Consistency: in sports, and in life

February 25, 2023February 25, 2023 ~ Wei ~ Leave a comment

Estimated Reading Time: 8 Minutes (~1000 Words)

I started Salted Bites as a forcing function to get myself to write more, but it’s almost 2 years since my last article. I must admit I have a mental barrier and prefer not to commit to a regular publishing schedule, and would find all sorts of reasons to justify that, eg. what if I’m writing for the sake of it?

There was one exception: if I do get any inspiration (either in the shower or from other sources), I have no excuse not to write, hence here I am, penning this down. I have been following CommonCog for a while, and parts of Cedric’s recent article, An Expertise Acceleration Experiment in Judo resonated with me, and I had to write something since I could still remember the content a week after I read it.

To take a step back and provide some context: I’ve enjoyed playing, and competing; this mostly manifested in sports such as swimming, table tennis, lifesaving (yes there is a sport for this), but I’ve also done programming competitions before. I do not claim to be good (I’ve won some, lost much more), but most of what I’ve learnt was through lifesaving, where I competed through college, and indirectly coached juniors (new to the sport) on how to excel in them.

Today’s article was inspired by a quote highlighted by Cedric (I’ve since realised it came from someone else):

The difference between the champions and all the other players, is that the champions find a way to win when they play their worst tennis. You have to focus on what you can control. The most common mistake is to try to feel good, or try to play good. But this is not something you can control. My number one advice is don’t focus on yourself, but focus on the strategy to win the points, knowing what you have today. Because when you focus on you and your problems, you don’t focus on the opponent. My second piece of advice work on your body language and your attitude. The body language comes from the way you speak to yourself. So find a way to talk to yourself in a way that helps you have the best possible body language, which will help you also keep positive, and help you keep the focus on the game and not on yourself. The champions, on a bad day, focus only on those two things, and forget all the rest that they have no control over.
Patrick Mouratoglou (YouTube)

For any sport/competition, once the fundamentals are in place, the next phase of training is very much in the mind; and this sort of training is very hard to come by – it comes from a mix of deliberate practice, as well as experience (actual or simulated). In my time in lifesaving, because it is such an obscure sport, almost everyone who enters our club is new to it, but seeing folks in a couple of competitions would easily reveal who was an athlete before (and who wasn’t).

If you are wondering what this looks like, some cues (not exhaustive) that I use include the following – (a) the ability to translate training performance into the competition/race (b) the ability to perform at your peak after a bad race/mistake (lifesaving competitions usually involve multiple races a day); (c) the mindset to reflect and move on after a good/bad race. The best athletes are most consistent, but – they are able to deliberately translate training performance into races, they are able to overlook a bad race and perform well for the rest of the day, and use that bad race as a motivating factor for their training afterwards.

I causally referred to this as “competition experience” where I struggled to describe (a), (b) and (c) to different people, but the above quote sums it up pretty well – if I had to summarise it is how one can be consistent, even on their worst days. Practicing for this is challenging because it is almost impossible to set up the situation; one has to “feel bad” on a certain day, make a big mistake, or blotch a race, and then mentally figure out how to cue yourself to ‘extract the maximum performance. What makes it harder is that in such scenarios, it is likely that you won’t have the mood to do so. One way to achieve this is to simulate this through rigorous training schedule (ie. train daily as Cedric did), but few would be perverse enough to put themselves through that kind of pain.

An interesting point here is that regardless of the sport / competition, individuals (or teams) would need to develop this fortitude to be able to perform at their peak, regardless of external conditions. In a way, when former athletes from different sports share/joke about their past experiences, there is this silent acknowledge to each other on the pain one has to go through to get there.

Consistency in life

Now, how does this apply in life? I’d say to attempt to replicate the above, and swap out everything sports related to a skill / domain you are trying to master; this could be in your career, or honing a craft – the goal is to figure out how do we set up ourselves to have the best possible outcome by developing awareness and understanding how we respond to cues, regardless of uncontrollable factors. What is likely different is that competitions (or sports) and life is that they are like finite and infinite games respectively, and many domains in life are infinite, hence the ‘best possible outcome’ is somewhat grey. If you read An Expertise Acceleration Experiment in Judo, in Judo, one could technically be playing either game too.

How do you identify a bad day and power through it?

Perhaps this is something I should try with Salted Bites as well?

All in all, I wish Cedric all the best for his Judo competition and looking forward to his insights!

What Game do you Play?

June 27, 2021July 4, 2021 ~ Wei ~ Leave a comment

Estimated Reading Time: 5 Minutes (~600 Words)

When I was growing up, my parents would always give me 60 cents a day, with their intention for me to spend 50 cents on food/ anything else, and saving the other 10 cents. I was free to spend in any way I like, but I end up saving 10 cents, and this practice continues till today with my salary. After clocking several years of working experience and some savings, I’ve taken on an interest in financial planning to understand how I can grow my savings for the future. I spent some time studying finance (eg. efficient market hypothesis, beta of a stock) in college, but quickly realised that learned that I only touched the tip of the iceberg.

