I've mostly been saying in my mind "hey, I just did that, and that means I'm closer to doing X, that's pretty cool!" There's kindof a mental feeling that goes along with that for me, which I seem to be able to feel without actually saying anything in my mind, so I've been doing that too, and it seems to be working to move me towards my end goal.
People have suggested a lot of things to me, like physically high fiving myself or jumping up and down for a bit. I'd be curious to hear what other people do.
I have a roster of people who I imagine smiling at me, which I use to reward myself with: when I do something clever, I imagine a friend of mine whose intelligence I respect smiling at me. When I need comfort, I imagine my parents or my most accepting friend smiling at me. When I need excitement, I imagine a particular crush smiling at me.
I found Valentine's point about self-rewarding 'feeling like bullshit' to be true in much the same way that you can't tickle yourself. But then, I used his 'simulate an event; feel the emotions' method to simulate someone...
Background: I and many other attendees at the CFAR rationality minicamp last weekend learned a lot about applied rationality, and made big personal lists of things we wanted to try out in our everyday lives. I think that a regular (weekly or maybe semi-weekly) post where people mention any new interesting habits, decisions, and actions they have taken recently would be cool as a supplement to this; it ought to be rewarding for people to be able to write a list of the cool things they did, and I expect it'll also be interesting for other people to peek in and see the sorts of goals and self-modifications people are working on. Others at minicamp seemed enthusiastic about the idea, so I hope it takes off. Feel free to meta-discuss whether this is a good idea or if it can be done better.
Addendum 5/15: By the way, non-minicamp people should feel free to post too! I am highly certain that minicamp attendees are not the only ones working on interesting things in their lives.
This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of May 14th. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:
Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.
Discussion's likely to continue gradually through the week, so try to remember to check back now and then!