"The most instructive experiences are those of everyday life." - Friedrich Nietzsche
What is it that the readers of lesswrong are looking for? One claim that's been repeated frequently is that we're looking for rationality tricks, shortcuts and clever methods for being rational. Problem is: there aren't any.
People generally want novelty and gimmicks. They're exciting and interesting! Useful advice tends to be dull, tedious, and familiar. We've heard it all before, and it sounded like a lot of hard work and self-discipline. If we want to lose weight, we don't do the sensible and quite difficult thing and eat a balanced diet while increasing our levels of exercise. We try fad diets and eat nothing but grapefruits for a week, or we gorge ourselves on meats and abhor carbohydrates so that our metabolisms malfunction. We lose weight that way, so clearly it's just as good as exercising and eating properly, right?
We cite Zen stories but don't take the time and effort to research their contexts, while at the same time sniggering a the actual beliefs inherent in that system. We wax rhapsodic about psychedelics and dismiss the value of everyday experiences as trivial - and handwave away praise of the mundane as utilization of "applause lights".
We talk about the importance of being rational, but don't determine what's necessary to do to become so.
Some of the greatest thinkers of the past had profound insights after paying attention to parts of everyday life that most people don't give a second thought. Archimedes realized how to determine the volume of a complex solid while lounging in a bath. Galileo recognized that pendulums could be used to reliably measure time while letting his mind drift in a cathedral.
Sure, we're not geniuses, so why try to pay attention to ordinary things? Shouldn't we concern ourselves with the novel and extraordinary instead?
Maybe we're not geniuses because we don't bother paying attention to ordinary things.
Observe what your brain is doing before you experience the resistance. In other words, notice what your brain is predicting will happen if you do the thing you're about to do.
This handout gives an explanation of my "input-belief-prediction-feeling" model and gives some questions that can be useful in identifying the process by which you're creating resistance.
What I do is establish a "test" condition -- something I can think about in relation to the project or task that reliably reproduces the resistance response I'm trying to understand. Then, I can run the test repeatedly and try to see what images or sounds are flashing to my mind (the "prediction") before the feeling of resistance arises. Once you have the prediction, you can then ask what you must have to believe in order for that (unconscious) prediction to come true.
IOW, our emotions and (de)motivation are driven by unconscious prediction of expected outcomes, to which our body responds with defensive or aggressive postures. And usually the predictions are simply cached thoughts that no longer connect with the rest of your belief system.
When you get enough practical experience with this, you realize that belief system updating is a very hit-or-miss process for human brains. Updates have to be in context of a particular memory trace, and unless that trace is actually shared across your belief system, it's a one-at-a-time process. Sort of like having a subroutine in code vs. copy/paste -- our brains have a lot of "copy/paste", although there's also a lot of abstraction. You just never know going in what the effective scope of your changes will be.