Off the top of my head, it sounds like you need something to be awesome for. A goal. EY calls it “something to protect”.
I don’t doubt that you want to be awesome. What do you want to be awesome for? What do you really want to be awesome for?
You don’t have to post it publicly (though I understand it can help, and it would be of on-topic interest), but you do need to say out loud to yourself what it is. Because once you have your real goal formed into words, the rational steps to get there follow pretty easily. It’s a version of asking the right question.
The idea isn’t for only me to attain awesomeness, but to provide a base to start from and then encourage lots of exploration. Everyone will have different goals, so we should have lots of meetups doing different things, focusing on different skills.
I could fairly easily envision one group focusing on fitness, another on social interaction, a third on creative activities. Smaller sub-groups would go more into depth in any particular type of awesomeness, and people would go to the groups as they wish.
Personally I want to get myself up to baseline in every area I can, with ‘baseline’ being the ability that our culture expects people to be at. The idealized ability, not the real-world average of dismalness. After I do that, I’d like to focus on writing. I’m sure that as I get closer to the baseline more things will appear, but that’s what I’d like now.
As a side note, even getting to the baseline would be rather awesome.
Writing clearly and persuasively seems like an important enough skill that, with LW’s recent shift to self-improvement topics, I’m surprised there haven’t been posts on how to learn it.
Eventually I’d like to be able to craft fiction that people would read out of choice as opposed to some obligation brought about by being friends. I don’t inflict my writing on others yet, and I’ll probably start by making fanfiction when I do.
Having the ability to persuade people and communicate clearly would be a nice bonus, though.
Produce many words of fiction. Many. Many, many, many, many. Find out what makes words come out of you and arrange for that to happen a lot.
If you have a tendency to become defensive when criticized, dig it out of yourself with a melonballer and set it on fire. You can grow it back later when you are better, if you want (especially if it has self-esteem implications of some kind), but it is not your friend in the early stages.
Finish things sometimes. Finish a drabble or a 500-word vignette, if that’s what you’re up to. But do not start and start and start and never finish.
Fall in love with something about something you write. Love a character, or a setting, or a sentence, or a plot twist. You don’t have to love everything about anything or anything about everything, but love something about something.
If you have a tendency to become defensive when criticized, dig it out of yourself with a melonballer and set it on fire.
Nice phrase. Nice sentiment, too. This is the main sticking point for recruits to most of the non-commercial projects I’ve been involved with, and if not overcome it’s incredibly destructive both on the creative and the critical side of things.
Well-intentioned attempts to attract talent by shielding it from criticism are even worse.
Yep yep! The first thing I’m trying to get into the habit of doing is simply writing, without worrying about the quality. My inner critic is SO picky! (>_<) The general idea I have is that to be a writer, I have to actually write. If I can’t for whatever reason, then writing isn’t going to work. So, writing first.
I’m fine with criticism. I believe that either 1) it’s true, and I need to accept it, or 2) it’s false and I can laugh at it. Getting mad seems silly in any case.
Write a lot. Read a lot. Brandon Sanderson had to write five novels before he sold one. Read every day. Read Strunk and White. Learn the rules. (Yes, writing has them.) Get a giant wall calendar showing every day of the year. Set a writing goal and every day you meet it, draw a line. After a few days you have a line segment. Don’t break the line! Convince yourself that reading and writing is “work” and don’t let friends and family tell you otherwise. Find a room with a door. When you’re writing, close it. Don’t edit when you write. Move forward, forward, forward. Get to the end. If you need help with motivation, readthesebooks.
It’s not the direct usefulness of it that I’m looking for so much as the ability to get money to promote the things that I want to see happen. I may not be able to program, and I might not be incredibly rational, but at least I can help the people that are.
I’m not very familiar with the details of writing fiction professionally, but it seems like the wrong thing to do if you’re looking to make money—I’m remembering hearing that a large proportion of authors aren’t very successful, financially. (The fact that I don’t remember where I heard this and so can’t gauge its credibility very well means that it should be discounted significantly.)
Can anyone who is more knowledgeable about the professional writing business comment on this?
with ‘baseline’ being the ability that our culture expects people to be at.
Careful—this is a chimera. That many cultural standards are plausible but not actually possible standards set by advertising to keep people spending money is a cliche because it was true first. So that’s a phrase to taboo to dust. Do you have a detailed list?
Hm, you’re right. For physical ability, how about what the military considers barely acceptable? I’m fairly sure those records will be easy to find.
