The Productivity Show: Poker Pro Productivity Secrets
I sat down with Thanh Pham, Founder of Asian Efficiency and host of The Productivity Show to share my frameworks for performing and producing at the highest levels.
Audio recording, show notes, conversation transcript, and resources mentioned below.
Show Notes:
Chris shares his top resources for productivity [2:10]
What made Chris realize he could be one of the best players in the world? [8:07]
What sets aside a top-ranked player? [11:17]
How does Chris navigate the role of luck in poker? [14:14]
What was it like living in the Hollywood Poker Mansion? [19:15]
What role does timing play in success? [22:49]
What “waves” does Chris anticipate in the future? [26:22]
How did Chris transition to advising successful founders and investors? [29:13]
What concepts from poker did Chris apply to achieving success in his business and personal life? [32:04]
Why is the lens of “expected value” so important for making great decisions? [37:10]
How would Chris assess and launch a new product? [45:10]
How does Chris plan his extensive travels? [49:00]
How does Chris describe his life philosophy? [56:29]
What is the meaning behind the company name “Forcing Function?”[59:05]
How does Chris set long-term goals? [1:03:28]
What is the emerging frontier in productivity? [1:08:06]
How to apply to work directly with Chris [1:11:34]
Conversation Transcript
Note: transcript is slightly edited for clarity.
Introduction (00:01): Thanks to Indeed for supporting The Productivity Show. Indeed makes it easy to connect with your applicants, and Indeed is the hiring platform where you can attract, interview, and hire all in one place. So start hiring right now with a seventy-five dollar sponsored job credit to upgrade your job post at indeed.com/tps. Offer is valid only for a limited time. Thanks also to Novo for supporting the podcast. Novo is powerfully simple business checking. You're making something new with your business, and to support you, Novo built a new kind of business checking. Get your free business checking account in just ten minutes at novo.co/tps.
Thanh (00:46): Welcome to The Productivity Show, a podcast where we believe that you can get the important things done without having to sacrifice your health, family, and things that matter to you. My name's Thanh Pham, I'm the founder and CEO of Asian Efficiency, where we help people become more productive at work and in life, and today I'm joined by a friend and a special guest. His name is Chris Sparks, he's the founder of Forcing Function, where he helps executives achieve peak performance. And what's interesting about Chris is that he is a former top twenty poker player in the world, and what makes him unique is that he takes lessons and frameworks he'd learned to become one of the best at poker to help others perform at the highest level and make better decisions. So we're going to be diving into Chris's productivity methodologies and strategies so you can use them to perform at the highest level as well.
Welcome to the show, Chris.
Chris (01:38): Hi, Thanh. Hi, guys. Very excited to be here.
Thanh (01:41): I'm excited to do this, because I've hung out with you quite a bit, and I think you have a very interesting way of thinking and interesting way of approaching scenarios and how you make decisions, so I'm really excited to start diving deeper into that, but before we start doing that, one of the things we like to do at The Productivity Show is have our guest share some of their favorite productivity resources. So maybe in like ninety seconds or less, can you share some of your favorites?
Chris (02:08): Sure. I tried quite a few. For reading I always want to direct someone to our performance library, that's a categorized list of all the books, articles, and podcasts that I've found useful in my journey. That's forcingfunction.com/library. And this timing is actually perfect, 'cause I just put out the 2022 edition of our top resources for optimizing productivity and performance. We'll link to that in the show notes. A hundred things that I've found super useful. I would highlight three things that I don't think that you guys are using, or if not you should be. First, in the new year, I recognize that focus is just incredibly important. I've been letting too many distractions creep up into my life, and I think the best tool out there for this is Freedom, to set limits on what you can access, how often, when, syncs across all your devices. Really well-done program.
One that I've recommended to a lot of friends that they've found useful is a food sensitivity test. I like the one that's made by EverlyWell. And what's cool is just with a couple drops of blood you can find out what foods your body does not react well to. And the results almost always surprise you. For me, this is how I found out I was lactose intolerant. My friend found out that he was mildly intolerant of strawberries, or super intolerant of broccoli. Little things that you wouldn't expect that if you cut these foods out of your life, your energy will really improve.
And the final one, I actually just set this up yesterday. I was using a program called "unroll me" to really cleanse my email of the thousands of subscriptions that I like to have access to, but don't want cluttering. And I switched to a tool called "Clean.Email" which so far one day in has saved me a lot of sanity, and I am very excited to be back to my usual ten emails a day.
Thanh (03:59): Yeah, ten emails a day is a lot more manageable than probably a hundred fifty a day. So I totally get that. And for everyone that's listening, we'll link to everything that Chris just mentioned in the show notes, so don't worry if you missed it. But Chris, I wanna start diving deeper into your story, because as a former top twenty poker player in the world, like, how did you get there? I know you graduated college, you ended up moving to Detroit, and somehow you became a poker player. Can you share with everyone how that came about?
Chris (04:30): Yeah. I'll try to give the highlights, and then we can dive in. I've always been very interested in games. I think that games are a very good sandbox for understanding human behavior. So before poker, I played video games. Most notably, Ants. It was a game that Microsoft made back in the day on MSN Gaming Zone. Shout out to gamers out there. And I actually was one of the best, and finally became the best Ants player in the world, in a small community. I started getting into chess, and then later card games, notably gin. Gin is a two-player form of rummy, where I got a perfect rating on Yahoo Games in the equivalent of ELO. Some of my gin friends, I was a sixteen-year-old playing on my dial-up internet in my, you know, family's living room, essentially, where if someone called I would get kicked off my game. Some of my gin friends told me, "Hey, there's this new game called poker, and you can enter into one of these freeroll tournaments of ten thousand people, and if you finish in the top ten you get a thousand bucks." And so for a sixteen-year-old, this seemed like a pretty good way to spend the day, compared to, you know, if you're gonna play video games, you might as well try to make some money.
So I had a nice kind of leg up when I arrived at Ohio State, and this guy named Chris Moneymaker had just won the World Series of Poker main event, and poker is on ESPN seemingly 24/7. So this became a really nice way to not only hang out with my friends and get a little social status, but to pay off my college tuition, 'cause I was paying my own way. I ended up in Detroit because I had a dream to create television commercials. I thought this was going to be my purpose here, and everything that I was doing from my marketing internships and leadership to taking a minor in psychology was designed to become the best television commercial maker there was. I even got to participate in a Super Bowl "Life Comes At You Fast" commercial when I was interning at Nationwide. That was really fun. I got to meet MC Hammer and everything. Anyway, I graduated in 2008. Not the best time to go into the auto industry, for those of you guys who are coming out of college around then, and I end up in a hiring purgatory.
