World Poker Champion On The Science Of Decision Making - Chris Sparks

Chris Sparks 0:00 There is so much to be learned from poker and games in general. So I've tried to transmute poker into my mission of understanding the games that we're naturally participating in, and I think that game theory and the systems thinking that's so necessary to success has so many wider applications. You think about decision-making, you think about human performance, you being the person who can show up and perform every day. Thinking about understanding yourself, understanding your own psychology. I realized through working with other high performers in business and investing that so many of the things that I had to develop in myself instrumentally to, to become one of the best poker players translated to a number of fields as well. So I think of poker as almost my sandbox or my lens for understanding how can we achieve the ambitious things we set out to achieve? How can we, you know, find a life of freedom and purpose? It's always been my avenue of understanding.

Ali Abdaal 1:02 Hey, friends, and welcome back to Deep Dive, the weekly podcast where every week I have the immense privilege to sit down with authors, entrepreneurs, creators, and other inspiring people, and we find out how they got to where they are, and the strategies and tools that we can learn from them to apply to our own lives. Now, this week, it's very exciting because I'm speaking to a chap called Chris Sparks for the first time in real life. Now, Chris is a professional poker player turned executive coach, and he actually worked with me as my own q- performance coach for a period of 90 days during one of the early lockdowns. And so Chris taught me a lot about how to maximize my own performance while it also being sustainable and working towards the goals that I personally care about, and how to set those goals that I care about in the first place. And so it was super nice meeting him in real life and having this conversation. We talked about a load of stuff. We talked a lot about what it's like being a professional poker player, and crucially, what we can learn from the world of a professional poker player around decision-making and decision-making under uncertainty and how to deal with that kind of stuff. We also talked a lot about the frameworks that Chris uses with his clients, which are g- generally tend to be high-flying executives and investors and stuff, uh, and me, [laughs] about, like, how to actually make sure you're working on the things that you wanna work on, how to set goals intentionally, and how to be more productive in working towards them. So I hope you enjoy this conversation with Chris Sparks as much

Ali Abdaal 2:17 as I did. If someone's listening to this, and let's say they're in their 20s and they don't really like their job, and they're thinking, "Ooh, playing, playing professional poker sounds like it could be a fun way of making a living," what does that look like? Like, if I wanted to start playing professional poker, like, what would be the steps I would have to go through to become sufficiently pro to get good at poker? And what's the whole deal with is it, like, a game of chance versus luck versus skill? Like, what... Yeah, I'm just gonna throw, th- th- throw that open to you. [laughs]

Chris Sparks 2:44 Ali, it's an honor to be here.

Ali Abdaal 2:46 [laughs]

Chris Sparks 2:46 Uh, giving, uh, credence to the title Deep Dive. We are diving in deep right away. I love that. So yeah, what makes a professional poker player is you have just decided to make this your main thing, right? So there are lots of professionals in things who aren't necessarily making a living from it, and people who are doing very well who wouldn't consider themselves professionals. And I was once a slightly younger than 21. I started when I play- started playing when I was 16, so been going at it almost two decades. Slightly younger than 21-year-old thinking, "Hey, is this something that I should do for a living?" And what really pushed me over was I had a moment. I wanted to make television commercials for a living. I was gonna be working for Ford Motor Company. I had done all the internships in school, all the student organizations, moved up to Detroit, all the networking, and what do you know? The economy falls out. So this, uh, thing that I've been doing instead of sleep, instead of occasionally going to class, what if I did this as a full-time gig? And what if I really dedicated myself to it? So I think that's a starting point when you wanna, you wanna ask yourself, "Hey, is this something that I wanna do?" Is are you willing to dedicate yourself to it? There was a point in time where all my friends were poker friends, all my dreams were poker dreams. It's definitely not something that you can just half-ass it-

Ali Abdaal 4:13 Mm

Chris Sparks 4:13 ... so to say.

Ali Abdaal 4:14 So I couldn't just do it as a side hustle while working full time as a marketing exec or something like that?

Chris Sparks 4:18 No, I, I think that things are very competitive these days, and poker is no exception. I mean, there are literally millions of people who've said, "Hey, maybe I'll have a go at this poker," and I would say that there's probably less than 1,000 who've really, really made it. The odds are very much against because you need to be playing at a certain level in order to make a living. And with the amount of money that's at stake, people are incentivized to work very hard. And like many things, technology has really evolved the game, whereas when I started, uh, eons ago, it was pretty much a trial and error to get better. You played a lot of hands. If you won the hand, you did a little bit more of that. If you lost the hand, you say, "Okay, maybe I'm gonna do that a little bit less." As the game has evolved, it's much more about modeling and running simulations. So you see the top players spending on average about eight hours a day running simulations of different hands even before they sit down to play. The idea that the computer as an aid to determine what is the, we call the game theory optimal approach of playing. And the challenge that anyone has coming into it fresh is that the people you will be competing against probably have thousands of hours on you, perhaps tens of thousands of hours of study on you. So not only do you need to catch up, but you need to be working harder in order to try to pass them up because they are gonna continue to grow and to improve. A good rule of thumb is that the average player is about twice as good on an annual basis. So you can see there, there's a sense of this Red Queen effect. You have to be moving very quickly to stay at the top. Um, and just like any-

Ali Abdaal 5:59 Sorry, what's, what's the Red

Ali Abdaal 6:00 Queen effect?

Chris Sparks 6:01 Sure. So this comes from the writer Lewis Carroll. So, you know, Alice in Wonderland. The idea is, like, your- things are moving so quickly that you have to run really quickly just to maintain your place.

Ali Abdaal 6:13 Yeah. Okay.

Chris Sparks 6:14 All right? So this is, like, when competitive and everyone's getting better, you have to be improving just to not fall behind.

Ali Abdaal 6:20 Okay.

Chris Sparks 6:20 That- it's ... Poker's a very much a Red Queen pursuit in that way. So you can see I'm sort of cautioning the 21-year-old, know what you're in for. And you hear this narrative a lot with startup founders or someone who goes out there and raised an investment fund is, if I knew how hard it was going to be, I might not have ever do- done it. I wonder if you feel the same way about YouTube-ing. Knowing how much work goes into reaching the top, perhaps you wouldn't have started. So there's certainly a level of naivete that's necessary to get going. But I always ask, like, are you willing to put in the work necessary to see if you have what it takes?

Ali Abdaal 7:00 Mm.

Chris Sparks 7:00 With something like poker, I would want to commit to six months to a year before you're going to see even, like, a semblance of a profit. Like, there, there's this sense of you're paying tuition, not in a traditional education sense, but by losing money. You will be losing money at first, and it's impossible to play without having real money at stake.

Ali Abdaal 7:24 Why?

Chris Sparks 7:24 All of our decision making changes when there's something at stake.

Ali Abdaal 7:28 Okay.

Chris Sparks 7:28 Imagine that we were just playing for, I don't know, I'm dating myself here, like Pogs or, like, Pokemon cards, something like that that we don't place all that much value for. We would just be going all in all the time. There's not really all that incentive to, all much incentive to play smartly to make good decisions. But all of a sudden you're putting the equivalent of a car in the middle or let's say even just a very nice bicycle. Well, all of a sudden, people's decision-making processes start to change. That's the thing is, like, poker is a game played with cards, but it's played in the mind, right? It's played with people and how decision making starts to warp once there are real stakes at play. So you don't really know how you are going to perform until you're under that type of pressure of having some real stakes.

Ali Abdaal 8:16 Yeah. Okay.

Ali Abdaal 8:18 So six to twelve months of study. Um, my understanding based on, like, watching films like 21 and stuff is that, uh, and, and watching the trailer for Daniel something's masterclass in poker-

Chris Sparks 8:29 Daniel Negreanu, yeah

Ali Abdaal 8:30 ... that's the one, uh, of like, oh, crap, like you have to be able to do a lot of calculations in your head and run probabilities. But I guess that gives you the, a kind of optimal game theory response to a given situation. Presumably it's not that hard to learn, right? Because there's only a finite number of possibilities. Or have I just got that completely wrong? Like where, what's the skill? Like where, where does the skill come in beyond learning the basic probabilities of a four of a kind versus a full house, et cetera?

Chris Sparks 8:54 It's a great question. I think of the math side as table stakes, as you need to at least be able to estimate the odds in order to have a chance. But there's no advantage there. I think the advantage is all psychological.

Ali Abdaal 9:10 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sparks 9:11 So understanding other players and most importantly, understanding yourself. There's a real aspect of decision making under pressure here, and it's very hard to talk about at an abstract level if you haven't experienced it personally. And why the game is so interesting is because people are a black box. Poker is a game of imperfect information, right? This isn't chess where you can just have the perfect move, you can just plug it into your computer and it'll tell you what to do when you memorize it. You're trying to predict what other people have based off of their behavior. So there's an element of deception and certainly an element of self-deception that's occurring. So a lot of the mastery-

Ali Abdaal 9:51 Sorry. Self, self-deception? Why?

Chris Sparks 9:52 Self-deception in both, hey, I am telling a story with the actions that I'm taking, my, my betting patterns that I have this type of hand. But really I'm playing my hand not as, uh, my hand actually is, but as all the hands that I could have, as a set of possibilities or as a set of hands that I want you to think I have.

Ali Abdaal 10:14 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sparks 10:15 That's why I say the game is played in your minds, is that, like, the cards are really only an interface-

Ali Abdaal 10:20 Yeah

Chris Sparks 10:20 ... for what's going on. And-

Ali Abdaal 10:22 So it's kind of like those lying games where y- if you, if you know you're the mafia, uh, but you're acting as if you real- you really wanna believe that you're not, 'cause then you will act as if you're a good guy [laughs] rather than a bad guy. And you're kind of convincing people to think that you are a good guy even though you actually know you have a bad guy card.

Chris Sparks 10:38 Yeah. I don't think that people are very good actors. Instead of trying to pretend, "Hey, I have a really big hand, you guys should fold," I think it's easier to fool yourself into, "I have a good hand, so I'm just going to act as if I have a good hand," right? I'm not acting, I'm just doing what I would normally do. But I've sort of overwrot- wrote that part in my brain that says I have this hand or that hand. Uh-

Ali Abdaal 10:57 Sorry, I, I interrupted you when you were, when you were saying the mastery of.

Chris Sparks 11:00 Yeah. There's, there's a sense of no situation repeats. Like, you can have, you have limited combinations of cards, but because all the variables change all the time, you're continually adapting to changing situations. And that's why experience is so valuable because you start to be able to identify the patterns within the noise and see the situation. Where a lot of beginning players struggle is that they don't understand the absolute strength of a hand versus the relative strength of a hand. Without getting too technical, sometimes a good hand isn't all that good, and sometimes a good hand is amazing. And a lot of that just comes down to experience and repetition and iteration of understanding the situation that's occurring. And it's something that you can't really read in a book. You have to start to calibrate your intuition in this way.

Ali Abdaal 11:54 And so just the maths is like [laughs] everyone knows the maths. That's not the hard part. The hard part is actually being able to play the mind game to deceive yourself and then als- also to deceive other people. And the people that are good at this are, have had- 20,000 hours more preparation on this than I have, and therefore, if I try to play poker with them, with my, even with the basic knowledge of the maths, there's almost no way I'd be able to actually beat them consistently over the long term.

Chris Sparks 12:18 The challenge is that people are constantly adapting, right? Sy- systems terms would say that poker's a complex adaptive system, that as soon as you figure someone out, they change, right? It's just that they're, people aren't static. So that's where you see r- expert players are, they're able to adapt faster. They- they're sort of setting a trap. You think they're playing in a certain way, but they've already preset a counter to that. And that, and that's why I say, like, the game is continually evolving, is in order to sustain your place at the top, you need to not only be evolving on a session level, on a game level, but as a player so that people can't get a real sense for what your tendencies are, because you have no tendencies.

Ali Abdaal 12:59 Hmm. Nice. Okay, another sort of basic question. What's, what's the deal with online poker

Ali Abdaal 13:04 versus real life poker these days? If I were thinking of getting into poker, can I just get really good at playing online poker and make loads of money that way? How, how does that work?

Chris Sparks 13:12 It really depends on skill set. I, I think that online poker is more statistically based, whereas live poker is much more of a social game. So everything goes in cycles, and we see cycles that online poker becomes much more popular. 2020 and 2021, online poker was much more popular for obvious reasons, so everyone kinda gravitated back towards things that you could do inside on your computer. And I'm primarily known as an online poker player, and a lot of my skill came from deep statistical analysis of myself and other players to reveal correct strategies in a vari- a variety of situations. But the primary advantage of playing online is that you can play multiple games at a time. So I, I've played a maximum of 30 games at a time. Um, my, my average is around 12. What this means is that I'm getting a new hand every two seconds on average, so I'm making decisions every two seconds for hours at a time. And there's this concept that I like, that improvement speed is proportional to the tightness of your feedback loops, which is a fancy way of saying that the more decisions that you're making and the more that you're iterating on decisions you're making based off of feedback you get, this worked, this didn't work, the faster you improve as a player. So because I was playing so many games and being very systematic about the way that I improved, I improved very, very quickly. And think about it just in pure math terms. If I'm playing 12 games, I'm getting about 600 hands per hour. In a typical live game at a home or a casino, you're getting about 20 to 25 hands per hour. So this means that playing online, I'm seeing 25 to 30 times as many hands. So that means I can win 25 to 30 times as much playing the same stakes, or I can play smaller stakes and have lower variance. Those are, these are different factors at play. But online, over time, because of these tools available that I shared before, has gotten increasingly competitive over time. And because it's a global player pool, you're competing against the best players in the world. So m- in my view, on average, online has gotten much, much more difficult over, over time. Now, what we've seen post-pandemic, everyone going outside and going out, is that live poker in person is having another, another renaissance, particularly tournament poker. My specialty is cash game poker. You know, tournament poker, you have one buy-in. You're trying to compete over a prize pool, which is very top-heavy. Majority of the prize pool will go to the top few finishers. In a cash game, you're putting, you know, actual chips or bricks of cash in the middle.

Ali Abdaal 15:42 Hmm.

Chris Sparks 15:42 So you're betting what you actually have in front of you.

Ali Abdaal 15:43 Which I imagine changes the psychology of how people take risks and stuff.

Chris Sparks 15:47 Absolutely. And because tournament poker, uh, like I say, is a power law of distribution, so it's very top-heavy, it really rewards risk-taking, whereas cash game poker is more of a, think of it as like a cash flow business. It's a little bit more consistent. You're trying to, you know, maintain discipline, not get too out of line, that sort of thing. And it's, it's more you're, you're... I play with the same 50 players every day. So it's much more of a long-term, you know, it's an iterated game in game theory terms. So I'm not only thinking about what's the right move to do now, but how does this move set up my opponents, you know, weeks from now? Th- th- 'cause, 'cause I'm playing with them every day. I have many, many opportunities to capitalize on something that I've set them up on. It's, it's a very different approach.

