is a great place for a productive break

where you do anything that's not productive. OK, day two. And so this is, all right. Now I know what happened. Now I know what I want. What the hell am I going to do to make this happen? And so part three is planning. And so this is, this is part of the template, which I'm going to share with modern wisdom crew. You're looking at these areas that you identified in the reflection. And you're picking one goal, just one. Everyone wants to pick multiple.

One goal that you're going to shoot for in the next year, that North Star. And so the framing here is, if you could only achieve one thing in your health, if you only achieve one thing in your relationships, if you only achieved one thing in your career, what would that be? And really, really would that be?

And really, really defining that. So how will you know if you've achieved it? Why is it important to you? What would it look like if it was achieved? What is that unlock? You know, let's say that you've achieved enlightenment. What's next? What does that get you?

Right? Thinking about what do you want? If you can only pick one thing and say a lot of life is reconciling with these trade-offs. And so assume you can only get one thing and choose wisely. Don't assign yourself more than you can chew. Hey, worst case scenario, you achieve your big goal by month six. You have permission to pick a second one.

No big deal. So this is like each area of my life and so I break mine down a little bit thinking about what's my one goal in this area. And so once I've really, really defined that it's clear what it looks like. Someone else who's an objective third party observer say yes, Chris, you did that or no Chris you're kidding yourself. I'm going to start to break that goal down into milestones. And so hypothetically, if I wanted to achieve this goal right on December 31, 2021, I would break this down to okay, end of Q1, end of Q2, end of Q3, here's where I need to be in order to know if I'm on track towards this goal or off track towards this goal. And so

let's say, you know, just up top of my head, maybe my goal for next year is to be exercising for an hour every day. Well, I'm not gonna start this on day one. It might be, all right, end of Q1, I want to be exercising one day a week, every week without fail. And then Q2, I want to be exercising two times a week,

every week without fail, all right. I'm not missing a single one. Q3, I want to be exercising two times a week every week without fail. Right? Not missing a single one. Q3, all right, only exercising four times a week or every other day, whatever it is. And so building up slowly. And so by breaking down these milestones along the year, it allows me to course correct if I'm behind. All right, something's got to change here.

If I'm ahead, maybe I can raise the bar for myself a little bit. The, and then the final step just before that, your goal there that you've just chosen, I'm aware it's just a hypothetical, but you've chosen a process goal as the outcome goal. So what you want is to be able to get to a point where you are able to do a process, and that process is your goal. Is that something that you would tend to get people to focus on? Would you rather people focus on not saying, so for me next year with the podcast or sort of the channel overall, would it be more optimal for me to say I want to hit 500,000 subscribers on YouTube by December 31, 2021, or would you say I want to be publishing regularly one bespoke YouTube video per week by the first of December, 31 December 2021.

You know, in terms of guidance, I think typically before James Cleary came along, everybody thought in terms of outcome goals, but as we know, outcomes are lagging measures behind the lead measures, which are our habits and our behaviors on a daily basis. How do we fit all of that together? I know that like actual tacit goals, the 100k play button that you get for YouTube subscribers or whatever it is, is a nice motivator, and that kind of helps to get us moving, but also the daily challenges that makes the difference is the habits. How do we kind of marry those two? Excellent question.

And if you don't mind, I'm gonna use you as a guinea pig example. The short, short answer is both. And so the 500,000 subscribers, this is part of the vision. So having that outcome in mind, right? What do I want? And I think that you work backwards from there. But again, a lot of people let themselves off the hook on this. And so let's use that example. Is there right? Next year at the end of the year I want to have 500,000 subscribers. Why? Why is that important to you? What is that achieved for you? Okay, now you have 500,000

subscribers. I'm handing them to you on a silver platter. Will you take them? Like, will you take these subscribers from me? Now that you have these subscribers, what next? What do you do? What, you know, what is that change for you? What's different? This is all part of that vision as far as what you want. And so clarifying that, and you can say, sometimes it's, oh, well, I want, I'm just project on you. These are not things that Chris was told me before. Well, 500,000 subscribers allows me to get any guests that I want in the world to come on the show. Or 500,000 subscribers allows me to maximize that impact.