For social ability, feeling at ease in common social situations, and the ability to handle a real conversation. Possibly also how to handle exotic bad situations like dealing with crisis victims, or suicidal people. I’m not sure whether basic dancing should go here or in the physical pile. Public speaking and debate might go here or in the strategy pile.
For strategy, game theory and anger management. I’m not sure how to teach general ‘strategy’, but I think that studying enough related skills would indirectly affect your ability. Crisis management, how to deal with emergency situations?
The goal in the social and strategy categories is to know what the most common mistakes are and how to avoid them, and then after that work on skill.
Creative.. it’s impossible to become good at every instrument, singing, and every art form without a lot more intelligence or time or something. Find two or three things you like from different disciplines, and study with others that are interested? Maybe we can spawn a LW band?
These are just random ideas, of course. Once I start walking daily I can talk it over with anyone that wants to join me, and maybe make the goals more specific over time. Everything will have to be subject to change depending on interest, of course… but still I want to do things, and not just talk about them.
Fitness: The military fitness test is a good idea. There are also a variety of all-around fitness tests designed for different groups (e.g. police, firefighters, athletes), plus general measures of different types of physical fitness (e.g. VO2 Max, beep test). I could generate a fairly lengthy list if you’d like (I was, once upon a time, a certified fitness trainer). Fitness doesn’t really seem to me to require a group to practice, although groups can be useful to keep you motivated.
Social: The social bit came up at our first Ottawa Meetup (our group actually appears to be headed in the exact direction you desire, by the way), and Cyan recommended volunteering at the Distress Centre. I checked it out and it seems like they offer interesting training on handling “exotic bad situations”. Maybe something similar exists in SF?
For general social skills, Dale Carnegie is my go-to for drop-dead basics. This book is intended to be the fundamental textbook on getting on with folk, and in my opinion it does a pretty good job. Implementing its suggestions is straightforward (i.e. it’s quite close to first principles), and I think it could be really valuable to get group feedback on this kind of stuff.
Strategy: I’m currently reading Tempo and Thinking Strategically. Both have myriad ideas that could be turned into exercises and worked on in a group setting. Lionhearted, aka Sebastian Marshall has set himself the goal of being history’s greatest strategist, so I’d imagine he might have something to contribute to this conversation.
I’m extremely interested in seeing this happen. I’ll contribute further in the near future.
I think that pick-up artistry is a really limited subset of social fitness, if it even applies at all. It seems from the small amount that I’ve read on it that they target a subset of women (women that go to bars and hook up), and that it might not really generalize well. Carnegie looks like a much better start.
I have other thoughts that seem too unformed to put down here yet. They’re too nebulous, and it’s annoying… I can see there being a use for some sort of systematic approach to testing and evaluating people and techniques, but I’m not sure how it would work. (v_v)
Really, you’ve articulated my actual, underlying desire (i.e. Getting More Awesome) quite well in the OP. Why don’t you have a go at articulating your “nebulous” thoughts. Consider it brainstorming, don’t worry about it being neat or perfect!
I think that pick-up artistry is a really limited subset of social fitness, if it even applies at all.
Sure, but that’s irrelevant. I just think they’ve provided a decent example of a group getting together to figure out how to work on a particular social skill. In the article I linked, I was advocating copying their learning methods, nothing more.
I actually tried to write them out several times in the reply before I gave up. I’ll need more time to think about them when I’m not distracted by impending life.
I think a list of goals for fitness will help a lot. It may not need a group but doing it in a group will hopefully make us more of a community. Motivation is good too, of course.
Do nutrition and cooking fit in with fitness? People seem to have good results with various diets, and I think that there have been a number of threads on them here. Is there a reason we couldn’t eventually put together a ‘Less Wrong Diet’? We have lots of smart people, I wonder if we couldn’t set up some kind of automated double-blind system that gave us diet suggestions and tracked results? (Since beating akrasia is important too, perhaps focusing on the effect that suggestions have at first might be best, since advice that doesn’t get followed is pretty useless...)
For physical ability, how about what the military considers barely acceptable? I’m fairly sure those records will be easy to find.
You’reinluck! Really, you can just type “army pft” into google to remember the goals. The Army test requires no equipment, the Navy test asks you to swim, and the Marine test requires a pull-up bar. When i decided to get into shape, i figured i should try to reach those standards. Although, be warned that when you look up such things the articles will assume that you’re a person who is thinking about enlisting in the US military.
