How I Became More Ambitious

I'm not trying to take over the world. It sounds like a lot of work, and not my comparative advantage.

There is something very Less Wrongian about this line.

First, congratulations on your accomplishments!

I went back and reread the post linked at the beginning, and I no longer feel much kinship with that person.

I would love to see you try to do the opposite: imagine yourself being Swimmer963 as she was around January 2012 or so, reading your current post and commenting on it. What would be her impressions of you?

Also, on the subject of self-modification, here is a quote from Yvain:

Once upon a time, an evil witch transformed a prince into a frog, telling him that only the kiss of a princess could restore him to his proper form. But although he searched around the world, he could find no princess who was willing to kiss a hideous little frog. Finally, he went to the Wise Wizard. “Gender is a social construct,” said the Wise Wizard. “Just declare your gender identity to be female, then kiss yourself on the hand or something.” So the frog did that, returned to human form, and ruled the land for many years as a wise and benevolent queen.

Moral: Ability to self-modify is just ridiculously powerful.

This is a bit un-LW-ian, but: I'm earnestly happy for you. You sound, if not happier, more fulfilled than in your first post on this site. (Also, ambition is good.)

I hate to focus on the negative, but a couple of things in your post made me go "ugh". The first is talking about taking over the world: It's funny when Harry Potter says it, grating when people on Less Wrong do it. Don't talk about conquering the world unless you actually have realistic plans to conquer at least a small part of it, otherwise it just comes off to me as trying to look cool in an awkward way.

The second is your overuse and misuse of jargon. The concept of comparative advantage for instance describes how it may be efficient for you to do X even though you may be worse at X than others, yet you call "looking better than average" a comparative advantage, when it really is just an advantage. "I suppose I can leverage it into a comparative advantage for getting high-status men to pay attention to me long enough for me to explain the merits of an idea I have." This should be: "I can use this to my advantage".

Your post isn't bad but things like this make it harder for me to draw use from it.

If you're having difficulty with Akrasia and procrastination and you are still looking for solutions, might I suggest the Less Wrong Study Hall? We do constant pomodoros of 25 minutes work, 5 minutes rest, and many of us have found it tremendously effective.

(This is a result of the Co-Working Collaboration to Combat Akrasia post)

I think 'embarrassing' is a keyword here. The first thing I thought, on the several occasions that I made mistakes, was "oh my god did I just kill someone... Phew, no, no harm done." The second thought was "oh my god, my preceptor will think I'm stupid forever and she'll never respect me and no one wants me around, I'm not good enough..." This line of thought never goes anywhere good. It says something about me, though, that "I'm not good enough" is very directly connected to people wanting me around, to belonging somewhere. For several personality-formative years of my life, people didn't want me around. Probably for good reason; my ten-year-old self was prickly and socially inept and miserable. I think a lot of my determination not to seek status comes from the "uncool kids trying to be cool are pathetic" meme that was so rampant when I was in sixth grade.

Hi, I don't have any experience with LW talk and I don't want to diagnose from afar. But I have had similiar experienced though and I found out that:

A. It was a fear of the denial itself. So I could not work with it by rationalizing. Because the "reasons" were only triggers, not the Source.

B. It was strongly connected with me not being I. In the sense that I could not stand up for my self and put my needs above the needs of others.

Maybe it's helpful. Your post gives a lot of insight, and helps me review certain parts of my current life. Thanks for that.

I still worry about the pain of future embarrassment, but I'm more likely to point out to myself that it's not a valid objection and I should do X anyway.

I HATE when it happens to me, it's the most stupid heritage of our undercortical brain. I argue with my brain all the time because of this...
Anyway:

Silly plan for taking over the world: Arrange to meet high status-people and offer to give their children swimming lessons. Gain their trust. Proceed from there.

A possibly even better plan is to start an image consulting business.
Recently a book came out here in Italy, it was titled "The powerful men whisperer" (yeah, I know, even translated it's that bad) and retold the story of the head of a PR consulting organization, and how through that business he became the trusted friend of basically every top manager, prime minister or other powerful person in the last twenty years, while at the same time being able to remain thoroughly anonymous.

I read and identified with and commented on your post a year and a half ago. I just wanted to say I'm glad to know that you're feeling more ambitious now. And thanks for sharing. I haven't solved these same problems for myself nearly to the same extent, so learning about your recent experiences is extremely valuable for me.

I try to keep humble to my weaknesses of the past, as they may become a future again, or worse than that. As an old choir song goes: 'What will it help us that once we were strong?'

ETA: sorry for the rather rambling comment, and sorry for making it all about me!

This post is really interesting, thank you. When I was 22 I did quite badly in my exams at university, mostly because I had mental health problems around exam time. I had been ambitious up until then, but after that, my ambition somehow deserted me, since I became convinced that if I tried to do too much I would get too stressed and fall apart. I dropped the economics part of my degree, since it was harder, and graduated with a philosophy degree. In my final year, I put in the minimum amount of work needed to get a 2.1 (which was what the average student on my course got).

Since I graduated, I've done jobs that are far less challenging than I'm capable of, and spent large amounts of time being totally convinced that I'm on the verge of getting fired (I haven't been fired :)). I've just been convinced that if I try to achieve more than "having a job" I'll fail at everything and there will be doom.

