When I found LW, I was confused and nonambitious; my goal was to survive on as little money as possible (to ironically humiliate the people who say $17/hr is the minimum living wage), and maybe make a few video games or something, and I spent most of my free time on 4chan and arguing about radial politics on the internet.

Since coming to LW, I've used LW-far-epistemic rationality to figure out a great deal of philosophical confusions and understand a great deal more about those big questions. (this doesn't count, but it should be mentioned)

More specifically and interestingly: it took explicit LW rationality for me to:

• Think rationally about balancing my resources (time, money) and marginal utility, to great productivity benefit.

• Step up to run the vancouver LW meetup.

• Make and maintain a few really valuable friends (mostly through the meetup).

• Respond positively to criticism at work, so that I've become much more valuable than I was 6 months ago, in a way that has been recognized and pointed out.

• Achieve lightness and other rationality virtues in exploring design concepts at work, taking design criticism, not getting caught in dead ends. I explicitly apply much of what I've learned at LW to my work, though I'm unsure how much of that is just how I verally describe things I'd do anyways.

• Become poly with my wife rationally and in a controlled manner.

• Switch my goals from unambitious to working on the biggest problems I can find, like taking over the world. (this is actually hard).

• start using beeminder, get a smartphone, use pomodoro, and use remember the milk, for large measurable (just look at my beeminder graphs) improvement in personal project productivity, sex life, excercise, etc.

• Actually put in the hard work and strategic criticism-seeking that it took to actually get a really good job.

• Take more rational risks and make better small decisions every day

• Actually ask and get a cute girl's number today (yay)

Of course, my ambition has scaled way faster than my achievement, so despite the semi-impressive list above, I feel like I'm way behind where I should be.