Recently, I started a writing wager with a friend to encourage us both to produce a novel. At the same time, I have been improving my job hunting by narrowing my focus on what I want out of my next job and how I want it. While doing these two activities, I began to think about what I was adding to the world. More specifically, I began to ask myself what good I wanted to make.

I realized that writing a novel was not from a desire to add a good to the world (I don't want to write a world changing book), but just something enjoyable. So, I looked at my job. I realized that it was much the same. I'm not driven to libraries specifically by a desire to improve the world's intellectual resources; that's just a side effect. I'm driven to them out of enjoyment for the work.

So, if I'm not producing good from the two major productions of my life, I thought about what else I could produce or if I should at all. But I couldn't think of any concrete examples of good I could add to the world outside of effective altruism. I'm not an inventor nor am I a culture-shifting artist. But I wanted to find something I could add to the world to improve it, if only for my own vanity.

I decided, for the time being, on myself. Since my two biggest enjoyments (work and play) were important to me as personal achievements, not world achievements, I decided that the best thing to start with was to make myself the most efficient version of me that I could. Part of this probably came from my reading of Theodore Roosevelt's doing much the same to transform himself from an idiot into a badass. Sure, I've already been engaging in self-improvement for a while, but this idea of making the best me is more about trying to produce an individual worth having, rather than just maximizing my utility in a few areas for a few limited goals (i.e. writing a book, getting a job).

I'm sure this sounds simplistic since much of the LW literature already discusses such things, but it was a bit of an "aha" moment for me, and it made optimization and self-improvement more interesting. It made them into concrete projects with a real world application. I'm trying to give the world one less ineffective, dangerously deluded person. That's a good goal to strive for, I like to think.