Interesting.

As counterpoint from a 50 year old who has struggled with meaning and direction and dissatisfaction with outcomes (top 0.1% ability without as yet personally satisfactory results) I have vague recollections of my head-strong teen years when I felt my intellect was indomitable and I could master anything and determine my destiny though force of will.  But I've slowly come to the conclusion that we have a lot less free-will than we like to believe, and most of our trajectory and outcomes in life are set by neurological determinants - instincts and traits that we have little to no control over.  Few if any have drive necessary (another innate attribute) to overcome or modify their base tendencies over long term, a sisyphean endeavour at best, and the likely reason we see such heavy use of nootropic drugs.

Without an (almost literal) gun to your head you can only maintain behavioural settings at odds with your likely genetically innate preferences for short periods, months, perhaps years, but not decades, 'fake it till you make it' in personality modification mostly doesn't work - in my experience people (myself included) almost always fall back into their factory settings.  Choose your goals, careers and partners accordingly, follow your interests, and try to find work environments where others strengths can compensate for deficits you perceive in yourself, eg working with some highly conscientious types is a massive boon if you are ADHD and probably leads to greater satisfaction and better results.

Thank you for sharing this! I am fascinated by others' internal experiences, especially when they are well-articulated.

Some of this personally resonates with me, as well. I find it very tempting to implement simple theories and pursue simple goals. Simplicity can be elegant and give the appearance of insight, but it can also be reductionist and result in overfitting to what is ultimately just a poor model of reality. Internally self-modifying to overfit a very naive self-model is an especially bad trip, and one I have taken multiple times (usually in relatively small ways, usually brought on by moments of hypomania).

It took me a long time to build epistemic humility about myself and to foster productive self-curiosity. Now I tend to use description more than prescription to align myself to my goals. I rule myself with a light hand.

Here is a rough sketch of how I think that works in my own mind:

Somewhere in my psychology is a self-improvement mechanism that I can conceptualize as a function. It takes my values and facts about myself and the world as inputs and returns my actions as outputs. (I'm not completely sure how it got there, but as long as it exists, even if just a seedling, I expect it to grow over time due to its broad instrumental utility.) I don't understand this function very well, so I can't reliably dictate to myself exactly how to improve. I also don't fully understand my values, so I can't list them cleanly and force-feed them into the function. However, this self-improvement mechanism is embedded in the rest of my psychology, so it automatically has weak access to my values and other facts. Just by giving it a little conscious attention and more accurate information about myself and the world, the mechanism tends to do useful things, without a lot of forceful steering.

I was cognizant that I am the architect of my own mind, and used those powers.

Could you perhaps elaborate on how exactly you managed to "exotically self-modify"? Was it just the "aha!" moment you mentioned, or was it the meditation?

When I tried to do something similar a while ago (albeit probably with different methods), I just got null results. So what did you do that produced such undoubtedly strong effects?