Ali Abdaal 16:32 Well, so it's more like, hey, if I fold right now, then they'll think that I'm the sort of person who folds under these conditions, which means four weeks from now they'll use that data point to make a decision which is actually gonna be bad for them. [laughs]

Chris Sparks 16:43 Exactly. And, and-

Ali Abdaal 16:44 Okay, fine. [laughs]

Chris Sparks 16:45 And this is, you know, one of the other many definitions of a professional player, is that everything has, you know, what we call second-order effects.

Ali Abdaal 16:52 Yeah.

Chris Sparks 16:53 So you're, you're already thinking about what it... Of these options that I have now, what's the next layer on the game tree? What is going to be my opponent's reaction when I show this hand? What action do I wanna take that sets them up for what I want to do later? If you find your opponent has a weakness, say they play a particular, particular type of hand really poorly, you wanna make that situation happen as much as often so you can take maximum advantage of them.

Ali Abdaal 17:17 Mm.

Chris Sparks 17:17 That type of thing. There's, there's all these really interesting layers. Just to close out this thought on live poker, which just has resurged as everyone's playing in person again, there's been this really big boom of stream games. So, kind of a hybrid of online and live where you play poker in person in a studio setting and people tune in and watch on YouTube. As some people watching might be familiar with this, that, you know, gaming on stream has become really big and we have this resurgence of poker celebrities, people who have a character, they play someone on the stream, and people tune in to see what this person's going to do next while they play poker. So live poker is much, much more about social dynamics, being someone who understands the room, who understands what people are doing energetically, knows how to pick up when someone's mood has shifted or knows, hey, this person just got in an argument with their significant other, or they look under slept, or maybe they're not quite as focused today. There's... Because, like, for example, one of these stream games, you're playing five hours, so you have 100 hands, and that very, very small sample size to make the most of it. So you have to, you have to be much, much more attuned to each individual hand and trying to extract out maximum value. That's the main difference between live and online is online, I can just play my strategy. I'm seeing, seen 2 million hands in my lifetime. I'm playing for the very long term. In live poker, like, every hand really matters-

Ali Abdaal 18:43 Yeah

Chris Sparks 18:43 ... 'cause you don't get many more of them. So there's a lot more signal-

Ali Abdaal 18:47 Yeah

Chris Sparks 18:47 ... to drag, to draw from.

Ali Abdaal 18:48 Nice. So- [laughs]

Chris Sparks 18:50 I go so many layers deep, as many as you want.

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Ali Abdaal 20:16 this episode. One of the things that I like to think about when someone has an interesting career or a side hustle or something is to ask, for a complete beginner, how hard would it be to make a couple hundred dollars a month versus a couple thousand dollars a month versus a couple of tens of thousands, tens of thousands of dollars a month? And I can, I can, like I c- I can kinda think of what that looks like from a YouTube channel perspective. Uh, okay, cool. Let's say, take average CPMs and RPMs, let's reverse engineer this. Actually, as a YouTuber, if you're consistent and post two, two videos a week for two years, chances are, and you find the right niche, you probably make at least a few hundred dollars a month, maybe even a few thousand. And then if you really make it big, then you're getting in the tens and hundreds of thousands, which is fairly small numbers. But a lot of people might be like, "Hey, if I could do two videos a week and make a f- an extra few hundred dollars a month, that would be great." Like, that's an extra five shift, shifts as working, working as a doctor, for example, in return for making videos. And so the equation that, that, that equation in terms of monetization on YouTube means that there are a lot of people going into it thinking, "Oh, it's a thing I could do as a side hustle. I could be a part-time YouTuber. I might as well do this." What does that look like in the world of poker or online poker, like, but like-

Chris Sparks 21:22 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 21:22 ... if I wanted to make pocket money versus real money versus life-changing money? [laughs]

Chris Sparks 21:27 I talk about this in a post I did called Play to Win. I think the niche argument or the niche framing is really apt here, is if you find a good game, you can make unlimited money, right? It's not a fac- skill is not the predominating factor. It's choosing the right place to compete, right? So for example, if you're making videos on, oh, this is just like completely off the top of my head, like polar bears in Alaska.

Ali Abdaal 21:56 Yeah.

Chris Sparks 21:56 Uh, this is totally off the top of my head. That's pret- that's a pretty small niche, and if you can find, hey, this is really valuable to a small but reliable set of people, you can make a really good living there. The same sort of thing, if you are in Alaska and you stumble upon, you know, a small town, but it happens to be a few people who've done very well in the polar bear trade and like to play poker, you don't have to be very good if you're better than these players, right?

Ali Abdaal 22:22 Yeah.

Chris Sparks 22:23 And so that, that's the real difference about poker is that it's relativistic skill, and I think a lot of success in life comes down to playing in the right game, playing in the place that you have some sort of advantage. And even if that advantage is you just enjoy doing this more, you have more fun at it, thus you're, you're, have an easier time dedicating yourself to it, putting yourself into it. And that's the thing about poker is the, the earnings are pretty unlimited if you can find a good game. So that, that's really the critical skill is, like, finding this, this, like, product market fit. So if you wanna earn a little bit, you're probably playing lower stakes. If you want to, if you want to earn a lot, you're playing high stakes. And obviously, the higher that you go, generally, the player gets better.

Ali Abdaal 23:16 Yeah.

Chris Sparks 23:16 Right? The larger incentive you have to get good, the more com- competitive it is. It tends to look like a pyramid, is that there's very, very few people at the top. But poker is weird because you also have people who love to play poker, who are extremely successful in other areas of their lives, right? Maybe they sold their company. Maybe they have, you know, millions of followers on YouTube. Maybe they have an... Maybe they're a big hedge fund guy, and they love competing against the best. They really love that sense of, like, "I'm learning the most. I'm having the most fun." And so these guys love to play for big stakes, sometimes uncomfortably big stakes, but they're not very good.

Ali Abdaal 23:55 Yeah. Okay. [laughs]

Chris Sparks 23:55 So there's this conception that it, the higher you go, the harder that it is to play, and that's not always true. Some of the other players might be exceptionally good, but there's gonna be other players who are not as good.

Ali Abdaal 24:06 Mm.

Chris Sparks 24:06 But the higher the up that you get, the key thing is, like, can you get into the game? It's like, what do you bring to the table? It's like at the lower stakes, you can always find a game, but beyond a certain point, it's very difficult to get in because it's like musical chairs, right? There's just not enough chairs for everyone.

Ali Abdaal 24:23 Yeah. So okay. So, so, so it sounds like if, for example, I am a, uh, I'm, let's say, a consultant surgeon at my local hospital, and I know that there is a group of surgeons who likes to get together and play poker, and they all have private practices, and they all make several, several hundred thousand pounds a year, and I know that they just throw a few thousand pounds into this sort of poker game, which is pretty high stakes as far as things are concerned for me. I might be thinking, "Hang on, if I can get into those games, if I can, like, be likable enough and, oh, talk to this person in the break room in, in the operating theater and be like, 'Oh, you play poker? I play poker, too,'" I just have to be a little bit better than them. And if they're, you know, consultant surgeons with private practices and full-time jobs and families, and I'm not, [laughs] I can put in just way more time and effort to get better than them. But because I have access to that game, I can now potentially even make a decent chunk of money wh- where- whereas if someone with the same skill trying to play online will just get completely demolished. Is that fair to say?

Chris Sparks 25:20 That's exactly right.

Ali Abdaal 25:21 Yeah.

Chris Sparks 25:21 People have gone into med school for less.

Ali Abdaal 25:22 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 25:24 Uh, what does it take to get invited to these big, big games?

Chris Sparks 25:26 I think it's just like getting invited to any party or having a good friend circle. It's being someone who's likable and adds value. So all I can control is, you know, the presence that I bring.

Ali Abdaal 25:39 Yeah.

Chris Sparks 25:39 So trying to be someone who's positive energy, who, you know, tells good stories, laughs at the right jokes, you know, shows up on time, pays out when I lose. Just someone who, like, is adding to the atmosphere, right? It's the same thing as like, oh, how do I get invited to more parties? Well, be someone that people want at your parties. How do I find the love of my life? Be the type of person that the love of your life is attracted to. The same sort of thing. So rather than thinking like, "Oh, how can I find my way in?" Again, this is, this is personal. It's like, "Oh, how do I befriend these people?" It's more like, hey, just, just be someone who's cool, and you'll find a way in.

Ali Abdaal 26:16 Yeah. I guess it's like that thing of it's a lot easier to just, uh, when, when you, when you have a hand, to act as if you have the right hand, rather than to try and finesse your way using specific strategies to act as if you have that right hand. IE, just become the sort of person that gets invited to these sorts of things, and if you have a bit of an alpha in terms of being better than poker, better at poker than the average person there, chances are you'll make some money.

Chris Sparks 26:38 Yeah. It, it seems to be this unfortunate fact of life in that the people with the most opportunities are the people who get the most opportunities. That a sense of just not needing it means that people throw it at you. So I'm always trying to operate from this place of abundance, and that I don't need anyone, anything from anyone, and that's certainly seems to be a way to attract more abundance into my life.

Ali Abdaal 27:01 Hmm. Nice. Okay, so sounds like poker is a lot harder than initially, than, like, uh, these online course videos that will, that you'll get on YouTube videos. Be like, "Hey, make $1,000 an hour pa- playing poker online." [laughs] Uh, probably a, a lot harder than those make it seem.

Chris Sparks 27:16 Yeah, yeah. Not, not to get too meta, but if anyone out there, if for any- this goes for anything, is trying to make it sound like it's easy, think about like, well, why is this person making this course anyways?

Ali Abdaal 27:28 Yeah.

Chris Sparks 27:28 Like, if it were that easy, why wouldn't they be doing it themselves instead of making a course for it?

Ali Abdaal 27:31 Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. What was your poker career like? You said you kinda go- got serious about it at the age of 21. What did that look like? When were you in, in your heyday, and then why did you ultimately, I guess, retire from, from the online stuff?

Chris Sparks 27:44 Yeah. I'll give the super abbreviated version. I was always a gamer growing up. I was, uh, best in the world a game called Microsoft Ants at a very young age. I started playing this game called Gin. So it's a two-player form of Rummy. Achieved a, a perfect ELO rating, or at least the equivalent of ELO for Gin. Some of my Gin friends online said, "Hey, you can play this other card game for money called poker." So I was sitting in my, you know, my parents' living room on our dial-up internet and entering into what are called free roll tournaments. This is when I was 16. Hey, if you finish in the top 10 in this tournament out of 10,000 players, you win 1,000 bucks, which seemed like an infinite amount of money and so many shoes that I could buy with that $1,000. I entered into college. This guy named Chris Moneymaker had won the World Series of Poker. So all of a sudden, poker is on TV everywhere, and if you're a collegiate male, like, this is what you did for fun on Friday night, on Thur- Saturday night, and many other nights. So started playing some of these dorm games with friends, and they said, "Oh, you can actually play for real money online," and realized, hey, these guys that I'm playing with aren't very good, and they're making money. I could probably do that too. So started playing tournaments and then later cash games during my, uh, time in university at Ohio State and got to the point that I was doing, you know, very well. I was, you know, kind of like middling level, making a nice living. It paid off all my loans, that sort of thing. Uh, I mentioned I graduated this, you know, coming up from, uh, you know, a middle class household, first kid in college. It's like, oh, okay, obviously, I get a job, and I progress through this average corporate ladder. Luckily, economy had other plans, and I was forced to like, hey, why don't I do an experiment and treat poker as a full-time thing and see what happens? Couple months later, I was making what my annual salary would have been every month and said, hey, maybe I should do a little bit more of this poker thing. Moved out to Los Angeles with some of my, uh, closest friends who I'd only knew online at this point after my 21st birthday and really dedicated myself to it. Started teaching a lot of other poker players, created a consulting practice, later an investment firm around it and, you know, fast-forward 18 months of going full time, I was ranked top 20 in the world. I like to say I was like Deion Sanders top of my career when we had, as an American football reference for all you guys across the pond, we had was called Black Friday, where online poker was shut down in the US. So this is my, my first sort of forced retirement at 23. Decided I wanted to take a break from poker. Started traveling, backpacking. Actually didn't play a single hand of poker for five years, and there was a, a, another poker boom that lured me out. I heard about things that were happening in China. So these are games that, that were taking place over apps, sort of the equivalent of, like, a Zynga. You're playing with gold coins. Those gold coins are representative of real dollars via an intermediary, kind of like essentially You know, gray area type stuff, but, you know, really good games. Friends started learning Mandarin so they could get into these games. Like, people, people go through all levels. This got me back into poker, and luckily, I stumbled back into a new renaissance within US online poker. Because it'd been shut down, a lot of other- the best players had left the US to keep playing, and new sites popped up, and thus I was able to immediately hop back in after five years of not playing, essentially be at the top of my game. Did really, really well through the pandemic, and then, you know, the last year or so, I've been really focusing on playing in person, particularly in these stream games. So I've had multiple retirements. You know, usually I call it, you know, more like sabbaticals. I take, you know, three to six months off. At one point, you know, took a whole five years off. But poker's always been there as a background. I think of it as my sandbox for performance to make sure that I'm walking the walk.

Ali Abdaal 31:25 Hey team, hope you're enjoying this episode. Uh, just giving you a little message from our sponsor, which is Shopify, which is incredibly exciting because we've been using Shopify, the platform, for over a year now to host our online store. And Shopify is just an incredible, super easy to use, fantastic platform for building any kind of online business. You can sell stuff online, you can sell stuff in person, you can sell stuff with almost any payment method in almost any country. It's absolutely sick. And you can get started with Shopify without needing anything like knowing how to code or knowing how to design because their preexisting designs are absolutely sick. And we are now using Shopify for basically hosting all of our e-commerce stuff, including our physical products, the Essentially Stationery line, which I've designed recently. We're using Shopify to host our digital downloads, like Notion templates and website themes, and we're also using Shopify as the payment provider for our courses, which then hooks up into our courses platform. So it's just incredible. It's got thousands and thousands of integrations, so you can integrate with almost anything imaginable. I genuinely highly recommend signing up to Shopify and at least checking it out. You can head over to shopify.com/aliabdaal and get a totally free trial to Shopify so you can see whether you like it, and you can kinda build your own store and you can see what the vibe is. It's, it's just great. And thank you so much, Shopify, for sponsoring this episode.

Ali Abdaal 32:27 Why do you care about poker? Like, it sounds like your view... It's, it, it, it's, it sounds like part of it is you have fun doing it, and another, other part of it is you make money doing it, so you're like, "Eh, might as well." Um, is there, is there something beyond that? Is there, like, a wider mission purpose behind this thing, or is, is it kinda those two, those two factors?

