Productivity Without Limits - Chris Sparks - #099

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Oh, hello, friends. Welcome back to Modern Wisdom. My guest today is Chris Sparks. He is a productivity coach and one of the ex top 20 online poker players in the world. So he's coming in with a couple of big credentials. Today, he's taking us through his new ebook, Experiment Without Limits, Personal Experiments for Peak Performance and Productivity. Chris has essentially compiled a list of all of the best approaches he's found over his productivity career and put them into an ebook. And today, we're going to go through them, including setting goals, designing systems, building habits, creating routines, maximizing time, attention, energy, overcoming procrastination, the mental game and how to accelerate your learning. I genuinely can't believe that this ebook is free. It should be a 500 quid course. I'm also not getting any kickback from this, but you 100% need to go and download it. It is unbelievable. Link is in the show notes below. And I'm actually going to be going through this ebook over the coming months, step by step. So if you want to do it with me, feel free to drop me a message at ChrisWillX wherever you tune in. And we can do like a productivity book club thing, the action-based productivity book club and be all accountable to each other. Also, this episode is brought to you by The Protein Works. Huge fan of them and they continue to support the podcast. This time they are giving away one loaded nuts tub of amazing peanut butter every month for an entire year. So that's a year's supply of peanut butter and it comes in all sorts of awesome flavors like white choc fudge and chocolate brownie. They're essentially peanut butter on, I don't want to say steroids. That's probably bad for The Protein Works, isn't it? It's peanut butter upgraded, upgraded peanut butter, but it's unreal. And you can get a year's supply of it for free. All that you need to do wherever you are tuning in, leave us a review that might be iTunes or Stitcher. Head to the app, it will take you literally five seconds to leave us a review and you will be entered into the competition to win an entire year of free peanut butter. Also, if you've already given us a rating, you will be automatically entered into the competition. So do not worry. If you haven't, I bet that you can go and do it in the time it takes for this intro music to finish. So crack on. And while you're doing that, please welcome Mr. Chris Sparks.
I'm 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.

**Chris Sparks** (2:45)
Hey Chris, hey guys. Thank you so much for having me.

**Chris Williamson** (2:48)
Absolute pleasure to have you on. Recently had one of your peers, Tiago Forte, talking about tools. Also had Nat Eliason, host of 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 pressure, mate, no pressure.

**Chris Sparks** (3:10)
Thanks, I'll do my best.

**Chris Williamson** (3:13)
So why don't you give us a little bit of a background. Before we delve into the dark world of productivity, why don't we hear a little bit about you?

**Chris Sparks** (3:21)
Yeah, certainly. So I kind of got into this through the side door. As you mentioned, I think a lot of people know me for my online poker career. I still play at a pretty high level, but I had my peak right before the event we call Black Friday, so 2008 to 2011 And I learned quite a bit 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 poker players, 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 in 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, 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 just released book, Experiment Without Limits, which I'm happy to talk about. I do workshops, I do one-on-one coaching, and it's something that allows me to have really interesting conversations, just like this one. I get to learn something new every day.