That's the magic number that I've identified that, hey, if I have this number of people, I know lots of people are going to hear me. I create some vi-rality whatever it is. Well, you're like, well, that's interesting. Well, let's say that that desired outcome is I want to be able to get any person on the planet to come on the modern wisdom show. So I will, is there anything else you could do that might be a little bit easier, a little bit more direct towards that goal. And so, like, once you have that vision, you can think about, are there any other paths to the top of the mountain. And that's the planning part is, all right, now that we have this vision,

this North Star in place, which path do I want to take? And this is very much the journey or the input part of, okay, well, I've decided that 500,000 subscribers is the goal. And now, well, if I record this many episodes per month, and I send those episodes to these 20 influencers after our episode, right? You break that down into actionable steps that it's obvious whether you did it or you didn't, and it brings it back into your own control. I think the whole notion of a smart goal is super overplayed but way underutilized. There's a lot of power

and just making things specific, actionable and measurable. And so that what that I always start with, what do I want? But then I bring that into what do I have control over? What can I do? What's something that I can track progress towards? So yeah, both end. I understand you can't I can't control whether or not we hit half a million subs. I can't control whether or not I can deadlift 280 kilos this time next year. But I can control whether or not I stick to my program and stick to my diet and continue to turn up in the gym and progressively overload and regularly check in and do my rehab and all the rest of it and over time

It's what are the things that I can do that give me the best chance of achieving the goal that I have set 100% you take a goal which is way out into the future and you turn it into something that you can feel is way out into the future and you turn it into something that you can feel satisfaction for making progress on a weekly or even a daily level. And that's critical for taking action is to reduce that delay, right? If it's just, hey, I want to look good in my wedding dress or my suit in nine months, that doesn't really get me

all that motivated to not have an ice cream today. But if it becomes, okay, well, nine months down the line, I've worked backwards, okay, at month one, that means I need to be exercising and at least tracking my macros at somewhat or maybe I have one list dessert per week. But something that in the present

is connected to these future goals, but gives me that satisfaction and reinforcement that I'm making progress. So the goal setting we're picking within the three areas that we've got, that's it. We're not breaking that down yet. Is that part of implementation? So we're breaking those down into milestones. Okay. So, you know, here's here's along the way.

Yeah. The the implementation part. This is the final. I think this is another part that a lot of people skip. All right. It's okay. Yes. I decided that next year is the year that I'm going to eat paleo. And all right.

I'm just it's just going to happen. It'm going to eat paleo. And all right, it's just going to happen. This could be like magic. Well, now is when we're the most motivated that we're ever going to be to become paleo. And so this is like we set time aside now to do something about it, to take some form of action. And so I set an hour aside at the end is each one of these goals I have to do something immediately

to put it into practice. And the power of this is that I take something from, I'm going to do this to, I'm doing it. So let's say my goal next year is to write a book. All right, well, I want to start writing the book the day that I decide that I'm going to write a book. Even if it is, okay, the title of my book is 2021, the best year ever, subtitle, this is going to be a great year. Just like doing anything that has that verb change to now,

it is underway because it's really powerful because the temptation with the goals is like pat ourselves on the back. Great, we've done it. We're going to go ahead and I don't think something like buying a gym membership and saying, great, now I'm in shape is the best thing, but you got to take that first step so you might as we'll do it now. So this is a part that I think is a skipped a lot with these, this planning exercise is like, great, you know what you're going to do. Do one tiny thing to take action towards it. So for each of the different areas that we've got, we're going to take action. The messiest one that I can see here is the relationships one. It's pretty difficult to objectively metric and quantify. Let's say that by the end of 2021,

I want to be in a long-term committed relationship. Mom, don't get excited. There's not wedding bells. I want to be in a committed relationship by the end of 2021. Let's say, like, you know, what's the step that I'd download Tinder today, you know, like make sure that the hinge profile has been updated. You understand that I think that the relationship's ones probably, I want to have a better relationship with my parents, brother, sister, housemates, whatever it might be. Have you got any ways that you can kind of cut through the noise of that? So let's use the first one.

That's the common one I hear is I want to be in a long term committed relationship. And as everyone knows, there's a lot of this that's in your control and a lot of it. That's out of your control and a lot of it. That's out of your control. Unfortunately, we can't make someone fall in love with us as much as pickup artists would like to have you believe.

