Here's a link to a YouTube video by pjeby describing a very similar technique.

The following is the way I've approached the problem, and it seems to have worked for me. I've never tried to see if it would work with somebody else before, indeed I don't think I've ever explained this to anybody else before.

As I see it, these problems arise when what I think I should do, and what I feel like doing are in conflict with each other. Going with what you feel is easy, it's sort of like the automatic mode of operation. Overriding this and acting on what you think takes effort, and the stronger your feelings are wanting to do something else the harder it is.

The trick then, is to try to reconcile the two. The way most people do it is that they starting doing what they feel, and then rationalise it to the point that it's also what they think to some degree. Fortunately, you can also do it the other way as your feelings are trainable. Find what ever it is that you want to rationally do, and then keep on reminding yourself not just why you want to do this, but also try to feel it. Imagine how doing well in, say, some course of study is going to benefit and advance you in the future. How it will give you an edge against others who haven't studied the harder aspects of it, etc. Be creative, think of all sorts of positive reasons why doing this thing that you already know you should do is a great thing for you. And, most importantly, try to feel how you will benefit from this. Imagine yourself in the future having kicked butt in this course, or what ever, and imagine what that is going to feel like. Really try to feel it!

It takes time, but you slowly build up positive emotions around these things that you should be doing. At first, it just doesn't take quite as much effort to do them. Then it comes quite naturally. And after a while you will find yourself actually wanting to do it, to the extent that it would take an act of will power to not do it. Really.

This process itself also becomes a habit. When you decide to do something, you will automatically start to build up positive emotions around what ever it is that you've decided to do. During my PhD writing it built up to such a degree that I'd have these dreams some nights about how amazingly happy and proud I was going to be when it was finished. Motivating myself to work on it wasn't a problem.

Imagine a world where the only way to become really rich is to win the lottery (and everybody is either risk averse or at least risk neutral). With an expected return of less than $1 per $1 spent on tickets, rational people don't buy lottery tickets. Only irrational people do that. As a result, all the really rich people in this world must be irrational.

In other words, it is possible to have situations where being rational increases your expected performance, but at the same time reduces your changes of being a super achiever. Thus, the claim that "rationalists should win" is not necessarily true, even in theory, if "winning" is taken to mean being among the top performers. A more accurate statement would be, "In a world with both rational and irrational agents, the rational agents should perform better on average than the population average."

The most effective way for you to internally understand the world and make good decisions is to be super rational. However, the most effective way to get other people to aid you on your quest for success is to practice the dark arts. The degree to which the latter matters is determined by the mean rationality of the people you need to draw support from, and how important this support is for your particular ambitions.

I live in London, UK.

I usually have something nice to say about most things, even the ideas of some pretty crazy people. Perhaps less so online, but more in person. In my case the reason is not tolerance, but rather a habit that I have when I analyse things: when I see something I really like I ask myself, "Ok, but what's wrong with this?" I mentally try to take an opposing position. Many self described "rationalists" do this, habitually. The more difficult one is the reverse: when I see something I really don't like, but where the person (or better, a whole group) is clearly serious about it and has spent some time on it, I force myself to again flip sides and try to argue for their ideas. Over the years I suspect I've learnt more from the latter than the former. Externally, I might just sound like I'm being very tolerant.

Also the Birthday effect, as the coincidence was a match between two different events.

I'll answer with a koan.

Of all the people who live in the world, should the lucky thousand who witness the events that are a million times too unlikely to witness for any single individual, start believing in supernatural, while the rest shouldn't?

I am an atheist who does not believe in the super natural. Great. Tons of evidence and well thought out reasoning on my side.

But... well... a few things have happened in my life that I find rather difficult to explain. I feel like a statistician looking at a data set with a nice normal distribution... and a few very low probability outliers. Did I just get a weird sample, or is something going on here? I figure that they are most likely to be just weird data points, but they are weird enough to bother me.

Let me give you one example. A few years ago I had a dream that I was eating and out of the blue I discovered a shard of glass in my mouth. The dream bothered me so much that I had a flash back to the dream the next day as I was walking down the road. For me that's extremely unusual. It's rare that I can even remember a dream, and when I do they certainly don't bother me the next day. So, the day after that I was eating a salad and crunch. I spat out what was in my mouth and there was a seriously nasty looking slither of glass. I didn't cut my mouth or anything, no harm done. I just hit it with my tooth.

To the best of my knowledge that was the only time I've ever found glass in something I was eating, and it was the only time I've had a vivid dream about it that bothered me the next day (or any dream about it all). I didn't have any particular glass eating phobia before all this took place (except for a normal aversion to the idea), and I haven't been worried about it since (ok, except for looking rather carefully at salads from that particular cafeteria for a few weeks afterwards). Was this all just a really weird coincidence? As far as I can make out the probabilities are just too low to be ignored. To make matters worse, I have a few other stories that I find just as difficult to explain away as coincidence.

Now, I wouldn't say that I "believe" that something seriously weird is going on here. That would be much too strong. However, because I don't feel that I can adequately account for some of my observations of the world, I think I must assign a small probability that there is something very seriously strange going on in the universe and that these events were not weird flukes.

I have other things to say but that would get into topics currently banned from this blog :-/

I grew up knowing that Santa didn't exist. My parents had to then explain to me that I couldn't tell certain kids about this because their parents wanted them to still think Santa was real until they were a bit older. I still remember being quite shocked that these parents were lying to their kids, along with grandparents and other family members, and then expecting even me to join in. I was further shocked by the fact that most of these kids never worked it out themselves and had to eventually be told by their parents or a group of their friends (being told by one or two friends usually wasn't enough.)

So, while I never experienced the shock of finding out that Santa wasn't real, watching these parents lying to their kids about Santa again and again certainly left a strong impression on my young mind.