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Swimmer963 comments on The Spotlight - Less Wrong
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I have actually not included any insights about myself that came as a result of my luminosity project. My hatred of surprises, for instance, was manifestly obvious; only the exact mental background, which I did not publicly disclose in the post, was dug up when I started introspecting seriously. The trouble with including personal disclosure is that it would feel uncomfortably like bragging to advertise things I like about myself; meanwhile, things I don't like about myself tend to be obsolete by the time I've properly understood them because I can fix them, and the ones I can't or haven't fixed yet wouldn't be very good advertising ("I discovered I have the following nasty trait which is still there, and you can too!").
In the interest of disclosure, I will brag some:
I have raised my happiness set point. This requires some maintenance work, but at a "neutral" time now I am happier than I was at a "neutral" time five years ago.
When I identify a mood as being non-endorsed, decidedly useless, and unpleasant, I can often simply get rid of it. This takes a few moments now, although if I leave them to fester too long it can require a night's sleep.
I can, with some concerted effort, enforce my desire to like certain people (whether this be for comfort reasons, i.e. I'll have to be around them a lot, or for practical reasons, i.e. it would be instrumental to befriend them). This is more difficult with some people than others but I have yet to try very hard to like someone without being able to sincerely do it.
I have been able to do this for a number of years. Most people don't seem to realize how useful it is to be in control of who you like/dislike. Disliking someone is uncomfortable and it generally doesn't help. Congratulations on teaching yourself to do this; I expect it's difficult when it doesn't already come naturally.
If you didn't see it already, I wrote a whole post about that.
I went and tracked down the link after I made this comment. I'm not sure if I use the same strategy as you...a lot of the time, I don't really need to. I'm not easily annoyed, and my annoyance set-point is pretty malleable if I want it to be. Generally the way I go about liking someone is by having at least one in-depth conversation with them, whether about science or politics or their romantic life or drama at work. Once I convince myself that they're not a shallow, robotic automaton after all, once I can convince myself that they're like me, it feels natural to empathize rather than judge when they do something annoying... But like I said, this has come fairly easily to me. (Not to say that I don't ever feel annoyed at people, or complain about them to friends and family. I do, more than I should. But when I'm actually in the room with them, I can almost always get along civilly and even enjoy myself.)