That I think that becoming someone who your dream person wants to be in a relationship with is your best thing towards becoming someone who's in a long-term relationship, right? It starts with working on yourself. And so this is a very good opportunity, both in, so primarily in the vision section of who is this person? What qualities do they have? What do they value? How do we spend time together? All these types of things, having a clear picture of what you're looking for, and so when

Cupid hits you with your arrow, you can recognize this person, perhaps you know what you're looking for. But also, with the reflection, hey, how did things go with dating this year? Were you going on dates? Were you sending messages? How did those dates go? Were you chivalrous? Were you a dick? Were you kind? Were you going on dates with people who looked good on profiles, but obviously were incompatible? Look back to, hey, you've probably tried this before. What worked? What didn't work? Let's not make those same mistakes over and over again. And I think with the planning, personally with dating, you know, said a lot of, know a lot of people meet their significant others on dating sites. I don't think that's the most direct path. I think the most direct path is who are those key relationships, who know people who I would

like to date and perhaps they might want to set up some form of introduction. And so I'm thinking about who are those three people who might know someone, and I'm going to send them a message right now, and let's line a couple things up. And so things that you can quantify, being careful on some of these, if you over optimize towards number of dates, you're going to waste your time at a lot of poor dates.

But you know, it's like a good thing to check in on is what am I doing both to say generate some serendipity surface area, right? I'm meeting new people. I'm being open that, hey, every person that I meet who I'm somewhat attracted to, I'm gonna be in this frame of, is this a person that I'd like to spend more time with?

I like to say, you know, hang before you bang, like, this is a good, like, is this someone who I like spending time with? That's a good question to start with. And then, thinking about yourself, what can I be doing to become the type of person that this person would like to date? And I don't know, maybe this is just apocryphal, but my perception and my observation is,

if someone becomes someone who we like ourselves, right, We're confident because we're healthy, we're present when we're in a conversation with someone, we're working towards our vision, whether that's in our business or the service, our mission on the world, you're happy that becoming someone who's dateable miraculously finds someone to date. So yeah, I think that's kind of a two prong approach that I would take.

You're using an affiliate model to get new dates when you're dating. Most direct path that, hey, going on a dating site, there's lots of things, the problem is there's so much to unpack here. The problem is so much of our cognitive machinery is dedicated towards reassuring ourselves that we're doing a great job. It's like awesome Christopher, you know, and I said like my ultra ego, awesome Christopher, you sent 20 messages this week. You're doing great. And hey, you went on 10 dates with people who, you know, they love celebrity gossip and you've never watched television in your life. Awesome job. You're going to find the one

next day, right? And it's very easy to justify what we're already doing. And, you know, scrolling through Tinder is obviously super easy. It doesn't require a lot of effort. It's very passive, but it feels productive. Hey, we're doing something. And usually, the most direct path, the fastest way to achieve our goals, is really uncomfortable. Asking for help is really uncomfortable. But just think about context.

Is it more likely that you were going to find your person through like a random heap that the algorithm is serving you or through someone who knows you incredibly well and knows another person incredibly well and can make a very warm introduction that makes you look really good where the other person feels safe and open, which of those is more likely to be successful. Yes, it's going to be a little bit uncomfortable, but certainly you're going to have to go on fewer of those dates to get something going than the other way around. And so that's a good question to ask, is are you willing to be a little bit uncomfortable?

I love it, man. Internet market is out there just thinking in the heads about warm leads versus cold that's a good question to ask, is are you willing to be a little bit uncomfortable? I love it, man. Internet market is out there just thinking in the heads about warm leads versus cold leads right now. So what I've done is I'm kind of retargeting it's sort of on an affiliate model and there's the front end of the funnel has actually been, they've got a referral code and they've come through onto this different landing page. So okay, so that's the four steps. It's a good lens, it's a good lens to think about things, right? Hey, it's like something that works for you in another part of your life, right? I'm really good at marketing. How could I apply marketing to this other part of my life? It's like, it's crazy that I see someone who is just absolute outlier in one area of their life, completely has one

area of their life solved, and then in another area just completely wings it. It's like this thing that's working for you over here, have you tried that over here? It's surprising how often that works. Taking those mental models and applying them elsewhere, because as we've identified today, the principles are the same. You have large goal broken down into sub-tasks, broken down into smaller tasks, rolling down in daily actions,

and that slowly gets you to where you want to be. But yeah, the number of business people who are massively out of shape or the number of good athletes who've got shit relationships or the number of people that are happily married, but their career's going down the pan. Like, you know, these things don't happen by accident.

So we've got the framework. Is there anything else to say about the framework there? No, I think that's good. I think, you know, viewers will see the template. I think the questions lay it out. A lot of this is just asking yourself questions, attacking the problem from different angles and listening for answers.

And so the more questions you ask, the more angles you approach things from, the more likely you are to elevate something that you might have missed. And hey, I just taking it seriously, the process that I laid out, you know, for me, takes about five hours. You know, it's fractal if you have one hour, spend one hour. But the idea is here, hey, I dedicate one full day or two full days to this. Maybe I increase my chances of achieving this stuff by 100% next year. Because I avoid making a bunch of mistakes, or I get started in February instead of October.