For myself, i added Police and Fire Department tests to the list. My local PD test is similar to the Army PFT but uses a 1-rep benchpress (of my own body’s weight) instead of push-ups. The local Firefighter test is a bit more complicated and would require me to sign up for the test in order to use the equipment and facilities their test is based on, so it’s less clear how to measure my preparedness for that.
If you keep the idea “baseline ability our culture expects people to be at” and write down every example you can think of, that’ll be an excellent start. (And would be an interesting list to read, particularly the contradictions.)
I thought about that, but I’m thinking that this would be better as a group activity. I’m too likely to miss things or weigh them improperly by myself. For cultural things, I think the wisdom of the crowds is the best source.
I’m not exactly sure what sort of dancing you mean, but you mention it twice and I happen to have some background in dancing in a variety of styles. And since you seem to be somewhere in the SF Bay Area, I strongly recommend the social dancing lessons taught by Richard Powers at Stanford and in Palo Alto as a venue to learn/practice both social and dancing skills. I found it to be an extremely welcoming community and low-pressure environment to learn. Friday Night Waltz which occurs in both Palo Alto and East Bay is also a great community.
“Social dance” is similar in content to ballroom dancing, but recreational and more improvisational in approach. Skill will let you dance comfortably and enjoyably with someone you’ve just met. I think this style of dancing helps a lot with the social ability stuff too, because you learn how to send and interpret body language signals, and you have to interact on a basic social level with lots of people in a short period of time. There’s a rather explicit expectation that asking someone to dance is not a romantic overture, which I (and many others) find comforting.
Yes, for each of the three courses: each course is 1 hour per week, with the 3 courses being taught back to back on Tuesday nights. To take all 3 courses would be $135.
I think that two of the components of awesomeness—status and self improvement—would be useful in achieving a very wide variety of goals.
So if you’re still discovering what it is you’re trying to protect, or if you currently feel you have nothing but expect something to turn up, awesomeness is a reasonable medium-term goal.
Off the top of my head, it sounds like you need something to be awesome for. A goal. EY calls it “something to protect”.
I don’t doubt that you want to be awesome. What do you want to be awesome for? What do you really want to be awesome for?
You don’t have to post it publicly (though I understand it can help, and it would be of on-topic interest), but you do need to say out loud to yourself what it is. Because once you have your real goal formed into words, the rational steps to get there follow pretty easily. It’s a version of asking the right question.
The idea isn’t for only me to attain awesomeness, but to provide a base to start from and then encourage lots of exploration. Everyone will have different goals, so we should have lots of meetups doing different things, focusing on different skills.
I could fairly easily envision one group focusing on fitness, another on social interaction, a third on creative activities. Smaller sub-groups would go more into depth in any particular type of awesomeness, and people would go to the groups as they wish.
Personally I want to get myself up to baseline in every area I can, with ‘baseline’ being the ability that our culture expects people to be at. The idealized ability, not the real-world average of dismalness. After I do that, I’d like to focus on writing. I’m sure that as I get closer to the baseline more things will appear, but that’s what I’d like now.
As a side note, even getting to the baseline would be rather awesome.
Edit—please disregard this post
Writing clearly and persuasively seems like an important enough skill that, with LW’s recent shift to self-improvement topics, I’m surprised there haven’t been posts on how to learn it.
Eventually I’d like to be able to craft fiction that people would read out of choice as opposed to some obligation brought about by being friends. I don’t inflict my writing on others yet, and I’ll probably start by making fanfiction when I do.
Having the ability to persuade people and communicate clearly would be a nice bonus, though.
Edit—please disregard this post
Produce many words of fiction. Many. Many, many, many, many. Find out what makes words come out of you and arrange for that to happen a lot.
If you have a tendency to become defensive when criticized, dig it out of yourself with a melonballer and set it on fire. You can grow it back later when you are better, if you want (especially if it has self-esteem implications of some kind), but it is not your friend in the early stages.
Finish things sometimes. Finish a drabble or a 500-word vignette, if that’s what you’re up to. But do not start and start and start and never finish.
Fall in love with something about something you write. Love a character, or a setting, or a sentence, or a plot twist. You don’t have to love everything about anything or anything about everything, but love something about something.
Nice phrase. Nice sentiment, too. This is the main sticking point for recruits to most of the non-commercial projects I’ve been involved with, and if not overcome it’s incredibly destructive both on the creative and the critical side of things.