So I'm sitting in Detroit, one week away from when I'm supposed to start, and I get the call that, "Hey, actually we're on a hiring freeze, and the government says we can't bring on any new employees, you're just gonna have to hold on." And I said, "Well, I don't know anyone in Detroit. Why don't I play some poker?" I was super-involved and active, kind of like that annoying overachiever kid in college. So all of a sudden I had all of this free time on my hands from previously having to forego sleep in order to play poker. So, well, what would it look like if I treated poker as a full-time thing? That I did this as if I was going to do it for a living, at least until the real world comes calling? And when five months later Ford says, "Hey, we're finally ready for you to start," I was making what my annual salary would have been every month. And, like, "Well, maybe I won't take that job after all." And then another eighteen months after I had moved out to L.A. and got a poker house with some of my friends, I was ranked in the top twenty in the world.
It was kind of a whirlwind, but it was definitely a progression of just continuing to double down on what worked.
Thanh (07:53): So what I'm curious about, then, is how did you know that you had a knack for poker? Was it because you were winning a lot of money, or was it because you loved the game? What was it that you knew, like, this is for me?
Chris (08:07): I think that it's a combination of the two. So I'm really big on this concept of feedback loops, where you do something and you get feedback from your environment on how you were doing. And the nice thing about poker is that it has what's called very tight feedback loops. So when I was playing online poker, I was playing up to thirty games at a time, which means I was making a decision less than every second for hours at a time. Maybe I would make ten thousand decisions in a day, and each decision that I would make I would get immediate feedback on if my assumptions were correct, or if I needed to further calibrate those assumptions. So I was able to really converge on a winning strategy quickly, and had a lot of solid evidence of the chart going up and to the right, that what I am doing is working.
Obviously, there's deviations. I only won about fifty-two percent of the time on average, so every time I sat down to play poker, I'd win about fifty-two percent of the time, and if you aren't tracking carefully, that could feel like it's a coin flip. You could easily fool yourself into thinking you're the best player in the world or that you're the worst player in the world, but over time with enough evidence I was able to say, "Hey, what I'm doing is working, I'm gonna continue to double down." But I think you really hit the nail on the head where I just loved poker. I was totally obsessed with it. I had all poker friends, I had poker dreams, it was all I wanted to do. And you know, I think for a small window of time when I was eighteen to twenty-three, this was the perfect thing for me to be doing, and everything that I saw in my environment reminded me of ways that I could become better at poker. And that extended to my personal development, as well. I started to recognize energy leaks, and so, "Okay, maybe I shouldn't be eating an entire pizza and drinking a two-liter of soda, and maybe I should actually get some sunshine on my face or see the gym once in a while."
Like, I didn't wanna do those things before, right. I'm a gamer, I want to sit inside on my computer. But if my goal is to become one of the best in the world, if I want to be a cognitive athlete, I need to be a physical athlete as well. I need to treat my body as a temple. So all of these aspects of growing myself, they had a direction, they had a reason for me to push through the pain. And that obsession, that passion for wanting to get better and just loving it really allowed me to propel through a lot of these blockages.
Thanh (10:36): So what's the difference then between someone who's, let's say, a top twenty poker player, like yourself, and someone who's maybe in the top five thousand, as an example? Like you just mentioned, you know, "I was winning fifty-two percent of the games." Right? Which is a very small edge. It's almost like a little bit more than half of the time, right? And if the math is right then over a long period of time you're winning more than you're losing, which is a great place to be in, obviously. But how does one separate, like, the best, like the top twenty in the world, from other players, then? Is it because you were more diligent about measuring your performance, reviewing your hands? Like what's different?
Chris (11:17): This is an incredibly nuanced question. I gave my best attempt at answering this in a post I wrote about my poker career called "Play to Win: Meta-Skills in High Stakes Poker." It's about a five thousand word opus, so yeah. I'm gonna try my best to share some highlights from that. First, the point that you made I think extends to life, in I think a lot of life are small edges compounded. So looking at your life as a system, looking at your life as a process, it's always what is a small improvement, what is a small tweak or iteration that I can make today, because that becomes the foundation for tomorrow. And I think that that is what leads to someone becoming one of the best at something, versus someone who's just nearly good or even great, is that they're continually compounding, continually looking for small sources of advantage that they can then build upon.
And I know this first hand because I worked with some of the other best players in the world as a coach. I coached over a hundred players, some of them for several years. And I think that was a big part of what allowed me to rise to the top as well, as I just had this broad sample size of what other really good players were doing, and more importantly, how other really good players were approaching the game differently. So I could kind of cobble together the best parts of what other people were doing into my own process. And a few things that I saw that were very common were essentially that they only played when they knew what their advantage was. This is a key concept from poker—that if we play in a marginal spot, we're diluting our edge.
So this means game selection, only playing in games that you can win, only playing in the situations that you have evidence that you can win, and generally saying 'no' to almost everything else. This is obviously a key concept for productivity as well, that life is this gigantic smorgasbord of opportunities, and if we try to eat everything we're just gonna gorge ourselves. We need to say 'no' to the vast majority of things. And that's what you do as a poker player. You say 'no' to the vast majority of hands. I fold about eighty percent of the time, especially when I'm out of position and there's a lot of players left to act. You say 'no' to the vast majority of poker games, because you're not clear how you're going to win. But when you say 'yes,' you're all-in, you're a high conviction type aggressive, and I think that really extends to a lot of life, is that if you're very careful with the opportunities that you pursue, you can pursue them with full fervor.
Thanh (13:59): So, did you keep a journal as you were playing, and did you review, like, your hands every time you lost, or was it more of like, "Hey, I lost." And you know, "Hopefully it's going to be better next time." Like, what was your approach like?
Chris (14:14): Yeah. I like to share this concept of the confident, critical continuum. So I think this really extends to entrepreneurship and just mental health, as well. So when you're playing poker, it is very dog-eat-dog. Right? You're going against people who are giving it their all, and it's a really psychological game. So just like dogs can sense weakness, if another player senses that you're off your game, they're gonna go after you. So it's important that when you are at the table, whether this is in-person, at a casino, or in a home game, or online, because you can— There's still another person on the other side of the screen, right? You can't see them, but you can sense them, that you are giving off—You are emanating strength. That you are sitting down a hundred percent confident that I am the best player at this table, and today is my day, so you guys better get the heck out of my way.