It's worth investing the time now to figure this stuff out because, hey, this year, when the things kick off, I want to be sprinting. I don't want to be sitting in April having an existential crisis and being, what do I want to do with my life? Now is the time for that crisis. Let's get out of the way. Doing it again. Yeah, I mean, the time as well between Christmas and New Year is such a dead men zone in any case.

What's going on? There's nothing. You finish and after confectionery, celebrations, sharing box of sweets and kind of getting a little bit bored of being with your family and the dogs farted. And you know, like, you probably, but you also don't want to go back to work, right? And I think everyone, it might just be me, but everybody gets reflective towards

the back end of the year. We, these state posts in the ground, we think, okay, I was here probably in the same place. Mom and dad's house, boyfriend's house, girlfriend's house, whatever family house with the kids. I'm in the same place as I was this time last year. What's different? Perhaps the location's the same, but what else has changed? And I think yeah, it's a natural run-on It doesn't surprise me that there is such a thing as New Year's resolutions. It's kind of like If there wasn't a name for it people would come up with one How can people stay motivated? 80% of New Year's resolutions fail

What's the way that we don't just get to the February slump and everything drops off? The way to stay motivated is to not need motivation. If you need motivation to succeed, you're not going to succeed. I think motivation is very flady. If you personify motivation, it's very wispy, it's hard to pin down. And so my goal with this exercise is to eliminate the need for motivation throughout the year. Assume that there will be long periods. Yes, it happens for me all the time as well,

where I don't want to do anything towards my goals. And I'm super unmotivated. How can I set up conditions that I make motivation irrelevant, that I can't help but slip and fall and stumble into making some form of progress towards my goals. How can I make what I want to do easier? I said that's the really key part of that implementation at the end is what can I do now

to start moving, to already start making progress and to make progress throughout the year easier. And again, you notice that I'm eating my own dog food and we're like, oh my god, Christ just said, spend six hours looking at my life and you want me to do more. I wonder if you checked in at regular intervals, say every three months or every month, you know, if it's just asking yourself questions like you said, hey, I was sitting in the same chair and a month ago, what's different from the last month or what's changed, what's working these types of questions. If you keep asking yourself the same questions, you're going to want to give yourself different

answers. And so that's what I refer to as the improvement loop. And so you have the three parts. It's reflection, execution, and planning. And so the faster that you're going through this loop, the faster you will make progress. And so that's essentially what I recommend is, hey, this is the super 10,000-foot view, like really stepping back. But if you don't come back to these questions throughout the year, you're going to forget

about the answers. And so, hey, return to them. Come back to your responses. Read them over. Remind yourself of why you're doing what you're doing, because it's easy to forget. And just keep thinking about, hey, what can I do now to move myself forward a few inches towards this vision? It's really a marathon and not a sprint.

What's the cadence that you do that on personally? Do you do 90 days? My monthly review is the big one, where I spend a couple hours every month, usually on a Sunday with a nice pot of tea, just going through all the areas of my life and saying, hey, what's going on? This is where I usually pull in a little bit more data, and so I have things to draw upon. But essentially, this is just my check-in. I have a green yellow red system, so green, awesome.

Keep it up. You're doing great. Don't change a thing. Yellow. All right. At least you're not completely going backwards. You're making some progress, caution. You probably could be doing better. Think about maybe ways to accelerate. Red, get your ish together. You haven't done anything. Assume that if you don't change anything,

nothing's going to change. I think that zooming in on those reds, I don't want to put red down two months in a row. What can I do to change that? Quarterly level is a little bit more. It's like, hey, do I want to change those goals at all? Like, maybe that annual goal I achieved it in quarter one, or I needed a new goal,

or maybe this annual goal of writing a book. Wow, I've experienced this before, writing a book in a year is pretty impossible. Maybe the end of the year is like, all right, have a rough draft of the book. It's a good opportunity to scale up or back those goals. possible, maybe the end of the year is like, all right, have a rough draft of the book. That's like a good, it's a good opportunity to scale up or back those goals. Got you.

So the monthly is a check-in on cemented goals and the quarterly is allowing for the optionality to sort of switch those up while still optimizing for us to stay on one path. I like that. There's a few sort of other questions that have been good prompts for me, asking myself, what would have happened by the end of this year for me to look back on this year and consider it a success? Helps, I think, to frame. That might even be one of yours.