Well-intentioned attempts to attract talent by shielding it from criticism are even worse.
.
Bookmarked, thank you!
Edit—please disregard this post
Agree, agree, a thousand times agree.
Yep yep! The first thing I’m trying to get into the habit of doing is simply writing, without worrying about the quality. My inner critic is SO picky! (>_<) The general idea I have is that to be a writer, I have to actually write. If I can’t for whatever reason, then writing isn’t going to work. So, writing first.
I’m fine with criticism. I believe that either 1) it’s true, and I need to accept it, or 2) it’s false and I can laugh at it. Getting mad seems silly in any case.
Thanks for the tips!
Edit—please disregard this post
Write a lot. Read a lot. Brandon Sanderson had to write five novels before he sold one. Read every day. Read Strunk and White. Learn the rules. (Yes, writing has them.) Get a giant wall calendar showing every day of the year. Set a writing goal and every day you meet it, draw a line. After a few days you have a line segment. Don’t break the line! Convince yourself that reading and writing is “work” and don’t let friends and family tell you otherwise. Find a room with a door. When you’re writing, close it. Don’t edit when you write. Move forward, forward, forward. Get to the end. If you need help with motivation, read these books.
I would say that nonfiction skill is obviously more useful, though I guess HPMoR provides some amount of evidence to the contrary.
It’s not the direct usefulness of it that I’m looking for so much as the ability to get money to promote the things that I want to see happen. I may not be able to program, and I might not be incredibly rational, but at least I can help the people that are.
Edit—please disregard this post
I’m not very familiar with the details of writing fiction professionally, but it seems like the wrong thing to do if you’re looking to make money—I’m remembering hearing that a large proportion of authors aren’t very successful, financially. (The fact that I don’t remember where I heard this and so can’t gauge its credibility very well means that it should be discounted significantly.)
Can anyone who is more knowledgeable about the professional writing business comment on this?
Careful—this is a chimera. That many cultural standards are plausible but not actually possible standards set by advertising to keep people spending money is a cliche because it was true first. So that’s a phrase to taboo to dust. Do you have a detailed list?
Hm, you’re right. For physical ability, how about what the military considers barely acceptable? I’m fairly sure those records will be easy to find.
For social ability, feeling at ease in common social situations, and the ability to handle a real conversation. Possibly also how to handle exotic bad situations like dealing with crisis victims, or suicidal people. I’m not sure whether basic dancing should go here or in the physical pile. Public speaking and debate might go here or in the strategy pile.
For strategy, game theory and anger management. I’m not sure how to teach general ‘strategy’, but I think that studying enough related skills would indirectly affect your ability. Crisis management, how to deal with emergency situations?
The goal in the social and strategy categories is to know what the most common mistakes are and how to avoid them, and then after that work on skill.
Creative.. it’s impossible to become good at every instrument, singing, and every art form without a lot more intelligence or time or something. Find two or three things you like from different disciplines, and study with others that are interested? Maybe we can spawn a LW band?
These are just random ideas, of course. Once I start walking daily I can talk it over with anyone that wants to join me, and maybe make the goals more specific over time. Everything will have to be subject to change depending on interest, of course… but still I want to do things, and not just talk about them.
Edit—please disregard this post
Word, I agree!
Fitness: The military fitness test is a good idea. There are also a variety of all-around fitness tests designed for different groups (e.g. police, firefighters, athletes), plus general measures of different types of physical fitness (e.g. VO2 Max, beep test). I could generate a fairly lengthy list if you’d like (I was, once upon a time, a certified fitness trainer). Fitness doesn’t really seem to me to require a group to practice, although groups can be useful to keep you motivated.
Social: The social bit came up at our first Ottawa Meetup (our group actually appears to be headed in the exact direction you desire, by the way), and Cyan recommended volunteering at the Distress Centre. I checked it out and it seems like they offer interesting training on handling “exotic bad situations”. Maybe something similar exists in SF?
For general social skills, Dale Carnegie is my go-to for drop-dead basics. This book is intended to be the fundamental textbook on getting on with folk, and in my opinion it does a pretty good job. Implementing its suggestions is straightforward (i.e. it’s quite close to first principles), and I think it could be really valuable to get group feedback on this kind of stuff.
Strategy: I’m currently reading Tempo and Thinking Strategically. Both have myriad ideas that could be turned into exercises and worked on in a group setting. Lionhearted, aka Sebastian Marshall has set himself the goal of being history’s greatest strategist, so I’d imagine he might have something to contribute to this conversation.