It was tough to get started, with many content creators on mulitple platforms and products (Robo-advisors, Trading Platforms) to turn to for advice (Not an endorsement, but as a Singaporean I found these personally relevant: The Woke Salaryman on Instagram, Stashaway Market Commentary on YouTube). Earlier this year the subreddit WallStreetBets had the short squeeze of Gamestop (GME), along with cryptocurrency (Bitcoin, Ethreum, Dogecoin) as emerging as a new asset class, which probably made several folks millionaires. How does one parse through all these information, and decide what advice to buy, when to sell, or how to allocate their assets/portfolio? Who should I trust, if I find 2 sources with directly conflicting advice?

Taking a step back, I was thinking about how I made some of my own decisions, and was inspired by this article, Play Your Own Game:

Someone recently asked how my investment views have changed in the last decade. I said I’m less judgemental about how other people invest than I used to be.
It’s so easy to lump everyone into a category called “investors” and view them as playing on the same field called “markets.”
But people play wildly different games.
If you view investing as a single game, then you think every deviation from that game’s rules, strategies, or skills is wrong. But most of the time you’re just a marathon runner yelling at a powerlifter. So much of what we consider investing debates and disagreements are actually just people playing different games unintentionally talking over each other.
Morgan Housel

Similarly, there is a very big difference between a professional trader, a gambler, and a mid-career worker investing in the financial market. Yes, everyone invests to make money, but there is a stark difference between capital preservation and growth. I’ll liken this to an analogy where we compare between a marathon runner, and swimmer and a powerlifter in a gym: even if they are doing the same exercise (to the common person), they do it for different reasons.

Much of what we consider investing advice, debates and disagreements implicitly assumes that the reader understands the game they are playing. Only when we understand what game one is playing, can we then assess the merit of their strategy and actions (and whether we should be following it). Any debate or judgement before that would be unfair and meaningless. This, to me is perspective, and without it, one would find it very hard to persuade and/or convince one otherwise.

In most conversations, I now try to do 2 things: 1) when I speak, I explain the ‘game’ I’m playing (unless the person already has this context), and 2) I try to understand what game others are playing. It might not be easy or intuitive, but it does go a long way in achieving consensus.

When was the last time you sought to understand when a person disagreed with you?

Are rules are meant to be broken?

March 8, 2021March 8, 2021 ~ Wei ~ Leave a comment

Should we ask for forgiveness instead of permission?

Estimated Reading Time: 4 Minutes (~500 Words)

As a kid, my favourite question has always been asking ‘why?’ repeatedly, which my parents (thankfully) responded to. To an adult, those might seem like annoying questions, but for me, each answer became an important jigsaw piece to build one’s view of the world.

Fast forward till today, one of the most frequent (and annoying) question I get is why certain rules exist (yes, karma dictates that I now answer my nieces and nephews). I am more than tempted to answer ’cause they do’, but I’ve learned (as with most good teachers) to deflect the question back at them and have them ponder about it. I occasionally get questions that are interesting enough to get me off my seat to search for an answer.

As adults navigate through life, most would accept rule(s) as they are. However, there is always the insanely curious friend / relative, that keeps questioning “why”; the thinker, innovator, continuously asking questions, pushing boundaries, challenging norms.

Growing up in Singapore, I was taught to follow all the rules with the unsatisfactory ‘just because’ or ‘you will get fined or jailed’. My worldview changed when I started travelling, one vivid example was when I was at a cross junction in Vietnam – motorbikes drive as though the traffic light was an accessory. For the locals, this was ‘normal’, but two questions popped into my head: why is everyone not following the ‘Red Light’, and more surprisingly, why weren’t there any accidents?

Beyond the travelling, I began to notice many other aspects of life where my supposed ‘rules’ did not apply. As a software engineer, DRY (Don’t repeat yourself) was one of the first basic principles taught, and we should always reuse functions that were written. For each function I wrote, I fervently sought out similar existing functions, at times making modifications. As I become more familiar and thought more about other aspects of code such as readability, I found several personal examples, as well as readings ([1], [2]) where this was not true. And this got me thinking: when was it a good time to break a rule?

I probably don’t have all the answers yet, but one approach I’ve taken is to treat most rules as guidelines, to understand the spirit of it, the why. Why are traffic lights necessary at a cross junction? Why do we not like repeated code? Often times rules are a good (but not perfect) manifestation of the sprit / intent of doing something. In most cases, once I understand the why, it becomes a little easier to decide whether that rule should be followed. In the context of work, with an enlightened manager / boss, it’s sometimes it’s better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.

Given this, my personal goal is to reflect and relook at rules (conscious or not) in my head one at a time, and ensure that I am not following things blindly.

Footnote: This article is not advocating for us to break the law, that should be respected.

Links

When was the last time you broke a rule, but upheld the spirit of it?