I made like a, this time last year, I made the ultimate collaboration of all of your stuff on the internet. It was like your existing experiment without limits book that I'd got a hold of, plus then like whatever the original first draft of that that's still floating around on medium was and then something else. And it was like some prompts that I loved that had gone and some other ones that were still there. So yeah, I sort of found myself being very playful with that. Other stuff that I think would be useful for everyone to remember is that the James Cleary's, I would imagine most people fail at their years resolutions by trying to do too much too soon because we just desire that dopamine

hit of, so I've managed to achieve 25% of the movement toward my one rep max deadlift that I wanted to get by the end of the year within the first two weeks. Like, yeah, maybe you're going to fuck you shit up by the end of the month. And then you're injured and then you're gonna do nothing for the next six months after that. If we set ourselves an appropriate goal, which I guess comes back to the explore before you exploit paradigm, you will be able to make progress

and you're a big fan of direction over speed as well, that as long as you are moving in perfectly the right direction, no matter how slow you're going, you are always getting closer and closer toward the end state that you want to be in. And also the Bill Gates, quote, I think it's most people overestimate what they can achieve in one year and underestimate what they can achieve in five. It just shows that we tend to have a big blind spot for how effective compounding can be, which is probably not not all that surprising. But yeah, those are some really good prompts, man. I'm looking forward to. Can I add a, oh yeah, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, in efficiency rather than direction. So thinking about this logically,

the best way to waste time, imagine yourself sprinting as fast as you can faster than you've ever run in your life, but you're going in the opposite direction. So the better that you do, the farther you can get away from where you want to go. And what a great way to just waste your time and sorry for being dramatic, but your life to sprin as fast as you can towards things that you don't actually want.

So isn't it worth taking a few minutes to think about, hey, where are you going? Maybe, you know, maybe a map will help you get there. But I do think a danger that I do see with achiever types with this, oh, I need to know exactly where I'm going. I need to figure out exactly what my business looks like before I quit my job. Or I need to know exactly what my habits are before I start doing them is rather like have a general idea. Think about all your goals as a rough draft that are written in pencil that you can erase and change any time.

It's not the vision. It's the power of the vision. It's not what your vision is. It's what your vision does. It gives you something to head towards. I think that skill is to course correct continually. Is you're heading in the right general direction. And you're always aware of opportunities

either to go more directly to where you want to go. Or, oh, I need to be going northeast, and I'm actually going northwest. All right, I'm going to start to tilt myself a little bit in this direction. So I just want to make that clear up, is you don't need to have a perfect vision in order to start moving forward. Bro, I didn't do my 2019 Nier's resolutions, so like two years ago. I didn't do those until I'd finally finished Atomic Habits, which ended up being halfway

through February. I was like, no, no, no, no, because... It was still incredibly useful, right? It was super, it was super useful, but I'd been too focused on having my direction compass perfectly aligned. I was like, now, I'm gonna wait because maybe I could optimize for a little bit more of this,

and I'm like, hang on, like 10% of the year's gone. 10% of the year's gone by the time that I've actually done this. I could have done some of it and then updated as I went. Yeah, man, it's an interesting time for this sort of stuff and I hope that it's really prompted people. I also like, I'm gonna guess the reason that you've put a time limit on this is to stop people from wallowing and obsessing too much

within that. It's like, oh shit, I've got to Parkinson's law this here. I only have 90 minutes to do this particular section. I write that'll do. That's close enough. I'm working hard. Yeah, it serves two purposes. And so people see this repressed nation all the time is, you know, you can't get yourself

to get started. It's at a time of her five minutes and work until that five minutes is up, at least you're doing something. And so first, like you set that timer, say, okay, I'm going to think about my goals in this area for the next 15 minutes until the timer goes off. A lot of people are like, okay, great, 30 seconds in, I know what I'm doing for the next year. I'm not going to spend another 10 minutes thinking about what I'm going to do all of next year. No, that's not something I need to do right now. It forces someone to go a little bit deeper. The first answer is usually not the right answer. Let's think about other ways to approach it. Let's be let's think it looks like widen our vision a little bit. So it forces someone

to actually use all that time, keep the pen moving. But also, it's very easy to rabbit hole on this type of stuff and to go beyond the point of diminishing marginal returns. And so you set a time, or you set a limit, is like, all right, I only have this amount of time to figure it out. Secretly, you could change it later if you really want to. But you need some sort of answer in order

to close that container and move on. So I think it works on both sides. I like it. Any final thoughts about end of year review planning for the next year or anything that you need to add in? I always like to say with things like this, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If this is your first time doing something like this, anything that you're going to do is going to be valuable. It doesn't need to be a perfect process. You don't need to spend a ton of time, but to just take it seriously and see what comes out of it. You're going to be living not kind of wood, multiple years, you'll have multiple shots at this

to improve. So do what you can, take the time to look backwards and think about what you want to look for, do something to put that into motion, and hey, it can be messy, but just take it seriously and do it. And I also say, hey, I have the brilliant idea, you know how much I love forcing functions given the name of my company.