At the same time, this hubristic attitude, if you embody it throughout your entire life, is not going to serve you very well. Because, again, feedback loops. Your environment is continually giving you feedback on things that you can be improving, and so if you're blind to that because, "Hey, I'm the greatest thing on this earth," you're gonna miss a lot of those signals, and that's certainly not going to be true.
But the important thing is that you have the separation, that as soon as you cash in your chips and you walk away from your table, you move all the way to the other side of the continuum and you become a-hundred-percent critical. You assume, "I just made a million mistakes. It doesn't mean if I made a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million dollars in that session. I made a million mistakes in that session. Let me find what those mistakes are. I'm going to go in there, I'm going to pick everything apart, and I'm not going to get up until I've found something that I've done wrong and know what I'm going to do differently next time."
And for me, it's important to note that poker players play industry hours. A lot of my poker sessions go really late. 3:00 AM, 4:00 AM, 5:00 AM. So it's important for me to have a separation, and what I do is any time I have a situation while I'm playing that I am not sure what the best play was, I do something and it's my best guess, but I think I could have done something else, I note down all of the details of that hand, I capture it, I save it for later, and then I don't think about it again until the end of the session. As best as I can. Knowing that when I wake up the next day and I feel fresh, I'm gonna have all the context I need—it's like a mental bookmark, to return to that moment and figure out what I could've done better.
So yeah, it's—I think it's a really important concept to emphasize, that you really need to be auditing, reflecting on what you can be doing better, but that time needs to be time-boxed away from that time that you're actually executing.
Thanh (17:16): Yeah. And that reminds me a lot of professional sports. I'm a big fan of the NBA, and one of the things that they never do is as soon as the game ends, whether it's a finals game or just a regular-season game, they never review the game the night of, whether you won or lost, especially if you lost. They never review the game the day of, but they always review it the next day, and it's because usually after a game people are very emotional, they can't really critically think about a lot of stuff. So they always save it for another day, and what you just shared just kind of reminded me of the like the timing of the review process in that sense is very important as well. Like, you don't wanna do it when you're highly emotional. You don't wanna do it when you just lost a game or you just won a game, even, because you might be a little bit biased in many ways.
Chris (18:03): Hundred-percent true. I think that one of our biggest challenges and opportunities as executives is to maintain objectivity. And it's important to have these systems in place, but also to recognize when we are in this state of mind to be objective about ourselves.
Thanh (18:24): So one thing I want to circle back to is I know from your story you ended up moving to Las Vegas and you ended up living in a quote/unquote "poker mansion" where you were living with other poker players. Like you had a great time in Las Vegas with some of the friends that you made in the poker world and you said, "Hey, how can I continue this fun and this camaraderie?" And you said, "Hey, let's start a poker house." So you invited other people to come join you and have a great time playing poker in the daytime and hopefully making some money and then going out at night. Which sounds like a lot of fun, which I'm sure it was. But also, there's a lot of power in the immersion aspect, when you are learning, as you're playing, talking about what just happened, you're listening to what other people are going through, you're learning from their strategies. Talk to me about what it was like living in that house.
Chris (19:15): Environment is just the biggest lever we have to change our behavior, so I'm constantly thinking about how I can make my environment supportive of my goals. Thinking about things at this meta-level of what I want to support in my life. And in this case, I wanted to become one of the best players in the world, and so the best way for me to ensure that I would regularly make progress towards this goal was to surround myself with other people who were also trying to become one of the best poker players in the world. So when you see—We had a big table that we called the Grind Room set up. All these giant monitors, and when you see these guys sitting at the poker tables for twelve hours a day, and you're sitting there for four hours a day, you start to wonder, it's like, "Huh. I wonder if I worked a little bit harder, if I might make a little bit more progress." Not saying that working twelve hours a day is the right approach, but it certainly was a nudge towards, "Yeah, like, you probably don't need to be watching that Netflix show. There's probably something else you could be doing."
But most importantly, we helped to become an equilibrium for each other. So I always had someone on hand to ask questions about, to get different opinions on how to play a hand, but also it's like through the inevitable emotional ups and downs that it is to play a pursuit in this wicked game we call life that is just so luck-based in the short term, to help someone to kind of talk you down from the metaphorical ledge, or to bring you back to earth when you think you're God's gift to poker, was really, really helpful. And yeah, I owe these guys a debt of gratitude for essentially helping us all come up together. Something you see in sports, as you mentioned, is the greats come up together. So yeah. I look at that time very fondly. And if you're having fun, if you feel very aligned when you—A good test is like how quickly do you jump out of bed when your alarm goes off, or, hey, do you even need an alarm to wake up? That's a good signal that you are living in such a way that a lot of the score, a lot of the bottom line is gonna take care of itself.
Thanh (21:37): One thing I—I've always thought about, back in the day—Because I moved to the United States when it was 2006. This was, like you mentioned earlier, like the heyday of poker. This was the first time I actually got exposed to poker, because I saw it on ESPN. And I mean, what a name. Moneymaker winning the tournament. Right? And so I always think about, this is something I've really crystallized in the last few years, is just timing of everything, and how if you were not playing poker back in the day do you think you would have the same level of success that you had back then, versus if you started a few years ago? Because when I think about the poker wave that was happening at that time, it was on ESPN, it was almost mainstream news, there were so many resources. It was just this wave, and you could just kind of ride that wave. And I wouldn't say you would necessarily be the best in the world at it, but it was just so much easier to do things, than compared to, say, now.
So if you had to look back at it now, would you say—If you had to start all over again, and Chris of eighteen years old was starting, playing poker now, do you think you would be just as successful?
Chris (22:49): I think I could be. Whether that would be the optimal path I think is up for a lot of debate. A concept that you hint at that I firmly believe, that the biggest source of luck is timing. So being in the right place at the right time. And I was incredibly fortunate to be very well-positioned and already paddling for a giant cresting wave, where in the early days of online poker, essentially if you had a pulse and a mouse you could win money. And that was a really fertile training ground for me to immediately get feedback that, hey, maybe this is better than going into the corporate world, at least for right now. And there were so many resources out there, everyone was very open about sharing their knowledge, and over time as poker has matured and has become more competitive and more difficult to make any sort of living, a lot of those early advantages have gone away. It requires a lot more effort to obtain any sort of standing within poker these days. It's approaching more of a solved game.
