Like A Trader part 2: Invert the tweak, clip the tail

I consider myself a recovering unconstructive optimiser.

I use this term for people like myself who naturally behave in one or both of the following two ways.

The first is spending hours (even years, in some cases) obsessing over finding the exact right way to do things down to the very last detail and achieving nothing, instead of just trying things and finding a good-enough solution.

My own experience of this has mostly consisted of a few weeks each year trying to design the perfect workout while seated at my desk, trying in vain to evaluate what one expert says about another.

Worse than this were the years spent confusing myself by reading every trading and investment book out there, convinced I could craft the perfect market-beating strategy. 

At some point, more information starts taking you further away from a solution.  

This type of behaviour has been widely written about. It has been contrasted by the psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer and others with satisficing; saving time and mental expenditure by choosing a good-enough solution from a limited range of choices.

Gigerenzer's book Risk Savvy has some excellent tricks for dealing with this behaviour. Tim Ferriss also has a list of tips in an article on his blog about living a choice minimal lifestyle.

The second behaviour that is characteristic of the unconstructive optimiser is less well covered in my experience. 

This is the discarding or postponing of important activities because the circumstances are not optimal.

For example, many sources say it's good to eat soon after a workout. It's good to. But certainly not essential unless you are a professional bodybuilder.

Somewhere along the way, this message became scrambled and I began to behave as though workouts were not worth doing at all if they couldn't be done before a meal. 

Even if I had the entire evening free after dinner, I would skip the workout thinking it just wouldn't be worth doing.

However, I recently ended up working out late at night after a massive meal with friends a few hours earlier (this exercise was actually part of the ritual I discuss in my earlier Like A Trader article).

I not only felt better for having done it, but it was obviously a more rational decision for my health to do so. 

In trader/probabilist lingo, it clips the left tail. This means avoiding or minimizing the worst outcome. In this case, doing nothing would cause the most harm. So any exercise clips that tail.

This might seem obvious, and others might not make this mistake with exercise, but I bet many people make it in other ways.

The psychologist Kevin Dutton is one of precious few I've found who have written about this. Apparently it is one of the afflictions regular folk suffer from, but psychopaths do not.

Author, ex-soldier and psychopath Andy McNab, who co-wrote a book with Dutton, said he has no problem whipping out his laptop and writing during a spare ten minutes at a busy train station. But most others would probably not consider it worth working under such conditions.

For me, the problem often starts when I hear about a good habit that I would like to do. It's almost always delivered with a tweak; an optimal-but-optional condition under which to perform the behaviour. 

Take another example I have struggled with: meditation. This is almost universally recommended to be performed in the morning.

The exposure to both behaviour and tweak together seems to cause the tweak to become a necessary condition. The alliteration of morning meditation may even enhance this more. 

But this does not mean it is not worth doing if you didn't get a chance in the morning. In fact, I've never seen any evidence given in support of this suggestion. It just seems that many people who meditate do so in the morning.

However, simply knowing and believing something is rarely enough to alter behaviour. Small actions are needed.

My trick for dealing with this form of unconstructive optimisation is to invert the tweak. 

When I hear about a habit or behaviour I would like to try, I will deliberately do it under the opposite conditions than those people advise, even just one time, to demonstrate how it is still beneficial.

This practice makes the habit more resilient to circumstances outside my control. I lose the unconscious belief that the suggested condition is necessary using the irrefutable evidence of actually having done it under imperfect circumstances.

The trick is far from new. Confidence is built in soldiers by running them ragged and making them sleep deprived then forcing them to shoot, showing them they can still operate under terrible conditions.

Nightime exercise is now a pretty regular occurrence for me, especially when friends have dropped by unannounced or invited us to dinner so I can't work out earlier.

Another way inverting the tweak has helped me with exercise was by breaking up my exercise throughout the day.

I built a daily exercise habit by taking the total number of reps I wanted to do of each exercise and inverting the standard practice of doing them all in a single workout.

I did the same number of reps, but in small sets spaced throughout the day. They weren't even taxing at first (I was starting from basically no exercise and looking to build a habit).

Gradually, because this still led to improvements, I was able to increase the number of reps in each set and reduce the amount of time between each. Now I do one intense workout, as per the standard advice.

But if I'm ever unable to fit in a single extended workout, I know I can make do with breaking it up and it's still better than doing nothing. 

This resilience helped me another time when, staying away from home, there was no room to perform one of the exercises I usually do. In the past I would've scrapped the workout entirely, but this time I just did the exercises that I could. 

This leads to something I'm hoping to address in a future Like A Trader article. A concept I have given the working title of a portfolio of healthy habits. More on that soon.