I bet between the two of us, it would be a really valuable forcing function as well as pretty illustrative for some viewers. If after we go through this process, maybe we hop on. For those of you guys who are listening, I have one of these conversation series as well, inspired by Chris, where I have guests on and we do conversations like this. I say we hop on one shower and we talk about what came out of this annual review and planning. So we'll get some public accountability, but we'll kind of allow us to maybe, you know, demystify some of this, open up the curtain and say, Hey, what this actually looks like behind the scenes.

You make me make me put my money where my mouth is, no, aren't you? It's it's it's it works. Perfect, man. What's the URL? People want to go and check out this worksheet that they can move through everything. What's the URL that they need to go to? Sure. Yeah. A few places that I would point people to. So my company where we work with executives, investors, founders is forcing function.

Lots of great resources there. A couple of places that I'd point you to. The annual review template, which I discussed with Chris today, you can find that at forcingfunction.com slash modern wisdom. We're going to put that up there as free to download for anyone who's listening to this episode. A couple of other places you might want to check out. Forcingfunction.com slash workbook.

The workbook that Chris mentioned earlier, it's my distillation 100 pages of all the best things that I have seen to set yourself up for success. In particular, chapter one goals, what are the prompts that you need to do to discover what you want out of life, what you want to achieve? Those are the ones that I've found to work the best. That's also free to download. A couple of the things that I'm really excited about. This is the first time I mentioned it publicly. We're about to release the Forcing Function Library.

So my favorite studies, books, articles, resources on productivity categorized by topic. So there's a special section for planning and reviews. And you can see all the places where the things that I talk about originated. My favorite things that I've found wandering around the internet for some of these topics. So that's Forcing Function Library, ForcingFunction.com slash library. We have our performance assessment. Hey, maybe you want some guidance on what is the best place for you to get started in the new year.

All these things I could improve would help me the most. This is our free quiz to help illuminate your biggest opportunity in the new year. That's forcing function.com slash assessment. And finally, last one I promise. We started a program this year, which I was incredibly excited about where, you know, for the past few years, I've only been working one on one with about a dozen executives per year. And so, unfortunately, my impact was limited.

And for the first time, we started a group coaching program called Team Performance Training. We ran the first cohort in September. It was a great success. You could see some of the results that people had on the page really blew me away. Based on that, we're excited to announce the roomy running it again in February. We're opening up applications for that in January. You can check that out on our website as well. If you want to get notified when those applications are open, that's forcing function.com slash team training. That's all for me. I always like to think of these conversations

as the beginning of a conversation. Chris, as he said, it's been a year. Now I've forced you. We're going to have to do this again in a month. You're going to have to see me again. If any of you guys had questions, something that I said today resonated, something that we said that you completely disagree with, please let us know.

You can get a hold of me on Twitter as well. My handle is at sparks for marks. Dude, so good. I have to give another credit to the experiment without limits, which is slash workbook right on your website. That thing is a magnum opus of productivity. Like I've said it to people before, it should be a thousand pounds.

Like the fact that you give that away for free is the most ridiculous thing. And then I remember as well, it was you that introduced me to meditations on Mollock by Scott Alexander from Slate Star Codex. So I went through your, my favorite articles from around the internet, which I'm going to guess, we'll get ported across into this new library thing. And holy shit, man, if you didn't infect

me with the Scott Alexander book when I read that thing, I was like, what on earth is what? It was, it was crazy. So yeah, you're an underground hero of this stuff, man. I know that everyone else who's part of this space, absolutely adores the work you do in Long-Mate continue. Thank you for coming on. I'm sure that everyone's taken just so much away from this. If you do end up doing your end of your review and it follows this format, just feel free to tag us wherever you follow us. That's it, man.

I guess we're going to have to loop back in early January now and talk about all the ridiculous plans and my innermost fears and dreams for the next year. I can't wait! Peace! Cheers dude! you