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maia comments on Post ridiculous munchkin ideas! - LessWrong
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OK, a serious one now.
If you're looking to motivate yourself towards certain activities, use fictional characters as imaginary rivals.
For example, Stephen Amell is a ridiculously buff dude who plays the titular character in the TV show Arrow. He spends a non-negligible amount of screen-time prancing around with his shirt off. While this does not contribute to my hedonic appreciation of the show, I find myself a lot more motivated to get up and do some exercise after watching it.
I suspect this is my brain alerting me to the presence of a ridiculously buff rival who spends time prancing around with his shirt off, which results in some mechanism motivating me to compete along that axis. I also suspect this would work along different axes of rivalry. Watching lots of fictional smart people achieve lots of awesome fictionally smart things may be a good motivator for academic activities.
I suspect that for me, this tends to turn on the "Activate low-status sympathy-seeking behaviors" module instead of the "Try to be more high status" one.
Same here. I often get intimidated rather than competitive.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/h9b/post_ridiculous_munchkin_ideas/c6ht
Researchers frequently use serum testosterone levels as a proxy of competitive drives e.g. in stereotype threat tests. Which suggests this is fixable with things like lifting weights or doing scary things like boxing, munchung almonds etc.
This matters, because it is not simply about a trick but - in my case at least - it is about everybody who seems better than me makes me feel kinda miserable, so getting more competitive is necessary for happiness / non-depression in such cases.