Going to the gym does't require figuring out your cosmic goals first. Typically, leveling up is not a game objective in itself, but it's supposed to help you achieve game objectives, whatever they are.
I don't understand this. It seems like you should want to maximize the amount of things that you really care about that you get done. You should focus your effort on your actual goals. Not some set of parallel goals that you don't care about called "levels."
If you want to maximize how much you get done that you do care about, you should aim to minimize the amount of self-improvement that you do. You should make only those improvements that are necessary to get done what you are trying to get done right now. You shouldn't upgrade yourself speculatively.
I just got this random idea that people who want to become better at life could benefit from a common scale of "leveling". No, I don't mean vague Lesswrongey things like "changing your mind". I mean a set of concrete criteria like "you qualify for level 2 if you can do 5 pull-ups, have solved 30 Project Euler problems, and did 10 cold approaches". Obviously there would be separate ladders for different character classes, but not too many. Also obviously, my example was a bit too high for level 2. So I guess I really want to ask some meta questions here:
1) Do you think agreeing on a common leveling scale would be a good thing for a substantial subset of LW users? Would you feel good about leveling up and telling other people about it on LW?
2) Is there some good way to determine leveling criteria that are neither too high nor too low? Maybe make an intermediate scale of "experience points"?