Chris Sparks 32:47 Yeah. I, I can only guess at my motivations, right? I, I think we all just like to tell stories about ourselves. I think that there's so much to be learned from poker and games in general. So I've tried to transmute poker into my mission of understanding the games that we're naturally participating in, and I think that game theory and the systems thinking that's so necessary to success has so many wider applications. You think about decision-making, you think about human performance, you being the person who can show up and perform every day. Think about understanding yourself, understanding your own psychology. I realized through working with other high performers in business and investing that so many of the things that I had to develop in myself instrumentally to become one of the best poker players translated to a number of fields as well. So I think of poker as almost my sandbox or my lens for understanding, how can we achieve the ambitious things we set out to achieve? How can we, you know, find a life of freedom and purpose? It's always been my avenue of understanding.

Ali Abdaal 33:58 What are some of those skills that you think are sort of cross applicable from poker to other areas of life? I guess I'm kinda thinking the ones that someone watching this or listening to this would be able to kind of, yeah, would be applicable to them. 'Cause I imagine knowing how to count cards is not one of them, but I, I'm, I'm sure there's a whole world of, of others.

Chris Sparks 34:14 Sure. I'll, I'll share one that's probably my favorite lesson from poker. So we have this concept called expected value and, you know, as any gamer knows, you start to abbreviate things and a lot of terms, so we're just always EV. So, like, plus EV, minus EV. So, like, something has expected value, something doesn't have expected value. So small bit about math, right? You don't need... You can't get advantage from the math, but you have to know it. Expected value is, on average, what is the expected outcome from doing this? And so the way they calculate it is, for each instance, it's the how good it is multiplied by what percentage it is of happening.

Ali Abdaal 34:51 Mm.

Chris Sparks 34:52 So say, like, flipping a coin, right? 50% chance of heads, 50% chance of tails. It evens out.

Ali Abdaal 34:57 Yeah.

Chris Sparks 34:57 But if you say something more like, "All right. I'm going to pay you $2 if it's heads, and you're gonna pay me $1 if it tails," okay, two times 50 cent- 2 times 50% is one, plus one times 50% is 50. So every time we do this, I bet $1, expect to make $1.50.

Ali Abdaal 35:18 Yeah.

Chris Sparks 35:18 So I'm making 50 cents every time we do it, right? So expand this out. Every action that we take has an expected value. You have some form of risk and some form of reward.

Ali Abdaal 35:29 Mm.

Chris Sparks 35:29 And so the way that my brain works through just getting punched in the face so many times in poker is just like, is the roo- is the risk worth the reward? Or, like, all the options available to me, what has the highest expected value?

Ali Abdaal 35:42 Yeah.

Chris Sparks 35:42 And so that's what anything of, like, okay, what restaurant am I gonna go to? What am I gonna order at that restaurant? Who should... Should I go over and talk to this person? Should I reach out to this person that I wanna talk to? Thinking about, okay, well, what's the upside of this? What, what do I, what am I putting at risk?

Ali Abdaal 35:56 Yeah.

Chris Sparks 35:56 What are the other things that I could be doing instead, the opportunity cost? And once you start to just wear this idea of expected value, like, clothes, you realize that everything is a bet. You talk to people about poker, be like, "Oh, well, I don't gamble." It's like, "Okay, well, everything you do is a bet." Your, every action that you take, you're saying, like, this step forward gets me somewhere.

Ali Abdaal 36:18 Mm.

Chris Sparks 36:18 And so you're decomposing all your actions into, like, is this a good bet? And that's way, way I've sorta seen my life, is just I'm taking all of these tiny calculated risks that I expect will get me one step closer to where I want to be.

Ali Abdaal 36:34 That's great. This idea of plus EV. I gue- I guess another thing from this concept is that you're not wedded to the outcome of an individual decision as long as it was plus EV. Because, like, over time, like I'm, I'm, I'm just kind of thinking yesterday we had a call with this marketing agency that's like wants to do some TikTok stuff for us, and I feel like, you know, they're charging quite a lot of money. But I, in my mind I feel like it's plus EV. I feel like a decision like that is a decision we would just... a decision we should just say yes to because fine, it costs a certain amount of money, but like we'll, it'll probably pay off. And even if it doesn't, like if we had 10 of those other circumstances, it would like, like, uh, you know, on average the decision would be a good one to take. And when you said plus EV I was like, "Oh, yes. That's what I was trying to get to when I was trying to explain it to the team as to why I think this is a good idea." Because I think it's very easy for individual decisions to over-index on, oh, but what if this doesn't work? And then that makes you quite risk-averse because the whole bias towards avoiding a loss versus realizing a gain.

Chris Sparks 37:30 I, I think it's one step beyond that. Of, of course risk, risk aversion is true in that we tend to overvalue risk and undervalue gains. And I think generally in life the bis- biggest risks are the risks not taken because you forego all learning. I think it goes one step beyond that. I think it's moving beyond thinking in results terms and more thinking in process orientation terms.

Ali Abdaal 37:50 Yeah.

Chris Sparks 37:51 So let's say that you had this call with the marketing agency and it was a complete waste of time. It'd be easy to walk away from that and being like, "Okay, never talking to any more marketing agencies again. That was a complete waste." Like, well, did you know that it was going to be a waste of time before you got on that call? Maybe you had... there was no sign and it was still a plus EV thing to do even if it didn't work out because now you learn, okay, these are all the things we definitely don't want in an agency, or here are all the reasons why we definitely wanna keep this in-house, that sort of thing. Or you could take a step back and say, "All right. What were those signs that we could have saw before the call this could've been a waste of time? Were there any things that we missed or overlooked or overweighted?" You realize that in this equation all of these variables are unknown, right? Life is not flipping a coin. We have to just make guesses and estimates. So like when I'm playing poker I don't know the exact percentages of everything, but I'm very, very good at making estimates and continually calibrating those estimates over time. So thinking about, okay, like how risky is this really? Everything that we do, every encounter, every time we bump up against reality we learn a little bit more about what those actual probabilities or risk rewards are. And so we get a better sense of like what risks are worth it and what rewards are worth it over time through this feedback that we're getting. So it's not just, oh, this worked out, this didn't work out. It's how does what happened, how does that tell me about the assumptions that I came into during this decision, right? Did I, was I a little... Let's say that going back to this marketing agency call. Was I a little bit too excited about this whole idea of a marketing agency taking over everything? Or was I like a little bit too underestimate of the cost and whatever I would have to do involved? And you take a step back and say, "Okay. Resuming that this type of situation's gonna be recurring, how do we change our approach slightly so that we make it something that's a little bit more use of our time?"

Ali Abdaal 39:34 Mm.

Chris Sparks 39:34 I think this is the critical variable to solve for in all of our lives, is how do we solve for what we call self-organization, that processes automatically improve over time? That every time we do something it creates a jumping-off point to iterate and improve that process every time we do it. So th- I, I think that's-

Ali Abdaal 39:50 Yeah

Chris Sparks 39:50 ... that's the real, that's the real learning, is that the expected value, it's not just floating out there in the world. We have real control over these variables.

Ali Abdaal 39:58 Yeah. It's like a thing that I've heard Tim Ferriss say a few times which is that like when, when he was starting his podcast as an experiment it was like, how do I skew the circumstances in my favor such that even if this thing fails I will still have learnt a lot from it and it would be a, have been a worthwhile thing to do. Whereas I think, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think like I haven't used this concept in my YouTuber Academy, but we're in week four of our five-week course now and I'm just thinking actually a lot of this applies to the whole starting a YouTube channel or not and going down this niche versus, versus that niche, where we're operating with imperfect information. And a lot of t- a lot of the times a student will ask us, "Hey, what do you think about this niche?" And it's like, like I hon- honestly I couldn't tell you. I would have to sit down and do a ton of, a, a ton of research and, and even then I would have very imperfect information. And so I would just have to try it and see what happens. But I think, yeah, th- thinking about it in that like, y- you know, would it for example be plus EV to at least try and experiment in that and learn from it and then come back and regroup might be an interesting way of explaining it.

Chris Sparks 40:55 I think you're already doing it. My understanding of what you talk about with YouTube is that you just need to make videos.

Ali Abdaal 41:01 Yeah. [laughs]

Chris Sparks 41:02 That reps are their own reward, that you learn so much about the experience of like, hey, people responded to this-

Ali Abdaal 41:07 Yeah

Chris Sparks 41:07 ... people didn't respond to this. That automatically by making videos those videos improve over time.

Ali Abdaal 41:12 Mm.

Chris Sparks 41:12 You can't optimize upfront. You need that, you need to close that loop-

Ali Abdaal 41:16 Mm

Chris Sparks 41:16 ... of feedback. What do you like talking about? What is your, where is your audience already? What are they interested in? What do they respond to? What types of videos seem to get the right response? There's no substitute for putting things out there. That's why I think it's like a race to feedback. And that's why I say this, this EV you have control over it because everything that you do you get a little bit more attuned to what the odds are and you can make those decisions a little bit more systematically, right? And that's why I say it's like, it's more... When I, when I'm, when I'm talking about like, okay, this is a person I wanna build a relationship with.

Ali Abdaal 41:49 Yeah.

Chris Sparks 41:49 I think, think this comes down to like mentors, business partners, hiring. The thing I like to say is you wanna look at the X not the Y, is w- not where is this person currently, how successful are they, what have they done, but what is their trajectory?

Ali Abdaal 42:04 Mm.

Chris Sparks 42:04 So like the person who's gonna go on to do amazing things has a high trajectory, and that looks like they have a fast iteration speed, they're learning. And even if they're making mistakes, they learn from those mistakes and keep improving, right? Every video they put out has another small tweak that's, that's better. That's something that I'm always looking for, is like not where this person is, where do I project them to be a few years down the line if they keep improving? Because that's the thing. It's a hockey stick. The improvement speed goes exponential.

Ali Abdaal 42:34 Hmm. That was, that was one of the biggest factors we used to hire one of our interns, Sam, who has a YouTube channel. It's not hu- I mean, it's a few thousand subscribers, so it's like, it's not like incredibly huge, but it's like pretty reasonable. But I think the thing that was most impressive was the, the fact he's got about 60 or 70 videos in the last year, which means he's just making a video or two every week. I was like, "Oh, damn. We want the sort of person on our team who is the sort of person that makes a video every week or two while they're doing their degree." And that is just like a, a, a thing that is actually ... You know, it's, it's, it sounds like somewhat trite on the surface but is indicative of a, of a deeper sort of ... The, the sort of person that this person is is the sort of person that moves fast on things and iterates-

Chris Sparks 43:09 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 43:09 ... and puts stuff out there without being, without being 100, 100% sure it's perfect, which is the sort of person we want on our team.

Chris Sparks 43:15 Yeah. If you wanna extend this to productivity, it's like the 90% of success is showing up. Like almost everything, annoyingly so, comes down to consistently, consistency. Showing up, putting in the work over and over, and the systematic is like every time you do something, "Okay, what went well? Let's do a little more of that. What didn't go so well? Okay, what are we gonna try differently next time? What are we learning from that?" And you can see the people who are consistent day in and day out start to distance themselves. It's like we always wanna approach it as like, "All right, how do I find this like perfect process, this perfect system, and then like everything is going to be solved?" It's like, no, you still gotta show up and be consistent, and that's the thing that, you know, doesn't sell books, of courses, is like how do you become the type of person who's showing up? And I think this really comes back to, one, just like living life with a sense of curiosity and like, "Hey, I wanna know what happens here. Let's, let's see. Let's find out. Let's try it." But also like what is your why? What is your mission? What is that thing that's going to cause you to stay consistent, to stick it out, to pull through when you put something out there and not a single person views it, or you put a post out there and no response. It's all crickets. Like what's going to allow you to push through to get to that point of breaking through is the sense of mission, the sense of curiosity, of like, "Okay, I did an experiment. It didn't work out. Well, what did I learn from that? What am I gonna try differently next time?" And just keep putting things out there.

Ali Abdaal 44:43 Yeah. There's a lot of things that, that, that's like connecting in my head as you say that. One thing that I, I remember, a, a piece of advice I remember getting when I was in medic- uh, in medical school. Everyone who's trying to go for these jobs and stuff is trying to go after publications, 'cause if you get two publications, you get two extra points on your thing, which increases your chances of being in London because those two points are two points of alpha that no one else has because it's quite hard to get publications. And so the next question is like, "Okay, how do I get these publications?" And a couple of senior students just said to me, "Look, just make friends with all of the doctors you ever meet in the hospital. Just be nice to them, and then ask them at some point once you've made friends with them, 'Hey, do you have any projects that I can help you with?'" And through that, I got my two publication points, and it was great. And [laughs] then younger students would ask me like, "How do I get these publication points?" I'd be like, "Honestly, just make friends with the doctors and just ask them, 'Do you have any project, pr- any, any projects I can help with?'" And this connects to something that happened yesterday. So one of our team members asked, was, was in the office and said, "Hey, you know, I, I, I wanna ... I'm involved in this aspect of the business. I wanna get involved in more aspects of the business, so like how should I do that?" And this, I, I, I had like 10 seconds before I had to go to something else, so I was like, "Honestly, just like be in the office a bit more." And, uh, uh, just by virtue of doing that, by, by virtue of showing up in the room where conversations are happening, where those conversations are not being barred from anyone, but it, it just so happens that the people that show up here in person more often will automatically be plugged into more conversations that are happening than the people that don't. And of course, in an ideal world, hybrid team, we'd find a way to make it accessible for everyone who's not even here. But like in the real world, if a conversation's happening serendipitously, no one's gonna hop on Zoom to update the f- eight people who weren't here, but the five people who were here are now feel, now feel as if they're part of something.

Chris Sparks 46:20 This makes me think of my concept of the most direct path, is when you understand what you're going to accomplish and what it's necessary to get there, you can identify the most direct path to get there. So in your case, recognizing, okay, I wanna get this residency, and this requires these two recommendations. I'm getting the terminology wrong, but just to generalize it. All right, so all the other things I could be doing matter so much more, so much less than getting the two recommendations. So what is that most direct path to getting those two recommendations? Okay, who has the power to write those? Why don't I go and talk to them? And there's so many aspects of this. Uh, talking to a client the other day who's like, "Okay, I have a really big product launch coming up, and I'm, I'm coordinating across all these channels, and I'm putting out a bunch of posts." I'm, "Okay, let's, let's take a step back. Let's say the launch was successful. What happened?" "Well, like these five influencers probably talked about us." "Okay, well, have you reached out to those influencers? Like all this other stuff you're doing is great, but if this is the criteria for success, like go directly at it. Make su- if these five s- influencers are that influential, talk to them directly. Uh, give them something of value so that you make sure that you solve for this part of the puzzle." And I think this is really that difference between productivity and performance that we love talking about, is productivity, there's a lot of things you can do that'll make you feel good at the end of the day as like, "I tried. I did all these things. I did my best," that sort of thing. But when you take a step back and say, "All right, what does success look like?" Now doing those things which are likely to be more ambiguous, maybe harder, a little bit more risky, but most on that direct path, that's how you start to maximize your time and your EV.

