The crux of your argument seems to be that “borrowing” motivation from leaders and peers can help your goals. Unfortunately there’s a flipside: leaders and peers often try to motivate you for their goals, not your goals. So instead of becoming more sensitive to other people’s emotional appeals, you could try getting more in touch with your own values, increasing their emotional appeal to you while still blocking out everyone else.
you could try getting more in touch with your own values, increasing their emotional appeal to you while still blocking out everyone else.
I would like to increase the emotional appeal of my values, yes. In fact, being better at this is the ultimate goal of this post.
But becoming more motivated by my values is not a simple process. (Is it simple for you? How do you do it?)
There are lots of tricks that can help do this, already described around Less Wrong. I’m suggesting another.
I suspect that selectively allowing emotional appeals to move you is a powerful such technique—if it can actually be done. But I realize that doing this poorly is a hazardous to rationality. I don’t know how to be selectively moved, and so I don’t know how the risks and benefits balance.
The crux of your argument seems to be that “borrowing” motivation from leaders and peers can help your goals. Unfortunately there’s a flipside: leaders and peers often try to motivate you for their goals, not your goals. So instead of becoming more sensitive to other people’s emotional appeals, you could try getting more in touch with your own values, increasing their emotional appeal to you while still blocking out everyone else.
I would like to increase the emotional appeal of my values, yes. In fact, being better at this is the ultimate goal of this post.
But becoming more motivated by my values is not a simple process. (Is it simple for you? How do you do it?)
There are lots of tricks that can help do this, already described around Less Wrong. I’m suggesting another.
I suspect that selectively allowing emotional appeals to move you is a powerful such technique—if it can actually be done. But I realize that doing this poorly is a hazardous to rationality. I don’t know how to be selectively moved, and so I don’t know how the risks and benefits balance.