The chart below is a measure of the rate of compliance among patients taking medication that I got from an online lecture on nutrition. The full lecture can be found here.
To put this into perspective consider what is involved in taking medication – it rarely involves anything more than setting aside 20 seconds a day to follow a pill. I have long known that compliance is an issue in all walks of life but this stat is a depressing indictment of how hard people find it to stick to anything.
Consider this in light of sticking to a trading plan – if people cannot set aside a few seconds to pop a pill out of a foil wrapper and take it then sticking to a trading plan must be near impossible. And it turns out it is impossible for most, the majority of people cannot stick to any sort of predetermined plan be it medication, dieting, exercising, or even getting up five minutes early.
The reasons for this are many and varied but if you have trouble following a plan with anything I would consider the following two books.
The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential
Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