Recently, however (after 7 years), my ambition is returning. My mental health has vastly improved, in part due to mindfulness and CBT techniques, and I'm taking on something challenging at work. I've decided to take more risks even though I might fail.

I've found HPMOR (I read it all at once in the last week) really useful too. I think I mostly want to develop my Griffindor side. I just don't do many brave things. I'm not out to my family about polyamory, bisexuality or kink. I'm not out to most of my friends as a less wrong reader and aspiring rationalist because I'm worried that they'll think that I've joined a phyg! I don't ask guys out, and I'm even too scared to go to the local less wrong meetup because I'll be older than people and I worry they won't think I'm smart enough. I'd like to try to do more scary things.

Thanks for the post.

Curiosity may play a greater role in people's capacity to achieve things than ambition does. Quoting Alexender Grothendieck's Recoltes et Semailles:

In the Promenade, and here and there in Récoltes et Semailles I will be speaking of the nature of mathematical work. It is work that I understand very well from first hand experience. Most of what I say will apply equally well, I think, to all creative labor, and all activities of discovery. It will apply at least for what is known as 'intellectual' work, which is done mostly 'in one's head', and to writing. Work of this sort is distinguished by the hatching out and by the blossoming of our understanding of certain things which we are interrogating.

To take an example in the other direction, passionate love is, also, driven by the quest for discovery. It provides us with a certain kind of understanding known as 'carnal' which also restores itself, blossoms forth and grows in depth. These two impulses -that which animates the mathematician at his desk ( let's say), and that which impels the lover towards the loved one - are much more closely linked than is commonly believed, or, let us say, people are inclined to want to believe. It is my wish that these pages of Récoltes et Semailles will make its reader aware of this connection, in his own work and in his daily life.

Most of the time in the course of this excursion we will be concerned with mathematics itself, properly speaking. I will be saying almost nothing about the context in which this work takes place, or of the motivations of individuals which lie outside the work itself. This runs the risk of giving me, or the mathematician or scientist in general, a somewhat flattering image, and for that reason distorted- the sort of thing one sees in speaking of the "grand passion" of the scientist, without restrictions. That is to say, something along the lines of the grandiose "Myth of Science" ( with a capital S if you please!); the heroic "myth of Prometheus" which writers have so often indulged in ( and continue to do so) , for better or worse. Only the historians, and then not always, have been able to resist the seductions of this myth. The truth of the matter is that it is universally the case that, in the real motives of the scientist, of which he himself is often unaware in his work, vanity and ambition will play as large a role as they do in all other professions. The forms that these assume can be in turn subtle or grotesque, depending on the individual. Nor do I exempt myself. Anyone who reads this testimonial will have to agree with me.

It is also the case that the most totally consuming ambition is powerless to make or to demonstrate the simplest mathematical discovery - even as it is powerless ( for example) to "score" ( in the vulgar sense) . Whether one is male or female, that which allows one to 'score' is not ambition, the desire to shine, to exhibit one's prowess, sexual in this case. Quite the contrary!

What brings success in this case is the acute perception of the presence of something strong, very real and at the same time very delicate. Perhaps one can call it "beauty", in its thousand-fold aspects. That someone is ambitious doesn't mean that one cannot also feel the presence of beauty in them; but it is not the attribute of ambition which evokes this feeling....

The first man to discover and master fire was just like you and me. He was neither a hero nor a demi-god. Once again like you and me he had experienced the sting of anguish, and applied the poultice of vanity to anaesthetize that sting. But, at the moment at which he first "knew" fire he had neither fear nor vanity. That is the truth at the heart of all heroic myth. The myth itself becomes insipid, nothing but a drug, when it is used to conceal the true nature of things.

How much of The Morality of Ambition is covered by the one-liner "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be."?

Cool post. I feel like I solved most of the problems you describe in this post a while ago myself. Here's my problem, if anyone wants to give me feedback: A few years ago, I was substantially more driven/ambitious, but I developed a really serious case of RSI/tendinitis that forced me to use a voice recognition system to control my computer for about a year. That's pretty much gone now, but it caused me to lose a bunch of habits (like frequently ask myself what the optimal thing to do at this instant is, and then go and do that thing, my own feelings be damned). Before, if I was feeling miserable and unmotivated, I would push on and keep studying/working; now I try to cheer myself up first (generally unsuccessfully). And I don't even care very much about solving this problem, either--I've just become more laid-back in general.

I now have an explicit goal of being well-known for non-fiction writing, probably in a blog form, in the next five years.

This is an interesting goal. I have an intuition that most people who became well-known for writing started with the goal of communicating some great ideas, not the goal of being well-known for writing itself. (Indeed, when I think of prominent non-fiction writers, I seem to think of them more as domain experts in the area they write about than writers for their own sake, except maybe Isaac Asimov.) So maybe your goal should be "read a bunch, think a bunch, experiment a bunch, and look for opportunities to expand the frontier of human knowledge"--but of course, this is more abstract and probably less motivating than "achieve high status through writing". (BTW, who's to say expanding the frontier of human knowledge is even higher-value than spreading little-known but important ideas that have already been discovered? You could do this through writing, but you could also do it through submitting links to reddit (I've spent a pretty decent amount of time trying to spread important ideas by submitting links to reddit, actually).)