Productivity Without Limits | Chris Sparks

A good rule of thumb is that people chronically underestimate intangible value, right? There's familiarity that I'm sure a lot of people have at Goodhart's Law that once we have a measure, it ceases to be a reliable measure, 'cause we over-optimize around that. Think about, you know, you're talking about Instagram, you know, think about once you decide that followers is an important metric, you start to over-optimize towards followers, versus thinking about, "How do I increase engagement? How do I get these people to convert to something that I want them to do?" Et cetera. That, um, if we can understand what are these things that are bringing intangible value to us, things that we can't necessarily measure but have an effect spread across our entire system, we can find ways to unlock hidden value, because everyone is over-tied to things that are very easy to reduce to a number. (wind blows)

I am joined by Chris Sparks, founder of The Forcing Function and former top 20 online poker players in the world. We are talking all things productivity. Chris, welcome to the show.

Hey, Chris. Hey, guys. Uh, thank you so much for having me.

Absolute pleasure to have you on. Recently had one of your peers, Tiago Forte, talking about tools. Also had Nat Eliason, host of, uh, the Made You Think podcast saying that you and Tiago are the only two people in the world that he listens to about productivity. So no, no pressure, mate. No pressure. (laughs)

Thanks. I'll do my best. (laughs)

(laughs) So why don't you give us a little bit of a background? Before we delve into the, the dark world of productivity, why don't we, why don't we hear a little bit about you?

Yeah, certainly. So I kind of got into this through the side door. Um, as you mentioned, I think a lot of people know me for my online poker career. Um, I still play at a pretty high level, but I had my, my peak, uh, right before the event we call Black Friday, so, uh, you know, 2008 to 2011. And I learned quite a bit, um, during that time about what it takes to perform at the highest level, and I realized that the people who were doing things that I saw as shaping the world were all becoming entrepreneurs, some of my other, some of my, uh, poker, former poker players, um, friends included. And I wanted to find a way that I could take all of the things that I had learned about peak performance and find a way to accelerate the growth of these people who I thought were putting things into the world that needed to exist. And so that's how I stumbled upon founding The Forcing Function, where I take everything that I have learned about how to produce at a very high level, so become the sort of person who can accomplish anything that you want, um, whether that's installing habits or systems or just removing roadblocks to accomplishing one's goals. And I've created a system which I've put together in my, uh, just released book, uh, Experiment Without Limits, which I'm happy to talk about. Uh, I work on, do workshops, I do one-on-one coaching, and it's, it's something that allows me to have, you know, really interesting conversations just like this one, um, get to learn something new every day.