The Most Direct Path
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- —
Sparks' method for the difference between productivity and performance. Productivity is doing many defensible things and feeling good at the end of the day. Performance is defining what success actually looks like, working backwards to the one or two things that genuinely cause it, and going at those directly — even though they tend to be more ambiguous, harder and riskier than the busywork surrounding them. The move is to imagine the goal already achieved and ask what happened, then attack that mechanism head on rather than working through the conventional front door. Applied to a product launch it means talking to the five influencers who would have made it succeed. Applied to a job it means solving the employer's problem before you are hired. The rules of most games are conventions, not laws.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Define what success concretely looks like
Before planning activity, state the observable outcome. Sparks does this with clients by asking them to imagine the launch, the quarter or the residency application already succeeded and describe what is true in that scenario.
Watch out A vague goal lets you justify almost any activity as progress towards it.
- 2
Work backwards and name the actual cause
Ask what made the successful version happen. In the client's launch case the answer was that five specific influencers talked about it. In Ali's medical school case it was two publications, which came down to two doctors willing to include him on projects.
- 3
Identify who holds the outcome
Find the specific person or lever with the power to grant what you need — who writes the recommendation, who does the hiring, who can amplify the launch — and route straight to them rather than through the general process.
Pro tip Most jobs are filled offline. Go to the person directly instead of adding a CV to the pile.
- 4
Give them something of value directly
Approach with empathy for their problem rather than a request. Understand the other person's problem better than they can define it, then propose how you would solve it and demonstrate you can. Sparks frames the whole move as understanding the person better than they understand themselves.
Pro tip Ali's hire was the only applicant who made a video for a video-making business out of five thousand applications.
- 5
Cut the activity that only feels productive
Everything not on the direct path matters far less than you assume. Once the criterion for success is named, drop or shrink the coordinated posts, the polished resume, the extra channels — the things that generate a sense of effort without moving the outcome.
Watch out The direct path is usually more ambiguous and more uncomfortable, which is exactly why most people take the legible route instead.
In the wild
A client came to Sparks coordinating a large product launch across every channel, writing a stack of posts. Sparks asked him to step back: imagine the launch was successful, what happened? The answer was that five influential people talked about it. So the question became whether he had reached out to those five directly. Everything else he was doing was fine, but if that was the criterion for success, the direct move was to go to those five people and give them something of value.
→ Effort was redirected from broad channel coordination to the specific relationships that determined whether the launch worked.
Ali needed two publications to gain two competitive points for a London job. Senior students told him the direct route: be friendly with every doctor you meet in the hospital, then ask whether they have a project you could help with. He got his two points that way and passed the same advice down to students who asked him. Sparks generalised it — recognise that everything else you could be doing matters far less than the two recommendations, then ask who has the power to give them and go and talk to them.
→ Two publication points obtained through direct relationships rather than a broad research strategy.
Common mistakes
Confusing productivity with performance
You can end a day having tried hard at many defensible tasks and moved nothing. Sparks' test is whether the activity sits on the direct path to a named outcome, not whether it felt like work.
Taking the legible path because it exists
Applying through the front door, filing the resume, sitting the interview — these are conventions people mistake for rules. Sparks calls them false velvet ropes that exist mainly to filter out anyone unwilling to be creative.
From the transcript
“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…”
“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…”
“life is just full of these false velvet ropes that are really just there to keep out the people who want to stay within the…”
From the episode
World Poker Champion On The Science Of Decision Making - Chris Sparks
Chris Sparks