Ali Abdaal 48:02 Hmm. Yeah. That's great. Yeah, I'm just thinking about that in terms of ... Yeah, just thinking about my team as well, where if someone's like, "I wanna get more involved with the business," where it's like, "Okay, cool." Like, uh, I mean, just like make something happen then. And [laughs] the most direct path to getting more, more involved with the business is to do a thing that the business needs outside of your current role and being like, "Hey, I've done this thing." And that would be like, "Oh, sick." Thank you. [laughs] Here are some other things that we can do, and suddenly that person becomes a lot more valuable. And I guess this applies to any job as well, where-

Chris Sparks 48:32 Yes

Ali Abdaal 48:32 ... yeah.

Chris Sparks 48:33 Yeah. I think this is a good extension of this whole understand the game that you're playing and know where the rules can be subverted.

Ali Abdaal 48:40 Mm.

Chris Sparks 48:40 So imagining that you're applying for the job, and everyone loves to just go in through the front door and throw their resume on the pile and sit on the interview. But, like, take a step back and say, "Okay, who is this person hiring? What are they looking for? How can I make myself stand out and make myself the obvious candidate for the role?"

Ali Abdaal 48:57 Yeah.

Chris Sparks 48:57 So instead of an- answering a bunch of questions, let's say, okay, unders- show you understand their business or you understand their problem really intimately and make some sort of proposal that, "Hey, this is how I would solve it," and make sure that those are things that you can do and say, "Hey, like, if you pick me, I will solve this problem for you."

Ali Abdaal 49:15 Yeah.

Chris Sparks 49:15 That's a lot different than where like, "Oh, I'm gonna hire this person to do these things," is, "I'm gonna have this person solve this problem for me."

Ali Abdaal 49:22 Yeah.

Chris Sparks 49:22 But that really, that comes back to, again, is empathy and thinking about, all right, here's the way that all the other people are playing the game, and that's great, but it feels really competitive over here. What's the backdoor that I can get in that no one's thinking about? Because the rules are, are made up, right? Somewhat... You don't need to necessarily follow, okay, you go to interview. Like, most jobs are filled off-

Ali Abdaal 49:45 Yeah

Chris Sparks 49:45 ... offline. So it's like, all right, how can I go to that person directly and make myself indispensable? And you realize that, like, life is just full of these false velvet ropes that are really just there to keep out the people who wanna stay within the rules. Now, I'm not saying just, like, color all over and make it all up, but, like, there's a lot of room to take a step back-

Ali Abdaal 50:06 Yeah

Chris Sparks 50:06 ... and be creative and think about what do I bring to it.

Ali Abdaal 50:10 Yeah. Uh, and and I, I think, I think on the, yeah, just on this job application topic, there

Ali Abdaal 50:15 is, there, there seems to be a lot of, from what I've h- I, I've heard, almost a combination of moralizing and expectancy or, like, I applied for this job properly. That was there-

Chris Sparks 50:26 Yes

Ali Abdaal 50:26 ... that, that was therefore the right thing to do. And oh my God, this company didn't get back to me. Wow, what a mean company. I would not want to work for them anyway because they clearly don't value their candidates 'cause they didn't reply to my thingies. And it's like now having been on the other side of it and being like, we've got like freaking 5,000 applicants, and the guy who h- who got hired was the only guy who made a video knowing that we are a freaking video-making business. Like, I'm not even gonna read the other 1,000 because, like, I haven't got time for that. And it's li- I, now being an employer, I'm like, bloody hell, like, I wish I could [laughs] every single person I know who's applying for jobs, I could just be like, "Hey, just act genuinely. Try and have empathy for the employer. Like, get into their heads. Don't think of employer as a dirty capitalist who's just, like, profiting off the sweat off your back and, like, exploiting you," et cetera, et cetera. Just like genuinely think, if I were running a business and I had a zillion things to do, how would I make it easy for myself to get hired in this situation?

Chris Sparks 51:16 I mean, so you're asking about poker lessons. It's understanding the other person better than they understand themselves, better than they... Understanding their problem better than they can define it, finding this backdoor. This, uh, this reminds me of, like, if I could just play armchair psychologist a bit-

Ali Abdaal 51:31 Mm

Chris Sparks 51:31 ... I think the challenge that we have in productivity, in finding happiness and fulfillment, is that so much of our cognitive infrastructure is there to just be able to pat ourselves on the back. Like, "Good job. You tried," you know. You applied to 10 jobs. Hey, you didn't hear back, but, like, their loss. They don't see you. And thinking about, well, all right, perhaps the way that I'm doing things isn't working. It doesn't mean that I'm bad. It means that I'm not playing the game well. So how can I play this game better? Think about, like, playing one of these, like, like a Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat back in the day, right? And so they're always, like, projectile. And so you'd have, like, this annoying kid, you're playing, and so you just, like, projectile-

Ali Abdaal 52:14 Hadouken

Chris Sparks 52:14 ... projectile, projectile, projectile.

Ali Abdaal 52:15 Yeah. [laughs]

Chris Sparks 52:16 And the response is always like, "Oh, that's cheap. You gotta, you gotta punch and kick. That's not the right way to win." Well, is it within the rules of the game? Yes. Okay, then it's not cheap. But we go through life like this. It's like, "Oh, there's a right way to play," and it's like, "I have to do it this way." It's like, no, you don't. Like, the conventions are just conventions. It's just things that people agree to, but they're not set in stone.

Ali Abdaal 52:40 Yeah.

Chris Sparks 52:41 Right? There's a lot of room for making the video.

Ali Abdaal 52:44 Yeah. Yeah, I was interviewing a chap called Matthew Dicks yesterday, and he was talking about, you, you know, the idea that, you know, in the world there are some people who are rule breakers and some people who are rule followers. Now, the rule fo- followers feel this sense of, like, I must follow the rules, and generally a rule breaker is someone who was once a rule follower who then broke a rule accidentally or on purpose and realized nothing bad happened. And then you get, then you see the matrix. You're like, wait a minute, all rules are basically made up, and unless, like, the state or violence or the police is enforcing them, basically everything is made up, and therefore you can, like, find the most direct path, find the path of least resistance, do the thing. And the benefit of that is that no one else is also then doing the thing because everyone else is a rule follower.

Chris Sparks 53:25 Yeah. I think this comes up for me a lot when, uh, with boundaries. So when we talk about, like, distractions, interruptions, a lot of it is like, "Well, I would get so much done if I didn't have to be in all these meetings, or if my boss wouldn't hit me up on Slack or text me all the time." It's like, well, have you talked to them? You know, do they know what they're, what's happening, that you would be able to do more deep work or get more things done if you weren't switching priorities all the time? "Well, no, like, you know, they're my boss." And so it's like, well, why don't you tell them? Why don't you have a conversation? And finding, oh, not only were they really supportive of that, that problem no longer exists only because I had the courage to speak up, that a lot of these self-perceived, "Well, I can't do that," is like, well, what if you did that? What, what's the worst that could happen? What's the best that could happen?

Ali Abdaal 54:10 Yeah. Fluffy. [laughs]

Chris Sparks 54:11 And it comes back to, right, there's, there's an experiment that can be done here to disprove these assumptions that we have about the world that really aren't all that well-founded.

Ali Abdaal 54:19 Hmm.

Ali Abdaal 54:21 Nice. Experiments. You're big on the whole thinking and experiments thing. Your, uh, PDF ebook book, Experiment Without Limits, [laughs] it's great. I've actually referenced it on my other podcast with my brother a couple of times.

Chris Sparks 54:32 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 54:32 So every time we need, uh, something to talk about, I'm like, "You know what? Let's just look up Chris's PDF and just go through some how to do- figure out what to do with your life questions."

Chris Sparks 54:39 I'm the same way.

Ali Abdaal 54:39 [laughs]

Chris Sparks 54:39 I'm just, "Hey, you guys want something to talk about?" [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 54:42 [laughs] So what's... How, how do you think about, like, experiments?

Chris Sparks 54:45 Great. So yeah, first, the, the workbook that Ali is referencing, Experiment Without Limits, it's available for f- completely free online. You can find that at forcingfunction.com/workbook. If you prefer the, uh, to, you know, write things down, I'm an analog guy, so I like to have it out at my desk and write things in the book. We put it for, uh, at cost on Amazon. You can order it there in any country. The way that I thought about it was I work with all these just really smart, talented, ambitious people. I wanna deconstruct what seems to work for all these peak performers into a step-by-step guide that people can follow. 'Cause a really big value for me is open sourcing my knowledge, so this is my way of giving back, is to put this out there for free so everyone can benefit. Spent almost a year putting it together, and so I, I've put a lot of effort. In my mind, we tried to create the best free productivity resource on the internet, and I, I think we did pretty well. But the concept of experiments, why we had it in the title, why it's so near and dear to me, because I think it's getting around this lack of action. I think that so many things in life are solved by taking action, and it's usually deconstructing to, like, the smallest possible action to get some sort of feedback about what's working and what's not working. And as you might be able to tell listening to me, I have had the tendency to overintellectualize things or try to over-systematize, over-plan, over-design, and my idea of framing it as an experiment is, well, what's an hypothesis I have? What's a guess that, hey, if I do X, Y will happen. If I start putting out YouTube videos, I will start to find my tribe. I will start to have opportunities fall in my lap, whatever it may be, and it's find a way to test that. Well, what's the fastest possible path to test this, right? Creating a, creating an experiment around it and then seeing what happens. So this way, I am able to commit to something, right? I give the experiment full opportunity to work. I say, like, "All right. I'm gonna do this for 30 days." If we're trying to be our 21-year-old poker player, I would say six months minimum, 'cause it's gonna take you a while to get good. I commit to the six months. Then I say, "All right. What are the signs that I'm going to see along the way this experiment is going well? If I see these signs are going well, that I'm making progress, that my inputs are leading to good outputs, how am I gonna double down? How am I gonna accelerate on this?" And that's what really all a lot of life l- is, is just pulling all these levers. Okay, a little bit of, little bit more of this, little bit less of this. If I wanna add something, I have to put something down. It's like, all right. Working out is helping me. I have more energy. Okay. Well, what if I worked out a little bit harder? What if I worked out a little bit more often? That sort of thing. Okay, I'm gonna pull this lever a little bit. And the way I frame it as an experiment is I'm constantly collecting data. Everything that I'm do, I'm getting feedback on what's working, on what's not working, and the things that are working, I do more of that. The things that aren't working, I do less of that. Hey, I notice when I do this, the days feel fulfilling and happy. All right. Why don't I try doing that a little bit more? Hey, I notice those days that I didn't go outside, I didn't feel as good. All right, I'm gonna try going outside. And, and that's the thing, is it takes the pressure off of everything. It's all of, like, okay, great. I'm gonna do this and see what happens. And how much fun life becomes when you just have a total sense of curiosity about everything. Hey, if I push this button, let's see what it does. Oh, I am gonna keep pushing that button. I'm gonna keep pulling this lever. So that, that's if I could tr- kind of train one mindset into people, is to approach things experimentally, to try it, see what happens. If you like the results, keep doing it.

Ali Abdaal 58:24 So I just had an idea for a video called How to Stop Overthinking, and I think thinking in expe- uh, thi- thinking in bets, thinking in experiments, like, I f- I find myself almost doing this by default, but just not intentionally enough, I think. Like, when we moved into this studio, it was like, you know what? This move to London, this move to build a team in person, is a one-year-long experiment. We're gonna try it. We're gonna see what happens. We're kinda gonna go all in it, or gonna go all in on it while we're trying it out, which is why we're in this expensive, fancy-ass studio. And it's like, hey, it's a one-year experiment. We'll... I'm sure we'll learn things along the way, and we've learned so much along the way, and it's been fun. And now it's time for the next experiment, which is probably, all right, cool. Given that I'm gonna stay in London, what does it look like to be in a studio where it's in my house, and, like, what if I were to live with my brother and his wife? And that could be fun. Let's try that as an experiment and see what happens. And I was thinking the other day, like, what was it? I was listening to, like, a random Noah Kagan episode. No, I was re-listening to the Deep Dive interview I did with Noah Kagan, like, two years ago, and he said something in that about, "Hey, you know, uh, I've always liked the idea of living in a van, so I'm just gonna... You know, I've rented a van for three weeks. I'm just gonna try it out." And I was like, fuck. I've always liked the idea of living in a van, but I have, I have not taken that next leap to be like, you know what? Let me just actually rent a van for a week and see what it's like. I've always thought one day when I'm, five years from now, when I'm in the US, when I've got my visa, I'd like to do a van road trip across the US. But actually, I could just literally rent a van in London and live in it for a week just to see what it's like as an experiment. And then I s- I added that to my, like, list of experiments that I wanna run. And I find that for me, whenever I feel... Well, yeah, whenever I'm overthinking about something, just actually telling myself, "Hey, it's an experiment. Let's treat it, treat it as such." Even, even just that word just immediately takes all the pressure off. It's great.

Chris Sparks 59:58 Yeah. A challenge that I used to have was just facing existential angst all the time. It's like, hey, is the thing that I'm doing with my life the thing that I actually want to do? And I found this, all right, okay, I'm going to commit to this- For this amount of time, and for that amount of time, I'm just going to give it my best shot. I'm gonna try my best, that way I have no regrets, and at the end of the month, the three months, the six months, I'll say, "All right, I can stop doing that and do something completely else if I want." All right, so how did that go? What aspects did I love about it? What aspects did I not like so much? What went well? What didn't go well? And from that, I take off all of these days in the middle of, like, "Hey, is this thing that I'm doing the thing I actually want to do with my life?" Like, whoa, not time for that. I'm still running the experiment, still running the experiment. And that's the thing is I've set aside the time to take a step back and say, "I can do literally whatever I want with my life. What do I want to do?" But I don't wanna be asking that question every single day. I want it to be in its designated time before and after the experiment. So there's a real power in this commitment because a challenge or opportunity that we have is that life has unlimited optionality. But if we're just bouncing all these options all the time, we're totally like that meme, like, we're sort of looking in front of the person fr- person right in front of us. We're, like, turning around and like, "Oh, I could be talking to that person. I could be talking to that person." So by committing, all right, for the next year, I'm gonna prioritize having the studio and see what that's like, and after the year, I can decide whether I want a studio or not, that has a lot of power because that full year, you're giving the experiment the full time to run.

Ali Abdaal 1:01:27 Yeah. And you're also freeing up your own mental bandwidth to be f- constantly revisiting that decision. Like, I'm just thinking, yeah, again, again, to use a YouTuber example. One of our friends, when she started her YouTube channel about 18 months ago, her name's Elizabeth, she was like, "You know what? I'm gonna commit to this thing." I've, I've watched Ali's videos where he says two videos a week... Oh, he says one video a week for two years. She was like, "I don't think I'm very good," so it's like, "All right, cool. Let's make it two videos a week for four years, and that's gonna be the period of my experiment, and then I'll... And then I'm not gonna... I'm j- I'm... Like, once I've committed to it, I'm not gonna think about it anymore." And it... Just, just sort of committing to that decision, almost like, you know, I venture to say committing to the decision to marry someone. It's like, cool. I have tied myself up from... Well, I, I have tied myself off, as it were, from the optionality that's out there in the market. Great. Like, now I can fully focus on this person. [laughs] One thing

Ali Abdaal 1:02:14 you mentioned was this bias, this propensity that we have to pat ourselves on the back. I wonder if you, we can zoom in on that. Like, what do you, what do you mean by that?

