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John_Maxwell_IV comments on Post ridiculous munchkin ideas! - Less Wrong
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If you are a human, then the biggest influence on your personality is your peer group. Choose your peers.
If you want to be better at math, surround yourself with mathematicians. If you want to be more productive, hang out with productive people. If you want to be outgoing or artistic or altruistic or polite or proactive or smart or just about anything else, find people who are better than you at that thing and become friends with them. The status-seeking conformity-loving parts of your mind will push you to become like them. (The incorrect but pithy version: "You are an average of the five people you spend the most time with.")
I've had a lot of success with this technique by going to the Less Wrong meetups in Boston, and by making a habit of attending any event where I'll be the stupidest person in the room (such as the average Less Wrong meetup).
I think the same might work with online forums. E.g. an interesting way to motivate oneself to learn programming might be to spend a lot of time hanging out on the IRC channels for the tools you want to learn.
Anecdotally, this seems to work. I've become a much better writer while spending a lot of time in a writers' irc channel.
Could you name some actual writer's IRC channels? I've never seen any.
I've seen exactly one, and it's a private channel for the editorial staff of a blog that curates My Little Pony fanfiction. (Yes, this is actually a thing.)