Thank you for pressing me for concrete details.

Some of what follows goes way back before OB, which is one of various things I have studied or done -- a major one, but there are others -- on the matter of how to think better. The first, for example, I describe as inside vs. outside view, because that is what it is. The practice goes back longer; OB gave it a name.

I. Getting out of bed in the morning. That may seem a trifle, but there is no time at which rationality does not matter, and an hour a day is more than a trifle. The inside view whispers seductively to just laze on half-awake, or drift off to sleep again. The outside view reminds me that it has been my invariable experience that lazing on does not wake me up, that the only thing that does is getting up and moving around, and that in twenty minutes after getting up (my typical boot time for both mind and body) I will be more satisfied with myself, the sooner I did so.

The more clearly I can contemplate the outside view, the easier it becomes to make a move. I can't claim expert proficiency in this. I still get up much faster when I have a specific three-alarm-clock reason, the moment the wristwatch pinger goes off.

II. I began taking much better care of my money after I instituted the simple exercise of recording every transaction on a spreadsheet, and estimating all of my expenses month by month out to a year ahead. And this without having to make any particular resolutions to limit my spending on this or that, or to save some fixed amount. I just have to look at my savings account, and other stores of money not to be casually drawn on, to see the difference. Sometimes noticing is all it takes, and the doing takes care of itself.

You cannot fix errors that you do not know you are making. That includes errors that you are looking straight at, without realising that they are errors. (Our chief weapon is noticing. Noticing, and discernment. Our two weapons...)

III. I have learned that whatever the person in front of me is saying, it makes sense to them, no matter confused or wrong it may seem to me. Even if they are lying, there is still a reason. Therefore, I look for the greatest possible sense and address that, whether I'm dealing with a student, a colleague, someone being wrong on the Internet, or anyone else. Or as it was put, "you must fight not only the creature you encounter; you must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse." The application is wider than fighting.

As I said, my experiences of a lot of this go back way before reading OB. Most of what is said on OB can also be found elsewhere -- a significant part of it is links to elsewhere. But that is only because the truth is constant and discoverable by anyone, so it is unsurprising when it has been. A lot of what is valuable in OB/LW is to draw its material together in a coherent body.

(Edited to defeat the software's too-clever handling of the originally Arabic-numbered paragraphs.)