Chris Sparks is a retired professional poker player, recently ranked in the top 20 online cash game players in the world. He’s also the Founder of Forcing Function where he teaches elite poker frameworks to a select group of twelve investors and executives in meaningful companies, and the author of Experiment Without Limits, a comprehensive workbook for achieving peak performance and leads workshops on decision-making, systems thinking, and performance architecture to organisations and investment teams. In the conversation we talk about what we can learn from the world of poker around high performance and how systems thinking and decision making is crucial for success. Enjoy!

(00:00) Intro (02:17) Being a professional poker player (06:00) The 'Red Queen' Effect (08:18) The psychological advantage and self-deception (13:04) Online vs real life poker (20:16) Relativistic skills (25:24) Having a mindset of abundance (32:27) Applying lessons from poker to your life (50:15) Understanding other peoples' problems better than our own (54:21) Experiment Without Limits (01:02:14) The power of objectivity (01:18:25) Perfectionistic tendencies (01:25:00) Deciding your priorities (01:28:22) Being a performance coach (01:42:31) Realising everything is a choice (01:47:40) The status quo bias and forcing functions (01:58:27) Chris' Free Performance Assessment

🔗 CONNECT WITH CHRIS

💻 Website 🎙Forcing Function Hour Podcast 🐦 Twitter 📸 Instagram

🔗 CONNECT WITH ALI

💌 Sign up to my weekly email newsletter 🎥 YouTube Channel 💻 Website 📸 Instagram 🐦 Twitter 👥 Linkedin

📚Check out my New York Times Bestselling book Feel-Good Productivity! Amazon Website 📚 RESOURCES MENTIONED

Forcing Function Performance Assessment - https://www.forcingfunction.com/assessment Peak Performance Workbook (free download) - http://www.experimentwithoutlimits.com Forcing Function Hour Podcast - http://www.forcingfunctionhour.com Group Coaching Program (Cohort 4 launches Sept) - https://www.teamperformancetraining.com Forcing Function Performance Library - https://www.forcingfunction.com/library Deep Dive with Noah Kagan - https://youtu.be/B4rVZW1YJB0 Deep Dive with Grace Beverley - https://youtu.be/7_hNRR6K6z4

Find the show notes and the transcript on the website: https://aliabdaal.com/podcast/

Sponsored by Shortform

This episode is kindly brought to you by Shortform, the world's best provider of guides for non-fiction books. Shortform gives you comprehensive coverage of thousands of books, the key ideas, clearly and simply explained, plus smart commentary and analysis. It’s like your smartest friend teaching you about a book. Go to https://shortform.com/deepdive to get 20% off the annual premium subscription.

Sponsored by Shopify

This episode is kindly brought to you by Shopify. Shopify offers an easy to use, all-in-one commerce platform for anyone -regardless of technical ability and experience - to start, grow, and manage a business. Shopify lets you sell online, in-person and on all major social platforms and it’s what I’m using to sell my essentali stationary as well as upcoming digital and physical products. To give Shopify a try, go to https://shopify.com/aliabdaal.

Leave a review

If you enjoy listening to the podcast, please do leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts - even one line helps! You can also Tweet @AliAbdaal with any feedback, thoughts from the lessons you've learnt from the episodes and we can thank you personally for tuning in 🙏

Want to start your own podcast? We use Transistor! https://go.aliabdaal.com/transistor

Check out the episode on the Deep Dive YouTube Channel.

See privacy policy at https://transistor.fm/privacy