Chris Sparks 1:02:21 It seems to me that it's very tempting to justify our own behavior. In investing, they have this, this saying, "Eat well or sleep well," that any improvement that you make to your investing returns, that you make more money, generally comes with more stress, right? You're making more decisions. You're watching the markets more closely. So there's a real luxury to being hands-off, to sleeping well, but that luxury comes at the cost is you're, you're probably not on it as much, right? And you're not as, you're not as on top of things. So that's one of the key trade-offs is like, all right, you can't be completely passive about anything. So any level of being active is gonna bring some level of stress, anxiety, and effort. So a lot of the temptation, in psychology we call this status quo bias, is, "Hey, everything that I'm doing right now is pretty great. I'm just gonna keep on doing that." And I see this a lot when I lead workshops around a quarterly or an annual review where people's goals tend to be, "I'm gonna do exactly all the things that I was just doing plus 20%." So all those things I was gonna do, I'm gonna put up, you know, 20% more pounds on the bench press. I'm gonna write 20% more articles. I'm gonna sell 20% more packages. And, you know, like, well, okay, great. Like, where's that... where are all those 20% gonna come from? Like, what are the things that you're no longer doing? This is, like, this, like, same but more tendency. And so a better way that I think about doing is, like... I'll use another investment analogy. Imagine that you sold all of your investments, and now you're just sitting on a pile of cash. Or all of your commitments, all of your, your job, your classes, all the things you're doing, you're no longer doing. You look at your calendar, and it's completely open for the next year. Okay, what do you do with that time? It's like our, our bias is to justify the things that we're already doing. It's like, okay, I'm just gonna keep on doing more than that. But it's like realization, you could do anything. What do you do with that? I think is a much better place to operate from because naturally, just to, you know, sleep well, we tell ourselves, "Hey, what I'm doing is great." But we get all our identity tied up in, like, all right, if I'm, if I'm being successful, then I'm a success. If I'm, if I'm doing really well, then I'm a good person. Like, I'm happy, all these sort of things, versus, like, I am separate from what I do. I am not what I do. Given that I am separate, what do I choose to do? I think this, like, this separation of identity is real important to be able to take an objective look at ourselves and say, "What are the things that are doing right, that I'm doing right now? What are the things that are happening that I think could be going better? What are some thing, actions that I could take?" It doesn't mean that I'm not doing well. I'm doing great, but here are some ways that things could be going even better. I think th- this, this is a real hack for objectivity. Another way is to imagine that you're giving advice to a friend, and the friend is in the exact situation that you're in. What's the obvious advice that you would tell your friend? It's very easy to see from the outside, but if you try to give that advice to yourself, it's like, "Well, I already tried that," or, "I can't do that." It's like, well, what would you tell a friend? There's, there's all of these ways to just be a little bit more objective about what we're doing. And this is big for me as I'm always trying to correct my natural bias. Another one that I like a lot is fear is a compass. So if I'm between two options, always do the thing that's scarier because naturally I'm gonna shy away from the thing that I'm afraid of. So if I think I should do it, but I'm not sure and it's really scary, then I should definitely do it. And all, all this type of stuff is just coming through this planning, experimentation, reflecting process of, like, what are the things that I've learned? What, how am I going to... When I'm facing this type of decision in the future, you know, how do I wanna make this decision? As everything echoes out into eternity, I'm thinking about what's my process going to be? How can I improve this process for the future?

Ali Abdaal 1:06:28 Hmm. Yeah, I think I, I think I fall into the status quo bias quite a lot. One thing you and I were sort of just briefly touched on, on the walk here was I did this Odyssey Plan thing where it's like, "Hey, what's your... What does your life look like for the next five years?" It was like, "Cool, now throw that out. Start from scratch. Like, from your, from your current point, what does your life look like for the next five years, uh, five years from now if you took a completely different path?" And then, "Cool. That's fine. Now start again. What does your life look like five years from now if you took a completely different path again and if, uh, money and, uh, status were no longer concerns?" And when I did this exercise a few weeks, a couple months ago and posted it in my newsletter, all three options ended up in one way or another, I am creating content on the internet. And now, like, part of me was like, I- I saw that and I was like, "Hmm. Is, is this a sign that this is what I'm meant to be doing, that I really fundamentally value teaching and stuff, and this is the way I'm, I'm doing it? Or more likely, is this just a failure of imagination, where I'm so tied up, I've got the blinders so on with, like, I'm a YouTuber with three million subscribers and a podcast, I need to create content on the internet?" Uh, [laughs] where that I'm not even entertaining any possible life beyond that because again, it, I, I think it comes down to... I was kind of feeling this about a year ago. About a year ago, I was toying with the idea of doing an MBA in the US or something, and what my brother was saying to me was like, "Look, you've got this infinite sort of degree, in- infinite degrees of options around you, and you're picking the options that seem most legible, which in your current life means either being a YouTuber or going to university and doing a degree or going back to medicine," which are like the only three routes in life that I have ever had experience with. How should I help tackle my status quo bias in this sense?

Chris Sparks 1:08:10 It's, it's a really difficult question to ask because I think it really gets at things that I can only guess at-

Ali Abdaal 1:08:18 Yeah

Chris Sparks 1:08:18 ... from my observations of you, which is, you know, what, what do you value most in life? Um, I, I think you're right in that creating content on the internet being a commonality could both be a signal that this is a true calling for you and just a failure of imagination or a fear of doing something that you're unproven in that, you know, who knows how it could work out. It's, it's really hard to say. So that's why I'm always asking questions like, you know, what do you like about what you're doing right now? What do you not like so much about what you're doing? What would you do more if you could, if you had an extra hour in your day?

Ali Abdaal 1:08:56 Yeah.

Chris Sparks 1:08:56 How would you ask that? Uh, 'cause I find that the best proxy on someone's values is their, is their behavior. So getting at these sort of hypotheticals like if you could do anything, what would you do? And working from, okay, what are the commonalities in the things that you would do without these constraints in place? That, that's why it's, it's really hard to make universals like, hey, this is what a good life looks like. Because for me, a good life comes back to values. Like, do you understand what you value? Do these change and shift over time? It's this, like, infinite process of excavation, and once you have a good understanding of that or at least a provincial understanding of that, does your... Is your life a reflection of that or of liv- living in alignment with that? So I know for you that making videos on the internet satisfies a lot of deep values, you know, teaching, giving back. It's an engine for personal growth. Um, and the question is always like, great, like, what does that, you know, when you're doing something, questions like what does that bring you, right? So example is someone's like, "All right, what, what do you want?" It's like, "I want a million dollars." Okay. What does a million dollars bring you? What does that unlock? What, what, what can you do with a million dollars that you can't do now? And you start to get a, "Okay, well, I can provide for my family," or, "Oh, I can take that class I always wanted," or, "I could have a space to create my art," whatever it is. Okay, so now we know what you're going at directly. Let's try to find that most direct path there. So okay, you want to teach people, for example. What are other ways that you could be doing that, that you could satisfy that value? And that gets around this like I, this is the only thing that I could be doing to, all right, now that I understand what I'm trying to achieve, what are other things that I could do that are presumably towards that? And then you can start to frame an experiment. You see, okay, maybe it's a thing that I just really like teaching, so why don't I try teaching in other formats and see what I like and what I don't like about that. And see, it all goes back to try something, see what works, do a little bit more of that.

Ali Abdaal 1:10:59 Mm.

Chris Sparks 1:11:00 See what doesn't work. When I think about this in a productivity sense, it's always like, you know, once I understand what I want to do, what brings me happiness and fulfillment, how can I make that easier to do? How can I make that more of a commonality in my life, the things that get in the way? It's like, well, you know, watching, uh, watching lots of Netflix is fun. You know, I like, I like film. I think it's really interesting. I think being in culture is very cool, but I could be doing other things instead that I seem to enjoy more, that bring me more fulfillment. So how do I make Netflix a little bit harder to access? It's not that Netflix is n- is bad, it's just not as good for me. So it's like you can see this ladder as like what do I value? What are things that I do to seem to satisfy the values? How do I make those things that, uh, seem to satisfy those values more accessible in my life, more of a recurring presence?

Ali Abdaal 1:11:46 So many ideas for experiments that I wanna run. One hypothesis I've had about my life is that, huh, I- I think I seem to value kind of social, social connection with people, like a lot of people do, unsurprisingly.

Chris Sparks 1:11:56 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 1:11:56 Um, and it's like, okay, cool. One hypothesis was that, like, therefore, living with a flatmate is gonna be more fun for me than living alone. But to be honest, I've never really tried the living alone experiment, so I should just run that experiment for a week or two. I mean, I've, I've tried it for a, for a couple weeks here and there in the pandemic, and it like, it was fine. But like that, that could be an experiment I try. But another thing I wanna do is like I know I, I enjoy hanging out with friends a lot and I, and I know I enjoy hosting people at my place, but it's a lot of effort to clean afterwards and stuff. And as I'm saying that, I'm thinking, "Okay, I mean, paper plates solves that problem. A bin bag solves that problem. Ordering pizza rather than trying to cook solves that problem." Hiring a private chef for a night just to see what happens and just be like, that could- that might be a fun thing to do. Invite, like, 10 friends over and get a private chef to cook for everyone and clean up afterwards. All of these are experiments that I absolutely could run and should run to be like, "Hey, this, th- this will actually make it easier for me to satisfy the value of I enjoy connecting with people and having people over at my place."

Chris Sparks 1:12:55 Yeah. Th- this brings me to the concept of over-optimization. I feel like this is something that someone else besides me needs to hear, is there's this assumption that, hey, if I'm going to do something, I need to do it all out or, or it's not worth doing at all.

Ali Abdaal 1:13:10 Mm.

Chris Sparks 1:13:10 So for example, it's like I love travel. We're having this conversation because I'm traveling around Europe, and I especially love creating experiences for my friends. I love planning group trips. I love hosting. I love planning events and doing things like that. But because I can have perfectionistic tendencies, because, like, everything has levels and I always wanna try to raise the bar somehow, I'll create situations where, for example, I'm planning a birthday trip right now. It's like, all right, it needs to be, like, four days, like, packed nonstop, like, top-of-the-line experiences, and I just think to myself, "Wow, I'm putting a lot of thought and effort into this that I could be doing other things," and, like, starting to get a little bit worried, like, "Well, what if it doesn't match my expectations?" And realizing people aren't coming to my birthday trip because they want the trip of a lifetime, at least I, I don't think so, because they want to celebrate me, meet my friends, like, have a nice weekend. And I'm realizing, all right, if what I'm doing this for, if what I'm optimizing for is to bring people together for a nice experience, what are all of these cherries on top that I'm putting, like, way too much time and attention into, right? Coming, coming back to, all right, what I value most is this sense of connection and bringing people together who should meet. And, like, having, like, a Michelin star chef cook every meal and, like, go on these, like, super logistically complicated excursions, like, it's a nice to have, but it's not a need to have, right? So it's like I, as you were talking, it comes back to, all right, what am I trying to achieve here? What am I, what am I valuing? What is the most direct path towards just, like, bringing people together in the room?

Ali Abdaal 1:14:46 Yeah. I... So I did a kind of party thing at my place a couple months ago for my, for my birthday, and this was my first time kinda hosting a lot of people in one big room and stuff, and I was quite, like, frazzled about, like, the food situation and like, ah, there wasn't enough this and there wasn't enough that, and like, ah.

Chris Sparks 1:15:02 And no one notices all that stuff but you.

Ali Abdaal 1:15:04 And, yeah. And, and so, like, a f- a f- a f- a friend, a friend of mine kind of could see that I was a bit, like, frazzled, and he was like, "Okay, Ali, I'm gonna say something to you that I kn- I know I also need to hear more often. Take a breath. When you're 85 years old, you're gonna give anything to be back here and enjoy this moment in the present day, and also no one gives a shit about the food. So just relax, enjoy yourself. People are here. They're having a good time. Don't worry about it." And I was like, "Oh, he's so right." And I was still sort of worrying about the food in the back of my mind, but then I was thinking, "Who cares? The berries ran out. The yogurt ran out. Who, who actually cares?" Like, the, the point was the people were there, and I think this... Like, for me as well, I, I, I put a lot of, like, if, if I'm doing this, it should be done right. And if I'm doing this, oh, I don't, I don't just wanna order pizza. I can actually order a pizza. It's super easy. I should just order pizza. [laughs] If, if the requirement for me to cook, is it gonna stop me from hanging out with friends? Scr- screw cooking. Just, like, invite, invite pizza. Like, get people over, encourage that social connection more.

Chris Sparks 1:15:58 Th- this is a mental reframe that's been really impactful for me. Just kind of the way that my brain work is that I'm just hyperactive, like, hyper-aware of opportunities, and opportunities for improvement in particular. Like, this thing is great, but, like, oh, if I did this, it'd be more streamlined. If I did this, if I change the lighting, if I change... Oh, like, if I position the food in this way, if I put the bar over here, the flow will be better. Like, always, like, thinking about the next one.

Ali Abdaal 1:16:23 Yep.

Chris Sparks 1:16:23 Right? That's, like, the downside of the process orientation-

Ali Abdaal 1:16:25 Yeah

Chris Sparks 1:16:25 ... always thinking about how the process could be better, and to take the step back and breathe and enjoy. It's like, oh, like, all my friends are here.

Ali Abdaal 1:16:32 Yeah.

Chris Sparks 1:16:32 Let's, let's, like, enjoy this and have fun. We can do a postmortem after the event. But it's turning what can become an obligation into an opportunity, right? And think about something like a to-do list. When you think of a, a lot... The way that a lot of people treat a to-do list is here's this, like, never-ending list of obligations that I have to get through before I can have fun, and it's this morbid thought that we're gonna die with a very long to-do list because we're gonna keep adding things to it. And if our whole goal is to get through the list until we can be happy and enjoy ourselves, like, we're in for not so good of a time. So the way I try to always reframe is like, this is not my list of to-dos. This is not an obligation that I've thrown upon my shoulders, but all opportunities. These are all things that I don't need to do any of these, but I could do them, and maybe things will be going even better. And that's always a frame is like, "I'm great. I don't need to do anything. But here's, here's some things that I could do. Which one of these, like, do I want to do now?"

Ali Abdaal 1:17:31 Mm.