I’m extremely interested in seeing this happen. I’ll contribute further in the near future.
I think that pick-up artistry is a really limited subset of social fitness, if it even applies at all. It seems from the small amount that I’ve read on it that they target a subset of women (women that go to bars and hook up), and that it might not really generalize well. Carnegie looks like a much better start.
I have other thoughts that seem too unformed to put down here yet. They’re too nebulous, and it’s annoying… I can see there being a use for some sort of systematic approach to testing and evaluating people and techniques, but I’m not sure how it would work. (v_v)
Edit—please disregard this post
Really, you’ve articulated my actual, underlying desire (i.e. Getting More Awesome) quite well in the OP. Why don’t you have a go at articulating your “nebulous” thoughts. Consider it brainstorming, don’t worry about it being neat or perfect!
Sure, but that’s irrelevant. I just think they’ve provided a decent example of a group getting together to figure out how to work on a particular social skill. In the article I linked, I was advocating copying their learning methods, nothing more.
ETA: Well, this is certainly timely!
I actually tried to write them out several times in the reply before I gave up. I’ll need more time to think about them when I’m not distracted by impending life.
Edit—please disregard this post
I think a list of goals for fitness will help a lot. It may not need a group but doing it in a group will hopefully make us more of a community. Motivation is good too, of course.
Do nutrition and cooking fit in with fitness? People seem to have good results with various diets, and I think that there have been a number of threads on them here. Is there a reason we couldn’t eventually put together a ‘Less Wrong Diet’? We have lots of smart people, I wonder if we couldn’t set up some kind of automated double-blind system that gave us diet suggestions and tracked results? (Since beating akrasia is important too, perhaps focusing on the effect that suggestions have at first might be best, since advice that doesn’t get followed is pretty useless...)
Edit—please disregard this post
You’re in luck! Really, you can just type “army pft” into google to remember the goals. The Army test requires no equipment, the Navy test asks you to swim, and the Marine test requires a pull-up bar. When i decided to get into shape, i figured i should try to reach those standards. Although, be warned that when you look up such things the articles will assume that you’re a person who is thinking about enlisting in the US military.
For myself, i added Police and Fire Department tests to the list. My local PD test is similar to the Army PFT but uses a 1-rep benchpress (of my own body’s weight) instead of push-ups. The local Firefighter test is a bit more complicated and would require me to sign up for the test in order to use the equipment and facilities their test is based on, so it’s less clear how to measure my preparedness for that.
If you keep the idea “baseline ability our culture expects people to be at” and write down every example you can think of, that’ll be an excellent start. (And would be an interesting list to read, particularly the contradictions.)
I thought about that, but I’m thinking that this would be better as a group activity. I’m too likely to miss things or weigh them improperly by myself. For cultural things, I think the wisdom of the crowds is the best source.
Edit—please disregard this post
D_Malik’s list above is pretty awesome in itself.
I’m not exactly sure what sort of dancing you mean, but you mention it twice and I happen to have some background in dancing in a variety of styles. And since you seem to be somewhere in the SF Bay Area, I strongly recommend the social dancing lessons taught by Richard Powers at Stanford and in Palo Alto as a venue to learn/practice both social and dancing skills. I found it to be an extremely welcoming community and low-pressure environment to learn. Friday Night Waltz which occurs in both Palo Alto and East Bay is also a great community.
“Social dance” is similar in content to ballroom dancing, but recreational and more improvisational in approach. Skill will let you dance comfortably and enjoyably with someone you’ve just met. I think this style of dancing helps a lot with the social ability stuff too, because you learn how to send and interpret body language signals, and you have to interact on a basic social level with lots of people in a short period of time. There’s a rather explicit expectation that asking someone to dance is not a romantic overture, which I (and many others) find comforting.
Of course, YMMV on any/all of this.
Am I reading the prices correctly as $45 for the whole course for a non-student?
Edit—please disregard this post
Yes, for each of the three courses: each course is 1 hour per week, with the 3 courses being taught back to back on Tuesday nights. To take all 3 courses would be $135.
I think that two of the components of awesomeness—status and self improvement—would be useful in achieving a very wide variety of goals.
So if you’re still discovering what it is you’re trying to protect, or if you currently feel you have nothing but expect something to turn up, awesomeness is a reasonable medium-term goal.