Oh MAN, I had a big long list here somewhere...
Learn how to tie various knots. This is useless but awesome.
Not so useless. I've gotten a surprising amount of mileage out of a Boy Scout-level knowledge of ropework; it's one of those skills that doesn't come up very often but makes your life vastly easier when it does. Tying a tent down in high winds, for example, is made much simpler if you're familiar with the bowline or one of its variations.
Two or three minutes under cold (or at least colder) is an awesome morning wakeup IME.
The effect is probably mostly Mammalian diving reflex, which is triggered by colder-than-21°C water contacting the face, with other factors (such as showering your whole body) much less relevant.
Do rational people have sex?
There are a bunch of awesome sexual things one might try. However, even if we had a list of such things, I'm not sure how to navigate around the emotional pitfalls of organizing a group of people to learn them.
In my experience, when my sex life started working I immediately lost interest in dancing, making music, making art, and learning martial arts. I was somewhat surprised to discover that all those things were for me, apparently, part of attracting a lover rather than something worthwhile in themselves. Certainly now that I've been married 20 years I'd much rather invest effort in improving my sex life than in doing any of those things.
Off the top of my head, it sounds like you need something to be awesome for. A goal. EY calls it "something to protect".
I don't doubt that you want to be awesome. What do you want to be awesome for? What do you really want to be awesome for?
You don't have to post it publicly (though I understand it can help, and it would be of on-topic interest), but you do need to say out loud to yourself what it is. Because once you have your real goal formed into words, the rational steps to get there follow pretty easily. It's a version of asking the right question.
Produce many words of fiction. Many. Many, many, many, many. Find out what makes words come out of you and arrange for that to happen a lot.
If you have a tendency to become defensive when criticized, dig it out of yourself with a melonballer and set it on fire. You can grow it back later when you are better, if you want (especially if it has self-esteem implications of some kind), but it is not your friend in the early stages.
Finish things sometimes. Finish a drabble or a 500-word vignette, if that's what you're up to. But do not start and start and start and never finish.
Fall in love with something about something you write. Love a character, or a setting, or a sentence, or a plot twist. You don't have to love everything about anything or anything about everything, but love something about something.
I've been explicitly working on being awesome for the last few years. A friend introduced me to The Sims and I played long enough to reach my character's life goal, then realized that I should be working that hard on reaching my own goals.
Results:
Since joining LW, I've had the nebulous goal of knowing all of the material on the site well enough to teach a semester class on it.
Actually, if you're an adult English speaker, learning foreign languages is probably not worth its opportunity cost. It takes an enormous amount of time and effort to learn a language well enough to do anything useful or productive with it, or even just to be able to talk to native speakers in a way that won't be annoyingly incompetent.
What's more, for just about any language there are huge numbers of native speakers who speak professional-level English, including natively bilingual kids of immigrants, so you're not developing any rare and precious combination of skills. (There are exceptions, such as e.g. knowledge of some languages combined with a security clearance that's hard to obtain if you're not a native citizen, but they are few and far between.)
Of course, if you find learning languages a fun hobby, go for it. But unless it's a greater source of fun and enjoyment than other things you might be doing, it's quite pointless. (And I say that as someone who can find his way around in at least five different languages.)
Target Focus Training is definitely awesome. They did not pay me to say that. It's an odd, quiet type of awesome that has negative value for status-signaling, hence the throwaway account.
I took one of their classes and am looking for a reaction partner in Silicon Valley for practice. If you are in a similar situation, please drop me a note. I won't out you, and I'm pretty good at not hurting people accidentally when practicing this sort of thing. ETA: As of 4 May 2011, I'm logging into this throwaway account for the last time. If you're looking for a...
At NYC we have a weekly Self Improvement meetup, which encourages everyone to have a supergoal they're working towards.
I very much like the idea of this. In the interest of driving this less in the direction of wouldn't-this-be-cool and more in the direction of actual awesomeness, I think it would be useful to list skills that we have that we feel qualified and willing to teach. I'll go first:
If anyone is interested in learning these things or sharing t...
I think the code of the bushido had this one right: the warrior should cultivate awesomeness in many disciplines, not just the ones he (directly) needs to survive combat.
after that I'm going to be walking daily for at least a mile, and working my way up to 5 or so
The procedure described in "Body by Science" by McGuff and Little can get you stronger than that with less time investment. I've been doing it since September 2010 and still prefer it over any exercise regimens I've done before.
I'm primarily interested in it for injury prevention. Jogging and weight lifting with higher weights caused too many injuries. Walking 5 miles would have taken too long.
Awesomeness seems like a fuzzily defined goal here. It's not clear how you will know when suitable awesomeness levels have been reached.
Alternative proposal: self-modify so that your current state is considered "totally awesome".
Apologies for the wasted time spent reading and replying to this post. Please disregard it.
I've been feeling non-awesome for a long time. I don't know if anyone else here feels the same way, but I'm going to assume that at least a few people do. I want to correct this horrible deficiency.
We already have the LW meetups in a lot of places, monthly in some places and weekly in others. I've gone to a few, and they're interesting and I get to meet a lot of very smart people (and get intimidated by them)... but mostly all we've done is talk and sometimes go and eat at a restaurant. I want more than this!
We already talk, we need an action-based meetup. I want to propose another kind of meetup, the Insufficiently Awesome meetup. It should aim to make us good at baseline things like fitness, social skills, strategy, and reflexes, and to make us very good at specialized awesome things like master-level chess/go/shogi, public speaking, various sports, dancing, making music, making art.
I think this meetup should be daily, though not everyone would want to go every day. Nonetheless, we should have something happening every day that we're not spending talking. The goal shouldn't be just to be fit in different situations, but to instead become totally awesome.
Is there anyone else that feels the same? If so, what things do you think we need to learn for the baseline, and what things should we get very good at?