I'm way—I play maybe ten to twenty hours a week now, depending on the week. I like to think of myself as more or less retired. Retirement is more a state of mind than anything. I play for fun. I try to make a lot of money when I play, but I mostly play for fun these days. I'm a much, much better player now than I was back in 2011 when I was ranked in the top twenty in the world. I wouldn't even try to put a ranking on myself. I've had to get much, much better, not even maintaining my standing. Just to give you that impression, it is like the learning curve gets really, really steep over time. So there's a big luck factor. And what you're seeing is that people who are in this rare state of, say, in college or coming out of college and have a bunch of time and they're really hungry, and they have a very high-risk tolerance, they're finding that next wave.
So what I've seen is maybe it's daily fantasy sports, and a lot of poker players who would have gone into poker or left poker went into daily fantasy sports, or they started, became internet entrepreneurs and they started living in Thailand and doing SEO, or now what we've seen, I think the last four to five years, is in cryptocurrency, where you know, if I was an eighteen-year-old I would be learning solidity and building smart contracts and going deep into the bowels of Discord and Signal to scrape alpha on new alt-coins. I think the lesson here is that there are always going to be more waves, and something that I like to think is that I'm already living in the future. What is completely normal and benign to me is completely earth-shattering to someone else, and it's up to me to decide where I am already tapped in on where this next wave is going to be, and how can I just position myself for it?
So rather than trying to think, "Oh, okay, I want to become a poker player, I want to become an entrepreneur, I want to become a trader," it's you looking around you and saying, "Where am I already positioned for a wave that's coming?"
Thanh (26:14): So what kind of waves are you anticipating over the next year or few years?
Chris (26:22): That's a great question. I think the biggest one that comes to mind right now is online education. It's a really big wake-up call for me with the pandemic and everything that's happening as far as like—I think maybe decades worth of shift to online-based work that essentially was just waiting for the necessary infrastructure and social norms to be in place. I've already been working remotely nomadically for as long as I can remember. As soon as I decided not to work at Ford, that was back in 2008, I've been living on the internet since. So not much has changed for me personally. But the way that people learn, receive content, educate themselves, meet their friends, all of this has forever changed. I don't think we're going to necessarily be sitting in front of Zoom forever, but certainly we've moved to the remote first world. So I used to really emphasize in-person connection and education. When I lived in New York City, I loved hosting meetups and I taught all my workshops in-person, even though doing things in the real world takes a lot more effort than in the virtual world. I found it really fulfilling. And now I've just learned to love scale, and being able to reach people across time zones, across the world at any time.
And so I think there's just never been a better time for someone to share their knowledge/experience/expertise. And the best way to get started is to start. So, yeah, I think we live in a really golden age of access, and that's a wave that I'm really excited about. It's why I decided to move my in-person workshops online. The timing is pretty cool. We're actually about to offer it again. So, it's called Team Performance Training. For fifteen executives in ten weeks, I teach my performance system for maximizing productivity, performing at their peak, scaling their business, essentially everything that I've learned through hundreds of coaching conversations with really, really successful executives. Group coaching experience—This is the third time we're running it. It's something I'm really proud of. And it's something I only used to do in person, because I thought there was no substitute for just bumping up against each other in the real world. But seeing that this actually works really well in a virtual environment—So, that's teamperformancetraining.com. I don't know if anyone here is listening. We'd love to have you check it out.
Thanh (28:55): Yeah. We'll have a link to that in the show notes, as well. Speaking of online education, I'm kind of curious to hear how you went from, okay, being a former poker player to now helping others perform at the highest level. Where did that come about, how did that transition happen?
Chris (29:13): I always like to joke, somebody asked to pay me and I said yes. It wasn't the first person who asked to pay me. It took a few. But yeah. That's really good feedback from the environment, when someone says, "Hey, if you were offering this thing I would pay you for it." And you're like, "I don't know, maybe I could do that." So that's always my tongue-in-cheek answer, was I was having tea with a friend and he said, "I really think—I love hearing your advice, I really value your opinion, I feel like I would be a lot more likely to put it into action if I was paying you." So that was how Forcing Function started in 2016.
Hey, I do think that the best way to learn is by teaching, and I've learned an incredible amount in the past five years. A lot of my early coaching clients, the conversations weren't too different from when we were just talking about poker. There's a lot of commonalities there. If you want to be the best, that means putting yourself in the position to become the best. And a lot of this systematic thinking really translates across fields. One of these critical bottlenecks, leverage points, points of leverage that will allow you to have outsized returns, outsized output with minimal input, minimal effort. So that's really how I try to look at things. What are the patterns that someone has, what are patterns that are supportive of their productivity and performance, what are the patterns that hinder them? Try to, you know, amplify the former, add friction to the latter. And yeah, just recognizing that, hey, I have things that people find useful, I have a lens of looking at the world that people find helpful.
And over the years, just becoming progressively more comfortable talking publicly about it in forums like this one. It used to just be you know, one on-one conversations and offering it to people around the world.
I like to say that my product is my marketing. The vast majority of people that I work with come from other clients. That's my preferred way of working. Essentially if, you know, I figure it's like, if what I do helps someone achieve their goals, they'll probably talk about it, and maybe this person will wanna talk to me.
Thanh (31:18): One thing you mentioned early in the episode that I find very true is there are a lot of parallels between playing poker and just living a real life. Just like how, when you're one of the best athletes in the world, whether you're the captain of the team or whatever, that translates oftentimes to being a good team leader in business settings as well. Just like, how when you play poker what makes you good at poker I think oftentimes translates into let's just call it quote/unquote "The real world." Not the Metaverse, quite yet, but the real world we're living in.
And I'm curious to hear, what are some of the things you learned in poker that you now apply to, say, coaching or just like how you make decisions living in real life?
Chris (32:04): So many. It's a very long list. I'll share one that's a pet favorite. Any time someone asks me what is the most important lesson to take away from poker, it's the concept of expected value. Our mutual friend, Billy Murphy, calls this "millionaire's math." So high-level expected value is on average what is going to happen. So if you think of parallel universes, if I had the opportunity to try every option available to me, what is the average outcome across these universes? So you would calculate that—Think about it, it's like the probability of occurrence A times they call the utility of occurrence A. Like, how good or bad is it? And you add all those together. So think about this like an investment, right? Everything that we do is an investment, but if you think of a literal financial investment, all right, okay, if this investment goes well, how much money do I make? What do I think the chances are of it going well? And obviously there's a spectrum of outcomes. Think, if you're investing into a new startup, well, maybe you get your investment back, or maybe it has a small exit. They sell to Facebook or Google, or maybe they become the next Facebook or Google.
Right? So what is the size and how good or bad of the outcome, times how, what is the percentage of that outcome? All those probabilities adding up to a hundred.
