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sixes_and_sevens comments on Post ridiculous munchkin ideas! - Less Wrong
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OK, a serious one now.
If you're looking to motivate yourself towards certain activities, use fictional characters as imaginary rivals.
For example, Stephen Amell is a ridiculously buff dude who plays the titular character in the TV show Arrow. He spends a non-negligible amount of screen-time prancing around with his shirt off. While this does not contribute to my hedonic appreciation of the show, I find myself a lot more motivated to get up and do some exercise after watching it.
I suspect this is my brain alerting me to the presence of a ridiculously buff rival who spends time prancing around with his shirt off, which results in some mechanism motivating me to compete along that axis. I also suspect this would work along different axes of rivalry. Watching lots of fictional smart people achieve lots of awesome fictionally smart things may be a good motivator for academic activities.
On the other hand, fictional worlds are not constrained by such trivial things as "plausibility" - how smart or conscientious or strong a character is is purely up to the whim of the author. Comparing yourself to these "superstimulus role models" might not be a mentally healthy thing to do - look at how many young girls (and boys!) are starving themselves in the pursuit of magazine-model beauty.
That particular analogy (cf. "thinspiration") had occurred to me, though I suspect the general process (look at superstimulatory examples of what you aspire towards) is something most people have an intuitive grasp of, and I (and perhaps other people broadly like me, who are probably over-represented on Less Wrong) simply haven't cottoned on to it until now.
You have to be careful with this sort of thing. It's possible to accidentally make yourself unhappy even if you don;t actually harm yourself or something. I think different people respond to this sort of thing in different ways.
Already done this to myself -- it lowers your self-esteem enormously.
I suspect that for me, this tends to turn on the "Activate low-status sympathy-seeking behaviors" module instead of the "Try to be more high status" one.
Same here. I often get intimidated rather than competitive.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/h9b/post_ridiculous_munchkin_ideas/c6ht
Researchers frequently use serum testosterone levels as a proxy of competitive drives e.g. in stereotype threat tests. Which suggests this is fixable with things like lifting weights or doing scary things like boxing, munchung almonds etc.
This matters, because it is not simply about a trick but - in my case at least - it is about everybody who seems better than me makes me feel kinda miserable, so getting more competitive is necessary for happiness / non-depression in such cases.
I have a female friend who recently said something along the lines of "normally I think guys who go around topless are kind of dicks trying to show off, but that guy had the muscles to pull it off". I think it was just after that that I started using my resistance bands more.
edit: to clarify, she was talking about a real person who had been wandering around topless.
Somewhat relatedly, I sometimes find using fictional characters (or stereotypes) as anti-inspiration. For example, I may ask myself "what would Sheldon Cooper do?" and then make sure not to do that.
Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
Not sure that's what the OP is doing. It's one thing to say "This is obviously stupid; I should do the opposite." It's different to say "This is obviously stupid; I shouldn't do it."
However, reverse Boring might be Interesting.
Sometimes I see Sheldon as a role model. If something is stupid, he'll tell you.
Continuing the marksmanship theme, your proposed mechanism is part of why I watch Archer.
This is one thing that you could use a tulpa for - make them a better version of yourself. I guess that could be psychologically unhealthy.
You could also use real people as inspiration; for example, one person who annoys me by being more awesome than me is Yi Sun Shin.