Chris Sparks 1:17:31 And it, it, it's very subtle from like, oh, I have to plan this party. Now I have to send out all these invites. Okay, I have to figure out, you know... Oh, I have all these dietary restrictions I have to communicate with the chef. These like, like, planning a party, like, having a good time with your friends easy can be, like, a to-do list, into like, wow, what a great opportunity to bring my friends together, to create this element of surprise and serendipity and wonder that we can all be in this shared container and have a good time. It's like, well, like, do I really care that much about the food? Maybe I don't, or maybe it's like, oh, this is a cool opportunity to-

Ali Abdaal 1:18:05 Yeah

Chris Sparks 1:18:05 ... try to make a new dish or to, like, try a new skill. And it's just that, that subtle frame not only makes everything we're doing more fun, but allows it to be more present in the, and like, harvest the benefits of the things we're doing too.

Ali Abdaal 1:18:18 Yeah. One thing I was thinking as, as, as you were describing that, the, the, this, there's this tendency that... Ooh, I'll write this down in my thing. The, the tendency

Ali Abdaal 1:18:25 to overthink about stuff and the perfectionistic tendencies, and I always get this question in our YouTuber Academy live sessions. And the thing I always say is that, and, and I should take my advice on this in other areas of life, which is that- Look, it's all well and good overthinking about your production value and your lighting and your sound and stuff, but don't let any of that stop you from publishing the video. As long as you are hitting that consistent schedule of whatever you've decided it is, once a week, twice a week, whatever it might be, as long as you're putting the videos out, overthink all you like, but don't s- let that stop you from putting the, putting the videos out. And I think as, you know, with my channel and with our team, as we've grown the team and as we've had to evolve elaborate processes for doing things, at the times when that has to come at the expense of our upload schedule, the channel has slumped and not done very well. At the time, they were like, "Well, we're fixing the processes, but, like, the video still s- the, the vid- the videos are still coming out," then everything has felt like it's moving way more forward. And as I'm saying this I'm thinking that, like, okay, if I... I've kinda had a goal for the la- for th- since January when I did my New Year's goals of like, "Hey, I'd like to have people over for dinner every week." I have people over for dinner nowhere near as frequently as every week, but if I just set aside like Friday nights are my having, having people over for dinner time, and it almost became a thing where it's like, at the very least I need to invite at least one person over on a Friday. And then beyond that I can start stacking up, ooh let's try the chef, let's try the pizza, let's try cooking, let's try this. But it's all on the fundamental layer of, hey, the, the, the main th- point is to just hang out-

Chris Sparks 1:19:46 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:19:46 ... with my friends a bit more.

Chris Sparks 1:19:47 There's th- this concept in economics called revealed preferences-

Ali Abdaal 1:19:51 Mm

Chris Sparks 1:19:51 ... that what people tell you they believe is much different from what they actually believe or how they act, how they believe.

Ali Abdaal 1:19:58 Yeah.

Chris Sparks 1:19:58 And productivity context is if you ask someone, "Hey, what's important to you?" The answer will be very different from how they act, what's important to them.

Ali Abdaal 1:20:07 Yeah.

Chris Sparks 1:20:07 So a very early thing that I do with the clients is I have them share with me their calendar. And beforehand I know like what their top values are, what they say their goals are, what their priorities are, and I have a very clear side-by-side to say, "Well hey, like you said that like your biggest goal for the quarter is making this new hire or raising this investment round. But I look at your calendar and I don't see it anywhere on there. So like which one is it? Is it not a priority for you or is it you're just not prioritizing it?" And that's what really, when we talk about prioritization that it is, is like understanding what's most important and putting that first.

Ali Abdaal 1:20:43 Yeah.

Chris Sparks 1:20:43 Right? So it's very easy to pick a goal, for example, I'm gonna have friends over every week and just be like, "Okay, great. Let's do it. It's gonna happen." But then it's like, okay, well if I want to have friends over every week, like what does that mean? Well it means I need to set aside a week every night, I need to have a plan for that, I need to be inviting out far enough in advance for people to come over. And it's like essentially like what do I need to give up in order for this to happen? And a lot of people don't take those extra steps. They're just like set the goal and be, "Okay, well we'll figure it out along the way." It's like if it's really a priority, what does that mean? What do you have to stop doing in order for that to happen? So that's like a big thing that I'm always trying to see is like how can my schedule be more of a reflection of my goals, of my priorities? And that's the same thing, the inverse is true. It's like what am I dedicating time and resources to that's not on my goal list, that's not a priority list? 'Cause like when you ask someone, "Okay, what are you gonna stop doing?" It's like, "Well I have to do all these things." "Well this thing, it's not a goal of yours, not a top priority, why are you doing that?" "Oh, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da." Okay, well which is true? Is, is it more important or is it not? A fun, very painful exercise that gets everyone to love me very much is I have everyone list all of their priorities. It's like, you know, a bunch of brainstorm. Okay, what, what are you doing with your health? What are you doing with your career? What are you doing with your relations? List all those things out. People have these... I'm like, "How many things you got on your list?" They're like, "10, 12, 26." It's like, "Awesome. That's so great you have so many things going on. Okay I want you to number these in order." And they're like one, two, th- five, 10, 25, 26. "Okay, great. I'm numbering. Okay, this one's not quite as important as... " And they're like, "All right, now I know. All right, I'm gonna do these like all these 26 things and I'm gonna do them in these order." It's like, "Well no, I want you to go through the bottom half of your list and cross a line through them." So say you got 10 things on your list. These are your 10 goals for the quarter. Okay, now you have five goals. Every time you try to bring up that you made progress on goals six through 10 I'm just gonna cut you off and say, "Okay, well what are you doing towards goals one through five? Like those are the important ones, right?" 'Cause the biggest distractions are working on the things that we can justify later but are not our top priorities, right? It's the opportunity cost. So this is something that if you don't correct for is really, really insidious. Again, thinking about our tendency of justifying everything we're doing is good. Client will show up for a call and like, "Okay, like what's happened since last call?" And they share a bunch of updates. It's like, "Hey I talked to this person. Oh this thing happened." It's like, "Oh I, I don't see that on any of your goals. Is that... That's really interesting. What, what updates do you have related to these goals?" They're like, "Oh well, you know, like it was really busy. I had all these things happen." It's like, "Okay, so what you're saying is that those things were more of a priority." "Well no, no, no, no." It, it's really funny when you have to kinda walk back and justify your behavior. And it's like okay well is it a priority or is it not a priority?

Ali Abdaal 1:23:31 Mm.

Chris Sparks 1:23:32 And again like zero judgment. Maybe you decided along the way, okay maybe I don't need to have friends over for dinner every week or maybe you just haven't treated it as a priority. But this is a opportunity for reflection is like you have this regular feedback, right? The more often that you're checking in, closing this loop, iterating, the more quickly can you adjust. So let's say you had as part of weekly review one of your questions is like, "Did I have friends over for dinner this week?" And you're like, "No." And it gets marked yellow. And the next week like, "Did I have friends over for dinner this week?" And like, "No." It's like ooh two weeks in a row that's a red. And that, that becomes like a canary in the coal mine, a signal. It's like all right well two weeks in a row I said I was gonna do this thing and didn't do this thing.

Ali Abdaal 1:24:13 Mm.

Chris Sparks 1:24:13 Clearly what I'm doing is not working. So first checking in, is this still important to me? That's always the first question is like you can always decide later don't wanna do this and say well actually yes I, I do want to have friends over every week. So then it's just like what is one thing that I'm gonna do ... this week as an experiment that might work to make this happen. So I go, "Okay, well, I never send out invites. So now I'm gonna set aside a time, I'm gonna send out some invites, I'm gonna set a date." And you try it, and you see what happens. And that way, even if it's a no in week number three, you're like, "All right, I tried it. That didn't work. Is this still important to me? What am I gonna try next?"

Ali Abdaal 1:24:48 Mm.

Chris Sparks 1:24:48 And that way you catch it and you iterate more o- more often, and that the thing that you said was a priority actually gets treated as a priority.

Ali Abdaal 1:24:55 Yeah. I, I... It's, it's so funny that, that you say this. When you, when you said that line, um,

Ali Abdaal 1:25:00 "Is this thing not a priority or are you just not prioritizing it?" That's literally word for word what my editor said to me last week-

Chris Sparks 1:25:05 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 1:25:05 ... when, uh, actually t- two weeks ago, when I was like, "Yeah, so..." She's like, "Yeah, so how was progress on the book this week?" And I was like, "Yeah, you know, stuff came up." Um, and she was like, "Okay, let's [laughs] let's think about this." She was super nice about it, but she was like, "You know, it seems that this book is seeing... is a priority for you. If it, if it's not, then, you know, that's a different conversation, and that's fine. We can, we can talk about it. But if it is, it sounds like you're not prioritizing the thing that you say is your number one priority." And I was like, "Damn, you're right."

Chris Sparks 1:25:28 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 1:25:29 And then she was like, "Okay, what can we try as an experiment this week?" Perhaps she's worked with you [laughs]

Chris Sparks 1:25:33 Sounds like a great editor.

Ali Abdaal 1:25:34 She's like, "Yeah."

Chris Sparks 1:25:35 Yeah, I approve.

Ali Abdaal 1:25:35 And I was like, "Okay, cool. We can try that. Okay, a non-negotiable three hours in the morning to do the thing. We can try, I don't really get work done at home, so I'll go to the local, uh, restaurant to do it. We can try that. We can try, I will say, I'll write clocking in on Slack in our book Slack channel whenever I'm getting started on the book stuff. We can try, I'll post screenshots of what I'm working on so I have accountability." And all those things worked really well, and I've made progress on the book so much in the last, like, seven days than I have in, like, the month before. I guess, yeah, one question I have is-

Chris Sparks 1:26:03 Can I, can I touch on that real quick?

Ali Abdaal 1:26:05 Yeah.

Chris Sparks 1:26:05 Uh, it's, it's so obvious that it's, it doesn't even feel worth stating, but we act as if it's not true, is there can only be one top priority.

Ali Abdaal 1:26:13 Mm.

Chris Sparks 1:26:13 We like to act as like there's a bunch of top priorities, but, like, there's only one top priority. And by definition, if it's your top priority, it's a non-negotiable.

Ali Abdaal 1:26:22 Mm.

Chris Sparks 1:26:22 Everything else fits around it. The classic annoying analogy of you're filling your jar. Like, the top priority is the giant boulder that you put into the jar, and then everything else is just sand that fill- fits around it. So if, example, I k- I keep using your examples that you keep so generously putting out there. If writing the book is the top priority, it comes first. It means it ha- gets its own block in the morning, and then other things happen if there's time.

Ali Abdaal 1:26:47 Yeah.

Chris Sparks 1:26:47 But the way that we treat a lot of these things that are called important but not urgent is that they happen when it's convenient for us, when we have time, when we're not busy, when there's not other things going on, when we don't have deadlines. And so I would say, like, put the important but not urgent first. The urgent things will always happen. But instead, we, like, try to treat it, try to, like, fill the jar and then, like, stick a boulder in there. So I'm always trying to think about, all right, if this is really most important to me, what does that mean? We come back to values. Uh, I have clients who say, for example, that family is my top value. Uh, the obvious follow-up is, "Okay, if, if family is most important to you, family's your top priority, what does that look like for you?" Means, okay... And again, there's no right answers to this. It could be we sit down for dinner every night. It means that, like, my kids get an hour of undivided attention before bed. It's like, hey, you know, weekends I'm completely off, no work. Whatever it means to them. Okay, this is what it means to have top priority. Okay. Then the obvious follow-up question is, like, what do you need to do for this to be the case? Like, what gets in the way of being able to sit down for dinner with your family or having the weekends off? And everything comes back to that, is like, if it's really most important, what else needs to conform around it? What else needs to get out of the way? Because the way that we like to do it is like, well, it, it really is important to me, but all these other things came up.

Ali Abdaal 1:28:12 Yeah.

Chris Sparks 1:28:12 And it's just, life just doesn't work like that.

Ali Abdaal 1:28:14 So we've kind of talked about this sort of meandering. You mentioned you, how you have clients and stuff. But, like, uh, uh, I was, I was gonna mention this in the intro that I record after

Ali Abdaal 1:28:22 the fact, that you are a performance coach. And you and I actually worked together. Uh, you were my performance coach for three months, it was about 18 months ago, and it was great. What does a performance coach do? And I guess, how did you become one? And I guess the, the question I want to follow up on that is that, like, if someone in the audience listening to this decides as a 21-year-old, "I too want to become a performance coach"-

Chris Sparks 1:28:41 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 1:28:42 ... what is, what is the process of doing this as a side hustle look like? [laughs]

Chris Sparks 1:28:45 Oh, man. Uh, well, as far as what a performance coach does, I think you could probably answer this better than I could, being on the other side. The way that I try to describe it is I act as a third-party objective observer for high performers to accelerate their path towards their goals. So what that generally looks like is asking lots of annoying questions, like, "Is this really a priority? Okay, what are you doing towards that? What's the next step? What are you committed to doing this week?" Those types of things. So there's a, there's a hybrid of, you know, holding someone's feet to the fire, the classic accountability type stuff. There's acting as this mirror for what's really important to you, what's really working for you. There's taking some of my systems thinking lens and thinking how... all right, this thing you want to be doing regularly, how can we make that more consistent, less effortful for you, get more out of it? These types of things. Uh, it really depends upon the clients and their goals, but the commonality that I see is that someone comes out of the process with more clarity on their goals and what's more impor- what's important to them. That feels like the things they're going after, they're, the process is easier. They're getting more of the things they'd like to done. You know, more things, less time, classic. But it's- Primarily about doing the right things, the things that are actually moving the needle, actually a priority to them, aligned with their top values. And then just really a sense of how this can be a repeatable process, something that goes on beyond our work together, right? My, my typical agreement, I only work with 12 clients at a time, and it's usually in, in three-month sprints. So I, I always wanted to be, like, the trainer who, like, gave the whole playbook at the first class and say, "Okay, go forth and do it." And I think a lot of that comes down to some of these principles and mindsets that I've tried to share today, which these things are really grounded in action. So it all comes back to me for experiments, and we co-create an experiment and say, "Hey, say this is a top priority for you for the next quarter. What would that look like?" Convert that into some sort of input goal. So okay, so you're saying, you know, every day you want to spend the first hour of your day meditating, or the first hour of your day writing, or you want to host a party at your place every week. What are the, what are the, what are the actions that you need to take in order to make this happen? Let's say you're successful, let's work backwards from that. Let's say that you didn't achieve this. What would be some reasons why you didn't, reasons that you failed? So kind of simulating ahead of time so we don't have to learn through experience, and then we try it, and as we work together, we try things, we see what works, we double down on that. So I see myself as primarily a guide, where I think a lot of my clients have a pretty good idea of what works. But always the interesting question is, "Well, you know this works. Why aren't you doing it?" And that's where, that's where all the really interesting conversations happen.

Ali Abdaal 1:31:51 Hmm. Yeah, there's a... I think I, I heard one time around, around the idea of coaching and executive coaching, 'cause basically everyone seems to have a coach of some sort, and people who don't have a coach are always like, "What the hell does a coach do?"

Chris Sparks 1:32:02 Mm.

