The first place I saw the claim that a huge amount of life success is encapsulated in many simple life optimization "tricks" (or "cheat codes" in your terminology) was in David Allen's book "Getting Things Done" which is full of many such tricks (plus motivational exhortations) organized around the rough theme of efficiently increasing the number of one-off embarrassingly parallel actions you accomplish per day.

I prefer the term "technique" personally because when I tried using Mr. Allen's term "trick" it sometimes backfired and confused people into thinking that there was bad moral intent involved. They could teach me one, and I would be happy and exclaim "That's an awesome trick!" and they would get defensive instead of take it as the compliment I intended it to be. I suspect that your term "cheatcodes" will run into this problem even more dramatically because it literally contains the word cheat in it.

The term "technique" primes for things like skill development, kung fu, painting, and technology rather than "violation of social norms" so it is safer to use, but all of these terms are imprecise... For educational and linking purposes, I think it would be a good thing to track down and use a term that is (1) more precisely about this specific idea (2) was coined long ago by someone other than a LWer and (3) has positive resonances. Sadly, I'm not familiar with any term that fits this bill. Anyone else know a term? As a last resort, perhaps one could be imported from a foreign language or created from latin or greek?

In any case, here are some "techniques" I can think of off the top of my head:

• The first and most obvious thing is simply "the meta-technique" which is internalizing how much of human development is simply composed of the acquisition and use of techniques. They can be noticed and learned if you keep your eyes open. They can be sought out and practiced if you can articulate their need and come up with key words for searching for them. You can ask people for them. First you have to know that they exist and can be learned.

• In David Allen's book, he illustrated the concept with a particularly striking technique which is to put exercise clothes on as the very first step upon waking. This helps to make exercising a default action in the morning because there are fewer steps between you deciding to exercise later, and then actually exercising. Also, the effort of putting on the clothes (and making them dirty) creates a sunk cost that can deflect you from rationalizing yourself into not exercising that morning... it would be silly to put on exercise clothes and then not exercise :-P

• Something I learned from a really good boss I had was a social engineering optimization summed up in the aphorism "What gets measured gets done". Unfortunately, this one is dangerous to apply naively because of things like Goodhart's law and social complications around other optimizing but it is still useful to know about.

• My brother taught me an interesting one for situations where service relationships are important, tipping is appropriate, and you'll be making a series of purchases (restaurants in your neighborhood over weeks and months, a club over a night, etc): try to make your first purchase at a time when there is a lull in the customers and give a big tip and maybe make friendly smalltalk with the server. This makes them more likely to remember you with positive valence at later busier times.

• A technique I've gotten a huge amount of use of over the course of my life is to notice when some big picture aspect of my life is less than ideal and seek out a book on the subject. Read, experiment, retain the good stuff. I learned this technique before I came across "the meta-technique" but they obviously dovetail.