Jettison

"I have such a stressful job that the only way I can get it out of my mind is by running hard."

If this is your first time reading this quote, let me tell you it's from Alan Turing. I decided to follow his advice to run tonight.

It is perhaps not surprising that I feel stressful when my department is operating at 130% of maximal capacity, foreseeing an as-yet-undetermined higher record. What just happened in my brain is an overloaded boat on the brink of sinking. The natural response is to jettison as much as cargo I can. Not the simple tidying chore, but the hysterical throwing overboard of everything. Everything. I knew I did this when I opened my laptop and found absolutely no documents this afternoon. Let me repeat that: I found nothing; all computer files had disappeared. My heart sank.

I breathed in. I breathed out. For five minutes I refused to believe it. I thought high and low, trying to make Hansel and Gretel-esque trails for the whereabouts of my files. I rummaged through the computer and recycle bin in the hope that I might find my documents. Zilch. My conclusion: I must have been so mad that I deleted the folders at one fell swoop, followed by jettisoning the recycle bin. I lost my marbles, and then my files. You would have to be a total curmudgeon to have such a silly snafu. So much so that Alan Turing can't help at all.

And maybe it's just a signal for me to take a break, run home and retrieve my files from another laptop of mine.

Motivate

If your New Year's resolution was to exercise more but you haven't been sticking with it, don't sweat - the medal of self-control isn't that straightforward.

I'm talking about the cycle of forgetting resolutions that we have experienced over the years. This is common to all of us in ways small and large. There's, of course, the lesson of keeping the true north in mind. To paraphrase Stephen Covey, begin with the end in mind. Little do we realize that instant gratification is more useful to motivate ourselves than long-term goal. Instead of fantasizing the health benefit like longevity, we should focus on an immediate payoff of exercise. What's important to nudge myself to exercise is that I can readily find its value.

Think about my experience this weekend, when my routine is to borrow a book to share with my daughter on her way to gymnastics class. I checked out 12 Great Tips on Writing Poetry today, and much to my surprise, my daughter finished the book quicker than I'd expected.

"Daddy, can you find the next one for me: 12 Great Tips on Writing Fiction?"

The easiest answer would be taking taxi to borrow that book, yet a little homunculus in my head continued to jump up and down, shouting at me - "but I should take the errand as a chance to exercise." I reasoned that my tight jeans (and equally tight schedule) won't be that good for running. My back-up plan is to figure out a game: head to library by taxi and then unlock a GoBee bike for return trip, trying to beat the time of taxi ride with a bike that cost me one-tenth of the taxi fare.

I don't think there's anything I find more blissful than such simple way of keeping my momentum to exercise.

Footnotes

My knowledge in stock analysis is next to nothing.

And nothing, absolutely nothing, has renewed my interest in building (and checking) my portfolio more than my running workouts portfolio. Many apps have now automatically updated our portfolio with pie chart illustration of various running distance.

In much the same way as charts showing the movement of a stock's price over time, there are also graphs tracking the average pace. I can't recall any one-way direction of Dow Jones graph that resembles mine in terms of pace over time. At least that's what I've been achieving for the previous half year since I took up running. I try not to care too much about the results but a competitive gene is a difficult thing to ignore. I know.

Nudge

You're not alone if you do not know Richard Thaler.

Not anymore, after he has become the Nobel prize winner.

I came across his book Nudge in Time magazine almost ten years ago. The thought about checking out this book, nevertheless, didn't materialize. It seems like a good illustration of inertia. One of the reasons for my wish to learn more about nudge theory is my hospital chief's nudging three months ago. If there is a stronger driving force, it's the long waiting queue when I made reservation for Nudge at the public library system. I just could not believe that more than twenty people had been waiting for this book ahead of me.

The mere fact of scarcity drives us to desire the book even more. And the story that customers appear more attracted to restaurants with a long line waiting for a table illustrates similar psychology.

I'm pleased to have my turn (eventually) to borrow the book Nudge today. And there is an obvious catalyst for me to finish the book without delay: I won't be allowed to renew this book after two weeks, with the long queue of waiting behind me.