I’ve been going to Val’s rationality dojo for CFAR workshop alumni, and I found a kind-of-similar-to-this exercise useful:

• List a bunch of mental motions — situational responses, habits, personality traits — you wish you could possess or access at will. Visualize small things you imagine would be different about you if you were making more progress toward your goals.

• Make these skills things you could in principle just start doing right now, like ‘when my piano teacher shuts the door at the end of our weekly lessons, I’ll suddenly find it easy to install specific if-then triggers for what times I’ll practice piano that week.’ Or ‘I’ll become a superpowered If-Then Robot, the kind of person who always thinks to use if-then triggers when she needs to keep up with a specific task.’ Not so much ‘I suddenly become a piano virtuoso’ or ‘I am impervious to projectile weapons’.

• Optionally, think about a name or visualization that would make you personally excited and happy to think and talk about the virtuous disposition you desire. For example, when I think about the feeling of investing in a long-term goal in a manageable, realistic way, one association that spring to mind for me is the word healthy. I also visualize a solid forward motion, with my friends and life-as-a-whole relaxedly keeping pace. If I want to frame this habit as a Powerful Technique, maybe I’ll call it ‘Healthiness-jutsu’.

Here’s a grab bag of other things I’d like to start being better at:

1. casual responsibility – Freely and easily noticing and attending to my errors, faults, and obligations, without melodrama. Keeping my responsibility in view without making a big deal about it, beating myself up, or seeking a Grand Resolution. Just, ‘Yup, those are some of the things on the List. They matter. Next question?’

2. rigorous physical gentleness – My lower back is recovering from surgery. I need to consistently work to incrementally strengthen it, while being very careful not to overdo it. Often this means avoiding fun strenuous exercise, which can cause me to start telling frailty narratives to myself and psych myself out of relatively boring-but-sustainable exercise. So I’m mentally combining the idea of a boot camp with the idea of a luxurious spa: I need to be militaristic and zealous about always pampering and caring for and moderately-enhancing myself, without fail, dammit. It takes grit to be that patient and precise and non-self-destructive.

3. tsuyoku naritai – I am the naive but tenacious-and-hard-working protagonist-with-an-aura-of-destiny in a serial. I’ll face foes beyond my power — cinematic obstacles, yielding interesting, surprising failures — and I’ll learn, and grow. My journey is just beginning. I will become stronger.

4. trust – Disposing of one of my biggest practical obstacles to tsuyoku naritai. Feeling comfortable losing; feeling safe and luminous about vulnerability. Building five-second habits and social ties that make growth-mindset weakness-showing normal.

5. outcome pumping – “What you actually end up doing screens off the clever reason why you’re doing it.” Past a certain point, it just doesn’t matter exactly why or exactly how; it matters what. If I somehow find myself studying mathematics for 25 minutes a day over four months. and that is hugely rewarding, it’s almost beside the point what cognitive process I used to get there. I don’t need to have a big cause or justification for doing the awesome thing; I can just do it. Right now, in fact.

6. do the thing – Where outcome pumping is about ‘get it done and who cares about method’, I associate thing-doing with ‘once I have a plan/method/rule, do that. Follow though.’ You did the thing yesterday? Good. Do the thing today. Thing waits for no man. — — — You’re too [predicate]ish or [adjective]some to do the thing? That’s perfectly fine. Go do the thing.

When I try to visualize a shiny badass hybrid Competence Monster with all of these superpowers, I get something that looks like this. Your memetico-motivational mileage may vary.

7. sword of clear sight – Inner bullshit detector, motivated stopping piercer, etc. A thin blade cleanly divorces my person from unhealthy or not-reflectively-endorsed inner monologues. Martial arts metaphors don’t always work for me, but here they definitely feel right.

8. ferocity – STRIKE right through the obstacle. Roar. Spit fire, smash things, surge ahead. A whipping motion — a sudden SPIKE in focused agency — YES. — YES, IT MUST BE THAT TIME AGAIN. CAPS LOCK FEELS UNBELIEVABLY APPROPRIATE. … LET’S DO THIS.

9. easy response – With a sense of lightness and fluid motion-right-to-completion, immediately execute each small task as it arises. Breathe as normal. No need for a to-do list or burdensome juggling act; with no particular fuss or exertion, it is already done.

10. revisit the mountain – Take a break to look at the big picture. Ponder your vision for the future. Write blog posts like this. I’m the kind of person who benefits a lot from periodically looking back over how I’m doing and coming up with handy new narratives.

These particular examples probably won’t match your own mental associations and goals. I’d like to see your ideas; and feel free to steal from and ruthlessly alter entries on my own or others’ lists!