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So8res comments on Deregulating Distraction, Moving Towards the Goal, and Level Hopping - Less Wrong
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I'm not sure I'm articulate enough to explain it. One possible summary is "Internalize the decision to achieve your goals, so that you don't have to keep actively re-affirming the choice."
The mental narrative plays a big role in it, too: Somehow, the narrative of "I am taking the easy way out, it just happens that the easy way is really really hard" seems to help me out.
Perhaps the section is confusing because I conflated these two points -- I'll sleep on it, and maybe rework things tomorrow.
Do you have any recollection of how you entered this state? Do you remember what it was like to not be this way and how you might have changed?
A bit, yeah. The previous post was supposed to shed some light on this. I used to attach lots of guilt to "unproductive" activity, and I lack the ability to gain long-term satisfaction from these activities. This wasn't a particularly healthy period in my life, but it led me to a schedule where I was at least a little bit productive on a regular basis for a long time. Even after removing the accompanying guilt, I maintain the schedule and I must be productive if I want satisfaction. This goes a long way towards trusting that System 1 will keep making progress without System 2 needing to act as a shepherd.
Thats not the whole answer, though: there's a bit of mindhacking involved, and I have a particularly intense personality. I'll cover these in more detail in the upcoming posts.
I kind of wonder whether taking caffeine or other more interesting stimulants might be a good way to shift ones personality to be more driven & determined... during the most effective periods of my life, I was taking lots of stimulants, and I would be pretty driven even when I wasn't caffeinated. Seems to get me in the habit of thinking strategically and punching through aversions somehow.
I haven't experienced any personality changes of this kind from long-term stimulant use.
A hypothesis about what happened to you: while the stimulants were effective, you got stuff done, which allowed you to shift your whole self-image towards "someone who gets stuff done", thus resulting in a personality change as an indirect effect.
I tried caffeine in early 2011, in the form of plain coffee no more frequently than every third day (so as to avoid building up tolerance/addiction). It seemed to help, but I don't recall any strong evidence that it was better than placebo (and I typically just followed it up by spending the entire time of effect at a piano, which succeeded in getting people to approach me, but not much else).
This came after I'd been on Prozac for a couple months (again, effects may or may not have outperformed placebo, but was weaker than caffeine), which came after a few weeks' trial of Focalin (which appeared to help a ton at 5mg, then stopped being helpful when I went up to 10mg, and wasn't nearly as effective when I went back down to 5mg, which sounds like evidence that the first bit was placebo).
I think the section is confusing because of the personalized nature of the concept.
I have become really strongly convinced over the past year or so that anti-akrasia and motivation (but not productivity) 'techniques' tend to be incredibly personalized, and that trying to directly implement what others have found successful with no insight into the details of your own problem is trusting your success to blind luck.