And this is just the lens with which I view everything, whether I'm crossing the street or deciding whether to order the same thing that I always get or to try something new or, hey, should I go over and talk to that person that I know on the internet but probably doesn't know my face from Adam. All of these things are calculated bets, and there's some really cool takeaways that happen once you start to live with this mindset. The first is that we just don't think in probabilistic terms, but we live in a probabilistic universe. We think something happens, and we just work backwards from, "Well, that's the only way that it occurred." But you recognize that there's a probability of anything occurring, and so what you're trying to do is put yourself in the universe with the outcomes that you want. Right? Maximize your odds for that which you have control. And the more that you estimate odds—This is really how I think, when two poker players get together, will be like, "Yeah, I think it's like a forty percent chance those two cars hit each other," or like that, "You know, I think it's like a twenty percent chance you can actually fit in that spot."
And inevitably some of those will be like, "I lay three to one." And we'll be like, "Okay, I'll do four to one at a thousand bucks." Booked. Okay, let's see if you can fit in that spot. Like that's how we settle things, if we're trying to calibrate our probabilities at all times. And once you hone this skill, you're able to literally just pick up dollar bills off the ground, because people see things as inherently risky and say, "No, I'm not going to do that." Well, you can't just write off anything. There has to be some upside that makes any risk worth it. Right? It's like, "Do you want to play Russian Roulette?" "No, I like living." "Well, would you play Russian Roulette for a billion dollars that you donate to your favorite charity?" Oh. Maybe you're starting to change your mind. Okay. What is it at a hundred million dollars? A million dollars? Right? There has to be some odds, some probability that you would take on any risk. And you start to realize that you can take a lot of calculated risks where you're getting more upside for a small downside.
And remember we talked about the difference between the top twenty and the top two thousand is that being in the top twenty means picking up lots of these fifty-two/forty-eights, where I have four percent edge and I'm gonna lose a lot of the time, but over time all of these small edges add up. And most people are passing up all these opportunities not only to gain leverage, to gain compounding, but to learn. Every time we bet, we calibrate our intuition, we gain more evidence that our intuition can be trusted, thus we can move faster and trust our intuition. That's why I think this is just such a powerful framework, because really when you think about it, when you're able to calibrate, hey, what is the risk, what is the upside, the biggest risk is the risk not taken, because you're completely giving up your opportunity to learn.
Thanh (36:42): So one question that comes to mind right away is that in a poker setting, the constraints are pretty much defined, and that makes the calculation, let's just say, a little easier. You know how many players there are at the table, you know how many cards there are in a deck. However, in the real world, that's kind of abstract. So how would you apply that idea of expected value to just everyday life in terms of just how you do things?
Chris (37:10): That's a great point, and it brings to mind this quote that not all that can be measured should be managed. So I think we fixate on the things that are easily measurable, rather than what are the things which carry the most signal. When I say "signal," this is something from information theory that it's like new information has the most opportunity to change our mind on something. So it can be useful to decouple the aspects that are knowable from the aspects that are unknowable, to break something down into parts. And so when we live in a world where exact probabilities are unknowable, well, all we can do is make decent estimates and then see if the feedback we get from reality matches with those estimates or not.
I'll give a poker example. So, in poker a lot of people think that we are just, like they do in the movies, calling out exact hands. Like, well, "You must have exactly nine-ten suited for the straight flush, and thus I fold my four of a kind." And that's not how poker works, if you're putting poker players on a probabilistically weighted range of hands. And that's just a fancy way of saying, what are all of the hands that they could have? Obviously, all of the hands that they could have are not equally likely, so we weight them according to how likely they are to happen. So let's say that I think someone is bluffing. I don't know how often they're bluffing, but I make an estimate. I'm also thinking about how often they need to bluff. Like, you can have hands in poker where it's very hard for someone to have a bluff the way the hand played out, so you need to have this combination. Have a hand that needs to bluff in order to win, and be willing to bluff in order to win. What is the multiplication of those two probabilities?
Well, if I say, "Well, I think that it's really, really hard for him to have a bluff here," he might be bluffing a lot, but I don't think he has a bluff. Like, he could only have straight draws and flush draws here, and both straights and flush hit here on the river. And then I, so I call, and he shows up with a completely random hand that I didn't even think was a possibility of this player happening. All this tells me is that my assumptions were incorrect. Right? If he showed up with a missed flush draw or a flush, that doesn't tell me anything. And so you see this feedback from reality all the time, it is like checking your assumptions. Imagine you're a venture capitalist, and you're investing into a new startup. There's just obvious risks. There's just so many ways that the startup could fail. So when I work with venture capitalists, I have them write out an investment memo and say, "Hey, what are ten ways that this investment could fail?"
And a lot of times, because most investments and startups go to zero, the investment will fail in one of those ten ways. Well, it doesn't tell them anything, it's like, "Hey, you thought it could fail this way. The only thing, you thought it was a low probability event and it happened. So maybe it's not as low of a probability as you thought." Right? In probability, we called this Bayesian updating. You take feedback, and you update your probability distribution of outcomes.
But the most insightful thing is, "Hey, you had this list of ten reasons that this company could fail, and a reason that wasn't even on this list was the reason this company failed. Obviously, there's something missing in your process, that you have some sort of assumption that wasn't validated."
And that's what we're looking for, is we're not looking for exact probabilities, we're looking for signals that we are missing something, so that we can correct for these biases.
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Thanh (44:43): Hmm. Yeah. So when you say that, I immediately think of scenarios that I might be in. So as an example, let's say I wanna launch a new product to the market, but I have no idea what the probabilities are if this is going to be a success or not. Right? So walk me through your mindset. Let's say you wanna launch a product for Forcing Function. How would you kind of like to assess and think about and launch this?
Chris (45:11): Sure. So I'll do a mini-coaching demo here. So the first thing I would do is for this hypothetical product, Thanh, the biggest failure mode, I think, is making something that people want. So from zero to a hundred percent, how confident are you that this product is something that other people want?
Thanh (45:32): Well, as a forever-optimist, I'm gonna say it's pretty high, so let's just say eighty percent.
Chris (45:38): Okay. So this is where we start to validate some of your assumptions. Right? A lot of people would immediately start building this thing and, "All right, I'm gonna go into my cave and spend one month building the perfect product, and then I'm gonna release it into the world, and they're all gonna love me." Well, first, let's make sure before you start building the thing that the thing you're building is something that people want. Okay. So you said eighty percent confidence. Well, what new information could come in that would take you down from eighty percent confidence to seventy percent confidence?