Ali Abdaal 1:32:02 Like, "Why the, why the hell do you need a coach?" And it's like, in a way, like, the less you pay for a coach, the more tactical the advice is, [laughs] or something like that, where it's like when you're in the sort of, I don't know, I have a tennis coach or something like that, it's like a very specific thing that you're working on. Whereas as you get to the higher and higher levels, I suspect Roger Federer's tennis coach is not really teaching him about forehands, and it's a lot about psychology and the mind and, like, behavior and emotions and dealing with his own, like, traumas, and it, it becomes almost like a... I fi- I find every anytime I've worked with a coach, it sort of felt more like what I imagine a therapist would be rather than what I initially imagined a coach would be. Does that kind of vibe with your experience?

Chris Sparks 1:32:42 Every client is different. I, I think that mental game is, is really important. When I think about mental game, it's the, some of the psychological mindset, preparedness, showing up, presence, that type of stuff that I think is really important for high performance in, in any endeavor. I think, I think there's always this toeing the line of I think it's very different from therapy, but clearly people find ways to act out old patterns, mental and otherwise, to get in their own way, to, you know, prevent success. So there's usually an aspect of taking a step back and looking at past behavior and-

Ali Abdaal 1:33:23 Yeah

Chris Sparks 1:33:23 ... identifying, hey, what are the patterns that we want to repeat? Maybe the patterns that we want to disrupt. But the main differential, again, experience of one, that I would have between, you know, a therapist and myself is I want everything that we talk about to be quantifiable, and that, hey, we are-- we have set milestones and metrics towards a goal, and my job is to support you in making the progress towards the thing that you've said is important to you.

Ali Abdaal 1:33:52 Yep.

Chris Sparks 1:33:52 We can have conversations about if it's important, why it's important, what is the path, what is that roadmap? But at the end of the day, if we ensure the regular steps are being taken towards that, we have some raw material to work with.

Ali Abdaal 1:34:05 Got it.

Chris Sparks 1:34:06 Right? I think when you're thinking about talking to an employee or just in auditing yourself, is it, like, is it that I'm not putting in the effort, like a failure to prioritize, as we were saying before, or that the things that I'm doing aren't working? And there's always those two paths. It's like, well, is this not a priority for you? Okay, you are putting in efforts, but the efforts that you're doing aren't leading you to the specific goal that you want. So let's try something else. Let's see if this... Perhaps we step back and we change the approach, we can have different results. So those are the, those are the types of conversations that I have.

Ali Abdaal 1:34:40 Mm.

Chris Sparks 1:34:40 Again, I think, I think your point about tactical versus more psychological is really apt, is if you want someone to teach you how to use Notion, for example, it's pretty, pretty prescriptive, very step by step. If you want someone, again, this is just one example of, like, okay, well, why aren't you using your Notion system to save your notes? And is this really though, it's what's in the way of you not publishing your book, or is there something deeper that's going on in that you're not setting aside the time or, you know, you don't know what to write about, all these types of things. That starts to get into things that are much more bespoke, and we're drawing on experience of... I mean, having worked with, you know, over 100 clients at this point, you start to see the same patterns recur. So that- that's kind of the answer to how does one start doing it, is you just do it. I think fortunately or unfortunately, I just love teaching, so I just can't help doing it, and I'm luckily I've, I've found a societally acceptable, you know, [laughs] way to, you know, find this outlet and, you know, have a little bit of impact on people, at least they tell me so, is, okay, well- Both this seems to work generally for most people. You know, wake up, do the most important thing, don't check your email, uh, all that sort of stuff. But also from past experience and from what you told me, these things seem to work really well for you. Why don't we go back to doing that? That's like the coaching cheat code, by the way, is like, "Hey, that time that things were going really well for you, what were you doing? Okay, why don't you try doing that again?" Like, we always wanna try doing something new-

Ali Abdaal 1:36:17 Yeah

Chris Sparks 1:36:17 ... but we generally, we already know the thing that's working. So yeah, breaking down this like third party objective observer. Third party, I'm outside, I'm not invested, I want your success, but I don't really care how you succeed. Objective, I'm trying to bring some objectivity towards it. It's like, "Hey, this is what you're telling me. This is what I'm seeing. This is what seems to work." And like observer, "Hey, that, that's really interesting. Tell me more about that." Or like, "Ah, I'm not quite sure. Like you say this is important to you, but it doesn't look like it's important to you. Talk to me about that." That's, that's the role that I type to try to play and, you know, the world calls it executive coach, so that's what I go with.

Ali Abdaal 1:36:53 Hmm. Let's say, again, we've got our 21-year-old in the audience. They're like, "I've got a job. I kinda wanna make money on the side. Becoming a coach sounds like a good idea."

Chris Sparks 1:37:02 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 1:37:03 Anyone can call themselves a coach these days. What about... Why don't I become a life coach? Ooh, executive coach. That sounds like basically being a life coach, but you can charge more 'cause it's got the word executive on it.

Chris Sparks 1:37:10 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 1:37:11 How would you advise said 21-year-old? We can role play it if you like, or however, however, however you would kind of advise this person to explore this as a potential side hustle that which could potentially become a, a full-time living further down the line.

Chris Sparks 1:37:23 Yeah. I, I'm gonna generalize this to starting any business is generally if you're trying to make money from something, right? Assuming that your goal to coach is to make money from it-

Ali Abdaal 1:37:33 Hmm

Chris Sparks 1:37:33 ... there can be lots of other tangential goals. But let's say you're trying to create a coaching business or any business. It's, well, what is the feedback that someone has given you? It's like, "Oh, you're really good at doing this. Oh, what if you offered this? I bet I would pay you for that." Or like, "Man, like every... I had that conversation with you. You really sorted me on it." Like listening to this type of feedback or people saying like, "You... What you are doing here, you're both good at it and it is useful," this is, this is good feedback to receive. If you're not receiving any of this type of feedback, this is an anti-signal that, hey, perhaps this is not something that you should be doing. I think there's a sense that people who get really good at something, they can't help but doing it. Not saying they're naturally good at it, but it's something they're naturally curious about, and they just can't help talking about it and doing it with people.

Ali Abdaal 1:38:24 Yeah.

Chris Sparks 1:38:24 So I- part of the reason that I think I've been able to become better as a coach, I think I'm... You never quite arrive at like I've figured it all out, is that I'm just very, very curious about people, and I'm very interested in what seems to lead to success and happiness and fulfillment.

Ali Abdaal 1:38:44 Hmm.

Chris Sparks 1:38:44 And this is just a really effective avenue for me to scratch my own itch.

Ali Abdaal 1:38:50 Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I think it's kinda similar for me in the sense that like from like the age of seven, I have enjoyed explaining stuff to people in my class. And then from the age of like 13 to 20, I was a private tutor teaching people maths and English. From the age of like 17 through to 25, I was teaching courses to help kids get into medical school. From like 18 to 24, I was teaching medical students younger than me how to... And it's so like at every stage of my life, I've just found myself drawn to teaching people stuff, whatever that stuff might be. [laughs] And so the extension of, oh, let's teach stuff on YouTube. Whereas, whereas before in a previous life, I tried, I tried YouTube to be a musician. No one's ever told me I'm good at singing. No one's ever told me I'm good at playing musical instruments. But I said, "Ah, I wanted to try it, experiment, try it out." But as soon as I aligned the thing that I was doing with the thing that I was g- I got like f- 15 years of feedback from the, "Oh, you're actually good at this thing and you seem to enjoy this thing," suddenly things started to click. So I guess, you know, at this point, someone might be thinking, "Oh, damn, I've... Like no one says I'm good at anything, and I feel like I don't have any skills that are useful to society." What, what, what would you say to that person?

Chris Sparks 1:39:52 Well, I assume we're talking to a 21-year-old. And I mean, it's very easy, again, I'm 35, to sit back and say, "Man, like I thought I knew everything, but I didn't know anything." Is what a wonderful opportunity to... Like you have a lifetime of compounding in front of you. What would you like to be good at? You know, I think of this as like stepping back to the meta level of we can decide what to prioritize. We can decide what we want out of life. What do you want to want to prioritize? Is like you can, you can pretty much do anything at this point, and the stakes are very low. So if y- the younger you are thinking about what are the things that benefit from a lifetime of compounding, building an audience is probably one of those. Building many skills, particularly interpersonal skills-

Ali Abdaal 1:40:40 Yeah

Chris Sparks 1:40:40 ... skills of, you know, personal organization and management, of capturing and sharing ideas. These are things that tend to build upon themselves. And the good place to start is like what are the things that you're already really interested in? It's this classic notion that tomorrow's companies is today's tin- tinkering around in the garage. Like what's the thing that you can't help but doing? Don't worry about tr- like, oh, it's not a job. It's not something I make a living from it. Just keep doing that, and particularly finding ways to share what you're doing with others. Like naturally, opportunities will emerge. I, I tend to think that a lot of opportunities are at the intersections. We worry all the time. It's like, oh, I'm about... I'm the same, same as everyone else. But really it's like you are the only person with your unique set of skills and experiences. There's gonna come some sort of intersection like you found, like medicine and content creation. For me, like games and investing, or games and founding companies that like I can speak to both that very few people can, right? Like there's lots of people who've played games, lots of people who founded companies. Very few people who've done it a high level at both. There's a... So thinking about like these intersections that will naturally emerge by just optimizing for what's interesting to you. And I really think it's like, it sounds weird to say, but like taking some of the pressure off is just like keep doing what you're doing, and if something's working, do a little bit more of that.

Ali Abdaal 1:42:12 Yeah. I think it's this idea that if you're, as long as you're taking steps in a direction that is broadly aligned with a thing that you actually want, then- Something good will probably happen further down the line.

Chris Sparks 1:42:22 Yeah. It's often said, but I, I thoroughly take it to heart, is trusting the process. The main thing to optimize for is continuous improvement.

Ali Abdaal 1:42:31 Nice. So we've got our 21-year-old. They've been told, "You know what? You know, when I have a conversation with you, I feel, I feel quite inspired. I feel like, you know, maybe you could become a coach." I've heard people can become coaches. Like, what would be the next step that they would take to set up this hypothetical coaching business?

Chris Sparks 1:42:45 I actually wanna take a step back on this one just to... I, I think it's always very easy to be sitting on our pedestal here, and it's like, "Well, I've got it all figured out, and you're 21 and you don't know anything." So I, I would like to share a little bit about where I was at 21.

Ali Abdaal 1:43:00 Yeah.

Chris Sparks 1:43:00 You know, I, I had some level of, let's, let's call it, like, cultural success. I was already making money in poker. I, you know, had extremely good grades. Like, I was, you know, most likely to succeed, change the world, all that sort of stuff. Like, people are like, "Oh, this guy is, like, smart. He's going places." But, like, internally I felt like a total imposter. And so I graduated, I moved up to Detroit, um, I was sort of on this, like, hiring leave while I waited for the auto industry and the economy to get their ish together, and I didn't see anyone. Like, I just sat inside for weeks. The only person I would see was the guy who was delivering my pizza and my two liter of soda. My only friends were on the internet. Nothing wrong with that, but I certainly was lacking for social interaction. Really, you know, just unhappy, but didn't understand that I was unhappy or understand why. And, you know, I was playing, playing this game, but it, it just felt like an escape for me. And, you know, it's very easy to say that there was, like, this one moment where I had the proverbial gun to my head and my entire life turned around, but really it was just, like, a set of realizations that like, well, everything that I'm doing is a choice. Like, what if I made other choices? I could do, I could do other things. And, you know, starting to realize, well, I'm playing this game, poker. I'm pretty good at it, but what if I was even better at it? What, what would that, what would that look like? Well, you know, falling asleep in the middle of a poker session probably isn't helping me. What if I improved my energy levels? I start sleeping in more regular hours, and I actually go into the gym for the first time in my life, and I learn about nutrition, that maybe eating a pizza every day, especially when you're lactose intolerant, isn't the best thing to be doing. And it's not that, like, I was really, really into nutrition and performance and sleep. It's like, well, I wanna be one of the best poker players in the world. Well, what are the other best poker players in the world doing? Okay, well, if I want this goal, I want to do that too. Like saying if I wanna be a cognitive athlete, I needed to be a physical athlete. So treating myself as someone who was important, as someone who was doing something important. And everything really started to turn around from that. It's like, whoa, my energy levels are better. I can start... I start making better decisions. I start making better decisions, my, my life goes better. Oh, I start making more money. I can do more things. I have more opportunities. I just start creating this positive spiral. And I'm not saying that anyone here is, like, not doing it or, like, doesn't have it, but it really all just starts with this decision to, like, I'm gonna try to get a little bit better today. I'm gonna try to do something small to move towards my goals. And just every day I got a little bit closer to, all right, I wanna be one of the best poker players in the world. What's that next thing that I have to do? So I coulda done anything. I mean, I was like, oh, what if I... I don't, I don't think my singing voice is particularly good, but hey, maybe I wanna be a Broadway singer. All right. What does that look like? I probably need to be training my voice. I need to be thinking about performance at, on a stage, all this type of stuff. But, like, just having the goal to go after, the goal itself isn't that much more important than just a direction to head.

Ali Abdaal 1:46:21 Mm.

Chris Sparks 1:46:21 So we're talking about this, this 21-year-old self, like, not needing to have it figured out, but have a general direction. Like, what's something that's important to you that you want to accomplish? And just be taking regular steps towards it. I, I think that it seems to me like success, like what, like you have to be making it, has just gotten younger and younger. I mean, this is weird from someone who's, like, had his career peak at age 23 to say, but, like, you have all the time in the world. There was this one moment where, you know, I, I retired from poker and I was sitting on a beach in Barcelona saying, like, "Wow, have I just, like, had my life peak at age 23? Like, what am I gonna do now?" It's like, is everything else just gonna be downhill from here and I'm just gonna be, like, one of those child actors just, like, hoping to, like, you know, celebrate my big moment once again? And realized, oh, like, I have a lifetime to do other things. Let's see what those other things look like. So yeah, that, that's a few of the ways that I've thought about it, and with the benefit of whenever I'm having a conversation like this, in the back of my mind it's, you know, what are the things that I would've liked my younger self to hear? It's not... it never comes down to, like, oh, you should try harder or do more. It's just like, trust the process

Chris Sparks 1:47:40 and you'll get there.

Ali Abdaal 1:47:41 Yeah, that was something I wanted to, I wa- I wanted to bring up from something we discussed previously, this idea of so we all have this bias towards the status quo where let's say I'm watching Netflix for three hours a night and I'm convincing myself that, like, actually, actually this is a good decision. My life is going fine otherwise. I'm good, and actually this three hours is good for self-care and it makes me happy, et cetera, et cetera. Now some people would say that, mm, that's a lot of time you're wasting, three hours of your life. Like, when you're lying on your death bed, are you really gonna be glad that you spent those three hours, et cetera, watching Netflix? And then that person might think, oh, okay, fine, maybe I'll only do two hours of Netflix and one hour of, like, something more productive. But that can often look like trying harder, i.e. doing more or, like, working harder. And then there's a regret people also have of like, "I wish I hadn't worked so hard." So it's like, how, how do you think about this balance between, I guess, almost... And I kinda wrote down here sort of a, a spectrum on my notebook, like, so ambition and happiness on two other end, on two ends of the spectrum of like enjoying the, and basking in the present moment right now, and maybe going, falling into the status quo bias. But actually, life is pretty good. I feel day, day-to-day I'm pretty happy versus I want to be moving forward in a way that my future self will thank me for.

