Great, thanks for the suggestions! Though it seems really hard to make the difficulty of the alternative courses match the original ones closely enough, e.g. your strength requirement is much easier than the current one, endurance is much harder, social is easier...
Creativity: "5 drawings" is too vague for someone who doesn't know how to draw (how much is one drawing?), but writing 500 words in one sitting is a great idea and I'm taking it!
Games: I like the suggestion, and would prefer to start with just chess. No idea how much work is reasonable to ask from a beginner, though.
Altruism: icks me out :-)
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"?