Thanh (46:12): Well, I could speak to a lot of customers or past customers or clients and readers and put it out there and if a lot of them say that they are not interested or it just wouldn't be for them that would probably take it down a bit.
Chris (46:26): Cool. That seems like a really easy first step and something that you could do today, which would really up your confidence. How about one thing this time that would take you from eighty percent confident to ninety percent confident?
Thanh (46:41): Well, I could try to sell it without actually having a product, and if people buy it, off a webpage, without actually having it, and they're willing to put in their credit card and pay for it without actually receiving it right away or maybe receiving it in a few months, if that seems to be happening then that would probably bump it up.
Chris (47:03): Yeah. The "shut up and take my money" test works really well. If people are beating a path to your door to try to buy something that doesn't exist, that's a very good signal to create that thing. And I think just from an overall business perspective, it's important to come at this customer-centric approach of don't create the thing that you want to make, create the thing that is going to solve a problem for a customer that ideally the customer is asking for. Right? You can always educate them a little bit, but ideally this is a problem, a real thorn in their side, that they've already shown a proclivity and an interest, a desire, to exchange something with you, ideally monetary. And so you can see this process can drill down as deep as you want. So I normally wouldn't let you off the hook as much, right? I would ask you for five things that you could do right now to increase your confidence, or five ways that you could fail, and five things that you could do right now to prevent those failure modes.
But the key thing is to excavate those hidden assumptions beyond, "This is why I am building this product, instead of not only building all of the other products, but doing all of the other things that I could be doing with my life."
Thanh (48:20): And what I'm hearing from that as well is what you mentioned earlier. You're looking for feedback loops along the way to see if this assumption is the right assumption or not.
Chris (48:30): Exactly.
Thanh (48:31): So let's take another example here. Let's say you and your wife are planning a trip. Okay? I know you have a very systematic mind, and knowing your wife, I think she really appreciates that. So I wanna hear from you, like, what is this conversation like, when you guys are planning a trip together. Let's say you're going to Mexico together, right? Are you talking to her in expected value terms? Are you using poker methodologies with her? What is this conversation like?
Chris (49:00): Yeah. So, in this context, I like to travel. I actually spent eighteen months straight traveling around the world at one point. I visited sixty-five countries, probably a couple hundred cities. I still spend about three to four months a year on the road while somehow keeping all the balls in the air, my business going. So I love—Not only do I love to travel, I love thinking about how I can incorporate this love of travel while not making it too much of a burden while it's still fun, while I can still continue to make money, serve the world, that sort of thing.
The first question, any time you're making any decision, not only a travel decision, is what are you optimizing for? So when we're about to take a trip, it's, "What is the purpose of this trip?" Are we going to, you know, have some romance and relax? Are we going with a specific purpose? Like, I'm going to speak and I need to be ready to perform for that. Or recently I was playing in the biggest poker tournament of my life, and I wanted to get myself into the state to win. Are we going for an adventure? Do we want to push ourselves to explore new boundaries? Are we going to see old friends we haven't seen in a long time? It's like, why are we going? What is the most important thing?
A lot of people skip this step in all decisions, and it's the most important one, like, why are we doing this? And you always come back to that. What—Keep in mind. It's like, it's always a litmus test. What option available best fits this purpose that we are optimizing for?
Next, I'm always thinking about constraints, non-negotiables. So, first, who's coming? If I'm traveling solo, it's very different than if I'm traveling with my wife, Marianna, or if I'm planning a group trip with a bunch of friends, or if I'm planning a trip for my family. Right? It's like, who has allergies? What sort of mobility issues out there? Are people going to be working during the day, are there places that people really wanna see, what type of schedule constraints do we have? Like, you get the best pricing on booking travel if you can go anywhere at any time, but if people need to be somewhere on a very specific date, that's a really good factor to know. Essentially it's like, what are the constraints that we're dealing with, what are the non-negotiables? Budget, locations, mode of travel, all that type of stuff. What are those boxes we need to check?
I think scheduling is really important when it comes to travel. I even just like to draw out with a pen and paper, you know, what an average day is going to look like on this trip, just to get an idea of, you know, just like a preview, a simulation of the landscape.
And then the last thing that I will do, so this is from, say, two weeks to six months out, I just make some form of pre-commitment where I know that I am going to go on this trip, at least as a default. Obviously, all things being equal, I try to do things that are refundable, so in case some sort of act of God happens I can back out. But there's a big power in just clicking "buy" or putting it on your calendar or getting the deposit from your friends, whatever it is. Say, "Hey, yes, this is a thing that we're doing." So I get there, but then it's like booking a flight or train ticket, whatever it is, and I usually will book a place to stay. If I'm traveling solo, or just with Marianna, I'll tend to wait on that a little while to see if opportunities to stay with friends or to keep the schedule flexible. But if I'm traveling with a group, those are the two things that I always lock in, is how we're getting there, where we are staying.
And then the last thing that I might look at is there's probably going to be one anchor experience of this trip, right, going back to optimization. When I'm going to Japan, I'm specifically going to Japan to eat. So if I can eat at any restaurant in Japan, making that reservation. When we're going to Galapagos, if we can see only one island, what island is that going to be? And like anchoring the trip around that. And then I try not to—As much fun as anticipation is, I try not to work on the trip at all until I'm literally on the plane. So once I've had those big pieces in place, I buy the guidebook, I read the guidebook on the plane, I have my executive assistant do some research on the place, send some ideas, a simple itinerary, and I don't open that up until I'm literally on the plane, and that's when I'm actually starting to plan out here's what I'm doing and when.
And you know, the last recommendation I would have for any sort of travel is to have the equivalent of a local on the ground. Ideally, I'm staying with a friend who lives there, speaks the local language, and can sort of sherpa me—It's like, "Hey, here are the things to do." Maybe get some insider experience, to have dinner with the family or go to an event I wouldn't have known about. If that's not on the table, I try to stay somewhere where I'll have a local resource, whether that's a really good Airbnb post or a boutique hotel with a good concierge, because as fun as it is for me to do travel research, when I'm on the ground I want to be fully present, and it really helps to have someone who I know is helping to curate that experience.
Obviously, I plan probably four or five trips for groups of friends a year, so when I'm planning those, like, I'm playing host and I'm completely focused on making sure my friends have a good time. But when I'm going to relax or for romance or for adventure, I try to delegate and offload as much of that as possible.