Chris Sparks 1:48:45 Uh, this is such a, such a complex topic. One example that comes to mind for me, I, I come back to this, this concept of the most direct path. I wanted to be funnier.

Ali Abdaal 1:48:55 [laughs]

Chris Sparks 1:48:55 Believe it or not, I think I was somewhat successful. You can be the judge of that. But, uh, I thought, "You know, hey, I want to be funnier. What's the most direct path to become funnier is to perform some comedy." That through this forcing function of needing to be on stage and make people laugh, presumably I'll learn a few things about the art of making people, making people laugh. And that'll translate to my conversations, to my writing, to my day-to-day. Well, there were the... If I start with this kind of abstract goal of I want to be funnier, there's lots of different things that I could have justified towards that goal. For example, I wanna fire up Netflix and watch every single comedy special on there and see what all these comedians are doing. And like, well, that is a path, but it's a very passive path. It's a very easygoing, convenient path. I bet if I raise the stakes and I stand on the stage and, like, I'm actually telling the jokes as opposed to, like, watching someone else tell the jokes and be like, "Oh, I could do that better," I bet I would learn faster, right? My feedback loop would be much tighter and I thought this was gonna be funny, and it's crickets. Okay, let's figure that out. So it comes back to that question of, like, yes, like, things are going well, but are you on the most direct path towards your goals? This doesn't always mean that you need to do more or try harder. Sometimes that might be true, but it's more as like, well, like, how is watching Netflix, using this example, on the path towards your goal? 'Cause it's very easy to justify it as like, "I'm relaxing, I'm recharging, I'm getting culture," et cetera. It's like, well, if you weren't watching Netflix, what would you be doing with that time instead? These are always just interesting questions to ask and perhaps the interesting experiments to run. It's like, hey, what if you spent that two hours doing something else? And you see the end of the day, how do you feel about the day? And let's... How do you feel, feel differently? Just be curious about that, 'cause with all of these things, it's not that they're good, it's that are they plus EV, right?

Ali Abdaal 1:50:59 Yep.

Chris Sparks 1:51:00 Compared to all the other things that you could be doing, are they the best thing that you could be doing? Think about things like Twitter, which there's classic upsides to using Twitter, but it's very easy to hit these diminishing marginal returns. So it's not saying, like, is an extra hour spent on Twitter useful? Is that, is it more useful, more EV than how you could spend that hour otherwise? And this doesn't need to be that, like, every time you're like, you know, "Bad Chris, bad Ali. You, you, you binged that series. Like, you're, you're a waste man. You're a failure." It's more, well, uh, I watch Netflix. That happened. I, you know, no regrets it happened. But would I wanna make that decision if I was faced with that decision every time? 'Cause that's the thing, is like these decisions echo out in eternity. Every time you sit down with your partner for a long night of Netflix, you make it more likely that the next date night is gonna be another Netflix night. Is that what you want? And I find that stepping out from the, like, rather than thinking about this individual decision, like, what is the type of decision that I'd like to make allows me to separate out my identity from it.

Ali Abdaal 1:52:11 Mm.

Chris Sparks 1:52:11 And I can more think about, hey, well, on average, I like to do something. This is personal. I like to do something that's a little bit more active. This could be active learning and that I'm doing something with my hands or I'm having some sort of conversation creating an artifact. Or it could be actually activity that I'm outside with the sun in my face and I'm moving my body, for God's sakes. What it, whatever that is. And think, well, I wanna be more active. How can I make it more likely that I'm active in the future? I can make it easier to be active on the same way. It's like, well, what gets in the way of being active? Well, man, there's that new Netflix series coming out and the algorithm is really, really good at serving me up what I could be doing. Well, what if I had the experiment of I gave away my TV for the week and I see what happens? Or I sign out of my Netflix account, or at least I have to, like, remember my password, or I give my password to my partner and I say, "Hey, I'm not allowed to watch Netflix today. Don't give me the password. I can't log in." All these different things you can try, not that you have to commit to forever, but say, "Hey, let's see what happens."

Ali Abdaal 1:53:11 I guess it sounds like, you know, we were talking about this, this spectrum between, like, ambition and happiness and stuff. And actually, maybe it's kind of, s- strikes me as potentially a bit of a false dichotomy. Kind of like I spoke to another podcast guest, Gro- we gues- uh, Grace Beverley about the fake two sides of the spectrum between productivity and self-care. And it's easy to convince ourselves that actually those three hours of watching Netflix is self-care, and therefore it's good, and therefore no one can possibly argue with that because, like, oh my God, self-care and mental health and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it's easy to convince ourselves that, like, oh, I don't wanna be one of those people that, like, every day is like, I'm sitting there and hustling on my business for three hours. Like, screw that. And it's very easy to fall into this black and white thinking to then justify the lazy life choice of sitting there watching Netflix for three hours. And I guess it sounds like just about running the experiment. What if it was two hours one day and you spend that hour doing something else that works towards a goal that you have? If a goal that you have isn't to watch everything in the Netflix catalog or to watch every TikTok that's, that's been made in the last, like, decade-

Chris Sparks 1:54:06 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:54:07 ... then what is a goal that you have, and could you potentially y- even try working on that 15 minutes in that, in that time? 'Cause what I find a lot of people saying, you know, people in my team, people in my YouTuber academy, people in the audience that I speak to, I, I fall into this pattern myself, is we claim to have these goals, and yet when it comes to being like, okay- Where am I gonna, where am I gonna find the time for this? We set these arbitrary rules like, "Oh, I need three hours of self-care each night."

Chris Sparks 1:54:30 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 1:54:32 Ah, and as, and it's somewhat unfashionable to say in this day and age where it's, oh my God, like I, I couldn't possibly argue with someone's, ah, lived experience of how much self-care they need. But I always feel a bit like whenever I find myself making up these arbitrary rules for myself thinking that, like, "Oh, I need dot, dot, dot in my life. I need to spend 15 minutes in the spa after every gym session," do I really? [laughs] Probably not. Like, if I didn't have it, I'd probably survive. Humans have been, been s- surviving, been surviving without a spa, without Netflix, without TikTok for millennia. Like, it's actually not that hard, and I think it's very easy to convince ourselves that that's the case.

Chris Sparks 1:55:04 I think you're hitting on something really valuable is that our language about how we describe our experience can be very revealing. So when you hear phrases like, "I need," or, "I should," or, "I have to," I think it's very revealing about things that we're assuming to be facts that are really just opinions. So it is... Another, another way of thinking about this is the, ah, the opposite, right? So we're worried about imperfection, so we don't put something out into the world. Well, what that's hiding is this need to be perfect. Uh, what's, what's, what's behind that need? Why, what, what purpose is it serving? 'Cause there is a real purpose. The... It's not that any behavior is a good form of self-care or a bad form of self-care. It's more looking at, like, what are, what are the assumptions behind this behavior? Is this, is this true? Is this something that I just believe to be true? Have I, have I proven it? I think where I see a lot of people going astray when it comes to things like recovery and taking breaks is that they do things that they can justify as taking a break, but really aren't recharging. It's more of a, a disassociative. It's more of an unplugging, a distraction, a getting away. So, you know, for me, I, I've, I've had the benefit over the years of finding there are things that actually recharge me better than passive consumption. So I try to prioritize, pre-commit, create forcing functions around those things. But I'm only one person. It is, can't say that the things that are my form of self-care are everyone's form. Uh, the only way to, to do that is, is to try. And again, I'm, I'm a broken record, but, like, this stuff is just very simple to explain, but hard to apply. You figure out what works. You figure out how to make this more of a recurring thing by making it easier. You figure out what gets in the way of the thing that works. How do you make that less likely to happen? So I, I think that, yeah, self-care, taking breaks is so, so important. Something that I talk about often is that your, your best ideas don't come to you at your desk, right? You don't just, like, stare at the text editor and magic happens. A lot of productive happenings like ideas, you know, generation, synthesis happens if you're doing something that's completely unrelated to the thing you're doing. When you're, when you're kicking a ball, when you're taking a walk, when you're sitting in a sauna, when you're eating a delicious bite that maybe you cooked, maybe you're enjoying, that a lot of these other experiences in your life that are unrelated can't be decoupled from the thing that you're trying to do. That's why it's like this thing is productive or this thing is unproductive, I think, is a really unproductive argument. All that I can do is say is, like, well, when things are seeming to go well, these are the other things that are happening. My hypothesis must be that these things help me in some way. I'm gonna keep doing that. Or if, like, well, I notice that when I skip a workout or when I watch an entire Netflix series or when I don't go outside or when I start by checking my email instead of on my top priority or I don't call my mom, like, all these things that the day doesn't go so well that, you know, perhaps doing these things or not doing these things would be really helpful. And that's why, you know, you test them and you find out.

Ali Abdaal 1:58:27 Mm. One of the things that I li- loved about your stuff on the internet, but just before I started working with you, was you have this performance assessment thing online, which is this, like, free quiz thing that I did, and I was a bit skeptical. I was like, oh, performance assessment. Well, like, what is this? It's gonna be some, like, marketing thing. It's gonna get me into a funnel, et cetera.

Chris Sparks 1:58:44 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 1:58:44 Then I, and then I did it. I was like, damn, this is actually good, and you've given me your free book at the end of it, like, completely for free. And I, I looked through it and I was like, "Okay, I need to pay this guy to become my coach." What is this performance assessment and how can people take it?

Chris Sparks 1:58:57 Thanks. Yeah, the, the challenge that we always have is I only work with 12 people at a time, but I wanna help everyone. So this is a tool that we put a lot of effort into creating. The goal of tell us about what you're doing in your life, and we will tell you, here is the best next action you can take to improve your performance. So having the benefit of working with over 100 top performers, you start to identify these recurring elements. I usually put these elements into, to four main buckets. So it's vision, prioritization, systems, and presence. And so we d- we drill down, say vision essentially is like what do you want out of your life? Are you living a life of alignment? Prioritization, you know, do you know what's important to you? Do those things come first? Systems, are you making what you want to do easier to do? Are you streamlining things? You creating processes? Presence, are you doing what's necessary term- typically in terms of habits to show up as your best self? And we essentially apply a bottleneck framework to this. So thinking about theory of constraints is like, well, first, if you don't know what's important to you, well, start by figuring out what's important to you. Don't worry about all the other stuff. If you're doing the same thing over and over again and just not making it easier, okay, this thing that you're doing over and over, like, how do we create a process around that? How do we create something that improves? If you feel like your energy levels are not high enough to do what you want to do, okay, let's start there. And you start to drill down into these four key elements and it reveals, here's the one thing that if you did would have an immediate impact on your life. You get more done. You feel more happy and fulfilled at the end of the day. Forget all the other stuff. Start there. 'Cause I think that's a really big challenge that we have in the productivity performance space is that there's just unlimited opportunities for improvement, and vast majority of them do not move the needle. Why? Because they don't attack the bottleneck. They don't, they aren't the thing that's most holding you back.

Ali Abdaal 2:00:52 Mm.

Chris Sparks 2:00:52 So that's always the question that I get is like, "Hey, Chris, you talk about systems. You talk about attention, focus, energy, time management, planning, reflection," all these things. Like, oh, that's a lot of things. Like, where do I start? Start by taking the performance assessment and we'll give you that one thing that you need that will maximally move you towards your goals. And that's the thing is once you get that up to a level, say, okay, improve your energy level, all of a sudden everything will become easier and you can move on to the next thing. So it's like that's, that's the key I find to growth is figuring out what's that one thing that if I changed, everything becomes easier. So that's why we created it.

Ali Abdaal 2:01:30 Brilliant. Yeah. And we'll put a link to that in the video description, in the show notes. Completely free. Free e-book. Like, you make enough money from the other things that you don't need to charge people $10 here and there for PDFs. So [laughs] like, basically everyone should try this, 'cause, 'cause it's actually really good. I'm gonna, I'm gonna actually do this. I'm just thinking that, like, this would actually make for a really interesting YouTube video. I was just pr- sort of thinking, what would the title of this video be? Like, I don't know, 24 questions to level up your life, or some clickbaity title like that.

Chris Sparks 2:01:55 Yeah. It's, it's, it's, so it's 20 questions, and it gets at, all right, here are the things that I've seen every peak performer do who's successful. And I take this quiz myself every quarter to see, "Oh, yeah, like, that thing works really well."

Ali Abdaal 2:02:10 Yeah.

Chris Sparks 2:02:10 "Maybe I should start doing that again, or maybe I should do a little bit more of that." Because I, just like everyone else, forget things that seem to work really well.

Ali Abdaal 2:02:17 Yeah.

Chris Sparks 2:02:17 So this is always a good check-in with myself. It's like, these are the things that I know that worked. Like, what are the things that I should come back to?

Ali Abdaal 2:02:23 Mm. These 20 questions leveled up my life. Something like that. Yeah. It's a video. So I've got two videos from this. Number one, how to stop overthinking. We're talking about the idea of plus EV, the idea of thinking in experiments, the idea of status quo bias, the idea of fear as a compass, and the consistency thing. Uh, and then we're doing this other one on 20, 20 questions to change your life or whatever the [laughs] title of the video's gonna be. Chris, thank you so much. This has been absolutely wonderful. Where can people find out more about you?

Chris Sparks 2:02:47 Absolute honor, Ali. I have so much fun talking to you, and I really respect how you go beyond, you know, productivity tactics and techniques and thinking about, why are we doing the things that we're doing? Like, how is what we're doing on a day-to-day basis getting us to the place we're doing? I, I really appreciate the work that you're doing. The best place to get ahold of me is through my company, Forcing Function, so forcingfunction.com. We work with 12 investors and executives at a time. We actually have a very exciting offering coming up. Um, twice a year, we offer a group coaching program called Team Performance Training, where I walk through my complete system for peak performance. So here's how to set goals. Here's how to create systems. Here are the things you need to have to maximize your time, energy, attention, accelerate your learning. And then we have some really cool, like, you know, group coaching exercises to actually implement these things into your life instead of just reading about them. So if you're interested in that, go to teamperformancetraining.com. Another great place to start, as Ali said, is our performance assessment. You can find that at forcingfunction.com/assessment. Probably the best place to find me on social media would be Twitter. My handle on all the networks is @sparksremarks. And if you wanna email me directly, my email is chris@my website.

Ali Abdaal 2:03:58 Chris, thank you so much. This has been wonderful. Have a great day, and, uh, we'll see you next time. All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are gonna be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode. That would be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode. So thanks for watching. Uh, do hit the subscribe button if you aren't already, and I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.