It seems to me that, unless one is already a powerful person, the best thing one can do to gain optimization power is building relationships with people more powerful than oneself.
Depends on how powerful you want to become. Those relationships will be a burden the moment you'll "surpass the masters" so to speak. You may want to avoid building too many.
r/Fitness does a weekly "Moronic Monday", a judgment-free thread where people can ask questions that they would ordinarily feel embarrassed for not knowing the answer to. I thought this seemed like a useful thing to have here - after all, the concepts discussed on LessWrong are probably at least a little harder to grasp than those of weightlifting. Plus, I have a few stupid questions of my own, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that other people might as well.