Thanh (54:37): Yeah. I love the questions you ask yourself, because it makes me think of other parallels that people can use in everyday life. So what are we optimizing for? That's the first question we ask ourselves, or one of the first. And this is something that Tim and I talk a lot about, when we host events. So for those who don't know, Tim Francis is a good friend of mine here in Austin, and we host a lot of events around town. And one of the things we always ask ourselves, too, is what are we optimizing for? And what are the resources and constraints that we have? So is it budget? Is it timing? Is it the weather? And so on. These are all things we have to take in consideration before we actually even take action, right?
And I love the first question you post, because it kinda reminds me of the idea of what is one decision that makes a thousand decisions happen? So to give an example of travel, but you can apply this to other things as well, like you kinda hinted at, like how I categorize trips almost, it's either an adventure trip or a relaxation trip. And if it's a relaxation trip, then the hotel that I book is going to be very different, and the part of town that I'm staying in is going to be very different than let's say if it's an adventure trip. Right? So if it's a relaxation trip, I might be closer to a body of water, I might prefer to stay at a resort over an Airbnb, versus if it's all about an adventure, maybe I don't care as much about accommodation, because I'm not there as much, so maybe I'm willing to go a little bit cheaper, gonna spend more money on experiences or whatever.
So I really love the idea, like you mentioned at the beginning, whether it's a trip or a project or whatever you're working on, what are we optimizing for?
Chris (56:19): It really begins with that. I find a lot in life—I love that, how you phrased that: "What is the one decision that makes thousands of decisions easier?" Another way that I've heard this said is, "Easy questions, hard life; hard questions, easy life." If you start out by doing the hard work of, what do I want, and you know, why am I here, what is my purpose, this type of stuff, and not expecting to have a full answer that you'll stay with the rest of your life. Man, that sounds like a lot of pressure. But just asking the question and starting to approach it. And the more that you have clarity and conviction around why you're doing something, right, why the costs matter—You're talking about travel. Like, there's a lot of hassles involved with travel. A lot of headaches. But if you go in with eyes wide open, and, "Hey, this is why I'm doing this because, and this is why it's worth it," those all become part of the story and it all becomes fuel to get better, to grow.
So yeah, I really love starting with these questions of, you know, what am I optimizing for, what am I trying to achieve, and that just makes so many future small decisions easy. Like, the example that everyone shares is you know, name your influencer here. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Presidents, wearing the same thing every day. Well, not having to wake up and say, "Hey, what am I going to wear today?" That's one decision saved. Decide, "Hey, this is how I want to present myself to the world." Put a lot of thought and intention into that, and then create an easy system that supports you in that decision, taking a lot of the mental bandwidth out of the equation. There's so many opportunities for this in one's life, if only one is willing to do hard work of looking inward, of "what do I want." What do I want to look like? What do I want to do? What do I want my mission to be? What do I want my purpose to be on this earth? What do I—How do I want to spend my days?
Very hard questions, but the more that you can zero in on an answer, a lot of the other decisions become much easier.
Thanh (58:44): So I'm guessing you probably help a lot of people with that, because it's kind of like a downstream flow of, you know, productivity in that sense. And one of the things that I want to dive into as this transition here is your company name, because it's called Forcing Function. So can you explain to people how you came up with that name?
Chris (59:05): Yeah. I decided to name the company Forcing Function because I just kept saying the phrase over and over again, and people were like, "What the heck are you talking about? What is that?" Like, oh. If I say it, if I really like it, maybe I should name the company after it. So Forcing Function comes from the world of design, and the literal translation is to draw someone's consciousness to something. And I have this core belief that if we can become aware of the current state of things, a lot of progress will solve itself. So it's a double entendre there, is I become the forcing function for my clients, people who take a class like Team Performance Training, is that I draw their attention to what's important, and I keep it there, but also I help them install systems in their life to elevate what's most important and to ensure progress.
So, obviously, there's so many different ways to help people achieve their goals, but at Forcing Function we really orient around three key pillars. The first, as you highlighted, Thanh, is vision. Is helping to accelerate this process of figuring out what we want to achieve, and really clarifying that, making it actionable so it's something that we can track progress towards. Like, is what we're doing on a day-to-day basis leading us to where we want to go? It's what we call internal coherence, and it's really the key to a fulfilling life.
The second is systems. So, putting these processes in place that automatically become more optimized over time. Getting away from this putting out fires, one-off mentality, and thinking, "What is something that I can put in place so that continual progress is solved for?" This is my definition of a system, is that I'm always getting better little by little in this dimension.
And then the last thing is prioritization. As you said, one of the biggest challenges and opportunities that we have as humans in the year 2022 is that there are just so many opportunities out there, so we can often not fully capture all the value of something that we're pursuing because we're spread too thin. So I just really, really, really try to help my clients keep the eye on the ball. Once they've decided what's important, I help keep them there. And there's a lot of supporting systems that go along with that in terms of scheduling. I love the framework that you have, Thanh, at Asian Efficiency, of "what is the bottleneck?" Time, attention, or energy. Helping someone to uncover that, and to put new habits, routines in place to bring that average up.
So, essentially it's like resource allocation. Like, what is the most effective use of that time, attention, energy, monetary, asking for help, relationships, presence, all these resources that we have, how can we utilize those resources to maximum effectiveness to get us towards our goals?
So those are really the three anchors—vision, prioritization, systems—that we try to focus on at Forcing Function.
Thanh (01:02:25): All right. So, VPS. Vision, prioritization, and systems.
Chris (01:02:29): Oh, you're good at this.
Thanh (01:02:32): So, I'm kinda curious, going back to that, if you can apply that somehow to learning let's say a new language, right? So—And the reason I like to use that example is because it has no numerical output, necessarily, on its surface level. Like, using weight loss as an example is kinda easy because it's very numerical and everyone kinda understands that, but when it comes to learning a new language, there's no numerical outcome necessarily that's very obvious. Right? Or when let's say you're designing a new website or logo, or something like that.
So let's say, you know, you, Chris, want to learn Spanish. Okay? What do you think about learning Spanish? Are you setting a deadline for yourself, saying, "In ninety days I want to be able to speak Spanish?” What is your definition of success? Are you someone who cares about deadlines at all? How do you take that goal-setting approach, almost?
Chris (01:03:29): Oh, I love this question. Shout out to my friend Tiago Forte, who really dropped this red pill on me. The difference between projects and areas of responsibility. So real briefly, an area of responsibility is something that has no deadline, that presumably you'll be working on and off for the rest of your life. So something like health or exercise is an area of responsibility, while running the New York Marathon or losing twenty pounds or gaining twenty pounds of muscle is a project. So the first way to make progress on an intangible goal is to turn it into a project. Something that has a clear outcome with a defined deadline. So for something like Spanish, again, we come back to our original question. What are you optimizing for? And for me, I know this very well because I've been studying Spanish on and off for about a decade. At various points in my life, I've been almost fluent, definitely conversational. So for me, the biggest thing was I wanted to be able to have conversations with locals. When I was traveling, when I was living abroad, there's just so many doors that are open when you can communicate with locals in their native language, and they don't feel like they need to talk down to you, talk slower, you know, simplify things.
And it's important to note what this goal does not include. This goal means I don't need to learn how to conjugate verbs. I can just use the infinitive, and they'll hear the verb and generally know what I'm talking about. It doesn't mean that I need to be funny, because I'm just trying to be understood. I'm trying to have conversations, trying to communicate information. So I don't need to write—All I need to do is be able to speak in a way that someone can understand at a normal cadence.
And so this creates a very clear objective, you know. I like this question, what would it look like to be successful at this goal? Right? It's really useful in terms of vision to have an actual image. So like, imagine in your mind, like picture the movie running, and in this case, it's me having a conversation with a local, and the local's not at all annoyed for having to talk to some gringo, like, "Hey, this guy's pretty cool and interesting." Maybe. Or at least like we're able to have some sort of exchange that feels relatively fluid. So as soon as I have one of those, check. Project complete. And I can decide, "Hey, maybe I want to try to become funny in Spanish." Or maybe I want to try to pass the fluency exam. Right? A lot of different milestones that could come along the way, but before any of those I have to pass this test of having a conversation with a local.
And one thing about deadlines, I think deadlines are both incredibly powerful, but also way overused. And what happens when a deadline becomes overused, it doesn't become trusted. Right? Everyone's worked on teams where this inevitable sprint deadline just gets pushed out five different times. You start to wonder, "Okay, so like, what's the real deadline? Like when do we actually have to ship this thing?" And that's why I'm really against creating fake deadlines just to manufacture urgency. It's a lot more useful to have a real deadline.
So in this case, my deadline for Spanish is usually when I meet Marianna's family. So Marianna has family in Colombia or Argentina, and we'll go down there at least once a year to meet with her family members who are incredibly educated, speak English better than I do, but I want to be able to—I'm visiting them, I want to be able to communicate in Spanish. And so we'll have some sort of event, like a birthday, that I can't move, that I'm gonna have to show up and talk to them. So this obviously creates that urgency that's real. So those are the best kind of deadlines that you're looking for, something that can't be moved.
Thanh (01:07:35): I love that. Chris, before we part ways here, I have one final question. As two people who are very interested in productivity, efficiency, I'm guessing this is kind of like an area of your life as well, where you're always optimizing for stuff. So how are you looking at productivity, efficiency now? Like, are you still working on it? Is it like an evergreen thing for you? Like, what's your view, overall take on your own journey?
Chris (01:08:06): I think productivity and efficiency are just gateway drugs. Put another way, I think they're like Trojan Horses. So they're ways to start to gain self-awareness, to start to understand the mechanisms by which things get done or goals get achieved, but where people get astray is by treating productivity or efficiency as an end in itself. I see a lot of people get caught in these endless cycles of optimization where they're just running faster and faster on a treadmill, and I'm not preaching from the pulpit here. I've been in this place several times in my life, and I know, Thanh, you've talked about similar, about not, you know, letting productivity get in the way of your fulfillment or happiness, or not seeking, you know, some answer outside of yourself in the form of a new tool or a new system. So yeah, I try to just treat productivity as another tool in my belt for achieving my purpose here. And so I'm not tied to any tool or system or habit. I regularly reflect on, hey, what are the things that are doing that are moving me towards my goals? What are the things that I'm doing that are having no impact, or negative impact?
And I gotta say, there's definitely trade-offs, as you—Everything's a double-edged sword. I think I may have been more productive in an objectively measurable sense, but it seems like I achieve much more these days, and what I do seems a lot more relevant. So these are all trade-offs.
I certainly just try to approach things more from a sense of fun, enjoyment, sustainability than I once did. I was really kinda willpower disciplined/obsessed when I first started with this stuff, and now I try to at least be—this is the intention—to be much more gentle with myself, keep the long-term perspective, to remember that one day, one week doesn't really matter all that much in the grand scheme of things, that all that really matters is that I'm improving and the times that I am backsliding that I recognize it and I pick myself back up and restart from zero.
So yeah, I like to think that I've matured and I'm looking at things a little bit more holistically, but I imagine when we talk again in three, five years I'm gonna be looking back and saying, "Chris, like, what the heck were you doing?"
Thanh (01:10:46): I love it, Chris. We're gonna have to end it here, but I know we could talk forever and ever and ever. If people want to stay in touch with you, find out more about Forcing Function, your coaching, your services, where should people go to?
Chris (01:11:01): Yeah. Thanks, Thanh, and I really appreciate the opportunity to be here, for giving me a platform and for everything that you guys do at Asian Efficiency. I'm just an incredible fan, and I think you guys really have a lot to offer, and it's just very validating to be here and to be able to share some of this. I started Forcing Function, I do conversations like this, because I love it. I find it really meaningful, and I really hope that something I said today impacted you on your journey, that you have something to take away that will support you towards your goals.
I open source everything that I do and learn, so everything that I have managed to capture on paper or digital screen is on the internet at some point, so you can find a lot of that on our website at forcingfunction.com. Some great articles, previous podcasts on there. The best place to start is our workbook, "Experiment Without Limits." This is a hundred pages of our best strategies that are documented in a step-by-step fashion for you to immediately install some of these performance systems in your life. That's free to download at experimentwithoutlimits.com. I have all of our favorite reads and resources documented on Forcing Function, so forcingfunction.com/library. That new post, "100 Resources for Optimizing Productivity & Performance."
We also have a quiz that we offer called the Performance Assessment that will give you my recommendation for the very first step that you can take to optimize your performance, given where you are today. If you're into social media, my Twitter handle is @SparksRemarks, and if you're listening to this before February 16th, you're an executive, you're ready to take yourself to the next level, you wanna optimize your output and productivity, really recommend you apply for the third cohort of Team Performance Training. Again, it's only open to fifteen executives, it's a ten-week program that we only offer once a year. I'm really excited about it, and if you're excited about what I have to say, hopefully, you are too.
Thanh (01:13:06): Awesome. Thank you so much, Chris. We'll have everything linked in the show notes, and thank you again for joining us here today, and for everyone else listening, we will see you next productive Monday.